Bird's Eye View

Two Takes On The Importance Of Jobs

There appear to be two topics on which everyone has an opinion:

Jobs.  And jobs.

There are those still deconstructing the life of Steve Jobs--"Big J"--, responding to the revelations of Walter Isaacson's new biography on him, and musing over whether or not Apple can continue its innovative streak.

Then there are those who are most concerned with the "little j" jobs, namely employment or the lack thereof in the United States and elsewhere in the world.

What I'd like to initiate is a conversation on how Big J and little j intersect.  How do we find the next generation of Steve Jobs?--the people who will create and build the next generation of goods and services that will rock our world?  And how can those innovations create employment opportunities for more people?

My concern is that the talents and skillsets of our current unemployed may not be at all a good fit for the kind of work that will be needed for the next generation of innovations.  And therein lies a problem for America and its ability to maintain leadership in the marketplace, in its educational centers, and in its companies.

What say you?

Oh NO! Is It Possible The Semicolon Will Vanish?

A Hong Kong friend forwarded to me an article from the Wall Street Journal that brings tears to my eyes.  Well, not really, but anything to do with the demise of our usage of punctuation strikes close to the heart of a grammarian and self-described language freak like me.

Read what Herny Hitchings has to say. I'm fascinated by his ruminations about our written language having migrated from traditional prose to writings that mimic spoken language, hence the more frequent use of dashes, for example.  In other words, he posts that we tend more and more to write as if we are in conversation.  That's ironic, since we seem to have less and less of it, at least face to face. And more and more of it via technology.  Whatever it takes to further conversation, I'm in favor. 

But when he talks of predictions of punctuation that will go by the wayside, ouch!  Especially if he is right about the demise of the semi colon.  Say it isn't so!

In Whom Do You Trust?

I was talking with a good friend yesterday about an issue on both our minds: trust. 

Our U.S. currency declares "In God We Trust."  That seems to be debatable these days.

And if not God, just who is left in your circle of friends, acquaintances, loved ones, public figures...the world, that you trust?

I've talked here of the Inner Circle discussions I've facilitated among senior executives who said that on both a personal and professional basis, the number of people they trust has narrowed over the past several years.  I find the same thing repeated among everyone I've talked with on the topic, from the doormen at the apartment building where I live in New York, to taxi drivers, to the cashiers in stores I frequent.

No one seems to trust anyone else.  I've traveled to several different continents over the past year and find that trust is eroding everywhere, but it seems to be most dramatic here in the United States.  I've decided the reason for the precipitous drop in trust here is that we had a further distance to fall.

By that I mean generations of Americans had grown up trusting in many things.  We trusted that if we worked hard, paid our taxes and gave back to our community fellows, we'd have a good life.  And that life would be better than our parents had enjoyed.  And the chain would continue.  It's why so many citizens were willing to risk their lives in their country's service.  They wanted to be sure that our Nation remains strong, free, and bountiful.  They felt a sense of duty to protect all that.

It's why in so many families, the willingness to serve in the military was passed down from one generation to another.  It's why my husband served in the Marines; his Dad served in the Navy before him.

But the chain got broken somewhere along the lines.  None of our sons seriously entertained military service.  The world has changed.  And our willingness to place our trust in one another changed with it.

I remember a wise marriage counselor once telling me that when trust is gone, the marriage is over.  And that is true of other partnerships as well.  When business partners trust one another, all things seem possible.  When board directors of companies trust their fellow directors, and the executives in the company they serve, to do the right thing, they feel empowered as stewards of that organization.  When parishioners of a church or members of a temple or other religion have trust that their priest or rabbi or other religious leader has their best interest at heart, their faith is strong.

And politics?  When we believe our leaders are acting not in their own self interest, but in the Nation's, we want to follow their vision.  If our President announced today that we should ask not what our country can do for us, but what we can do for our country--as JFK did--we would no doubt have a cynical response.

How do we get it back?  Can we get it back?  Is it at its core a question of leadership?  In her remarks at Harvard Business School last Friday, Nancy Koehn talked of the trust that Americans eventually placed in Abraham Lincoln to lead them through the hell of the Civil War.  And she talked of the trust that Ernest Shackleton's men had that somehow--against all odds--he would bring them back to their homes alive. 

