Category Archives: Current Affairs

Current Affairs, Executive, Film, Leaders, Management

Of King Coal and Cleopatra, and icons and leaders

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Geraldine Ferraro.  Pinetop Perkins.  Lanford Wilson.  The gifts they, and many other Americans, have shared are almost too much to ponder.  Their presence and passing through this age?  A reminder to appreciate the many forms leaders take and the elements that turn them into icons.  

One look at Elizabeth Taylor and those elements were abundantly clear.  Or so one thought.  It turns out that things went a bit deeper than incandescent looks and a lust for life that shot through every performance.  There were loyalty and empathy, two traits that can, but should not, be hard to come by in a leader or an icon.  

As a young Virginian exposed to Miss Taylor's charisma during a whirlwind political campaign, on a night when it seemed every man left every woman's side just to catch a glimpse of her, I witnessed not just the power of glamour but the pull of celebrity.  Standing in front of her, though, I wondered what she was thinking about all of us.  Turns out that evening was probably one of many during which she sacrificed her own comfort to support her spouse.  Yet Miss Taylor not only made it look easy, she seems to have put this quality to use later in evangelizing the importance of compassion for others.

Sacrifice is not an element usually associated with stardom, God-given beauty, serial monogamy — or being a corporate CEO.  When it is, though, it's noteworthy.  

The March obituaries told us the story of another onetime Virginian who had as elite a pedigree as any of today's CEOs, if not moreso, but chose to hone his leadership style from the ground up.  Literally.  

Ted Leisenring was the easy heir to the mighty Westmoreland Coal Company throne, but he worked as if that throne were someone else's to steal.  Upon his graduation from Yale, he headed to Big Stone Gap, Virginia, to labor underneath the ground, side by side, with the people who would be his employees.  Years after that, Mr Leisenring represented the coal companies in a long labor negotiation with the miners.  

My guess is that, for someone who respected the union, Mr Leisenring's negotiating position was reached with clarity of conscience and purpose.  According to Dan Rottenburg, author of In the Kingdom of Coal, Mr Leisenring dedicated the company to opening the lines of communication inside it after the strike was over.  He didn't revel in the victory over wildcatters, he sought to anticipate the concerns that gave rise to action which hurt the miners as much it hurt the companies.  The miners were not remote entities or heads on a spreadsheet; they were people, like him, who had a job to do.  

Here's to the leaders who don't try to be icons.  And the icons who lead.

 

 

 

Books, Current Affairs, Executive, Management, Positioning, Social media, Startups, Technology

The seven business books I believe are right for right now

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These books, which I've read or am reading, are works whose content can inform business life. 

The Power of Pull:  How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion.  John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, Lang Davison.  Aptly describes the change that is afoot and how anyone — and any business — can sustain relevance and connection.

Team of Rivals:  The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.  Doris Kearns Goodwin.  Shows how competitors can collaborate when their leader is clear about the objective and recognizes how their motives can help reach the goal.  [Side benefit:  I found the description of the actions of biased journalists soothing.  If this country survived a civil war and those reporters, it can survive anything.]

The Divine Comedy.  Dante Alighieri [The John Ciardi Translation].  Amazing that despite every other kind of growth, the human character really never changes.  Very useful.

I Hate People:  Kick Loose from the Overbearing and Underhanded Jerks at Work and Get What You Want Out of Your Job.  Jonathan Littman, Mark Hershon.  The authors do an outstanding job of categorizing every personality you can encounter in the workplace.  The psychology and the comedy of pathological behavior.

Delivering Happiness:  A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose.  Tony Hsieh.  Sometimes nice works. Here's how to do it and prosper without becoming a patsy.

Power:  Why Some People Have It — and Others Don't.  Jeffrey Pfeffer.  How to get comfortable with power and decide whether you want it.

Overlook Much, Correct a Little:  99 Sayings by John XXIII.  Hans-Peter Rothlin, editor.  The musings of an enlightened mind, these thoughts inspire action that benefits every stakeholder in an organization — most especially, oneself.

