Time Persons of the Year 2005

From Time.com, December 19 2005



"These are not the people you expect to come to the rescue. Rock stars are designed to be shiny, shallow creatures, furloughed from reality for all time. Billionaires are even more removed, nestled atop fantastic wealth where they never again have to place their own calls or defrost dinner or fly commercial. So Bono spends several thousand dollars at a restaurant for a nice Pinot Noir, and Bill Gates, the great predator of the Internet age, has a trampoline room in his $100 million house. It makes you think that if these guys can decide to make it their mission to save the world, partner with people they would never otherwise meet, care about causes that are not sexy or dignified in the ways that celebrities normally require, then no one really has a good excuse anymore for just staying on the sidelines and watching.

Such is the nature of Bono's fame that just about everyone in the world wants to meet him--except for the richest man in the world, who thought it would be a waste of time. 'World health is immensely complicated,' says Gates, recalling that first encounter in 2002. 'It doesn't really boil down to a 'Let's be nice' analysis. So I thought a meeting wouldn't be all that valuable.'

It took about three minutes with Bono for Gates to change his mind. Bill and his wife Melinda, another computer nerd turned poverty warrior, love facts and data with a tenderness most people reserve for their children, and Bono was hurling metrics across the table as fast as they could keep up. 'He was every bit the geek that we are,' says Gates Foundation chief Patty Stonesifer, who helped broker that first summit. 'He just happens to be a geek who is a fantastic musician.'"

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Tom Peters on "Twenty dumbest business practices"

From Tom Peter's blog ...

"A START.

I want to do a list on the "twenty dumbest business practices." I'll give you my 11 starting propositions, scribbled out so far:

• Men as CEOs of consumer goods companies!
• CFOs promoted to CEO.
• Mergers of Decrepit Monsters!
• Strategic plans in excess of three pages.
• Big offices for bosses.
• Focus groups.
• Hiring lots of MBAs.
• HR boss not a member of the Board of Directors.
• CIO not a member of the Board of Directors.
• Corporate staffs in excess of 50 people.
• Anything other than Unbridled Enthusiasm at the top of the hiring or promoting criteria list for any + every job.

More later....."

The Deliberate Life: Secrets of Leadership

From Alec Watson of New Destinations Personal Performance Coaching, in his Deliberate Life blog, December 2005.

"Today I look at the leadership 'secrets' of Colin Powell, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State. Colin Powell's principles come from the book, The Leadership Secrets of Colin Powell, by Oren Harari. There are 18 principles in total. Today I'll present the first nine and follow-up with the last nine in tomorrow's post. While some have a distinct military favor, each translate equally well and have direct application to the civilian / private sector. After all good leadership is good leadership, period.

1. Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.
2. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.
3. Don't be buffaloed by experts and elites. Experts often possess more data than judgment. Elites can become so inbred that they produce hemophiliacs who bleed to death as soon as they are nicked by the real world.
4. Don't be afraid to challenge the pros, even in their own backyard.
5. Never neglect details. When everyone's mind is dulled or distracted the leader must be doubly vigilant.
6. You don't know what you can get away with until you try.
7. Keep looking below surface appearances. Don't shrink from doing so (just) because you might not like what you find.
8. Organization doesn't really accomplish anything. Plans don't accomplish anything, either. Theories of management don't much matter. Endeavors succeed or fall because of the people involved. Only by attracting the best people will you accomplish great deeds.
9. Organization charts and fancy titles count for next to nothing."

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China still holds Mao aloft

From The Mercury News December 15, 2005, by Tim Johnson

"As China hurtles down the capitalist road, the communist ideals of the modern nation's founder, Mao Zedong, lie discarded in the gutter.

Yet Mao is still enshrined as China's greatest leader. His large portrait, solemn and slightly enigmatic, looks out over Tiananmen Square, the symbolic heart of the nation.

The Communist Party clutches Mao as a monumental figurehead, 29 years after his death. Party leaders won't let go of him as long as they retain their monopoly on political power. The preamble to China's Constitution hails "Mao Zedong Thought" for helping to guide China into the present. His likeness appears on nearly every piece of currency.

