Clueless

The reason people do not know much is that
they do not care to know.

― Stephen Fry

I was scammed last week out of $500; a first, for me.

I received an email appearing to come from the president of an association I belong to. 

She asked me, as a favor, to buy $500 worth of gift cards and send them to a veterans charity on behalf of the association. She was supposedly swamped and couldn't get to it. I'd be reimbursed for my out-of-pocket expense promptly.

I helped her out the following day.

As a volunteer on several nonprofit boards, I receive frenzied requests from other association officers frequently.

Hers seemed fairly routine.

Only when I received a second request from her to send another $500, did I suspect a scam.

My credit card issuer has determined I was duped by a "credible imposter," so I don't feel completely stupid; only partly stupid.

By placing a few phone calls, I learned within moments of sensing a scam that the association's leaders knew for days about the imposters, but covered up their activities from the association's members.

They had also—years ago—posted all the members' names and emails on the association's website, making them easy pickings for scammers.

I informed the president she had committed an egregious breach of trust by exposing members' personal information and then covering up the scam.

But she didn't—and doesn't—get it. 

The term breach of trust means nothing to her. 

She only wanted to know whether to cancel my meal at next month's annual lunch, since I was resigning from membership.

Some folks simply have no business running a nonprofit.

If you are asked to do so, I suggest you first educate yourself—just a little.

It's easy!

There are hundreds of free resources at your fingertips.

Show you care enough to become informed.

Or stay on the sidelines.

You have no business trying to lead.

Bystanders

Business leaders cannot be bystanders.

— Howard Schultz

Bought anything lately?

Corporate waste and failure seem the norm.

Appointments aren't kept. Emails go ignored. Phone calls aren't returned. Quotes are inaccurate. Packages never arrive. Products don't work. Bills are wrong. Customers are scolded. Customers are spammed.

Everything is broken.

They wouldn't be, if business leaders stopped confining themselves to the corner office, indifferent to the constant missteps their employees make.

They wouldn't be if business leaders started leading alongside their employees, and stopped being bystanders.

Far too many business leaders are bystanders today, content just to manage risk, instead of serving customers.

An incident recounted in Nightmare Scenario, the new book about the Trump Administration's mismanagement of the Covid-19 outbreak, brought the problem home to me.

You will recall how, last February, the same month Trump tweeted, “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA," the Atlanta-based CDC issued hundreds of test kits—kits that turned out to malfunction by producing false positives.

In hindsight, the failure came just when accurate testing was most needed.

And what did the leaders of HHS do? They convened in Washington for three weeks to debate not what, but who was to blame, and how to cover up the failure.

Only when the head of the FDA at last sent an immunologist to Atlanta to see how the kits were being assembled did those leaders learn who was to blame—and, most importantly, why.

CDC's own lab techs turned out to be the culprits. Unsupervised, they were assembling the test kits on the same tables where they were examining samples of Covid-19, contaminating the kits with the live virus. That stupid mistake guaranteed the kits would produce false positives.

How many cases of Covid-19 might have been prevented if the leaders of HHS, instead of bystanding for nearly a month, had visited the CDC lab right away?

For the sake of contrast, consider Churchill, a boots-on-the-ground leader.

Schooled as a cavalryman and war correspondent, Churchill was obsessed with fact-finding, an obsession that served him well during World War II.

In his Memoirs, Churchill's chief advisor "Pug" Ismay recounts how, at the slightest hint of a snafu, the peripatetic prime minister would rush to the scene of the action, often to his bodyguards' chagrin.

During the war, Churchill inspected air fields, air raid shelters, rifle ranges, gun encasements, tank factories, dock yards, shipyards, submarine pens, encampments, fortresses, battlefields, smashed villages, fallen bridges, and countless bombed-out buildings.

During one Nazi air raid over London, he visited fighter command’s ops room to observe the progress of the battle on a huge plotting board, whispering to Ismay, "Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few."

Churchill would say that his fact-finding trips were "reconnoiters" rife with the "refreshment of adventure."

Before Churchill, Lincoln—the only sitting US president to come under enemy fire during a war—behaved in a similar way. 

Lincoln was literally a boots-on-the-ground leader.

CEOs, please take a page from Churchill and Lincoln.

Don't just be bean-counting bystanders. There's more to business than risk management. There are—duh—customers.

Get out of the corner office once in a while.

At the first sign of trouble, get your damn boots on the ground. 

Lead alongside your employees—and fix what's broken.

