J. Keith Murnighan – Do Nothing! : How to Stop Overmanaging and Become a Great Leader. (Portfolio)-

·        Are you a type A personality.

·        Does the thought of taking a two week vacation cause you to break out in a cold sweat?

·        Do you think that the only way to get things done “the right way” to do it yourself?

Then J Keith Murninghan has a suggestion for you… Do Nothing!

The most difficult thing for a leader, whether you have been doing it for years or if you have just been handed the mantle of leadership, is to avoid over-reaching and trying to tackle too much. Munighan sends the message that leaders need to lead, not work…not saying that leadership isn’t hard work, but he points out; leaders often make it harder than it has to be.

Murnigham points out that great leaders don’t work; they should instead facilitate and orchestrate. They take the 30,000 foot view of their business, department, or team that they lead and formulate strategies and choose the team members who will execute those plans.

When you transition to a leadership role, developing the trust in your team is a difficult initial step. Murnighan points out correctly that if avoid the easy urge to micromanage that your team will reveal the skills they need to get the job done. Your role a leader is to guide and nurture those skills, not overreach and do it yourself. If those skills don’t shine through, then a leader you need to make sure you have the right players on your team…it’s that whole right people in the right seats on the bus going in the right direction thing.

Do Nothing! gives you many actionable items and strategies that you can put in place to help not only your team develop, but also to help you avoid that tendency to micromanage. I have not only recommended Do Nothing! to leaders I know, I am using those tactics to help new leaders within my organization to make the transition from being great workers to becoming great leaders.

The NCAA’s Counterintuitive Leadership

The much anticipated announcement by the NCAA’s sanctions against Penn State University in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky sex-abuse conviction and the report by Louis Freeh regarding the cover up, resulted in prime example of counterintuitive leadership.

 

During the announcement, NCAA President Mark Emhert boldly proclaimed, “Football will never again be placed ahead of educating, nurturing, and protecting young people.”

Yet the sanctions he went on to announce do exactly that!

The sanctions include: a $60 million fine, equal to one year’s revenue from the football program, which will be placed in a fund to aide victims of sexual abuse nationally. Penn State will be banned from Bowl appearances for four years and will have their football scholarships reduced from 25 to 15. There are a number of compliance agreements and oversight stipulations as well.

 

Where it gets interesting is the fact that the NCAA will vacate all of Penn State’s football wins from 1998 – 2011. I get the fine and bowl and scholarship stuff, but why the collective punishment of the student athletes who earned the victories on the field in those games? What does that do to educate, nurture and protect those people who worked hard to earn those victories? Those students had nothing to do with the cover up, perpetrated by the University’s leadership, of the sexual abuse perpetrated by Sandusky, yet the NCAA has seen fit to penalize them.

This flies not only in the face of common sense, but the statement made by Ehmert. This amounts to the NCAA aiding Sandusky and Penn State to once again screw young people! The focus and blame should be placed on Sandusky who committed these perverse crimes and those in leadership positions who made the choice to cover up those crimes. Until that happens, untold damage will continue to be done to the value of the education and degrees being EARNED by students of the University.

A Failure to Lead…Not a Failure of Leadership

The headlines speak volumes; Fox News; Report by former FBI director finds Penn State concealed child sex abuse, ABC News Report: Paterno Concealed Sandusky Abuse, and CNN (with bad choice of lead) Probe: Penn State Showed ‘total disregard’ for victims.

The report in question is the one released today by former FBI Director, Louis Freeh, outlining his investigation into Penn State University’s mishandling of the Jerry Sandusky sexual abuse scandal.

In short the report concluded: “In order to avoid the consequences of bad publicity, the most powerful leaders at the university – Spanier, Schultz, Paterno and Curley – repeatedly concealed critical facts relating to Sandusky’s child abuse.”

In an amazingly dead on comment, a janitor at the University concluded that ‘the University will close ranks to protect the football program” after another janitor witnessed Sandusky sexually assaulting one of his victims.

I previously wrote a piece that hinted at this conclusion; that the University was more concerned about their public image and protecting their crown jewel, the Football Program. How many historic examples can we point to that show the cover up is always worse than the crime. For what would have amounted to a short term hit, that could have been easily remedied with a strong public relations campaign and community outreach; the alleged leadership of the University created an in-excusable firestorm that will likely do damage to the University as a whole and the football program in particular.

While Sandusky is an undeniable jizz who should spend the remainder of his miserable life in the worst hellhole of a prison, I think the case could easily be made that former University president Graham Spanier, former VP Gary Schultz, athletic director, Tim Curley and yes even Joe Paterno are deserving of a cell down the hall. Their utterly repulsive lack of action turned them into pimps for Sandusky serial child rape.

