Vital Integrities Blog

The Long Road to Equality

2012-08-22T10:08:00.001-04:00

The death last week of Helen Gurley Brown seemed like a good milestone to reflect on the advancements made by the women's movement that she helped champion throughout her life. But two national incidents since the former Cosmopolitan editor's passing reveal how much progress still needs to be made. The first occurred this past weekend, when U.S. Representative and Senate candidate Todd Akin

Leadership Is Conversations

2012-08-14T05:39:00.003-04:00

In an old story, a newly married man visits his minister seeking advice on a problem at home. "Father, all my wife seems to want to do is talk about our relationship," he says. "Morning, noon, and night, she wants to have conversations about our relationship. It's exhausting. Please, Father, how do I convince her that we don't need so many conversations about our relationship." "My son," says

Statues Are For Leaders

2012-08-13T07:44:00.000-04:00

In the early morning hours of Sunday, July 22, 2012, workers at Penn State University draped a blue tarp over the statue of Joe Paterno just outside Beaver Stadium. Paterno's bronze likeness had greeted football fans entering the hallowed field since 2001. But on that morning, a forklift unceremoniously moved the monument to an undisclosed storage space inside the stadium. Rumors of the

Who's Responsible for an Organization's Ethics?

2012-07-16T10:56:00.006-04:00

"The most saddening finding by the Special Investigative Counsel is the total and consistent disregard by the most senior leaders at Penn State for the safety and welfare of Sandusky's child victims." Freeh Report While performing an independent investigation into sexual abuse at Penn State, former FBI director Louis Freeh and his team conducted over 430 interviews and analyzed more than 3.5

Who's Driving This Bus?

2012-04-09T11:02:00.002-04:00

When it comes to driving growth, most executives have little faith in their companies' leadership. According to a recent survey of 200 middle-to-upper level managers, only 25 percent believe their company has the right leadership with the skills necessary to compel grow and identify new opportunities in the coming year. Nearly one in four said a complete overhaul of their leadership team was in

Nothing Lasts Forever

2012-03-21T15:31:00.000-04:00

In early March, the Indianapolis Colts cut iconic quarterback Peyton Manning. Manning had been the heart and soul of the Colts for fourteen years, leading the team to the playoffs in nine consecutive seasons, and to a Super Bowl victory in 2006-07. He won the NFL Most Valuable Player Award four times. “We all know that nothing lasts forever,” an emotional Manning told the press. Manning missed

Racial Biases in Leadership

2012-01-11T11:19:00.001-05:00

While playing varsity football in college, Andrew Carton "became aware of certain racial biases," as he put it. Later, as a graduate student at Duke, Carton discussed those experiences with Ashleigh Shelby Rosette, a Duke professor whose work included researching bias in the workplace. Their conversations led them to collaborate on a study recently published in The Academy of Management Journal.

Apple's Golden Leader

2011-10-10T09:56:00.001-04:00

Leadership: "A process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal." Peter Northouse Since his death last week, much has been written about the way Steve Jobs ran Apple. By all accounts, he was a mix of creative genius and business acumen who influenced every aspect of the company's day-to-day operations. Since returning in 1997 to the company he cofounded,

Failing the Integrity Test

2011-07-29T08:27:00.001-04:00

"I don't believe there are little transgressions and big transgressions. You're either going to have high integrity, or you're not." Erroll Davis, Jr. According to a Georgia investigative report, many teachers and administrators working in the Atlanta Public School system found a creative way to raise student scores on standardized tests: they cheated. As The Wall Street Journal reports, state

Spilling Integrity

2011-04-07T11:19:00.000-04:00

Statistically speaking, Transocean Ltd. just came off a very safe year. In a recent proxy statement, Transocean announced that 2010 was “the best year in safety performance in our company’s history.” That’s great news for a company whose vision lists the following goal: “Our operations will be conducted in an incident-free workplace, all the time, everywhere.” Things were so safe, in fact, that

Lights, Cameras, Action...Lead

2011-03-30T07:27:00.000-04:00

Where do evil bosses learn the leadership craft? Perhaps they copy the nasty behaviors of their favorite leaders from television shows and movies. Bschool.com has compiled a top-ten list of the worst bosses from TV and film. Read it, and maybe you'll see the character on whom your own boss's leadership style is patterned.