One Job

Is leadership possible without a purpose larger than ambition?

― Doris Kearns Goodwin

When my last manager drove me to quit a great company, little did I know I was in the majority.

Only six months later, Gallup asked a million employees why they'd quit their jobs and found the Number 1 reason to be the manager.

Seventy-five percent of employees who quit did so from sheer contempt for bossypants.

My manager was pretentious, narcissistic and bewitched by her own—and her betters'—power. She was a vestige from an acquisition and completely unlike her home-grown, more admirable, peers. I was unlucky enough to work for her—until I quit. It was a hard choice, but unavoidable.

A manager has one job. One. That's to, as Jean-Luc Picard always said, Engage!

The managers who shouldn't be managers don't get that. They can't. They only get blind ambition.

But ambition has nothing to do with being a manager.

Manager, meaning "one charged with conducting a house of business," came into English from the Italian maneggiare in the 14th century. Maneggiare means "to handle," especially with regard to teams of horses (maneggiare came the Latin manus, meaning "hand").

A manager acts as the "hand" that guides the business. 

She's there to direct work, neither "hands on" nor "hands off."

Her handiwork should be to engage, not to command, demand, or reprimand; and certainly not to manipulate, mandate, or manacle. More like to emancipate—in Latin, "to take someone by the hand."

"People leave managers, not companies," Gallup concluded from its million-person study.

When will companies come to grips with that?

Experts

Two months ago this weekend, I slipped on the ice on my driveway and broke five bones in my left ankle.

Too late to help me, experts at the University of Amsterdam have just discovered why ice is slippery.

While physicists previously believed that ice is slippery due to a layer of water on the ice's surface, it turns out "vibrating molecules" on the surface act as a lubricant that counteracts friction, causing ass-over-teakettle spills like mine.

That settles that. Thank heaven for ice experts.

How do experts become experts, anyway?

According to "expert on experts" Roger Kneebone, no matter their specialties, experts progress through the same "guild system" around during the Middle Ages.

"As an apprentice you start by knowing nothing, so you spend years in someone’s workshop, doing what they tell you in the way they prescribe," he says. 

"As a journeyman you go out into the world to ply your trade as an independent craftsman. 

"In the final stage, as a master, you establish your workshop with apprentices of your own, and the wheel comes full circle."

If you want to be called an expert, Kneebone says, there's no escaping years of tedium, followed by years of self-reliance, followed by years of responsibility for others' work.

A six-week online course doesn't cut it.

Experts, moreover, never call themselves that, because they know full mastery of their chosen fields is impossible, Kneebone says.

Only chumps call themselves "experts."

All These Condemned

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

 

― George Santayana

When I was a kid, it was routine to see people toss trash from the windows of their moving cars. Bottles, cans, cups, cartons, wrappers, bags, napkins, tissues, you name it.

It took a full-court mass media campaign—led by the packaging industry—to put an end to Americans' loutish behavior. The now-quaint Keep America Beautiful campaign sang out "Don't be a Litterbug," and we bought it (fines introduced by local governments helped).

Thirty years earlier, another mass media campaign—led by the Red Cross—was rolled out nationwide as the Spanish Flu decimated American cities. The even quainter Wear a Mask campaign spouted "Don't be a Mask Slacker." Americans bought it.

Our Executioner-in-Chief has resisted, mocked and politicized mask-wearing—and continues overtly to do so—with the result that he's condemned to death 183,000 Americans, with an additional 134,000—or more—soon to follow.

Now the Department of Health and Human Services is poised to spend $250 million of taxpayers' money on a new mass media campaign that urges America to Reopen Now, despite virologists' warnings that Covid-19 thrives on crowds.

The better use of the $250 million would be to fund a campaign preaching "Don't be a Maskhole."

But, hey, what's a few thousand more Americans' lives, when an election's at stake?

The Pity Pot

Self-pity is essentially humorless, devoid of that
lightness of touch which gives understanding of life.

— Anthony Powell

The owner of a large Texas-based company saw fit today to blog about her "heartbreak" over furloughing her employees.

"Nobody wants to go in front of their employees and deliver bad news," she says. "But when the news to thousands of employees is that we were enacting a plan to save their jobs in the long term by furloughing them in the short term… well, nothing can quite prepare you for that."

She describes her discomfort at handing out several thousand pink slips; how she had to forgo her prepared speech and speak instead "from the heart;" and how she's truly madly deeply empathetic with her now-former employees. 

