Assuming you live on this planet you’re aware that there’s a recession going on, so what’s happening in the world of youth and parents?

Business Week had a great article on Growing Up In A Recession, while the NY Times says that parents finally are figuring out that whatever doesn’t have to be new and are opting for hand-me-downs and cutting off their trust-fund babies. Good grief, they might have to make it on their own!

Do you tweet? Some college professors are finding uses for Twitter in their teaching, although enhancing spelling isn’t one of them; speaking of education, some schools are delivering sex ed via cell phone.

How fair or valuable are anonymous teacher rating sites, such as Rate My Professors or Professor Performance, some teachers don’t aren’t concerned, but others may not be so sanguine.

Multiple studies by professors at a variety of universities show that having interracial roommates reduces prejudice. Not that surprising, it’s hard to hate a real individual vs. a hypothetical stereotype.

Finally, there’s a new texting champion (control your enthusiasm) who practiced by sending 14,000 texts a month. Isn’t that thrilling?

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What do you do with a slightly-below-mediocre company that keeps its business going by staying in small markets where its dominance is assured by an almost total lack of competition; a company with little regard for its employees and less for the communities in which it operates?

You bring in a CEO who has a passionate belief that the interaction between customers and frontline associates has the greatest influence on success and that the greatest impact on that is the way their leaders/managers treat them.

In other words, employees at every level do unto customers as their bosses do unto them.

Jack Rooney is as far from a  rock star CEO as you can get, but he understands that real leadership must permeate the entire company and knows that while true cultural change is neither fast nor cheap it works and therefore is worth the effort.

Rooney calls his approach the Dynamic Organization; he developed it under challenging conditions at Ameritech and brought it to full fruition at US Cellular, which he joined in 1999.

The Pursuit of Something Better tells both stories, Rooney’s and US Cellular’s; they are told by Dave Esler and Myra Kruger, the culture consultants who worked with him at USC and his previous company.

Both stories are the culmination of a man who believed in doing the right thing and a company that was changed accordingly.

“Jack Rooney and his slowly-expanding team of believers challenged the long-prevailing assumptions that business is a blood sport, that the advantage inevitably goes to the ruthless and the greed, that the only way to win is to hold your nose and leave your values at the door. He has proved beyond question, once and for all, regardless of what happens from her on, that a values-based model works, that it can raids both a company and the individuals who are part of it to undreamed-of-heights, to peak experiences that will last a lifetime and change the way those lives are lived.”

And while the authors do a great job of telling the story, the real leadership that Rooney provided, along with his concept of the Dynamic Organization, aren’t broken down or spelled out as a set of lessons and how-to’s separated for you to memorize.

It’s your responsibility to learn from what was done, drawing out those lessons that are most in synch with your MAP, because if they aren’t in synch there’s no way you’ll be able to implement them.

And in case you’re tempted to shrug it off as a fluke, I suggest that you give some long hard thought to Zappos and its ilk.

I highly recommend The Pursuit of Something Better. It’s fun, it’s fascinating.  You might even start to believe that you don’t have to leave your ethics at the door; at the very least you’ll know what to look for in your next interview.

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I simply don’t understand what today’s parents are thinking—assuming they are thinking at all.

18 years ago Wanda Holloway tried to hire a hit man to improve her 13 year old daughter’s chances of making the cheer-leading squad.

More recently Lori Drew helped her teenage daughter fake a MySpace page that drove another teen to suicide.

Parents launch efforts to destroy teachers who don’t hand out ‘As’; they scream at referees and umpires when they disagree with a call; they threaten coaches who don’t allow their kids to play enough.

On one hand they enable their kids to avoid all responsibility and on the other castigate them for not living up to whatever parental dreams they are trying to realize.

I know that it’s not all parents; and this isn’t a new rant, but it’s one to which I keep coming back.

And it came back with a vengeance, in fact you might say my outrage cup runneth over, when I read that Senator John Ensign’s parents paid off his mistress.

“The wealthy parents of Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) gave $96,000 last year to the staffer who was then his mistress and to her family, his attorney said yesterday.