But Mao's ideas appear to have little relevance. Long gone is the cradle-to-grave system of Spartan housing, medical care and schooling that was guaranteed to everyone after the revolution in 1949. Mao reviled capitalism and oversaw industrial and rural development based on egalitarianism and central government planning. Soon after his death in 1976, China haltingly began to embrace capitalism, rely on market forces and end its isolation from most of the rest of the world.

One can only imagine the shock that the Great Helmsman would feel if he came back to life and strolled through China's cities. But that misses the broader point: Whatever the Chinese Communist Party's orientation, it retains Mao's propensity for authoritarian rule and uses him as a vital buttress to its own legitimacy.

The result is one of the world's great dramas: The party wants to maintain its iron grip on political power, but it also must permit China's economy to grow within a global system in order to meet the sky-high hopes of the Chinese people for better lives

Debate about Mao is largely off limits in China. In many ways, his public image is as frozen and static as his waxen body in a mausoleum on Tiananmen Square.

"Mao is a man of significant merits as well as weaknesses," said Xu Mingyang, a 27-year-old white-collar worker who was waiting to enter the mausoleum, repeating a common view espoused by the government that Mao was an epic figure with shortcomings near the end of his life.

Opinion polls routinely show schoolchildren listing Mao as their greatest hero, even above their parents, while young adults view him as a distant, even irrelevant, figure. Older Chinese are split. Some voice exhaustion at the social turmoil during his rule, while others, mainly rural peasants, admire him and long for the economic stability of his era rather than the vulnerability they feel today.

Outside China, new allegations are arising of some of the terrible costs of Mao's rule from 1949 until his death.

A new book, "Mao: The Unknown Story," by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, portrays him as a monster in Hitler's league, guilty of some 70 million deaths during the Great Leap Forward, Mao's drive beginning in 1958 to push all workers to meet unrealistic industrial and agricultural goals, and the Cultural Revolution, the 1966-76 period, in which he sanctioned national turmoil."

Read the rest of the article ....

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Mick's comment: I have read "Mao: The Unknown story", and found it a fascinating if somewhat horrifying account. The book is extremely well researched and documented, and reads like a page turning novel.

I've spent quite some time doing business in China - so I guess I'm biased as to why this is a book to read, as it has some very interesting clues about the future of China .

But I'd also classify it as a "must read" for anyone interested in leadership in general.

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Not just one of the gang

From MIS Manager, December, by Judith Ross

"When exploited, a good manager's intimate working relationships with the team can boost performance. Too much closeness could lead to discomfort.

In business, as in sports, winning teams have a well-honed sense of camaraderie that helps team members to read one another's signals, move as one, and watch each other's backs. In management circles, this sense of commitment and connection is often referred to as affiliation. Many experts consider it an essential component of effective teamwork.

The more people value their relationships with one another, the thinking goes, the better they will perform for one another and the organisation. But can you have too much of a good thing?

According to a new study of 20 executive leadership teams from Fortune 500 companies conducted by the Philadelphia-based Hay Group, you can.

While confirming that affiliation is a crucial component of effective teamwork, the study also showed that too much emphasis on positive relationships, especially by the team leader, could hamper performance.

Singing along

While leaders must foster conditions that promote trust, cooperation, and commitment, they cannot allow relationships to come before work. Instead, they should set well-defined boundaries that allow them to make the kind of clear-eyed business decisions that will put their teams in the best position to succeed."

Read the rest of the article ....

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Innovation: Fuzzy Front End

From the Broken Bulbs blog, by Gordon Graham

"The fuzzy front end lies at the initiation end of the innovation process. There tends to be more thinking going on than doing. Koen et al. (2002) describe the following tasks:

1. opportunity identification
2. opportunity analysis
3. idea generation and enrichment
4. idea selection
5. concept definition

These tasks/activities are carried out at the same time and iteratively. This type of list can be very useful for firms thinking about formalizing their innovation activities because it provides a quick check-list against which firms can see what they do and do not do. People often criticize check-lists like this, but I think they are great because they add a much-needed 'concreteness' to what is often a very abstract concept. We don't need any more pronouncements on the importance of innovation, we want to know how to do it!