"Empathy cannot be something you only do halfway," she says solemnly. "Empathy is the thing that helps you truly connect with the people around you, guiding you through the tough moments by reminding you that, in the end, we are all human."

I have no doubt, on the heels of her self-disclosure, the owner feels better. 

After all, confession's good for the soul. 

But how do her out-of-work employees feel? Are they consoled by her reminder that, "in the end, we are all human?" We are. But not a few of us are also facing the breadline.

Self-pity isn't only humorless—tiresome and banal—as the novelist Anthony Powell says; it's unbecoming, in the way Marie Antoinette's toilet (above) is unbecoming: you can dress it up, but you can't take it anywhere. "Sitting on the pity pot," as they say in AA, is equally unbecoming; blogging from there is worse.

Psychotherapist Joseph Burgo thinks sitting too long on the pity pot reveals an individual's sense of entitlement: the "inner brat," frustrated by adversity, believes she's helpless, a "victim of circumstance."

In a leader, self-pity is particularly unseemly. As Edward Segal, a crisis-management expert and the author of Crisis Ahead, told me, "Self-pity is not a good look for a leader. Singing 'Woe is me' only shows you cannot put yourself in the shoes of your furloughed employees."

You'll recall how frequently BP's CEO Tony Hayward sat on the pity pot when he was interviewed by reporters during the Gulf oil spill. It won him no friends.

And you're aware, thanks to the daily Coronavirus briefings, how the president seems permanently affixed to the pity pot when he's interviewed. It isn't pretty.

I've managed people in my time; I've had to lay some off; and it was indeed painful—but not nearly as painful for me as it was for them. Denied their livelihoods, my self-pity was a luxury they simply couldn't afford.

Self-pity is pointless when those around you are looking for a leader.

Like hope, self-pity is not a strategy.

Shad Bake

Hubris and overconfidence are always dangerous things.

— Erik Larson

It was baked in from the beginning: Trump's hubris could only cause the president to bungle his first "crisis."

History teems with popinjays like him.

One was the Confederate George Pickett, a man many contemporaries described as an "arrogant child."

During the Battle of Five Forks (April 1, 1865), Pickett—yes, the same general who led the futile charge at Gettysburg—was so confident he could repel a Federal attack, he accepted a fellow commander's invitation to attend a shad bake behind the lines, leaving his troops without their leader.

Shad were a fish local to Virginia's rivers, and shad bakes a tasty rite of spring for Virginia boys like Pickett.

Unfortunately, as it turned out, Pickett went off to the picnic without telling anyone he was leaving, where he could be found, or who should command in his absence.

A Federal attack indeed came, and Pickett's leaderless troops were overwhelmed.

His rout resulted in the surrender of the whole Confederate army at Appomattox eight days later.

NOTE: Remember to wash your hands!

Idiocy is Baked In

The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses
for execution by idiots.

― Herman Wouk

In a thematic scene in The Caine Mutiny, the worldly Lieutenant Keefer explains how the Navy works to a fresh-faced ensign:

“The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you are not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one. All the shortcuts and economies and common-sense changes that your native intelligence suggests to you are mistakes. Learn to quash them."

Most 21st century businesses are, of course, designed in the same fashion.

"After nearly a century of effort, the industrial system has created the worker-proof factory," Seth Godin says in The Icarus Deception.

"It’s okay if the person assembling your Domino’s pizza or Apple iPhone doesn’t care. The system cares. The system measures every movement, every bit of output, so all the tolerances are in order.

"It’s okay if the person at the bank doesn’t care—the real work is done by an ATM or a spreadsheet.

"We’ve systematized and mechanized every step of every process.

"By eliminating 'personal' from frontline labor, the industrial system ensures that it can both maintain quality and use ever-cheaper (and ever-fewer) workers."

At this moment, while "surprise and delight" are on every executive's tongue at large businesses, truth be told, the system can't tolerate them.

They cut down too much on productivity.

That threatens shareholder value.

Those master plans "designed by geniuses for execution by idiots" that we call corporations spell opportunity for entrepreneurs.

Because if today's customers really crave "surprise and delight," they'll never find them when they do business with large businesses.

Idiocy is baked in.

Road Closures

You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth 

may be the best thing in the world for you. 

— Walt Disney

Business setbacks haunt those unequipped for adversity.

That's just about everyone.

You slave over relationships and infrastructure, only to find the universe doesn't want another product like yours (at least, not enough to pay for it).

