Mitch’s Blog

First, the latest TTM Consulting Newsletter, People Will Leave Your Life, based on two posts ago, is available and has gone out to all my subscribers.

I was reading an article earlier on how the social networking site Facebook, is going through a redesign, which is going to launch at the beginning of June. I had two immediate thoughts when I read the story.

The first is that it needed a redesign. I like Facebook, but information isn’t organized properly at all. Every person who’s there for networking purposes has their information in different places, instead of it being in the same spot on every page. That makes it difficult to see what people do, especially when it’s couched with all those applications and other stuff that many Facebook users have on their site.

The second was just how impressive it was, at least to me, that a company with as many visitors and subscribers as Facebook would even think about messing with a product that many people have already gotten used to. In their past, they’ve made small changes here and there, but nothing as drastic as what’s supposedly coming. This one will make some people, like me, very happy, whereas others, those primarily there for fun, might not like it as much. Still, Facebook isn’t afraid to make that kind of change.

And neither was CNN a few months back, when they made some changes to their site. The same goes for Yahoo, which is overhauling its own site even as people are still debating its process in working with Microsoft.

My thought was that if large companies like this have recognized that they have to continually make changes to their infrastructure, why is it that so many smaller businesses, managers, and even employees, are resistant to change? I’m not all that different in some things. I still wear the same brand and type of shoe that I started wearing back in 1967 (larger size, of course), because it’s still the most comfortable shoe I’ve ever worn. I still buy all the same brands of food products; at least those that still exist. I know what I’m getting with my favorites, and I still like them. What’s funny is that my mother, who I learned such loyalty from, now is open to experiencing more things than I am when it comes to food; when did she become so flexible, and when did I become so rigid?

All of us have to be ready to make changes in our lives, both personal and professional, if we want to continue to improve and grow in some fashion. Those changes don’t have to be major; sometimes, even small changes are enough to get things moving in a different direction. I started that today, when I made some relatively minor changes to both my business homepage and my bio page. Nothing major, as I said, but the changes will help focus just a bit more on what my business is all about.

And there may be more changes to come also; no promises, though.

Lately I’ve been wondering what’s going on with a young friend of mine. We were talking almost daily through instant messaging for awhile there, and it was fun. Then one day I didn’t hear from her, and when I finally did it was about two weeks later through email. She said she was sick, but hopefully would be back soon. That was almost 5 months ago.

The problem is that I met this friend through one of those social networking sites. I have a phone number and email, but I’ve never met her in person, and she lives out of the country, so going to try to visit, especially without an address, is out of the question. And, just recently, the answering machine stopped having her message; someone else is on the machine now, so I think the number has been switched.

It reminded me of a time many years ago when I was first getting into the internet, though I’d been playing with computers for a much longer period of time. There was this guy I’d met at work who was really into it, a much older guy than I was at the time, and he knew so much about the internet and all its wonders that we developed a pretty close relationship. He would send me all sorts of things through email, then we’d talk about them at work. Then, one day, he was gone; he’d had a heart attack that Friday night, and I’d been wondering why I hadn’t heard from him all weekend until I got back to work on Monday. It was heartbreaking.

Being a military kid, one of those things you learn when you move around a lot is that people will fall out of your life, and sometimes no matter how hard you try, you just can’t hold onto those people because life gets in the way. I remember moving at a 10 year old halfway across the country and writing letters back and forth to my best friend at the time, a guy named Carl. We made it four months before the letters stopped. About six years later I had a different friend named Carl when I moved once again, and we made it less than two months. From high school, I now keep in touch with only 3 or 4 people; from college, maybe another 7 or 8. Not that I didn’t try, but there’s only so much one person can do when other people can’t keep up.

The same principles apply to working with people in business. People leave for a variety of reasons, and, luckily, most of the time it’s their choice, because most managers really do hate firing people. I’ve known some managers who have screamed at an employee for giving them a resignation letter; I’ve known many others who have told an employee to make that day their last. Sometimes it’s warranted; most of the time it’s not, though. People sometimes have problems keeping their emotions in check at tense times, and most of the time I figure that these managers have been caught off guard and don’t know another way to react.