Koen at al. (2002) maintain that these activities are driven and complimented by the leadership, culture, and structure of the firm. In terms of innovation, these factors are either an asset or a liability.

I'd add that having a sense of real urgency is also important. Everybody has heard of the famous 'Only the paranoid survive' quote from Intel."

The End of Shopping

From the New York Times, by Walter Kirn

"I thought I got a sweet deal on my first car. It was a compact pickup, American-made, and the salesman who approached me on the lot told me that if I bought it that afternoon, he was prepared to double the advertised rebate and throw in a premium sound system free. I played hard to get by mumbling the word 'Toyota,' and the salesman took off an extra $500. I could see by his shirt's dark armpits that he was nervous, and when we went into his office to sign the papers, he vanished into an adjoining room, where I heard his superior loudly chew him out, just as he'd predicted to me would happen if he let me 'steal' the vehicle. I drove off euphoric - I'd beaten the system - but the very next morning I realized I'd been toyed with.

Reading the local paper, I spotted an ad for a truck identical to mine priced at a cool $1,000 less. Nearly identical, that is. The other, cheaper truck had leather seats and eight mighty cylinders, not a feeble six. It also had tinted windows and dual chrome pipes."

Read the rest of the article ...

Either / Or Thinking

From The TrueTalk Blog:

"Either It's 'Design' Or It's 'Innovation'

Recently, I've been thinking about what for me is a new indicator of individual or organizational robustness: the ability to transcend either/or thinking. Not being able to get past thinking of something as either this or that is not likely to lead to successfully navigating the new frontiers in which we find ourselves. For example, thinking of yourself as either a 'producer' or 'consumer' of content is no longer applicable. Nor is it reasonable to focus on either 'quality' or 'cost.' How about, either 'free trade' or 'protectionism?' Doesn't work.

We live today in the complexity of a both/and world.

So, I was interested to read Bruce Nussbaum's latest post concerning the latest of these straw dichotomies: if I can't touch it, is it, 'design' or is it 'innovation'? Simply put, is it appropriate to speak about designing intangibles, like business models, or experiences? Or, should the more B-school friendly term, innovation, apply?

I think we've been here before."

Read the rest of the post .....

My Golden Rule

From Business2.0, December 2005

"We asked 30 business visionaries, collectively worth over $70 billion, what single philosophy they swear by more than any other -- in business, life, or both. Here are the secrets of their success.

(here are a few of Mick's favorites ....)

The Customer Should Always Be Happy - John Chambers, CEO, Cisco Systems

Don't Trust, Just Verify - Steven D. Levitt, coauthor, Freakonomics

Business Is Not About Ideas, It's About Initiatives - Sergio Zyman, marketing expert

Surround Yourself With People Smarter Than You - Chris Albrecht, CEO, Home Box Office

Read the rest of the Rules ....

Why Change Is an Affair of the Heart

From CIO Magazine. Editorial by Dan S. Cohen.

"In the drama of change, emotions, not logic, impel people to cast off the old and embrace the new.

Everyone wants to know why so many IT projects fail to produce the business transformation they're expected to. The reason we found after years of studying large-scale change may surprise you. Our research, based on interviews with hundreds of executives in Fortune 1000 - type companies around the world, revealed that it is not the complexity of the technology, a lack of buy-in from top management, high cost or the failure to create shareholder value that derails new projects. Instead, the single biggest challenge in any transformation project is simply getting people to change their behavior.

We also discovered that when people do change their behavior, it's rarely because they are offered a logical analysis that shifts their thinking but because they are shown a compelling truth that influences their feelings. Emotions are what trigger action - impelling people to behave in the often radically different and difficult ways that substantial change demands. We have found that at the heart of every successful change effort lies a three-part process:

1. seeing what the problems are;
2. feeling an urgency to solve them; and
3. being emotionally compelled to act."

Read the rest of the article ...
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