How those who directly witnessed Sandusky rapes and those who chose to cover them up didn’t call the police, let alone commit blunt force trauma on Sandusky is beyond comprehension. The fact that this cadre of despicable scumbags could feel so little for the victims is almost beyond explanation.

I originally called this a failure of leadership, but the University’s desire to cover up is so pervasive that it really amounts to a failure to lead. Think about how deep mindset extended for this cover up to remain so bullet proof for so long. The fact that no one cracked!  is astounding. No one stepped out of line and did the right thing, all in a effort to protect the mighty blue and white.

Despite the fact that I have a child finishing a degree at the University, I don’t feel sorry for the University when it comes to the all out legal onslaught that they will face from Sandusky victims; you reap what you sow.   

Neil Smith – How Excellent Companies Avoid Dumb Things

 

Veteran business consultant Neil Smith has worked with a number of large corporations around the globe over the course of the past 20+ years and has narrowed down the common difficulties that most companies encounter to a short list of eight categories that impede their future growth and success.

He spells out the problems using an acronym and details how companies can successfully avoid them in his new book How Excellent Companies Avoid Dumb Things. He boils it down to:

Avoiding Controversy

Poor Use of Time

Reluctance to Change

Organizational Silos

Management Blockers

Incorrect Information and Bad Assumptions

Size Matters

Existing Processes

Smith cites a number of examples in each of the categories; none of them quite rising to the level of case studies, but strong anecdotes from situations he’s been in or companies he has aided.

While Smith does a solid job of encapsulating the problems and offering prescriptive ways to address them, I’m not sure that he lives up to the premise of actually helping companies avoid the problem. It may boil down to being easier said… than done. It’s easy to see how many companies, including your own, are faced with these issues; the more difficult part is answering the question “how did we get into this mess?”

Smith’s experience shows when offers the road map that can guide you through the issue and arrive successfully at your desired goal. The tough part is finding the GPS coordinates to avoid the wrong turn in the first place.  

Michael Hyatt – Platform: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World (Thomas Nelson)

I have a dual confession to make…I love to read books on business, leadership and marketing, but I never buy them when they are new. I am amazed the tidbits and strategy that I have picked up on over the years that I use in my own business and my “day job” but I don’t get sucked into the latest and greatest “must have” books.

Why you ask? Call me cheap, but more often than not business people jump on the latest trendy thing, rush out and buy these books, are excited to dive right in and then about 3 chapters in the brakes lock up and book ends up collecting dust on the shelf. Then six months later they get donated to a local charity sale or end up in a yard sale and that’s where I come in!

I think more often than not, these kinds of books offer great ideas, but don’t offer the easily actionable steps that allow people to put the strategies into action. And I think that is exactly what sets the latest book from best seller author Michael Hyatt apart from the shelves of other similar books.

In Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World Hyatt lays out an easy, step-by-step road map for building your personal brand. While many business strategy books offer lofty platitudes about process improvement and paradigm shifts, Hyatt literally walks the user through the process in a manner that doesn’t go so far as saying his way is the only way, certainly offers guidance through the process.

Hyatt further illustrates many of the steps with how he himself has not only used the process, but also made missteps and errors along the way and how to avoid the pitfalls. I found myself for the first time since college taking a highlighter to a book and keeping a notebook handy to jot down the ideas that Platform generated along the way.

When you ponder the so-called fire hose of information that we deal with a daily basis with things like: websites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and other social media outlets, it can seem like a daunting task to deal with all that’s involved, whether you are starting your own business, an established business or charged with marketing for a company. Hyatt helps to pare that process down to manageable bits.

He not only addresses the something to sell or say, he also tackles the development of your business or product; after all it is the foundation upon which your platform is built.

The problem I ran into during the course of reading Platform was that it generated so many good action steps that it can seem overwhelming. Hyatt does a nice job of reminding the reader that building their platform is a process and it can and should be done over the course of time. Which is why, at Hyatt’s suggestion, I now find myself using Evernote to keep track of everything that is on my plate!

I can guarantee that Platform: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World will end up on your desk for you to refer to often rather than gathering dust on your bookshelf.

Gary Hamel- What Matters Now – How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation (Jossey-Bass / Wiley)

What Matters Now is my first foray into the writings of Gary Hamel, described as a “noted business thinker and strategist” and a three-decade member of the faculty at the London Business school and founder of the think tank The Business Lab.