Leadership Lessons from Tahrir Square

2011-02-14T15:09:00.000-05:00

After eighteen days of peaceful protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square, the people of Egypt have successfully accomplished the once unthinkable: They've forced Hosni Mubarak to resign his oppressive, three-decades-long reign as Egypt's president. Although it's too early to predict what will happen next – democracy, let's hope – there are leadership lessons that we can learn from

Building Pride

2010-12-22T13:41:00.001-05:00

In 1996, Roy Pelaez took over Aramark's airplane cleaning division at New York's JFK airport. His new staff included over 400 low-paid and mostly immigrant workers. Morale was extremely low, and employee turnover exceeded 100 percent annually. Furthermore, when passengers left wallets and other valuables behind on planes, those items tended to mysteriously disappear. Besides lacking pride in

Drilling Deeper Into Leadership

2010-11-07T08:10:00.000-05:00

The recent dramatic rescue of thirty-three Chilean miners, trapped underground for 69 days, revealed what amazing things can be accomplished with effective leadership. All leaders can learn some valuable lessons from the successful operation. Things go wrong. Despite our best attempts to keep everything running smoothly and flawlessly, we cannot prevent every error. That's one of the toughest

Don't Drop The Ball With Troubled Employees

2010-10-15T10:07:00.001-04:00

I often hear from clients about an excellent employee whose performance suddenly and mysteriously changes. What, my clients want to know, causes great workers to become so-so employees. Many managers attribute performance slides to an employee's incompetence, or condemn the individual for slacking off or growing complacent. Other explanations include burnout or being an overall misfit. But what

Landing With Dignity

2010-08-23T10:00:00.000-04:00

By now you've undoubtedly heard about Steven Slater's bad day at work. The Jet Blue flight attendant was working a capacity-filled flight on the Pittsburgh to New York route recently. A passenger, while attempting to squeeze a suitcase into an overhead compartment, supposedly banged Slater in the head with it. Then she added insult to injury, literally: in lieu of an apology, she told him off.

Not Hearing a Reason to Stay

2010-08-06T15:28:00.000-04:00

Here's a staggering wakeup call from Deloitte LLP's most recent annual Ethics & Workplace Survey: a third of American workers are planning to look for new employers once the recession ends. Among those waiting to jump ship, 48 percent say it's because they've lost trust in their leaders. Not surprisingly, the unforthcoming way management communicates is leading to

Imperfect Leadership

2010-06-16T08:53:00.000-04:00

Armando Galarraga had retired twenty-six straight batters and was a single out away from pitching a perfect game. You undoubtedly know what happened next. Umpire Jim Joyce called a clearly out runner safe at first base, denying Galarraga his rightful place in baseball history. Tyler Kepner of The New York Times called it "easily the most egregious blown call in baseball

Event Slides: Concept Schools

2010-05-22T07:19:00.000-04:00

Nitin Nohria, the incoming dean of Harvard Business School, said, "Communication is the real work of leadership." How true. And nowhere is good communication more important than in our education systems. That is part of my message today to a group of educators at the Concept Schools Conference in Toledo. You can view the slides for that talk at slideshare. When explaining President Obama's nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court to reporters, White House officials stressed her leadership qualities. With Justice John Paul Stevens retirement, the president sees Kagan as someone who can fill the resulting leadership void on the high Court…Pam and Jack Cumming have donated $1.125 million to Bentley University toward

More Corporate Shenanigans

2010-04-19T14:30:00.000-04:00

Corporate governance has taken it on the chin in the past few days. Over the past week: · The U.S. Justice Department and the Securities Exchange Commission announced an investigation of Hewlett-Packard for allegedly bribing foreign officials to secure a lucrative computer equipment contract in Russia. German and Russian prosecutors are

A "Sorry" Excuse for Leadership

2010-04-13T10:52:00.000-04:00

Last week, two former top-ranking Citigroup officials apologized on Capitol Hill for taking the banking giant to the brink of extinction. Former CEO Charles Prince and ex-board member Robert Rubin offered repentance to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. Prince ran the company from 2003 through 2007. During much of his watch, Citigroup ran up billions of dollars in losses, eventually

Leopards and Their Spots

2010-04-12T08:03:00.000-04:00

According to the Wall Street Journal, some of the nation's largest banks are still employing the same dangerous business practices that caused the recent financial crisis. Only now, they're trying harder to cover their tracks. Attempting to protect their stock prices and credit ratings, big banks have been temporarily lowering the debt levels they use to fund securities trades. For

Then and Now: The "Great Firewall of China"

2010-04-01T11:17:00.000-04:00

This is part of a series of posts featuring earlier content from the Vital Integrities Blog along with updated information and opinions. Here's an excerpt from a post that appeared in June 2009: News out of China this week will now compel PC makers to choose between human rights and revenue. The Chinese government has announced that, beginning July 1 [2009], every computer sold in China must come

All Around Good Leadership

2010-03-08T08:34:00.000-05:00

When it comes to leadership styles, many experts agree that leaders tend to exhibit two distinct types of behaviors: task behaviors and relationship behaviors. Task behaviors focus on processes and end results, whereas relationship behaviors concentrate on the people doing the work. Taskmasters demonstrate a heavy emphasis on authority and compliance; for them, people are simply the ends to a