 

 

 

Current Affairs, Executive, Management, Supernova

Supernova: Clips from Thursday’s thought leaders

In the final analysis, on this day, anyway, the Internet is human. 
That's the takeaway of dozens of Supernova conversations, whether they
happened on Twitter with folks miles away from the conference or with
the person right next to you in the room.  The Internet, in all its
technology and technicality, is a tool for intimacy.  We just have to
carve out the boundaries that protect our privacy, our talents, our
corporate competitive differentiation, our social interaction, our
governing systems.  The thing is, we don't have the luxury of waiting
for the Internet to pause.  Like people, the Internet keeps flowing and
leading us to new discoveries about ourselves and the data we produce. 
With luck, our closer proximity will generate and sustain the kind of
trust only humans can do.

Read more of this post at Supernova Hub.

Current Affairs, Executive, Technology, Web/Tech

The creative class: Networked, high performing and disillusioned

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Not surprisingly, employee morale and
commitment has worsened during the recession — and in response to
company actions to cope with the downturn. A recent survey finds that
high-performing employees have been substantially more affected than
the rank-and-file.

                                                                                    Lin Grensing-Pophal

                                         Human Resource Executive Online, October 2009

… the creative class: a fast-growing, highly educated, and well-paid
segment of the workforce on whose efforts corporate profits and
economic growth increasingly depend. Members of the creative class do a
wide variety of work in a wide variety of industries—from technology
to entertainment, journalism to finance, high-end manufacturing to the
arts. They do not consciously think of themselves as a class. Yet they
share a common ethos that values creativity, individuality, difference,
and merit.

                                                                                           Richard Florida

                                                                   Washington Monthly, May 2002

Watson Wyatt and WorldatWork just released a survey that tracks, among other things, employee engagement, and Lin Grensing-Pophal explains how companies can do a better job of engagement in a recent article.  But that may not be enough, going forward out of the recession.  The survey's results inspire a look back to an issue economist Richard Florida raised several years ago:  how the drivers of employee performance are changing.  

Today, the combination of networking tools, with a power burst from social technology, and a recession that now appears to be the result of an infrastructure crashing under its own incongruities — foreseen by folks like Florida — is forcing companies to look not just at compensation methods but at how they categorize employee positions from the get-go.  It's no longer the distinction between management and rank-and-file that makes sense in a service-dominated economy, if it ever did in a manufacturing dominated world, but the quality of performance along the scale of creativity and actual contribution.  We're in the midst of another major industrial shift that is exciting at the same time it is mind boggling.  And its impact will be felt not just inside corporations but around the cities and towns they populate. 

… the economy is different now. It no longer revolves around simply
making and moving things. Instead, it depends on generating and
transporting ideas. The places that thrive today are those with the
highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative
people, the highest rate of metabolism.

                                                                                           Richard Florida

                                                                                       The Atlantic, March 2009     

This post runs simultaneously on the Supernova Hub.                          

                     

Books, Current Affairs, Leaders

Linwood Holton: How to make politics personal

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I grew up in a very small town in a remote corner of Virginia.  Big Stone Gap.

How we got there from an Italian-American enclave in northeast Pennsylvania is a long story.  When we got there, Virginia was dragging itself kicking and screaming into an age of enlightenment.  What I like to think of as an entire society understanding that being reasonable is a continuous learning process.

One of the lights of the age, and there were many, was a native of Big Stone Gap who became the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction.  As this article tells us, he now has an autobiography.

Its timing is excellent, as the brief interview in the article demonstrates.  For example.  Governor Holton’s son-in-law, Tim Kaine, is Virginia’s current governor.  And he’s a Democrat.  Both former and current governor have come out for Barack Obama.

Linwood Holton flies out of the pigeonholes that our society so often wants to use for labeling and digestion purposes.  He did it in 1970, and he’s doing it now.  His story reminds us that the most important things are ideas and actions, and in American politics, that the focus should be keeping our nation’s founding principles not just alive but relevant to our daily lives.  Whatever your political philosophy.

In this article, the writer recounts the story of how Governor and Mrs Holton made the decision to send their children to Richmond’s public schools during the big integration ruckus in the state at that time.

Those who knew the Holtons understood this to be neither a political olive branch nor a grandstand.  Like many Virginians, some of whom had to learn it the hard way, the Holtons understood that fairness is the hallmark of a healthy society.

Thumb_holtonAnd something else you should know:  in this famous photograph, Tayloe Holton is wearing a dress made by the people of Miss Virginia, Inc, a garment manufacturer in Big Stone Gap.  Where I worked a couple of summers in the finishing department.  A business my dad started and lost, but one that still managed to produce some winning moments.

Including having the governor of Virginia remember the folks back home as he made a point to a larger world.