personal development

If you are a persistent person – and if you’re reading this blog, you probably are – then you know the power of focusing on something intensely until it gets done.

Unfortunately, the brain with the power to hone in relentlessly on solving a problem or achieving a goal is often the same brain that grabs onto a negative thought or a fear and can’t let that go either. If you ever find your brain spinning incessantly on an unproductive thought, no matter how hard you try to stop focusing on it, this method will help you.

Step 1: Is it real, or is it worry?

Obviously, if you are in the middle of an IRS audit, it’s real. If it’s real, skip to Step 4. But most of the time, our unproductive thoughts are worries, resentments, and fears. If you identify that the thing you are spinning on is not real, go to Step 2.

Step 2: Is it true?

It’s very tempting to believe that all our thoughts are true, but they’re not. The mind plays games with us, and we often waste time believing in things that aren’t real at all.

For example, I have a client who is likely the most experienced person alive in his field. He’s amazing. But when he sees other people in his field — people who have significantly less talent and experience than him — being asked to make presentations or take interviews as the expert, it really bothers him. When I asked him to articulate what it was about this that upset him so much, he said, “They think so-and-so is the expert instead of me.” So when I asked him, “Is that true?” he thought about it for a bit and then said, “I guess I don’t know.” So we talked about all the other reasons those other people might be asked to do things, each reason as plausible (or even more plausible) than his initial belief.

Our assumptions are based on a lot of things. We assume we know what others think or feel, we assume we know all the details of a situation, we assume we have more (or less) knowledge than we really have. Our assumptions become our realities, and many of them are simply false. By asking ourselves the question is it true, we gain the perspective that comes from stepping back and questioning our assumptions.

Step 3: What else might be true?

Make a list of all the other possible explanations for or interpretations of your worry. Once you see the entire list of alternative explanations and outcomes for your particular worry, you’ll start to feel better instantly. The human brain is a very logical mechanism. Actively focusing on a broader range of possibilities will almost always stop the spinning.

Step 4: Do I need to do anything about this right now?

Chances are, you don’t, or can’t. Even if you are in the middle of an IRS audit, there’s really nothing you can change about the past, and you simply need to wait until the IRS asks for more information, or tells you what they’ve determined, before you can take a next step.

Of course, in most cases, there’s nothing more to do because the thought wasn’t real in the first place, and by now you’ve identified several other explanations that are equally plausible.

Step 5: What should I do right now?

Make a plan. Whether that plan is to actively improve something related to the worry, or whether that plan is to proceed without worrying is irrelevant. The point is to do something positive and productive and get on with your day.

Does this seem too simple to work? There’s good brain science behind it. The brain will grab onto a detail and chew on it relentlessly in the absence of better information. By working through these five steps, you feed your brain more intelligence – more data – to stop the spinning and point your arrows in a forward direction again.

But don’t take my word for it. Try it out the next time you get stuck. You'll love being able to stop anxiety and get on with your day.

The owner of a small retail shop in Canada recently asked me how she could discourage conversation with her one employee without making the workplace seem cold and uninviting. This is an issue many owners of small businesses face.

The employer/employee relationship is particularly intimate in very small workplaces, and the temptation to chat all day can be a significant detriment to productivity.

I suggest that you address this issue in a forthright manner. A conversation that goes something like this will set the stage for more productive - yet collegial - days:

"I really enjoy the time we spend together in the store/studio, and I get so much out of our conversations. But one of the things I am working on is learning to minimize my conversation during the day and maximize my focus. I'm learning that the best way to maintain camaraderie and communication while also maximizing focus and accomplishment is to schedule time for both.

Why don't we start each day (or shift) with some time to catch up - personally and on business issues - and let's spend 10-15 minutes engaged in conversation over a cup of coffee or tea. That will help us stay in touch. The rest of the day, let's keep our conversation focused on the business issues, training, etc. Then, at the end of the day (or shift), let's spend another 10 minutes recapping our day."

This approach will help your employee understand that your limitation of conversation is based on a business objective, and not on unfriendliness. It also helps you when she starts talking during the day, because you can say "I'd love to discuss that with you (hear about it, etc.). Let's save that for our end-of-day recap - it will be something for me to look forward to!"

The nature of a small business culture is more fragile than that of larger workplaces, so the issue of reducing casual conversation must be handled with care. Failure to address it will only lead to frustration and an underlying tension that your employee may not understand. But if you address it effectively, with reasons and benefits, you will likely create the more effective workplace you desire while maintaining the fun and intimacy of working with someone whose help - and camaraderie - are both of great benefit to you.

I was working with a client yesterday and she expressed a fear that is common to many people these days. This woman is extremely intelligent, highly successful, and well disciplined, yet she has the fear of being professionally and technically left behind.

It’s a reasonable fear. The world is changing quickly, driven largely by the pace of technology innovation. Twenty years ago everyone was aware that computers were changing the face of business, but the general perception was that computers were the domain of ‘computer people.’ 15 years ago business sociologists were telling us that the big chasm between Baby Boomers and Generation Y would be a difference in work ethic. Today it is apparent that Boomers are alienated by technology that their Gen Y counterparts take for granted.

Emerging manufacturing technology highlights the insufficiency of tool and die skills without computer aided design skills. Marketers who can’t navigate high end software and challenging database environments fall behind. Warehouse workers interact at a high level with automation tools such as mini-computers strapped to their wrists. Artists and craftspeople must master the demands of having their own websites – or at least be capable of providing direction to a website developer and manager. And the business executive who can’t independently navigate the myriad of internet and wireless protocols can get shut out of their business for days on end (or drive some poor IT support person crazy at all hours).

The challenges go beyond computerized workstations. Defined benefits and company-provided pension plans have given way to individual structuring of retirement strategies – leading to a requirement that all individuals understand markets and economics and investment strategies – which themselves  become more complex every year. Competition is constantly changing as the barriers to entry for new business continue to shrink. Even our communication is evolving rapidly as language becomes more technical.

Some people have opted out of the whole problem by declining to develop computer or technical skills. I don’t consider this an option. Anyone reading this blog would agree that the inability to read or write is a guarantee of economic deprivation. I believe computer illiteracy will contribute to a similar result in the near future (and to a certain extent, already is). If you moved to a non-English speaking country, you could not expect to gain successful employment or integrate into society without speaking the language. In the case of computers and technology, the other language has moved here, and everyone must be proficient. When a normally intelligent person “can’t” learn a new skill, resistance – not aptitude – is generally the culprit. Ending residual computer resistance will open the door to new competencies quickly for most people.