So you accept the lesson and move on, sadder but wiser. Or you:

• Don blinders and blame the customers
• Get angry and blame the employees
• Get stoned before lunchtime
• Keep beating the dead horse
• All of the above

Limited information, skills and equanimity all get in the way of clarity and acceptance, especially during business setbacks.

The best way to deal with them is to reconnect with your "why" (why did we start this venture in the first place?) and remind yourself of everything you accomplished along the road to failure.

Doing the Wrong Thing

Nothing is funnier than confidently 

doing the wrong thing. 

— Adam McKay

Why do so many business leaders get it so very wrong, so very often?

For four reasons, says Dartmouth professor Sydney Finklestein:

• Experience (when the experience doesn't matched the situation)

• Self-interest (often unconscious)

• Pre-judgments (hasty decisions that stick)

• Attachments (undue influences)

Among my clients, I witness operator-induced train wrecks all the time. 

The five red flags are:

• Obsession with sacred-cow marketing tactics

• Fixation on "bright and shiny objects"

• Readiness to heed the advice of charismatic nincompoops 

• Hyper-focus on waste, instead of growth

• Bias for copying competitors and using low-price as strategy

It's easy for an outsider (like me) to spot when experience, self-interest, pre-judgements or attachments are driving decisions; far less so less for an insider.

As people in recovery like to say, "Denial ain't just a river in Egypt."

Denial enables business decisions to feel right, even when they're wrong.

That's because, as Professor Finklestein says, "Decision making is not a rational, step-by-step process. It’s much more emotionally driven."

HAT TIP to Steve Dennis for inspiring this post.

Make Your Mark

Pear and squash (Charcoal on paper)

I can never accomplish what I want―only what I would
have wanted had I thought of it beforehand.

― Richard Diebenkorn

Drawing classes have taught me something.

A plan means little, unless you make your first mark.

The plan says, "This is about perfection."

The blank sheet says, "This will never work."

The hand says, "This is beyond me."

The brain says, "This is embarrassing."

But as the generals know, no plan survives contact with the enemy.

You will never accomplish what you want; but what you want doesn't matter.

Your first mark matters.

Corporate Cargo Cults

If you've spent any time inside an American corporation lately, you've seen the executives abusing their young employees.

I refer, of course, to the damage being done by hotshot leaders bent on manufacturing cool corporate cultures.

They're victimizing the youths they recruit, in the same way European colonizers did many natives in the South Pacific during the years before World War II.

Unprepared for their encounter with wealthy and powerful white men―just as many of today's college grads are―those natives took refuge in bizarre religious cults anthropologists later called "cargo cults."

Although differing in local details, these cults all advanced one central prophesy: the world is about to experience a terrible cataclysm, after which dead ancestors will reappear and usher in paradise, by giving all the survivors electrical appliances.

Today's executives aren't manufacturing corporate cultures, but corporate cargo cults.

The natives, given their pitiful wages, can only pray the appliances will arrive soon.

Post-Competence

Pundits call ours the post-truth era.

I think it's the post-competence era.

In fewer than 10 days, we've seen:

• Mariah Carey botch lip-synching before 11.6 million viewers on live TV
  
  
• Walt Disney recall 15,000 Minnie Mouse infant sweatshirts due to a choking hazard
  
  
• Express (published by The Washington Post) illustrate its cover story on the Women's March on Washington with the male symbol
  
  
• Yahoo Finance Tweet "Trump Wants a Much Bigger Navy" using the "N word"

Dan Lyons' 2016 memoir, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble, provides a strong clue for why we're engulfed in post-competence.

Taking his cue from Steve Jobs, Lyons calls it "the bozo explosion."

Bozos explode in companies when "B players hire C players, so they can feel superior to them, and C players hire D players."

Of course, there's another, more powerful force in effect: companies' drive to profit at their customers' expense.

That drive manifests itself every day in companies' ready willingness to subject customers to post-competent employees—and to the fiascos they create.

Both Sides Now

CMOs who hope to keep their jobs must use both the left and right sides of their brains, according to Forrester's 2017 Predictions.

Those who can't—the "analytics-only" and the "brand-only" CMOs—will be pink-slipped.

A CMO's right hemisphere "designs experiences to engage customers." Her left "masters technology and analytics to deliver personalized, contextually rich experiences."

“'Whole-brained' CMOs are in the minority—but they will soon be the competency standard for both B2C and B2B companies," the report says.