Here’s the thing, though. The reasons why people leave should give you, as a manager, a chance to learn something about yourself and the company you work for. If people leave because of you, then you know you need to change something about yourself. If people leave because they have a problem with the company in some fashion (low pay, lousy benefits, etc), then you know there’s nothing you can do about it, but maybe you can talk to upper management about your issues in hopes that some things can change. If people leave for better opportunities, you should take pride in yourself for training someone so well that they’ve been able to score what amounts to an advancement. And if people leave for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with you or the company, such as a spouse is moving or they have to go take care of a sick relative, wish them well and allow both sides to leave on good terms.

Of course, both sides should always leave on good terms anyway; after all, you never know when the two of you might meet again. But people will leave your life; we all just have to learn how to deal with it.

I’m not sure how many people have read the book Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I thought it was a phenomenal book years ago when I read it, even though it’s one of the largest books on record as far as number of words, coming in around 645,000. I loved the story of Dagny Taggert, a railroad executive who seems to be fighting a losing battle in trying to help keep her railroad company relevant in the present society of the time as more people seem to be moving towards other modes of transportation. Throughout most of the book, she keeps getting confronted by this one odd question, at least odd at the time: “Who is John Galt?”

Of course it takes to getting near the end of the book that we finally find John Galt in some alternate land (I’ll admit that part kind of lost me; I might have to go back over it again) and learn that he was so disgusted with the way life was that he created a new life and society where others who believed as he did ended up and were thriving under a new philosophy they called Objectivism. And man, does he talk about it; the speech ends up being over 50 pages long! There was a man who had something to say.

Basically, objectivism believes that reality and consciousness are independent of each other. Rand said “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

It may seem strange that I’m talking about this on my blog, and the principle does go a lot deeper than what’s shown, but, in essence, if you look at just the basic philosophy above, can anyone say that this isn’t how most people perceive their own lives? Who can truly say that they don’t pursue everything in their life with the thought of what will make them happiest in the long run? Even if one’s purpose is only to help others, isn’t that action something that makes them the happiest?

I tend to believe that most managers are missing this concept when dealing with employees. I hear often about “bully” managers who seem to care only about themselves at the moment, not about long term success, or long term happiness of anyone else. One of my friends often says she’s sitting around waiting for the person to whom she reports to start yelling at her for one thing or another. I also hear people who say they’re always worried about making a mistake because they don’t want to get castigated for it.

Managers to attempt to lead by fear and bullying are doomed to fail because they haven’t learned the basic tenet of success, which is to try to make as many people as happy as they can be so that they will produce for them. Determining what makes these people happy and content during working hours is really what a manager’s job is all about, and the need to keep employees motivated is stronger than the need to find ways to pay employees more money.

I think everyone should probably find a way to read, or listen, to Atlas Shrugged, but I know that’s not going to happen. Instead, just think of the lessons it gives, and work towards making the workplace a nicer environment for your employees. You’ll be amazed at the benefits on the back end.

Many years ago, I inserted myself into a situation that was clearly sexual harassment; unintentional, but sexual harassment nonetheless. Because I was a director at the time, I felt an obligation to do something about it, even if it was just to talk to both parties and encourage the director to make a big time apology to the employee, who worked in another department and was clearly embarrassed by the episode

I think about that situation often because I wonder if I’ve applied that same sense of doing the right thing in other aspects of my job. I know I haven’t applied it outside of the workplace often enough, slipping as often into the “it’s not my business” mode as most people do when they see something going on with people they don’t know. When I know one of the participants, I’ve always gotten into it, sometimes against the person I know, because I figure I might have to see that person again. And that’s not quite right, is it?

I came across this blog post by Tom Magness at Leader Business where he mentioned a quote his leaders at West Point used to utter: “New Cadet, never walk past a mistake. If you fail to make a correction, you have just set a new standard.“ It makes one think about this issue a bit deeper, because, as I see the world today, with so much violence and hatred and the lack of respect for each other, I wonder if all of us have caused it because we haven’t stepped up to the plate at all times and worked toward maintaining the standards we already had.

In the workplace, we can’t afford to let these standards collapse; in the world, the same thing may apply, but we can’t control all of that. We can only control ourselves. And I’m going to have to think about this one some more.