But what about my client, the very smart executive who is worried about keeping up? In her case, we discussed what she is afraid of keeping up with or in. She has broad business responsibilities, but they are not all-encompassing. So we made a list of the general areas of knowledge in which she can’t afford to fall behind, and then we identified a few key resources to help her stay on top of her game. After evaluating the field of possibilities, she decided she will need to incorporate two new monthly magazines, one weekly magazine, and 4-6 training classes (online or live) each year to sufficiently supplement her knowledge. In addition, she will enhance her project and decision-making work by including more research, particularly research of a peer-reviewed or academic nature. I could almost see her cortisol levels drop as she realized she could design a strategy for staying ahead of her game.

For anyone who plans to work past the age of 60, making a plan for staying au courant in the important developments of their chosen profession is a wise move. The knowledge that sort of stumbles onto us is a gift from the universe. But the knowledge we planfully acquire is an important gift we give ourselves.

(c) 2007, Andrea M. Hill

I think the business world should banish the phrases “I have a great idea!” and “here’s a great idea!” and “what we need now is a really good idea.” I don’t think these phrases are doing anyone any good. In fact, they’re damaging.

That might seem crazy to you, dear reader, because business-people are supposed to be coming up with new ideas, right? All the time, right? What is the latest, biggest business buzzword? Innovation. And it’s used so often and with so little meaning that, well, it’s meaningless (meaning and meaningless are good words, but that’s not what we’re talking about today).

So, why do I have a growing opposition to the idea of the word idea? Because it’s a word for dilettantes. Anyone can have an idea, and from what I can tell, everyone does. My five-year-old granddaughter has about 275 ideas each day. My young adult children have a lot of ideas too, though I assume I’m not hearing about most of them. Just last week I was spending time with my nephews Caleb and Owen, who are 4 and 1. Boy, do they have a lot of ideas, most of them funny. So is it the fact that just anyone can have ideas that turns me against the idea of ideas?

Sort of. Let’s take it a step further. Remember those summer days when you were a kid and you sat on your back steps with your buddies from the neighborhood? Everybody sat there and threw out ideas for what to do that day, and this activity would go on for a while until an idea emerged that everyone could agree on. What was the difference between that final idea – the one that sent everyone on their way – and the first dozen or so? Intention.

Kids are good at putting intention to fun. They have all of their ideas with the ultimate goal of fun in mind. But businesses don’t seem to benefit from a common group intention, so too many of the ideas don’t lead to a common group activity. When kids negotiate about what activity they are going to engage in, they are all committed to the idea of having fun, and there’s little reason to compete with one another in the process, so they don’t. When adults negotiate about which idea they are going to commit to, they have all kinds of barriers, personal agendas, and competitions to navigate. When negotiation around ideas is too painful or fraught with risk, people won’t engage in it. What’s the next best thing? Apparently, just having the ideas in the first place!

I know (and you probably do too) executives who use up perfectly good oxygen in meeting rooms all over the country while practicing the art of self-stimulation for hours on end – dandling their ideas on their knees, trotting out their ideas for others to admire, and basking in the after-glow of being recognized as the idea person. Then, they return to their offices to continue the status quo until the next highly stimulating opportunity to indulge in a bit of idea stroking presents itself again.

What the business world needs – well wait, why limit it to that? What our personal lives, our families, our communities, and the world need, is more intention. Sure, let’s cough up some new ideas now and then, but really, how many more do we need?

What about all the great ideas that have already been born, that could solve problems if they were just implemented? Believe it or not, most of the problems business faces – and indeed, the world faces – have already been addressed with at least adequate and in most cases really good ideas. Even if the ideas are merely adequate, putting intention to them would be much better than doing nothing while waiting for a better idea to manifest. And the better ideas are likely to come about as a by-product of implementing the merely adequate ideas anyway, so why don’t we just get going?

Try saying this out loud: “I have the best intention.” “I just had a new intention.” “Wow, I heard the best intention today.” “What we really need is a few good intentions.” (Seriously. Out loud. Nobody’s listening, and if you’re so worried about it, close your door).

Can’t you feel the difference? Your personal quest, your family, your management team, and hey – possibly the world – are waiting to feel it too.

(c) 2007, Andrea M. Hill

Deciding what to do consumes an inordinate amount of time. We seek solutions to every type of problem. Want strategy? Look at dozens of business books and guess which concept will work best. Want personal productivity? Evaluate every planning system and choose the best. Want great employees? Profile, inventory, build competency models, interview, and nab the best. Recognizing excellence is critical, but what if there is a step that comes first?

For every idea we accept, for every employee we hire, and for every idea we pursue, there are dozens we turn down. Yet we orient our systems towards identifying the best. Well, the best only comes along once in any campaign. But the worst, the mediocre, and the good-but-not-so-great come along a dozen times. So learning to recognize when to say no is more important than knowing when to say yes. Eliminate the choices that won't work and save your resources.

I read a book a few years ago called "High Probability Selling" by Jacques Werth. Werth takes the no approach with sales. Rather than training salespeople to persuade prospects to buy, the High Probability Selling approach assumes lots of people want to buy. It suggests great salespeople should excel at eliminating lousy prospects quickly, so they can focus on the high quality prospects. 

HR departments review piles of resumes. The typical approach is to screen resumes with the inquiry what skills do we want, and who has them?  But it can be powerful to start by asking what things do we know we don't want, and eliminate those candidates first. One entrepreneur immediately disqualifies a candidate if their only past experience is consulting or investment banking. As he explains, "I don't have time to train someone in how to turn analysis into results. If someone has only worked at analysis jobs, I know to pass them up." Knowing when to say no streamlines his first cut at hiring.

This applies in personal life as well as business. Most people say yes too often. A clear sense of personal priorities helps you know when to say no. One executive realized he was missing out on quality family experiences. He made his family a priority by adopting a habit of saying no to project and job offers that didn't allow enough family time. By making it a non-negotiable point, he was able to instantly disqualify opportunities that conflicted with his goals.

Try turning your decisions inside out. Find out whether you can identify no criteria in various life categories, and evaluate how starting with no could make a difference in your life.

• To which job candidates will you say no?
• To which projects will you say no?
• To which invitations will you say no?
• To which leisure activities will you say no?
• To which intrusions on your time will you say no?

(c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill

If I had to run a distance of five miles faster than a relatively fit attacker, I would probably die. No, I’m sure I would die. In fact, less than two miles into running my fastest, I would probably turn around and beg the attacker to kill me.

Why? Because I am not fit enough to run at top speed for five miles, and adrenaline alone can only take one so far before muscles and oxygen give out.