A Little Mystery Goes a Long Way

The statue on the altar is never reverenced by him
who knew it as a trunk in the garden.

― Balthasar Gracian

Transparency's in vogue, but a little mystery goes a long way.

Sometimes you have to leave home for your talents to be appreciated; sometimes you have to appear foreign.

You're respected in a new place when you come from afar, because you're seen as ready-made and perfect; and respected by the folks back home, because you're seen only from a distance.

Inch by Inch

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has always found ways to leverage technology—whether e-commerce, rockets, drones or cloud computing—to give his company's flywheel another jolt.

Who doesn't want to find the profit-turning flywheel Bezos runs, the one Jim Collins describes in Good to Great?

But the truth is, you don't find it; you cultivate it.

"No matter how dramatic the end result, the good-to-great transformations never happened in one fell swoop," Collins says. "There was no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no wrenching revolution."

A flywheel is not the creation of the fast-buck "mercenary" (Bezos' term), but of the "missionary"—the patient, purpose-driven businessman or woman.

Can You Dig Out of the Hole?

If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.

— Will Rogers

A new survey by the Association Research Board shows most association executives lack urgency and direction in their search for non-dues revenue.

The survey found only one in three association executives is “very committed” to tapping new non-dues revenue streams in 2017; the rest are only “somewhat committed” or “not committed.”

It also found one in four executives never discusses non-dues revenue-generation with her board.

While one in two association executives tapped a new revenue stream in 2016, the survey says, only one in four describes her revenue-generating activities as “highly successful.”

Association membership and dues revenue continue to decline year over year. So why do most association executives give non-dues revenue-generation so little priority?

Don't they see the only other way to dig out of the hole is to trim expenses—and members' benefits?

Journalist Michael Hart recently hosted a webinar exploring some alternative ways out of the hole.

Take a peek, if you're interested.

Art & Science

Art is I; science is we.

                       — Claude Bernard

At INBOUND last week, Gary Vaynerchuck told 20,000 B2B marketers to respect art and science equally, if they hope to succeed in the next 10 years.

Most are good at only one.

The problem persists, Vaynerchuck says, because, "We have people who lack self-awareness to know what they're good at and what they're not good at."

Focus on that at which you suck, he insists.

I agree.

I've encountered few marketing leaders who are dexterous at both art and science.

Many master and respect only one (they're true specialists); and many others, neither (they're simply shrewd self-promoters).

Marketing leaders should be Renaissance (Wo)men.

It's no surprise 1 in 3 will be fired next year.

Remembering Sallie

May 1861. West Chester, Pennsylvania.

The men of the 11th Pennsylvania adopt a Staffordshire Terrier as their mascot and name her Sallie, after a pretty girl who'd appear every Sunday to watch them drill.

After 11 months of training, the regiment is shipped to Virginia, where it sees its first fight at Cedar Mountain. Sallie accompanies the men into battle, dodging the fierce Southern fire and grabbing at spent bullets as they strike the earth around her.

She repeats that performance at Second Manassas, South Mountain and Antietam, where she receives a scorch mark through her hair from a Confederate bullet.

After the Battle of Fredericksburg, Sallie gets a chance to march in review with the regiment past President Lincoln, who doffs his stovepipe hat when he spots her.

At Gettysburg, she loses her regiment on the first day, and is trapped behind enemy lines. She returns to the spot where she'd become separated from the 11th, and lies there three days, keeping vigil over dead Pennsylvanians until a member of the regiment finds her, nearly starved to death. Friends nurse her back to health.

Sallie is again struck by a bullet in May 1864 at Spotsylvania, and left with a bright scar on her neck. But the dog is undaunted. She travels with the 11th to the trenches before Petersburg.

On February 7, 1865, Sallie's luck runs out. She is shot through the brain during a skirmish at Dabney’s Mill. Gravediggers bury her on the spot.

In 1890, when the survivors of the Pennsylvania 11th reunite at Gettysburg for the dedication of their battlefield monument, they find a surprise.

“The 11th Pennsylvania has a grand monument to mark their line of battle,” one veteran writes. “A bronze soldier on top, looking over the field, while the dog, Sallie, is lying at the base keeping guard.”

Please honor veterans this weekend.

Nerves

The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he
can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome.

— Steven Pressfield 

Henry Fonda vomited before every performance he ever delivered.

Nerves never leave some of us.

Nerves are normal.

Nerves can make us better players.