Where are our Lincolns and Shackletons? 

Nancy Koehn, Harvard Business School Rock Star

Last week, I attended the Committee of 200's annual conference,held this year in Boston.  Thanks to connections made by C200 members with close ties to Harvard Business School, our Saturday morning was an intellectual business-based feast.

The high point for me was Nancy F. Koehn, who spent an hour or so with us that I wished could have been extended to a day or more.  She is electric, brilliantly smart, an incredible presented, a showman, a star. And she conducts a class (in effect, that's what our session with her was) as a conversation.  She is a great listener, knows how to read and hear an audience and adjust her remarks accordingly.

Nancy is a business historian.  It's a remarkable way for her to mix her deep and varied interests.  She graduated from Stanford, earned a Masters of Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School and then got a Masters and a PhD in History from Harvard.  She is an intellectual and began her teaching career on Harvard College's Faculty of Arts and Sciences where she spent seven hears, lecturing in History and Literature, and then in the Department of Economics.

Whew. 

Now she is an historian, especially of business, and her research focuses on entrepreneurial leadership and how leaders craft lives--as she describes it-- of "purpose, worth and impact."  She spent her time with us discussing three subjects of a book she is about to publish, showcasing Abraham Lincoln, Ernest Shackleton, and Oprah Winfrey.

Her work is especially important now in these days of confusion, depression, bad news from all sectors of our planet.  When Nancy talks of Lincoln and how he faced days that offered no respite from truly terrible and turbulent times and during which he felt he had no choice but to place men in harm's way in the Civil War, she is positively riveting in her ability to make you apply Lincoln's example to leaders in our current times. 

She knows her subjects.  Indeed, although Lincoln and Shackleton were not alive for her to interview, you sense from her words that she knows them deeply, that she understands the complexities of their humanness and that --best of all for us who want to learn from them--she knows what drove them to be such successful leaders in what most would consider impossible situations.

As for Oprah Winfrey, Nancy spent time in personal one on one meetings with Oprah and was given special access to the people around her. 

I'd guess that virtually every person in the room experiencing Nancy's presentation was inspired.  The inspiration was multi-layered; we were moved to consider our leadership roles in times of great adversity and take lessons from the remarkable people Nancy brought to life before us, and we were moved to take example from Nancy herself: a passionately engaged professor and historian who is committed to help build and sustain leaders who wish to lead lives that have worth and positive impact on others.

I'll be in line for Nancy's new book when it is published.  You may want to look for it, too.

Two Truths And A Lie

Here is a great ice-breaker.  It's not only useful at parties, it is a sure-fire win at business meetings where you are trying to create a sense of community and trust among your group.  It works equally well among people who know one another (although you have to be a little more inventive in the things you choose to mention) and people who are strangers.

In fact, a group of us played Two Truths and a Lie at the recent C200 conference in Boston last week.  Here was a group of senior business leaders, all women, who reached another deeper level of community by playing this silly but revealing game.

It works like this.  Someone volunteers to go first and shares with the group three facts about herself.  She could say, for example:

1) I grew up on a farm in North Dakota and never went to school until I was ten

2) I won a pie baking contest in high school

3) I'm a three medal chess champion

The trick is that two of the three facts have to be true.  One of them has to be a lie.  And the rest of the group guesses at which is the lie.  Besides finding out fascinating things about one another, we also learn just what is it in this person's imagination that leads them to choose the thing about which they lie? 

At your next sales managers meeting, start the meeting with a Two Truths and a Lie round at the table.  You'll be amazed at what you learn about each other.  And I guarantee the rest of the meeting will be more productive than it would have been without that session.

It's all about the conversation, all about engagement.  And Two Truths and a Lie get even the most reticent people engaged in the conversation.

Telling The Truth In Advance

I was in a meeting recently where someone was describing her entrepreneurial days and how much creativity she had to use in positioning her fledgling company as a true player so that prospective customers and clients would take her seriously.

She talked of the question raised by one big prospect of how many employees she had.  At the time, it was only her.  One person.  Self employed.

So, she told us, she decided to "tell the truth in advance" and reported that she had six employees.

So then she had to involve family and friends to pose as those employees...and she quickly got enough business so she really did have six employees.