If I was told I had until next week to prepare myself to run five miles at top speed or die, I would pull in every favor I am owed and go into deep hiding. I know for a fact that I could not prepare myself for that in a week. Willingness, optimism, and even deep determination are ultimately no replacement for fitness developed with disciplined practice over time.

If I was told I had until next month to prepare myself to run five miles at top speed or die, I would start to train. I would train as many hours a day as the best trainer I could hire would allow me to train and I would follow his or her every instruction to the letter. I would beg, borrow, and sell my favorite belongings in order to afford that trainer. Yet even as I worked with incredible focus and intent, I would wonder if my muscles, bones, circulation, and respiratory system could possibly strengthen as much as necessary in the very short time I had. And every night before passing out I would curse myself for being so out of shape in the first place.

I don’t particularly expect a death threat any time soon, and if I do experience one, it’s unlikely to come from someone who is angry enough to chase me for five miles. So I probably won’t start training as if my life depends on it. I’ll keep up my somewhat desultory exercise regimen and continue to eat healthy food, but I’m just not motivated to train for a mini-marathon.

But if you are a small business owner, the chances that someone (you, your partner, your unprepared staff, an ill-chosen advisor, or a competitor) will run your business down and kill it are remarkably high. The statistics say your business has more than a 74% chance of being killed within five years of start-up. If statistics showed that I had a 74% or greater chance of having to run five miles for my life in the next five years, there would be nothing desultory about my exercise regimen right now.

It takes time, good training, discipline, and practice practice practice to prepare your business for the run of its life. Trying on various sales strategies for size, dabbling in one technology idea after another, launching a website, deciding to play in social media, sending out an eNewsletter – these are all parts and pieces of a strategy, and then only if the strategy itself warrants those activities. If your business fitness approach is to stick your toe in the water here and there to see if anything works, you’re just delaying the inevitable.

Personally (quite personally – I’m a small business owner just like you), I take these odds very seriously. Though I can be a bit of a slacker on my personal fitness, I started training to beat the business odds from day one. This includes a carefully crafted strategy, a sales and marketing plan designed to achieve the strategy, a talent plan that identified which types of skills we would need at each phase of our growth, a technology plan that included trying to conceive of which technology would make us most competitive five and ten years in the future, and contingency plans for each type of aggressor that might pop out of a dark alley and try to run us down. We follow our training regimen every day, and if we sometimes fall off the wagon, we have metrics and other types of alert in place to sound the alarm and firmly place us back on track.

You don’t have to be a betting man to appreciate these odds, and you won’t want to wait until you feel the breath on your neck. Commit to the strategy, plans, and training regimen your business needs right now; you’ll run faster than ever before, you won’t waste energy looking over your shoulder, and you will be able to sprint –with relative ease – each time conditions tell you it’s time to run.

© 2010. Andrea M. Hill

Are you experiencing the leadership challenge in your business now?

One of the most constant things we must do to run a successful business is lead, and that's really hard work. Leadership requires a lot of consistency and discipline. In a very big business you can distribute that leadership among many managers, and as long as most of those managers are effective in that role the overall business does OK. But in a very small business, any deficiencies in leadership can quickly lead to morale problems and other types of dysfunction in the workforce. This is the small business leadership challenge.

It's one of the biggest challenges facing small business owners, because they are not only faced with the constant demands and worries of the business itself, they must also take leadership roles for which they don't always feel equipped or perhaps even interested. Dealing with the people aspect of running a business is often more exhausting and demanding for small business owners than cash flow, financing, or sales struggles.

The good news is that these skills can be honed over time, but it's not always the way you want to spend your energy, so it's a challenge. And it's a challenge unlike developing new computer skills or financial knowledge. It requires looking hard at yourself and evaluating how effective you are inter-personally,  what you can do to be a better communicator, and how you can express your irritations and frustrations in positive ways even when that's not what you feel like doing.

If you have more than three employees, take a look at your current business experience and analyze what percentage of your frustrations are people related versus business/task related. It may be that you are experiencing the small business leadership challenge right now.

I was talking with our friend John last night when he came by the house to pick up his daughter after a late evening at work. He is a teacher in the state university system, and his focus is on preparing new university students for freshman composition. Let’s do that again, in case you think I mis-typed. His focus is on preparing new university students for freshman composition.

Our students are no longer coming out of high school prepared for college. John said that the number of subjects students are required to learn in the elementary and secondary grades had more than doubled in the past few decades, leaving very little time to develop mastery in any of them. He said the biggest challenge, in his case, isn’t teaching them how to write. It’s teaching them how to write about something they have never thought about before. It’s teaching them how to react to the writing and thinking of someone else in an intellectual way – not just respond with their feelings.

This indicates that composition isn’t the most critical educational element missing in our college students today. It’s critical thinking. Critical thinking is the ability to think about what you are thinking while you are thinking it, to actively identify biases, assumptions and misinformation in your own thinking and eradicate them with something factual and supportable. There is a quote by Linda Elder (2006) that I really like. She says,

“The human mind has no natural guide to the truth, nor does it naturally love the truth. What the human mind loves is itself, what serves it, what flatters it, what gives it what it wants, and what strikes down and destroys whatever threatens it. To understand the human mind, understand self-deception” (p. 291).

One of the most common ailments I observe in today’s society is people assuming they know what they are talking about. Yes, it is an ailment. Each of us has mastery in some things, and some people – those who are curious, studious, and intellectually humble – may have mastery in a number of things. But since when were ordinary people running around masters of most things? This has to be a modern phenomena.

Get a group of people together talking, and invariably one member of the bunch knows a lot about something – for the sake of example, let’s say sales management. Listen carefully, ask for background, and you will find out they have a lot of opinions about sales management. They may have taken a class in sales management. Perhaps they even read a book about sales management. So, does that give them mastery over the topic? Absolutely not. Did they go to the effort of studying with multiple experts? Did they ensure the experts had conflicting opinions, and that those experts were, themselves, masters of the topic? Did they attempt to understand the topic from multiple points of view, and pick out the strengths and weaknesses of each point of view? Have they had their own experiences - and made meaningful mistakes - in sales management?

In a recent Harvard Business Review article by Roger Martin entitled “How Successful Leaders Think” (2007) Martin says:

"I have interviewed more than 50 such leaders, some for as long as eight hours, and found that most of them share a somewhat unusual trait: They have the predisposition and the capacity to hold in their heads two opposing ideas at once. And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they’re able to creatively resolve the tension between those two ideas by generating a new one that contains elements of the others but is superior to both" (p.62).

Our society seems determined to dumb itself down while simultaneously purporting to be filled with knowledge workers. But what are we studying and reading? Who are we listening to and learning from?  Watching the evening news doesn’t even qualify us for dinner-time conversation, let alone mastery of anything. And studying along a self-selected narrow path just makes us more narrow, not more knowledgeable.