The gifts to Cynthia L. Hampton and her family were given “out of concern for the well-being of longtime family friends during a difficult time,” according to the lawyer, Paul Coggins.”par

Ensign’s parents aren’t Gen-Xers and probably not Boomers, so this problem isn’t new.

You read stories about helicopter parents all the time, but when does it end?

How can anyone expect a person to make good choices when their mistakes (and worse) are ‘handled’ for them by their parents?

What do you think about Ensign’s parents’ actions? Obviously, pay-offs aren’t in the same class as murder; are they better or equal with bullying?

I don’t have any answers, but we’d better find some—and fast!

An open discussion is a place to start so let’s hear your thoughts.

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Click over and see the key to success.

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These days it’s called ‘engagement’ and smart managers are looking for ways to increase it. They want to incorporate practices and attitudes in their group’s MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) that will improve productivity and increase engagement.

Two such items are

• basic business knowledge and
• a large dose of pragmatism.

Business 101

Naiveté regarding business frequently leads to non-reality based ideas and attitudes. If people have a fuzzy or rose-colored view of what has to happen for the company to be successful, there’s no way they can contribute effectively.

Worse, this lack of knowledge can make them resistant to the procedural changes necessary to the company’s successful evolution as it grows, shrinks, or changes.

It’s not necessary, or even possible, to provide the in-depth business knowledge that comes from an MBA or 30 years as a successful CEO, but wise managers can provide basic understanding of the actual forces at work within the company, industry and even the economy in general at times such as this.

You want your people to understand

• the Business Mission Statement;
• customer desire as the driving force behind product development (why build it if they won’t buy it?);
• financial controls, what they are and why you need them;
• why/how to avoid blue sky approaches and impossible wish lists;
• the reasons for requiring excellent documentation;
• the importance of quality and manufacturability; and
• other business-specific subjects.

Teaching these should be active, not passive; merely posting the information on your intranet won’t get it done. Use brown bag lunches or company-wide webinars, followed by local discussions, to create a positive learning process.

Finally, be sure you encourage people to use what they’ve learned.

Pragmatism

Pragmatism should permeate your MAP, the groups and the company culture. It should be like stain as opposed to paint—not just covering the surface, but also sinking in.

By practicing pragmatism as well as preaching it, you encourage a reality-based culture where

• setbacks are easier to deal with because they are recognized and acted on quickly;
• employees speak up because they are assured that the messenger will not be shot;
• rose-colored glasses are obvious;
• growth and change of the culture without corrupting it is encouraged; and
• “not-invented-here” syndrome is veer batten.

Pragmatism works best as a part of a MAP that everybody is encouraged to embrace.

It helps to create a company in which not only can everybody see what the Emperor is wearing, but also have no compunction about discussing it.

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The list of executives paid for non-performance in 2006 pales in comparison to CEO pay in 2008.

We’re all taught the value of hard work, exceeding goals, giving our all, but some have found a better way—a loving Board.

Non-performance bonus money isn’t new; in 2007 Coke had a $2.9 billion noncash charge in the fourth quarter, so they cut 3500 workers and their execs missed their performance bonus targets, but the Board stepped in, giving “…millions of dollars in “discretionary cash awards.”

And no matter how good a leader is, does any performance warrant an average of $144,573 a day for 13 years?

The explanation (excuse?) for these giant pay packages is the same one that kids have been using for generations—peer pressure.

Boards claim they can’t hire the best (AKA biggest name; best negotiator) without these outsize pay packages, but there are hundreds of skilled executives that could be had for less and who would probably do more.

For all the public outcry against outrageous pay there is none against the directors who don’t just approve it, but spend their effort outbidding the other Board.

When are they going to show some real leadership instead of whining and complaining about government interference?

And when will the washed and unwashed start putting the blame where it really belongs?

Little girls are made of “sugar and spice and everything nice;” little boys are made of “snakes and snails, and puppy dog tails;” and many (not all) “leaders” are made of ego and greed and the skill to mislead.

What are Boards made of?

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Think of all the times you’ve used it as your argument of choice—or had it used on you.

The problem, Gloria Steinem tells us, is that “Logic is in the eye of the logician.”