It got even dicier--and funnier-- when she told of another prospect--somewhat later--wanting to come by and see her operation.  At that time, she realized there would be an expectation of over twenty people...so she cast a wider net of family and friends and hired a large space--temporarily--so that she could appear to have a bigger going concern.  She said she even had phones on the desk, except that if her prospect picked up the receiver, he would find nothing on the other end of the line.

Remember The Sting, with Robert Redford and Paul Newman?  This woman had her own sting going...except that she was truly in business and she delivered to meet her customers' expectations. 

It takes all kinds of ingenuity to get a business off the ground.  I don't suggest lying about your circumstances makes much sense, but it made for an hilarious story. 

And now I've got a new phrase in my collection: "telling the truth in advance."

The F Word Discussed At Inner Circle In London

We had a terrific Inner Circle in London, hosted by Maria Pinelli, who is the new Global Head of Strategy for Ernst & Young, and recently moved to London to lead that effort from the UK across the world.

The discussion was provocative, especially around the topic of whether failure is a pre-requisite to success.  Some felt strongly that failure is just too strong a word and is thus feared.  Mistakes should not always be seen as failures (really?  why not?  of what are we afraid when we use that word?).  Others said that failure and innovation are not directly related.

Others said, nonsense.  In fact, failure and innovation are joined at the hip.  To have innovation, you have to have failure.  It has to be a matter of trial and error and you need to be prepared for the fact that if you are doing anything remotely innovative, some of your efforts will fail.

Jay Bregman, one of my favorite entrepreneurs at the moment, recommended the recent book by Tim Harford, entitled Adapt: Why Success Always Startes with Failure.  I spent some time reading parts of the book before our Inner Circle and am a believer.  Harford is provocative: he's the "Undercover Economist who writes a column by that name for the FT.  He makes economics both understandable and fun.  In fact this book reads a bit like Freakanomics, the blockbuster by U of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen Dubner.  Adapt is pithy, uses great examples, and a quick read.

In any event, it makes you scratch your head hard as to why so many corporations have so much trouble letting people experiment if it is obvious that only through trial and error to we get to the game-changers of our time.  Some companies do, e.g. 3M which has a policy that every year at least 20% of their products have to be things they didn't produce last year. And I understand that P&G has gotten aggressive about innovation, even when to get a product that will scale, they have to collaborate with a competitor to bring it to market.

What about your company?  Do people shake in their boots at the thought that they'll be found to have gotten something wrong?  Does the company seem bent on putting error into the sunshine and figuring out how to avoid them?  Or do they spend their time placing blame on someone (perhaps even firing them) and then brushing the effort under the rug, letting everyone know it won't happen again.

 

 

The Need For Nationwide Conversation

I'm not referring to debates.  Nor stump speeches for presidential hopefuls.  Nor discussions pro and con President Obama.

I'm referring to our need to initiate and sustain a conversation on what is going to get us out of the mess we find ourselves in as a nation and an economy.  Frankly, I'm not so sure the solution will have a lot to do with who is President, although it will be important to have a person at the helm who understands that we can't save ourselves out of this mess.  Nor can we spend ourselves out of this mess.

If we want America to be competitive, we need to look at the one think that made America great: innovation.  The very formation o the United States of America was innovative and the governmental structure put into place to sustain this young country was powerfully innovative.  Since then, our remarkable growth as a nation came from hard work and, yes, innovation. 

So I'm thinking that is where we need to focus.  And how do we feed it?  We start with the kids and how we are educating them.  Innovation rarely shows its head in a rote-learning environment. 

Is there hope for turning our American youth into innovation machines?  I'm betting it's possible.  That's what makes me want to get out of bed every morning.  I'm thinking about how we can make that happen.

Any ideas?.

 

When You Need Community Go To The Midwest

Do you know the Robert Frost poem "The Death of the Hired Man?"  It has a poignant line "...Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in..."

Well, I was in Appleton, Wisconsin over the weekend in support of my sister and her daughter, whose young husband died unexpectedly on Wednesday night from a sudden heart attack.  He was young, and left three small children as well as his wife.  It is devastating to the family.