As leaders and managers we have a significant responsibility to those who depend on us for direction. That responsibility includes being students of our chosen field and actively seeking expertise and information wherever we can find it – including from our subordinates. This requires us to be more than studious, curious and open-minded. It requires us to be secure and healthy and, most of all, intellectually humble.

Because it’s not just current college students that aren’t prepared for composition that we need to worry about in business today. It’s the high school graduates who came in the years and decades before them, who are managing and leading businesses today, and who never learned to be critical thinkers. Luckily, failure to be a critical thinker isn’t a genetic disorder or an uncorrectable deficiency. It just takes discipline. But maybe that’s a topic for the next blog.

References

Martin, R. (2007, June). How successful leaders think. Harvard Business Review, 155, 9.

Paul, R., & Elder, L. (2006). Critical thinking: Tools for taking charge of your learning and your life (2nd ed.).  Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall

(c) Andrea M. Hill, 2007

To Succeed in Business, You Need to Play the Long Game

 In this six-minute video, Andrea Hill talks about the importance of using your marketing strategy to build a long game of exponential value.

 Transcript

I’m thinking a lot the past few days about how hard it is to play the long game in business. It requires several things most people lack: trust in the future, confidence about their choices, and patience. The requirement for a long-game is true in many areas of your business, but nowhere is it more stark than in the area of creating a meaningful online marketing presence.

When social media first hit the scene in 2007-2008, we were all struck by the instant-ness of it all. I think of an idea, I write it, I publish it. I come up with an idea for a visual, I turn it into a graphic, I post it. Fast, fast fast, right? The problem, is that the ability to produce and post things quickly has nothing to do with creating customer awareness or becoming a fixture of their consciousness. That is slow work, tedious work, and it takes a long time to see results. Because in today’s marketing environment, success isn’t measured by how many messages you can blast out to the public, but by how many meaningful links you can create that will bring a searching public back to you. Let me say that again, because what I just described to you is the most basic understanding of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Success isn’t measured by how many messages you can blast out to the public, but by how many meaningful links you can create that will bring a searching public back to you. When we talk about telling stories online, when we talk about creating rich content, what we’re talking about is all the words and phrases you bake into your website that will help a searching person find a product or a service you offer. And that takes time.

Time isn’t the only thing – it also requires a strong CMS website. It requires the creation of lots of good content across articles and products and promotions on your website, and it requires patience as you build out that content over time, and that content gets turned into links by search engines. But time . . . time is the thing that most small business owners underestimate. After all, in the past, you could run a radio ad, and a few people would come in off the street as a result of it. You could run a TV ad or a newspaper ad, and you could see pretty quickly if there was a response. You can run those same ads today, and you might even have a few people respond. The problem is that today’s consumers are completely distracted by whatever is happening on their smart phone, they are inundated with marketing messages everywhere they look and listen, and they aren’t “shopping around” for products like they did in the past. They do their shopping online, and then – if they like what they see – they come into the store to buy (and yes, 90% of all purchases are still happening in a store).

In a recent report on retail, the NRF, or National Retail Federation, reminded its membership that it’s not about “online versus retail.” It’s about “retail dependance on online.”  Today’s consumers see online marketing as a seamless part of their retail experience, as they search online for products, knowledge, and references, and then seek products out in stores and in-person. And, how do those consumers FIND your business so you can be the store they walk into? Using search. They search for what they seek, they drill into the links that show the most promise, they check out the ratings and reviews of the seller and the products, and then they decide where to go to buy. The creation of that website content, leading to meaningful links, takes time. The creation of a strong system of references and reviews – which we call Social Proof – takes time. And patience. And more time.

But here’s the interesting thing. In the first two or three months, it feels like you are doing a lot of work for absolutely no results. Then, in the four to six month range, you start to see tiny benefits, but it’s hard to trust them. Then, if you’ve been super disciplined and continued to develop content despite the fear and frustration, at around one year you really start to see results. They begin to build slowly and steadily.

When I first started my blog in 2006, I had a grand total of three readers, and I was related to all three of them. Now, 13 years later, my blog drives thousands of visitors per day to my websites. All those blog posts over all those years serve as links to my online presence. I don’t pay for any advertising beyond my blog, because the rich content I have put on the internet is all the marketing I need. Of course, 13 years is a long time. You won’t have to wait that long to see results – and if you are selling jewelry or other luxury goods, you will need other marketing tools besides a blog. I just use that as an example of the exponential power of rich content.

What you need to remember is that a year or two is not very much time at all. You also need to remember that this IS the way marketing and selling work now. So if you haven’t already, you need to commit to a long game of content creation, so that a year from now, you have already made significant progress. After all – the time is going to go by either way. What do you want to have to show for your business’s marketing presence when next year rolls around?

In a recent meeting with the president of a Chamber of Commerce serving a community of roughly 50,000 people, I learned something I can’t stop thinking about. He was speaking of the difficulty of attracting young professionals to the area. I asked if the reason was that young adults want to live in larger metropolitan areas. No, he didn’t think that was the reason – many people prefer small communities. Did he think the reason was lack of opportunity? Not at all – the region is doing quite well economically. He let me ask a few more questions – based on all the usual assumptions –then he said, “No, I don’t think it’s any of those things. I think it’s technology.”

“Technology?”

“Yes, technology. The business use of technology is low, though most businesses have set aside money for more automation. But they haven’t spent it.”

I asked, “And why is that?”

“Because they don’t believe their employees will accept it or even be able to use it once it is in place.”

Whether this is a genuine concern for business owners who are themselves technologically enlightened, or if this is a convenient excuse for the technologically impaired I’m not sure. I suspect the latter is more likely. Ultimately it doesn’t matter, because the result is the same. Organizations that fail to invest in technology – including investment in the technology skills of the owners and executives – will eventually cease to be competitive.

Not even a decade ago, business owners could get away with not knowing how to use eMail. Frightfully, some of them still refuse to use it. Their convenient excuse is that eMail is a time-waster, which happens to be true. But if an executive is proud of his ability to use Microsoft Word, Excel, and burn CDs; if he thinks he has mastered technology because he has figured out how to produce his own reports, he is sadly misinformed. It would almost be better to be the executive who refuses to use eMail – at least he knows he is not technologically adept.

Using software applications is essential for productivity, but it does not make one technologically savvy any more than being able to use a pencil and paper makes one a writer. So what is it that these folks who never wanted a job in the IT department in the first place need to know?