By now, everyone has heard about the incident in Philadelphia where 15 police officers pulled 3 black men from a building and started beating them without restriction. For once, it wasn’t just some guy standing on a corner filming it, but a news crew whose helicopter just happened to be flying overhead. At this point the 15 police officers have been suspended, and the typical talk about how this wasn’t racially motivated and how the officers have been under stress, is being used as an excuse for bad behavior.

It is true that officers in Philadelphia have been under some stress lately, as there was the murder of a fellow officer earlier in the week. But Philadelphia had been trying to do a crackdown in one of their most troubled neighborhoods lately, and if anyone thought this was something that didn’t have a potential to happen, they knew nothing about people and probably shouldn’t have been in leadership positions to begin with.

In essence, the officers exhibited a typical lynch mob mentality, choice of words purposely being used. It was somewhat reminiscent of the days when a mob would decide on the guilt of someone because of who they were, decided they didn’t want to wait for justice to occur, and took the law into their own hands. And when one jumps the gun, and emotions are already at a tense point, it’s hard to stop, slow down, and take a step back to look at it more logically.

History does indeed repeat itself, and leaders and managers are supposed to learn from history, and it doesn’t matter what the vocation is. But when the job the employees performs directly impact the populace, it becomes even more critical for those in leadership positions to be able to forecast the possibility of negative reactions to negative stimulus.

Has it really been that long since the riots in Los Angeles related to the Rodney King rulings?

Many of us don’t think of it this way, but fear drives most of what we do in our careers. We get a job because we’re afraid we won’t be able to make it working on our own. We don’t take a lot of chances because we fair being rebuffed or making mistakes. We work hard because we’re afraid of being found out or fired.

Every one of us deals with the fear question, even us independent consultants. Sometimes we acknowledge it, other times we don’t think of it as fear, but it’s there. How we respond to the fear issues that come into our daily and weekly lives determines how successful we will be, and what level of responsibility we’re ready to accept.

CEOs of major companies didn’t sit around waiting for things to happen for them. They faced their fear straight on and decided they were going to conquer it. Trying to achieve things and move up the ladder of success takes a lot of courage. It’s much easier to get another job when you’re resume doesn’t have a lot of elevated positions listed. After all, there are way more regular jobs than managerial jobs. I look at the healthcare industry as a perfect example. Every management position is a solo deal, and the only opportunities for advancement lay in either obtaining more education or waiting for the same position to open up at another hospital. Talk about your job insecurity!

This is why I love talking to, and working with managers. It’s a part of their existence that’s hard to resolve, but once they do, and decide they’re willing to keep moving forward, management can be a lot of fun. And that makes executive coaching a lot of fun also.

I’m not the only one who’s ever asked this particular question, but it’s my first time doing it here: why do all those rappers look so mad?

Why? Because it helps them sell records, that’s why. Most of them really aren’t that mad at all; why should they be? Many of them are rolling in money for music that really doesn’t have much substance to it at all; yeah, I said that.

There are some very talented rap artists out there, but it’s not close to the majority. Yet, put on a face that looks like it’s been sucking lemons, throw in a flashy grill (that’s the jewelry put over teeth, for the uninitiated), baggy pants with your underwear showing and an irreverent T-shirt and you’re now a million dollar rapper.

But it’s all image. I couldn’t begin to tell you how many rappers have been “outed:” as not having the background they tried to tell people they had. Many of them weren’t quite as poor, or as much into drugs as they purport, or lack a sense of humor that they purport. You want to see for yourself; just go to a black barbershop one weekend when the TV has cartoons on and see how many of them are engrossed and laughing at what’s going on. And when these rappers are found out, suddenly they’re not as popular anymore, which may be an interesting endictment against our society, but for these rappers, it’s back to looking for a different kind of day job, hopefully one that will keep some of them out of trouble.

Let’s relate this to some managers. Many come into a position with a lot of flash and bluster and sound like they’re really going to make a positive difference in the company and their departments. Yet, within a short period of time, employees learn that they don’t have the goods to match the hype, and feel disillusioned. Once an employee feels disillusioned, it’s hard to bring them back into the fold, and they’ll probably not be around for very long.

What type of manager are you? And, if you need help in learning how to be something more, do you know where to find it? Do you care Important questions to ask if you want to be in management for long.