Yet I saw first hand over the weekend the tremendous power of a loving and supportive community.   In Appleton they apparently know instinctively that when something happens to someone in their community, everyone is expected to act.  Not from obligation, but from the sense of community that drives the kind of connection they all enjoy during the good times as well as the not so good.

Neighbors, friends, teachers from the kids' school, people from every direction came and pitched in.  They didn't come for the kind of "Ain't it awful" form of conversation that often takes over events like this.  Instead, they rolled up their sleeves and without asking what needed to be done, figured it out and did it.  One friend of my niece is a registered nurse who normally spends her afternoons delivering babies.  But on Thursday last week she showed up at my niece's home, said she was sure that there would be lots of people showing up, so surely someone needed to clean the bathrooms...so could someone direct her to the cleaning supplies and rubber gloves?  She cleaned the bathrooms, returned all the materials to their proper place, and went back to her work at the hospital.

A teacher showed up with a list of meals--breakfast, lunch and dinner for three days of every week between now and December-- that are going to be delivered by the teachers from the kids' school.  They had already divvied up the work and the delivery effort.  Their only question was whether anyone had allergies to any of the things on the list.

People came over to keep the kids entertained, to bring pies and donuts, to offer their services to shuttle relatives back and forth to the airport. 

And they did all these things in a remarkable spirit of friendliness, compassion, community.  It's what people there do when one of their own needs help.

I thought of the fact that a woman in the apartment building where I live in Manhattan died two weeks ago.  I never knew her.  But I understand her husband, now a widower, is still living in that apartment, alone.  Now that I've been to Appleton, Wisconsin, I know that as a neighbor the least I can do is put a note under my neighbor's door and tell him I'm sorry to have heard the news about his wife, and how can I help?  Does he need company for dinner?  Does he need dry cleaning picked up?  Is he eager to see a movie?

It had not occured to me that I could or should be of help.  Now I know.  It is the conversation that comes naturally in a true community. 

I'll put my note under his door this evening.

 

 

 

Steven Pinker Says We're Less Violent Than We Thought

I had dinner at the magnificent home of Chris Anderson and Jacqueline Novogratz last night --a wonderful space-- to hear from Steven Pinker about his new book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Declined.  First of all, Pinker is not just smart.  Pinker is brilliant.  Scary smart.

And he knows his stuff backwards and forwards.  I haven't read the book but intend to for a couple of reasons.  The premise that there is good news of this magnitude in our world today makes me want to learn for myself that Pinker is right, namely that our world has become an increasingly less violent, more peaceful place that ever before in the history of humankind, and will continue on this trajectory.  Wow!  That's not the story we hear and see in the media (which suggests another look at how and why we let our media inform our perspective on the world).

A second reason is because in the process of changing our minds about how violent our world is, he draws on research in history, psychology, cognitive science, economics and sociology.  This guy's intellectual reach is both deep and wide.  I realized that in one evening, Pinker had taken us on a trip that started with the analysis of skeletons found at archaeological sites all the way through the Dark Ages, the Enlightenment, tribal customs and habits and finally, to the modern world and the wars we rage against one another.

Along the way of what he calls the civilizing process of mankind, Pinker explains the benefits of peace and why our material circumstances have so much to do with just how much peace we enjoy as humans.

Education, prosperity, commerce, inventions of all kinds, there is a long list of activities and circumstances that Pinker would argue would not have occurred if mankind had stayed as cruel, as violent as it had been in the past. 

Pinker argues that man has achieve enhanced powers of reasoning and that leads to an aversion to violence. 

It's clear that Pinker is an important scholar and that The Better Angels of Our Nature is an important book.  I can understand why Chris Anderson is such a fan of his.  Chris explained, in introducing Pinker, that when a young man, Chris read Pinker's How the Mind Works and it changed his life. He indicated he finds this recent book equally significant.

That's good enough for me.  I'll get it on my ereader to read on the plane this weekend.  Have a feeling this is one book that is going to be work (700 pages?  Are you kidding?) but worth it. 

And by the way, the questions raised by the amazing collection of people in the room (talk about rarefied air! this was an intellectual crowd) gave me even greater incentive to read the book.  And the side conversations were the stuff of the kind of memorable dinner engagement by which you judge all others.

Thank  you, Chris and Jacqueline.