Today’s business executive has a responsibility to master IT in the same way business executives readily acknowledge they have a responsibility to master finance. No president worth her salt thinks she can ignore finances because she has an accounting department. The same should be true as it relates to IT. Managers must have enough familiarity with tools to imagine their use within a proper context. Executives who insist technology can do anything – simply because they have imagined it – are no less annoying (or damaging) than executives who fear and refuse technology at all.

So what does a technology-savvy executive know?

1. Basic knowledge about the infrastructure of IT – the differences between server systems and desktops (it’s not just price); the basics of scalability; the pros and cons of redundancy and general understanding of the various ways to achieve it; how the various communication systems of a company can (and cannot) work together. An entrepreneur tooling up a new manufacturing plant would participate meaningfully in equipment purchase decisions and would be concerned about how the building layout impacts quality and productivity. IT infrastructure is at least as important.
2. Every executive should be able to describe the difference between a relational database and a flat database environment and be able to draw on a white board the exponential complexity of relational environments as they scale. This knowledge is as essential as the ability to forecast various margin changes on the bottom line. Executives who cannot demonstrate this knowledge seriously risk underestimating the cost and complexity of programming changes.
3. Executives must understand the types of application environments available to business, and how to use them. They must know the difference between ERP, CRM, accounting systems, MRP, sales force automation, publishing environments, and office/productivity tools. They must understand the basics of integration and be competent to weigh the pros and cons. Hosted or resident? Linux or Microsoft? If you think these questions are just for large businesses, think again. Small business owners must do all the same things big business owners must do – just on a smaller scale. The cost and volume capabilities of the software available to them will be lower, but the concepts remain the same.
4. To buy or to write? A home-grown application environment is referred to as a legacy environment. Most legacy environments were built using the same planning logic as rural New Mexican adobes; have another child, add another room, mother-in-law moves in, add another room, etc. etc.. Nobody wins any architectural awards for these structures. Even worse, nobody can figure out how to get to the kitchen quickly. To answer the question of build or buy, business executives must understand the pros and cons of each approach, and must be able to comprehend the differences in costs and why those differences exist.
5. And finally, executives must understand how to manage their personal technology:In a world where the business cycle no longer stops for night-time or weekends (according to whose clock?), productivity is essential. In the time it takes to dictate a letter, write a bunch of numbers on paper, or ask someone to look for something, most tasks could be completed using basic office software.
6. The internet is a powerful tool, and people who are unable to use search engines effectively, discern the difference between reliable and unreliable databases, or remember their passwords are cooking over a fire with sticks while others are building commercial kitchens.
7. How to use wireless systems. The executive who cannot figure out how to navigate her own wireless card from one airport to the next is not only a nuisance to her IT staff, she is crippling herself professionally because she can’t stay on top of essential information. Alternatively, she is inflating the cost of her support staff by causing them to do work for her which she could easily be doing for herself.

This list may seem daunting to some. There was a time when printing more than one book at a time, farming more than 40 acres, or figuring out how to deliver products overnight was daunting too. But times changed and so did the business people of each era. Computer technology is our printing press, our International Harvester combine, our streamlined, jet-fed logistics network.

I can imagine some folks claiming that the list above is representative of what IT folks need to know. That would be entirely incorrect. Volumes of books have been written about each bullet in the list above, and each bullet represents specific areas of IT expertise. No, this list is the equivalent of expecting a high school student to know the difference between math, language arts, history, sociology, and science well enough to describe each discipline accurately and to know which discipline (or disciplines) to turn to for answers to specific problems. Most of us would be incredulous if a grown man insisted on using a math formula to answer who won the Battle of Saratoga. Yet executives do the equivalent in IT every day, with little awareness of the damage they are doing to their bottom lines.

On the other hand, leaders who are comfortable with technology can initiate intelligent conversations about how to use technology for greater profitability, can understand the problems their IT, finance, and operational staff are struggling to solve, can imagine the potential benefits of expensive investments, and can even influence an environment to go through difficult change. And when young professionals find a business with a leader like that at the helm, they frequently jump on board - even if the business is small, even if it's located in a small town.

© 2009. Andrea M. Hill

As a writer, I value the editors in my life. They find my errors, recognize when I need to clarify, and push me to be better. An excellent editor approaches the task without self-involvement or ego - she seeks excellence for the sake of excellence.

Back when I was first studying the craft of writing, my professors drilled into me the importance of loving - and not resisting - the red pen of the editor. It wasn't easy at first, but as I began to see how much better the edits made my writing, my appreciation grew.

Once editing is an essential part of your life, you seek its benefits in other areas. We all need the impartial eye of someone we can trust, someone whose discernment is impeccable, to bring us thoughtful critique. A trusted life-editor - a mentor - can help us recognize when our judgment is off, when we are exhibiting less empathy, more ego, or reduced awareness of how we are behaving. Truly honing the self requires the insight of others.

Of course, not everyone can be trusted with this role. If you've ever had the experience of someone criticizing or manipulating you to do something 'for your own good' when clearly they were driven by selfishness, greed, or insecurity, you know what I mean.

When we look for relationships in life, this quality should be part of our consideration, and building the trust necessary to give and take the editing should be part of the commitment. This is also true of the mentors in our professional lives. We often perceive a mentor to be someone who coaches us on skills, but the best mentors coach us on behavior, professionalism, accountability, and maturity.

I have been blessed with excellent editors in my personal and professional life, and as the decades go by, their advice and guidance has become better and better. If you do not have these editors in your own life, its time to seek them

The process starts with you; you must evaluate your ability to accept feedback and work on your 'editability'.  We can only lay the groundwork by ourselves though, cultivate the willingness. The sometimes painful, sometimes revelatory, always challenging work of being edited is something we hone over time, and only with practice.

Of course, no successful relationship is one-sided. It is essential that we cultivate the ability to be a thoughtful, not self-interested, non-judgmental editor for others as well.

I've learned to love the red ink in my life, though on occasion it can still be hard to embrace in the moment. But at the end of the day, as my self-review rolls by in almost cartoon form, with red scratch-outs, redirects, and suggestions appearing in the margins, I enjoy the peace of mind that comes from knowing that, though one gets no re-dos, one need not suffer from repeats.

Ideas are a lot like zucchini. They tend to be prolific in production, but after a while you realize that a giant pile of zucchini isn’t all that useful (or appetizing). To get the full value out of a garden full of zucchini, you must use a recipe and transform them into something else — like zucchini bread, zucchini casserole, and my favorite - zucchini sushi.

To turn your giant pile of ideas into profits, you need project planning. Why? Because a project plan is the recipe that helps you define, manage, and complete the transformation of an idea into a new reality.