While I am not certain what a “business thinker” is, Hamel delivers an interesting take on his current viewpoint of the business world. I’m not certain however that he delivers anything all that groundbreaking; in fact I think an argument can be made that the bulk of what Hamel deems as mattering now, has really always mattered when it comes to business.

Hamel breaks What Matters Now, into five sections:

·         Values Matter Now

·         Innovation Matters Now

·         Adaptability Matters Now

·         Passion Matters Now

·         Ideology Matters Now

Hamel falls into a populist trap in the early chapters of the book; Values Matter Now, dissecting current public perceptions of so-called “big-business”. While no one can argue that that we have gone through a significant period of business upheaval, much of the problems have been self-inflicted and then magnified by the 24 hour media cycle, but in reality there have always been evil-doers in the business world.

I don’t think the lack of business ethics and values is worse now, however they may have grown in complexity. Their impact has been placed front and center in the public microscope. Mr. Charles Ponzi was around a long time before we ever heard of Bernie Madoff and credit default swaps.     

Hamel’s deconstruction of Apple in the section entitled, Innovation Matters Now reads a bit like a Blue Ocean Strategy case study rather than part of a strategic road map for the future direction of business. Leaders interested in erasing competitive borders and carving a different path to success would be better served delving into Kim and Mauborgne’s break through approach to business.

While overall What Matters Now isn’t in and of itself groundbreaking, it is Hamel’s way of delivering a gentle reminder and course correction for the way business should be done.  

Dylan Ratigan - Greedy Bastards (Simon & Shuster)

I have always found the portrayal of Conservatives as “angry white guys” entertaining and misguided. Grab your Advil, tune in MSNBC, which is guaranteed to induce a headache, and soak up to nearly non-stop anger and bitterness of the cavalcade of Liberal hosts.

That is the point you have to start from when you read Greedy Bastards by Dylan Ratigan, host of MSNBC’s The Dylan Ratigan Show, described by the press materials accompanying the book as “one of the highest-rated, daytime shows on the network.” Talk about damning with faint praise…given the cable news channel’s less than stellar audience numbers.

In Greedy Bastards, Ratigan attempts to details his perspective on our “broken system.” He runs down what ails a wide variety of problems ranging from banking to the stock market and healthcare to big oil/energy. Taking off on his crusade to remove money from politics, Ratigan attempts to draw correlations between the root cause of the problem and the flow of cash to politicians.

I don’t disagree! But I do find it interesting that Ratigan spent much of his early career as a financial journalist covering Wall Street yet he didn’t do a whole lot to raise red flags about the ridiculous Ponzi schemes and outright fraudulent financial instruments that the folks he was charged with covering were creating that became part and parcel of the financial meltdown tsunami that mowed down the housing, banking, finance and insurance industries in it’s wake. These guys created a financial house of cards that got a total pass from the regulators and politicians that wrap themselves in the cloak of looking out for the little guy and Ratigan stood idly by and said nothing until now.

Full disclosure; my day job is in the healthcare industry, so I read that section of the book with great interest. Ratigan lays out a classic example of his friend “Larry” who was clearly suffering a repetitive stress hand injury and was offered medical advice to address the issue with physical therapy which would have offered some relief. “Larry” decided not to follow through on the exercises that were recommended…let me stress that point; “Larry” decided not to follow through on the exercises that were recommended, and later needed to have surgery to solve the problem. It seems more than a bit ridiculous to indict the entire industry based on a patient choice.

Surprisingly, Ratigan does offer up a market based solution to the problem of the high cost of healthcare, rather than turning to the government to fix the problem. He advocates for a solution that I have pushed for many years; allowing market forces of health savings accounts and patient choices to drive down the cost of healthcare through competition and increasing quality.

The roadblock to most solutions tends to be the government and a HUGE increase in regulation. Ratigan bemoans some regulation, while pushing for new regulations, never accounting to the very real costs of those regulations and the fact that regulatory costs get passed through the so-called “greedy bastards” and get paid by the end-users.

The cartoonish cover may not have been the best choice, because it sets the tone for Ratigan’s BAM, BIFF, POW, approach; skimming the surface of very real issues, yet not really offering much in the way of in-depth solutions to the problems. Instead he chooses to nibble around the edges of solutions or offering up tried and failed solutions; like the electric car to solve the so-called energy crisis.

The real solution is not getting money out of politics, which is a limitation on free speech. The real solution is an energized, alert and informed electorate that pays attention and calls their elected officials when the put self-interest over public interest and an electorate that understands that the government is not the source of solving problems, but the source of creating problems.