I was swiping through my Flipboard on my Nexus 7 (okay, let me interpret for some of you. Flipboard is my very cool news/blog aggregator application, that looks like an electronic magazine, running on an Android powered Nexus 7 tablet computer – a tablet other than the ubiquitous iPad) when an LA Times article caught my eye. The article spoke about how many small-town movie theaters are turning to their hometown patrons to raise the necessary funds to move to digital projection systems. They are being forced to go digital since the new movies are being distributed that way as opposed to film. A couple of swipes later, I found another article stating that economists are predicting only modest growth in advertising for the balance of 2013. The convergence of these two articles along with the realization that I was reading the content on my electronic tablet (I have not received printed newspapers for many years) started me thinking about how we have to change our business paradigms. Hence the first two articles above and the present ruminations.
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Presently, I have no women in my CEO group. In the past we’ve enjoyed the presence of two strong women entrepreneurs. The group agrees that for sure we had a wider view of approaches to challenges and opportunities. And that was not simply because we had different business experience at the table when these powerful women were there, it was because we had a diversity of gender views. We continue to search for that gender diversity for our group.
So I picked up Sandberg’s new book on women leaders with anticipation. I wanted to understand why there was reluctance on the part of so many women entrepreneurs to join this high performing group. Part of it is just numbers. A 2012 McKinsey survey of more than four thousand employees of leading companies found that 36 percent of the men wanted to reach the C-suite, compared to only 18 percent of the women. And of course there are the “usual” reasons – too busy, I already belong to an industry group, I travel and can’t make monthly meetings, etc.
When it comes to leadership, L. David Marquet likes to frame the discussion into four broad areas: Control, Competence, Clarity and Courage. With respect to courage, he often highlights the issue of the personal struggle a leader must make to break out of the old “command and control” model or what we know as the “leader/follower” model. It’s “fun” to be in charge. It’s fun to be “the” decision maker. Yet we know, intuitively, that we cannot scale our companies to the level consumers may be demanding if we do not relinquish control at some point. Sooner or later, if we are to build sustainable and scalable organizations, we have to develop leaders who can make wise decisions and who think for themselves. Does that frighten you?
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“Back in the day,” I did an awful lot of spreadsheet work around forecasting. Sometimes, but not usually, I’d be asked for worst case and best case forecasts. Generally, though, any numbers I gave were reduced to only a single goal for revenue. It was vanishingly rare that someone in an executive position would present a revenue forecast that read like a weather forecast: We have a 20% chance of obtaining $200 MM in revenue in this fiscal year and an 80% chance of achieving $175 MM. Why not?
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There seems to be a big movement towards businesses being more “compassionate,” “conscious,” and/or “triple bottom line oriented.” Maybe it’s the chaotic times causing everyone to be looking for meaning. I’m told that’s what happens in chaotic times. I’m sure there are many, many books out there on the subject. A few have crossed my desk in the last couple of years: Triple Bottom Line by Andrew Savitz, Conscious Business by Fred Kofman, Conscious Capitalism by John Mackey, Be the Solution by Michael Strong, Firms of Endearment by Rajendra Sisodia, It’s Just Good Business by Keff Klein, The Living Organization by Norman Wolfe, etc. The list seems endless. What should we make of this accelerating trend?
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So, here we go. I was listening to one of my podcasts yesterday and the breathless announcer was peppering his guest with questions about the President’s directive to begin mapping the human brain. We don’t even know what that means, really, at this point, but we need to get started. And I couldn’t help wonder why the show host was so shocked by the concept. Did he not read Ray Kurzweil’s 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines? Did he not know all of this has been predicted including the timing – which is just about right on!
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Recently I read over on a leadership blog, that the author felt that an overriding corporate strategy is a “fools errand.” Freek Vermeulen reasoned that in larger companies divisions or business units often have widely different goals, products, costumers and even “brands.” Therefore, a one size fits all corporate strategy is impossible to implement and could harm the organization. Well, perhaps we are quibbling over words, but I say throwing out corporate strategy is crazy talk.
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I am not a car enthusiast. I enjoy having a reliable, clean and efficient vehicle, but the primary purpose, for me, is to get me where I’m going on time and without surprises. So when I ordered this book, my expectations were that I’d ignore the “car stuff” for the most part, and concentrate on the leadership stuff. Well, I wound up doing both, and enthusiastically at that. Hoffman has written an excellent book mixing family business intrigue with a history of the car business and its missteps as well as a book replete with leadership lessons. Here are just a few of the most notable for me. Read the full post . . .
Ever wonder why economists, in general, seem to always “get it wrong?” Did the thought cross your mind that they seem not to be improving in their economic forecasting but get lucky once in awhile? How about the national weather forecasters – they seem to be definitely improving even though they drive us crazy showing us storm landfall models and giving us “percent chance of precipitation” numbers. Ever wonder how reasonable people can look at exactly the same data and come up with conclusions 180 degrees apart? The answers to these and many more questions are in Nathaniel Read (Nate) Silver’s excellent book, The Signal and The Noise.
At the time I write this blog post, there is a great deal of “stuff” being thrown into the air, inked into headlines and typed into cyberspace about the so-called sequestration. This man-made “disaster” is, depending on who you listen too, just what we need to at least begin to get our fiscal house in order, or an unmitigated disaster that will be ruinous for many folks still suffering from the last recession and will throw our country into yet another recession. Most of the thoughtful people I know are paying little to no attention. The stock market all but yawned. It’s not news, but it seems that nobody I know believes the rhetoric on either side of this argument. There is no trust.
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