Thankfully, project planning isn’t that complicated. Oh, it can be – particularly given how people like to over-complicate things! But with an affordable project management software and some project management basics, you can become a project management guru. Read on to find out how.

Elements of a Project Plan

Purpose and Scope

Begin every project plan by defining its purpose and scope. This is important. Without purpose and scope, every person who hears about the project may have different expectations. Let’s use an example. If we created a project to select a project planning software, the purpose and scope would be essential to choosing the right tool.

For instance, some project planning tools are good for small projects, but not for large, detailed projects with many due dates and participants. Some project planning tools are good for only 5-10 people, and others are useful for large organizations.

Project Scope and Purpose A:

We need a project planning tool for our 7-person marketing team. We manage short-term projects, and the projects rarely exceed 1 level of task detail. We need this project plan to help us reduce our planning cycles and do a better job of hitting deadlines.

Project Scope and Purpose B:

We need a project planning tool for the 70 people in our head office. We manage large and small projects, and our most complicate projects can go to 2 or 3 levels of detail per task. We need to be able to include outside participants. We need this project plan to achieve strategic objectives, improve corporate communications, and create global transparency regarding our projects.

As you can probably see from those two descriptions, the project plans and software selections would be quite different from one another.

Create an Outline

The best way to start a project plan is to create an outline. This doesn’t have to be done in your project planning software. Sometimes, it is easiest to create the outline on a piece of paper, with lots of room to move things around, scratch things out, and develop good descriptions. For example, let’s use “Project Scope and Purpose B” from above.

We begin by asking, “what are the broad tasks that must be done to achieve the objectives of this project?” Your list may look like this:

1. Review current project planning processes and tools
2. Identify needs and wants related to project planning
3. Create short list of project planning software to consider
4. Assess each software against our software requirements
5. Shortlist and Test
6. Select project software
7. Implement project software

Are you done? No, but that is a good start. The next step is to create more detail in your project outline. It looks like this:

1. Review current project planning processes and tools
   1. Operations Team project planning processes and tools
   2. Marketing Team project planning processes and tools
   3. Merchandising Team project planning processes and tools
   4. Sales Team project planning processes and tools
2. Identify needs and wants related to project planning
   1. Senior Executive/C-suite needs and wants
   2. Department Head needs and wants
   3. Team member needs and wants
3. Create short list of project planning software to consider
   1. Develop list of known project planning software
   2. Request references and recommendations from business partners who use project planning software
4. Assess each software against our software requirements
   1. Using online information, develop preliminary description of each software
   2. Narrow list to 5 software packages to consider
5. Test Shortlist
   1. Contact vendors for product demonstrations or do online product demonstrations
   2. Document advantages and shortcomings of each software
   3. Review findings with representatives from each functional area
6. Select project software
7. Implement project software
   1. Create implementation plan and schedule (this is a mini-project — which would be created exactly the way we created the overall project plan).
   2. Follow the implementation plan

Assign Resources and Dates

The next step is to assign a point person for each aspect of the project plan. This doesn’t necessarily have to be the person who will do all the tasks themselves — they will likely be delegating many of the tasks, and keeping other tasks for themselves. But this person will be responsible to ensure that whomever is assigned the task is doing the task on time and correctly.

The date part is trickier. The way we set dates on a project plan depends a lot on the type of project plan; long-term or short-term. But let’s start with the way they’re both the same. Every project, large or small, must be assigned a completion date. This is the date at which we expect the entire project to be completed. Every other date assigned within the project must meet that overall due date. So, you can’t have an overall project due on October 15, 2019, but have a task within that project due on December 1, 2019.

Now let’s look at the way long-term projects and short-term projects are different.

For a short-term project, you will likely assign all the due dates at once. Many short term projects are repeated year after year (Valentine’s Day promotion, summer sale, Black Friday or Cyber Monday, Trade Show Plan). In those cases, the participants know the steps that need to be done and they launch and complete projects like this every single month. So assign due dates for each task at the same time you assign responsibilities.

For long-term projects, you set milestone dates at the outset, but save individual task dates until you are closer to working on those tasks. What is a milestone? Milestones are the significant stages or segments of a plan. The numbered items in the above list are the major segments of the project. The completion date for each group of tasks is a milestone.

For example, you would set the due date for the entire project. You may also set dates by when you want to accomplish the first level (milestone) tasks in your outline. But for the individual tasks within the outline, you may not set due dates or delegate responsibilities until you turn your attention to that task group. This is part of managing the project.

Once you have your project scope, outline, resources, and dates identified, it’s time to plug all that information into your project software.

Managing a Project

The best projects are inclusive, cross-functional, and heavy on communications.

With today’s Project Management tools, we pretty much have it made when it comes to project management, because this software category is well-defined and robust. Whether you use programs like Basecamp, Asana, or Trello for loosely structured projects and communication, or programs like Plutio, Zoho, Wrike, or Microsoft Project for highly structured projects and communication, all modern project management tools have a few common elements:

• The ability to create a list of tasks and assign due dates and people to them.
• The ability to create conversational “threads” on each task and on the overall project, which helps eliminate phone calls and email and creates better overall information sharing.
• The ability to track progress on the project plan, maintaining accountability and transparency.

Now back to due dates for a minute. In the long-term project plan, you may start out with due dates for the total project, and for the major groups of project tasks or significant time intervals, but few dates or assignments at the detailed task level of the project. That’s not only OK – that’s good.

In the not-so-distant past, project management software forced us to set dates for the entire project at the outset. But we all know that it can be hard to envision all the necessary detail for long-term projects. And once all those dates and details are set, we have to manage a lot of detail that may or may not be accurate or relevant – particularly as the project goes on.

The best way to set and manage accurate dates and responsibilities in a major project is one chunk at a time. The project team should meet weekly or bi-weekly. At those meetings, they should decide as a group which elements of the project to elevate next. Once decided, the project plan should be updated to reflect those dates. This method makes the project plan more accurate and meaningful, and it ensures that all project team members are focused on the right things at the right times.

The project team should also hold one-another accountable for due dates and results. If there’s no pressure within a project team to meet their responsibilities, the project will languish. A manager can certainly help to apply pressure, but case-study after case-study demonstrates that the best-executed projects benefit from peer group commitment and motivation.

Why Planning?

It may be difficult to imagine, but not everyone loves project planning equally (a bit of sarcasm here). Yet, there’s a huge benefit to project planning that turns all motivated professionals into raving fans.

As this graphic demonstrates, the cost of planning is lower than the cost of execution. So by spending more time in the planning phase, you can shorten the time you spend in execution phase and reduce your overall cost.