By now, everyone knows that Microsoft has pulled its bid to purchase Yahoo totally off the table. At this point, Microsoft figures it will figure another way to make a dent into the online search market, hopefully finding a way to make its MSN Live search engine a real player in the market.

At this point Jerry Yang, the CEO of Yahoo, it going to show the world just what others think of him as a leader. His wasn’t an easy decision, and he will either be thought of as a visionary or as the world’s world gambling CEO. Here’s some quick details.

Microsoft made an initial bid for Yahoo at around $27 a share when Yahoo’s share value was around $20. Yahoo’s share price went up after that, and kept going up, though slowly. Yet, Yahoo balked, figuring they were worth more than their share value. Last week Microsoft upped the ante by bidding $33 a share, still higher than the present worth of Yahoo, and they didn’t budge.

At that point Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, had two choices. He could have gone ugly and taken the offer directly to the shareholders, which could have lead to a protracted legal battle, or he could just walk away and save himself and his company billions. We know what he did.

Now Yang has to face some realities. First, the shares of Yahoo will drop tomorrow; how much remains to be seen, but it’s going to fall. Second, he faces some definite lawsuits from some of the shareholders, who saw a nice increase in their pockets as well as the possibility of hooking up with the company that was the number one tech company in the world last year as it pertains to profit. Third, he’d made kind of an audacious promise to the shareholders that the value of Yahoo would increase by a significant amount in 2007, and it’s going to be made tougher at this point. Fourth, Yahoo is getting ready to try a project where they’re going to be advertising on Google, their main competition, which might devalue their company even more. And fifth, many investors feel as though Yang isn’t looking much like a leader who believes in the company because they feel the number of shares he himself owns in Yahoo are deficient, and hasn’t bought any shares during the time that Microsoft’s offer has been on the table.

It’s a tough leadership position to be in. We don’t know if the majority of the shareholders or the company believes in him or his vision. He hasn’t communicated all that well with either during this tense time, and that makes people nervous. He hasn’t shown himself that he fully believes in what he’s thinking, and sometimes a leader has to be more visual to inspire others. Frankly, right now, I’d almost hate to be in Mr. Yang’s shoes.

Almost, that is, because no matter what, Yang will be a very rich man, and this gives him a bit more leeway in being able to take a tough stance that might cost him his job. We won’t know for a few months whether his vision was on point or whether he cost his company and shareholders the chance of a lifetime. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.

First, the latest TTM Consulting newsletter, Training Training Training, is available here. It was inspired by yesterday’s post on training, which makes sense.

I’ve been thinking about the Democratic primary process lately and wondering just what this type of thing seems to do to leadership. It seems that instead of the candidates being able to just boost themselves up in trying to convince people that they would be the best candidate for the job, they have to tear down their opponent, sometimes using tactics that have nothing to do with another candidates position on political topics at all.

Frankly, I don’t like it, and a lot of it keeps me from watching any of the debates or press conferences, and only looking in briefly at the results after each contest. I did the same when the Republicans were still running primaries. There is something to be said for taking the high road, yet, if I noticed that the populace seemed to only respond to negative tactics, I have to wonder if I’d be ready to go that route.

In the end, this probably means that we’ll end up electing the person who was able to trash his or her opponent the best. I’m thinking that’s a terrible way to elect a president. Some say that the process proves how touch a prospective president is to have been able to survive it; I say that it starts the potential president out with nothing but negativity that has to be overcome later on. When discussing true leadership, this is definitely not something one would point to as far as a recommendation.

I guess it could be worse; at least they’re not jumping over tables and engaging in fistfights, although, in this case, I think if that were to happen this election would already be over.

As someone who gives seminars on leadership and management, I have come to my own conclusion that these are two separate things, though it would be great if both eventually end up being the same time. I’ve always said that managers may not be good leaders because many managers end up in the position for reasons that have nothing to do with whether they can lead others or not. Whereas there are many leaders without the titles of leadership who people seem to gravitate to because they inherently know that person won’t let them down.

I came across this discussion again while reading a blog post titled Leaders Vs Managers; Are They Really Different on a blog called The Practice Of Leadership, written by George Ambler. I really like this part of a quote of his: “In the end, we need to be good at leading first and managing second,…”

You should check out the post, as he gives some links to a couple of books that help illuminate his position; good stuff.