That makes logic a moving target and subject to the whims of MAP, which means that “Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence,” according to Joseph Wood Krutch

Ambrose Bierce offers a wonderful definition, “Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.”

Boy is that true.

John Locke tells us that “Logic is the anatomy of thought,” while Leonard Nimoy believes that “Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.”

But it was Dale Carnegie hit the nail on the head when he said, “When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudice, and motivated by pride and vanity.”

And Tryon Edwards warns us that “Prejudices are rarely overcome by argument; not being founded in reason they cannot be destroyed by logic,” because, as Anon tells us, “The best defense against logic is ignorance.”

Which goes a long way to explaining why no one on Wall Street or the SEC listened to Warren Buffet or Harry Markopolos respectively.

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Phil Gerbyshak sent me a link to an interesting post by his friend Roy Atkinson. Roy talks about speedership—the need to act quickly in today’s world. Roy sees it as a requirement for a positional leader, which it is, but I see it as an attitude that everybody needs these days.

Click over to the slideshow at Business Week and learn what experts are saying about how leadership has changed.

Next, in case you hadn’t heard, one of the newest social media trends are Facebook suicides, as in killing your profile. Click the link and see why people are choosing to kill their profile.

Finally, something for you to think about. What happens when doctors start treating medicine as a business? What does it mean for the future of medicine, not healthcare, in this country?

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Jim Stroup at Managing Leadership describes it well.

“Initially the gurus told us that leadership was a superlative individual characteristic reserved to the elite, then a democratically distributed attribute accessible by all… first to vision, then decisiveness, then courage, then team-building skills, then forcefulness, then empathy. It’s about looking inward to one’s core self. No, it’s about communication and connecting with others.”

The list of leadership fashions is actually much longer than Jim’s list; different looks are marketed by different leadership houses and each has a name designer at the helm with more junior designers doing much of the actual work. Every so often one of these junior people leaves and starts her own house and so the industry grows.

Along with the major houses are the small independent designers who may be aligned philosophically with a larger house, but put their own spin on the product.

Just as fashionistas drive the cutting edge (which can be pretty weird) in clothes, anoint designers, models and wearers as icons and then trash them for being out of touch or too <whatever>, so, too, do leaderistas drive what’s fashionable in leadership, hold icons up for adulation, dump them from their pedestals when their feet soften and switch when more trendy designs comes along.

The greatest difference is that fashion products are made of real stuff, while leadership products are built of words.

Consider Lao Tzu, who, 2500 years ago said,

“The superior leader gets things done with very little motion. He imparts instruction not through many words but through a few deeds. He keeps informed about everything but interferes hardly at all. He is a catalyst, and though things would not get done well if he weren’t there, when they succeed he takes no credit. And because he takes no credit, credit never leaves him.”

and

“As for the best leaders,
the people do not notice their existence…
When the best leader’s work is done,
the people say, “We did it ourselves!”
To lead the people, walk behind the.”

In 1987 The Leadership Challenge presented the 5 Practices of Leadership

• Model the Way
• Inspire a Shared Vision
• Challenge the Process
• Enable Others to Act
• Encourage the Heart

These days the hot terms are thought leadership and servant leadership.

If you’re getting tired of the leaderistas go back to Lao Tzu’s Tao Teh Ching; I have a copy that, measured in inches, is 4.5×3x3/8 in an easily readable font.

It will rev up your brain, sink into your MAP, juice your leadership abilities and add peace to your soul—not bad for a book you can put in your pocket.

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As with any large group, negative attitudes and actions often get more attention and press than positive ones and I’m no exception.

Leadership’s Future is often about Millennials—their sense of entitlement, expectations, impatience, and the parental intervention that fuels it.

My Millennial friends kid me that I’m ignoring a large number of their demographic, although even they don’t claim that it’s anywhere near a majority.

But they do have a point, so I’m offering up a new term to designate those who are chronologically, but not psychologically, Millennials.

aMillennial, because placing an ‘a’ in front of a word nullifies its meaning (see a-6).

I ran into a great example of the positive at AARP’s u@50 contest.

It wasn’t the first place winner that blew me away, but the second.

Her words are an inspiration for us all and a good lesson to remember that people change as life changes.

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