Because planning helps mitigate time-consuming execution errors, spending more time in planning also tends to speed up the entire project.

You can also improve the quality of the project with better planning. Well-planned projects experience better overall results than projects with little planning effort.

The message is clear. Professional project planning is more economical and effective, and ultimately of higher quality, than seat-of-the-pants project management. And considering the fabulous software tools available today, project planning is easier than ever.

So that’s your recipe! Now it’s time to sift through that giant pile of ideas you have, and start turning those ideas into profits, using a project management approach that is easy to implement and makes managing the project (the real work) more effective than winging it. You’ve be so excited at how much more you will accomplish this way.

If you go online and search for information on business ethics, you’ll find a few interesting things. The first thing you’ll notice is that the people doing the most thinking about ethics in business happen to live and work in academia. There is a lot of theory about business ethics.

Of course, theoretically, if every business person behaved in an ethical manner, we would have little need for any sort of regulation or legislation around business activities. I know. That sentence cracks me up too. In reality, we take the most egregious offenses and legislate them. Discrimination requires legislation, because there will always be some numskull who thinks it’s OK to only hire people just like him. Stealing requires legislation because . . . well, I can’t come up with a reason, but somehow it does.

I don’t think we need a lot of theory around business ethics – though ethics theory has kept philosophers busy for thousands of years. Fun to study, harder to disseminate. No, I think business ethics can be made pretty, well, basic.

Basic Character

When my now-adult children brought home their Character Counts homework from elementary school, I was a bit mystified. I agree wholeheartedly that children must be taught trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, and citizenship from their earliest days. But I didn’t understand why they were using precious school time for a big Character Counts roll-out. Then I hung out with some of the other parents, and I began to understand why. But I digress. The fact is that basic character concepts such as these, when thoughtfully applied all day every day, are a powerful business ethics application.

The tough part is achieving the thoughtfully applied all day every day aspect. This is work for real grown-ups.

Let’s take a look at what Character Counts says about Trustworthiness.

Be honest. Don’t deceive, cheat, or steal. Be reliable – do what you say you’ll do.
Have the courage to do the right thing. Build a good reputation.
Be loyal – stand by your family, friends, and country.

Plain and simple, right? Maybe not so much. The toughest one is the one right in the middle: have the courage to do the right thing. That one is tough, because when we do the right thing, people might (probably will) get upset with us. Because doing the right thing often comes with some personal or professional sacrifice. Because doing the right thing will often set you apart as naïve or rigid in the eyes of your peers. That’s why courage is part of that sentence.

Now let’s take a look at what Character Counts says about Fairness.

Play by the rules. Take turns and share. Be open-minded; listen to others.
Don’t take advantage of others. Don’t blame others carelessly.
Treat all people fairly.

Don’t take advantage of others. If you stop and think about it, really think about it, it’s shocking how often we take advantage of others. If you stopped shopping at The Gap, H&M, or Abercrombie & Fitch when you found out they used child labor, then you have a grip on this concept. As an 8-year-old, you likely interpreted this concept to mean not tricking your 4-year-old sibling into doing something naughty. As adults, the executives at The Gap seriously failed to abstract the concept.

The Character Counts section on Responsibility says to think before you act – consider the consequences. In 3^rd grade that means not going to the park instead of doing your homework. As a corporation, that means considering the consequences for all your stakeholders (consumers, employees, stock holders, vendors – in other words, people) well into the future.

Well into the future. That’s one of three things that sets the elementary school version of Character Counts apart from the adult version of Business Ethics. Children are capable of being responsible for a much shorter future than adults. Their responsibility typically extends to days or weeks, not months or years. When adults make decisions, we need to be responsible for months and years, decades. Business leaders, particularly those in corporations that have significant global reach or access to capital, need to think in terms of generations.

The second thing that sets the elementary version of character training apart from the business version is distance. Ask a child what you can do to help a person in need (part of Caring), and their answer will likely point to someone very close to home. As adults and business leaders, we must be able to abstract this concept to people very different from us and often very far from us. As a society, we’re not even very good at this close to home. To be ethical in business we must be able to consider people far from us, and extend things like respect, responsibility, caring, and trustworthiness to them.

The third thing that sets the elementary version apart from the adult version is to consider these principles in conjunction with one another. Imagine Vikram Pandit (CitiBank CEO) thinking through the purchase of a $50 million private jet after taking $45 billion in taxpayer funds.

Lesser Self:           “I hate the jet I have to fly around in right now. It’s not as comfortable as I would like.”

Better Self:           “It’s probably not as bad as flying around in coach on a commercial airline, like most business people have to do.” (be compassionate)

Lesser Self:           “But I work so hard for my $11 million dollars per year!”

Better Self:          “I dunno. Is that actually logical? Do I really work 261.9 times harder than the average person? I mean, I don’t actually work over 10,000 hours per week. I work a lot, but so do people who have to work two or three jobs. I have to think hard, I guess, but so do small business owners with their lives mortgaged to the hilt, many of whom are my borrowers.” (be accountable for your words, actions, and attitudes)

Lesser Self:           “Well, maybe I don’t work more or harder than everyone else, but my work matters 261.9 times more than everyone else’s!”

Better Self:           “Now I’m just being an ass.” (resisting the urge to suck one’s own exhaust*  *Not found at the Character Counts website)

Better Self:           “My company just accepted a major payout from the American taxpayer because we’re in financial trouble. Maybe the right thing to do at this moment is suck it up and fly around on my older model, less comfortable private jet. I can buy a new one later.” (Set a good example for others.  Use self-control. Think before you act. Etc. etc.)

If you want to develop stronger business ethics in your place of work, here’s my recommendation. Using the Character Counts website, or any other good resource of solid universal values, create a set of principles that you would like your business to live by. When you need to make a decision about how to treat someone, who to hire, whether or not to implement a policy, which vendor to choose, how to respond to a customer complaint, how to address an internal manufacturing deficiency – the list goes on – when you need to make business decisions, refer to your business principles.

Make sure you consider each decision as it extends into the future, as it affects those far away, and using multiple principles in conjunction with one another. Does this take a bit of time? Yes, particularly until it becomes second nature. But this method will ensure you sleep better at night, it serves as a powerful role model, and in my experience, it ultimately returns significant financial rewards to the business. Not bad for a little grade-school philosophy.

Last week as I was driving home from the grocery store I was dangerously cut off by a driver who couldn’t wait for me to make a safe left turn. Apparently, she had just gotten a phone call that her house was on fire, because she cut around from behind me and turned left in front of me. I’m long past being shocked by poor driver behavior, but I was pretty disgusted to see that the woman was roughly my age and had a car full of kids in the pre-teen to teenage years. When I made a comment to the effect of “what can those children possibly be learning from that woman?” my five-year-old sagely responded, “not all grownups do the right thing you know.”

Yes, I know.

I remember having a wonderful discussion with my teenage son about ethics, when we talked for hours about why some things are ethical but not legal, and why some things are legal but not ethical. Both his world (the world of school and peer pressure) and my world (the world of business and peer pressure) present ample fodder for the ethical/legal grist.

I got a little more fodder today.

A colleague has invented a new product, and is working to bring it to market. When speaking with someone in his industry, he shared a small amount of information about his new product, and he was probed by that someone (let’s call her The Donna) for more details. He bought an item from The Donna, and that was it. Well, sort of.

Today I was looking into something for him, and I saw that the domain for the specific brand name he is in the process of trade-marking has been taken. I looked it up, and saw that it had been taken by The Donna. Her take? It’s just business, right?

Perhaps it depends on what business is synonymous with. To me, business means a profession (indicating specialized knowledge), a means to make a living, a way of providing a means to make a living to others, a way to provide customers with goods and services they need at a price they are willing to pay. Business should be honorable, meaning that one can give one’s word and have it respected and trusted as if it were a signature on paper. Business should be competitive, which means working harder and practicing harder so you get ahead based on doing something better – meaning more creatively, more passionately, with higher quality – than everyone else. Business should result in the honorable creation of wealth beyond oneself.

There are some who believe business is synonymous with a racket, who believe that competition means getting ahead at all costs, who think free enterprise means they have the freedom be disingenuous to get the result they want. Fortune Magazine published an article last week entitled “What Were They Smoking,” about the head honchos of the investment firms who lost so much money on the subprime mortgage fiasco. Honestly, if 10% of the subprime mortgages actually went into default (our national current homeowner default rates are actually lower than they were in the early 1980s), we would only have 1.5% of all mortgages in default. That’s devastating to the individual homeowners, but not to the economy at large. You know what is devastating to the economy at large? The way the investment firms packaged, repackaged, then re-boxed and ziplocked the subprime mortgage paper to make insane amounts of money on their money. That is not honorable creation of wealth beyond oneself – that is getting ahead at all costs.

Just like Enron. Like Arthur Anderson. And I believe, like The Donna.

Because at the heart of that behavior is a broken belief that just because something is legal, that makes it ethical. Or maybe it’s worse than that. Maybe it’s a failure to consider what is ethical in the first place. Maybe it’s such a supreme sense of selfishness that other people don’t actually matter. Kant says that we are only behaving ethically when we are treating others as an end unto themselves. The investment companies who are suffering subprime fallout didn’t consider the other players – they were only looking at their own spreads and market shares. Enron didn’t consider their thousands of stakeholders and business partners – they were only looking at their market value and personal gain. And The Donna didn’t consider my friend the inventor. She only considered an opportunity to make a buck on another person’s idea.

As my friend rightly pointed out, The Donna doesn’t understand Karma. But she should. Because choosing not to consider others ultimately results in not being considered ourselves, which is fitting. And if the failures of massive institutions such as Arthur Anderson and Enron, if the billions of dollars of losses of Merrill Lynch and other Wall Street firms don’t teach us that karma happens, then what will?

I know this may sound old marmish, and I’m only in my early 40s, so that’s not my excuse. But I do remember something my great Aunt Carrie taught me a long time ago. When I once became a bit snarky about an esoteric table manner, she said to me, “Honey, your table manners aren’t for you. They are to demonstrate that you have respect for others. But using them might just prevent you from messing up your lovely dress.” So the next time we’re thumbing our nose at some big business CEO or billion dollar financial institution for doing something that ruins wealth for thousands of people or puts a dent in the economy, let’s try to remember that our own failures to be mannerly – to be ethical regardless of legality – are just a small-scale demonstration of the same behavior.

Just what will our children learn from adults like us?

(c) 2007, Andrea M. Hill

These Growth Traits Matter

Jeff Immelt (GE Chief) evaluates all his management personnel on five “growth traits.” These traits are clear thinking/decisiveness, inclusiveness, expertise, imagination/courage, and external focus. You don’t have to have all five of them fully developed to move up the GE corporate ladder, but you have to have the potential for all five of them, and you have to be willing to not only work on all five, but to be intentionally surrounded by people who will force you to work on all five.

In a recent article in Fortune called “Life imitates TV” (Sellers, 2007), Jeff Zucker (CEO, NBC Universal) was observed to be light on external focus by Immelt. “To speed up Zucker’s training, Immelt has dispatched a SWAT team of GE executives to NBCU. Zucker’s EVP of Human resources, Marc Chini, ran HR for GE infrastructure. Ad boss Mike Pilot was CEO of GEs equipment finance division. Beth Comstock, who oversees integrated media plus sales and research, grew up at NBC then moved to GE headquarters, where Immelt appointed her chief marketing officer. And NBC’s new chairman? Immelt himself has taken that role” (pp 53-54).

Zucker is well known as one of the most competitive executives on the planet, and he holds a C-level position the envy of 99% of American business people. Yet he has been assigned an entire team of employees who are there to train him, and his boss has created a new role to be close to him. By all accounts he does not appear to be chastened by all this training he is receiving from his subordinates.

In an era when CEOs are (rightly or wrongly) widely perceived to be emblematic of corporate greed and malfeasance, and are in positions that shield them from having to deal on a regular basis with their own shortcomings (how many people actually give direct feedback to the boss?), this is an incredible story.

It’s not surprising that the story comes out of GE, which has made a science of developing executives. And it’s well known within the GE executive community that if you want to make it to a senior position there, you have to really work on developing yourself – work that obviously does not stop when you reach a C-level position.

The growth traits of clear thinking/decisiveness, inclusiveness, expertise, imagination/courage, and external focus scale to all sizes of business. I spend a lot of time in corporate environments, and I don’t see a lot of people working diligently on developing these growth traits. We aren’t all lucky enough to be pushed at by someone of the caliber of Immelt, or to be surrounded by the “staff” that surrounds Zucker – individuals who on their own could successfully run most American businesses better than their current executives can.

The development of these growth traits is a worthy pursuit for anyone in any size business. Finding information to develop them is not difficult, though finding mentors can be – and it takes mentors to help create the mental rigor and discipline to challenge one’s thinking and firmly establish productive behaviors. Competitiveness starts with the honed skills of the executives running the business. The good news is, discipline isn’t based on genetics. It’s anyone’s for the taking.

References
Sellers, P., (2007). Life imitates TV. Fortune, 155, 50-58.

(c) Andrea M. Hill, 2007