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| Volume 7, Issue 4 |
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In This Issue:
 How CEOs can avoid being blindsided in business
When sales are stalled and profits flat
The business case for trust
 Confessions of a serial entrepreneur
Steve Jobs' greatest presentation
Your brilliant second career?
 Learning to make the move to CEO
How much of leadership is about control, delegation, or theater?
Five steps to better family negotiations
 Al Gore's $100 million makeover
Can CEOs cure cancer?
Leadership is a muscle
 Sales management mastery
Forging a sales culture across your organization
The top 12 presentation mistakes
 Top 10 toughest questions - Asked and answered
Work like you're showing off
 Much too golden years
Kindness pays dividends
Good-for-you grilling
Top star-spotting restaurants
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Why Didn’t they See It Coming? How CEOs can avoid being blindsided in business
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| Elaine Eisenman, Ph.D. is Dean of Executive Education at Babson College and coauthor of I Didn’t See It Coming: The Only Book You’ll Ever Need to Avoid Being Blindsided, published this month by John Wiley and Sons. |
What do Don Imus, the recently reviled and fired CBS shock jock, and Robert Nardelli, the former chief executive of Home Depot and well regarded GE executive, have in common?
Neither Imus nor Nardelli Saw It Coming. They were completely blindsided by the actions of their employers. Both Imus and Nardelli believed that they had total control
over their respective situation, yet did not. Like Imus’ sudden dismissal, “Nardelli’s exit came as a surprise; according to Forbes.com, just months earlier, he told the Associated Press that, despite the firestorm, he would not leave the company and
had the support of the Board.” These events are far from unusual. A recent survey by Challenger and Grey has shown a sharp increase in the sudden firing of CEOs.
Why might this occur? Being a CEO can often result in isolation, both from the world at large and from those who ultimately are responsible for the CEO’s continued employment. Too often, CEOs are surrounded by well-meaning executives who protect them
from hearing bad news. While this can be affirming, it can also hide or distort reality. Being protected can too often result in being blindsided, as Imus and Nardelli
learned the hard way. How can you, as a CEO, prevent this from occurring?...
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When Sales Are Stalled and Profits Flat
Most entrepreneurial CEOs don’t have the economic safety net to tolerate slow market adoption of their new products.
When faced with a sluggish reception, marketing and sales teams typically suggest traditional solutions such as branding programs, reducing prices to gain faster adoption, spending more on marketing promotions, adding features to the
product or service or casting a wider net – tactics that further drain the company’s resources, yet provide no guarantees for success.
If this sounds familiar, the good news is that there is a proven, better way to get back on track with underperforming products and services. Instead of reducing prices (which cuts into margins) or investing more money in branding, marketing or additional
product development (which cuts into operating capital and delays introduction further), a quick analysis can reveal a clearer, and more rapid, road to success...
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The Business Case For Trust
Almost everywhere we turn, trust is on the decline.
We find low trust in our society at large, in our institutions and in our companies. Research shows that only 51 percent of employees trust senior management,
and only 28 percent believe CEOs are a credible source of information. This compels us to ask two questions. First, is there a measurable cost to low trust? Second,
is there a tangible benefit to high trust? Few argue with the notion of trust.
Everybody is in favor of it and nobody is against it. But at the end of the day, many CEOs don’t really believe that internal organizational trust is directly connected to their company’s bottom line. Instead, they believe that trust is merely a
soft, nice-to-have, “social virtue.” An increasing number of CEOs, however, are convinced that this socalled “soft” trust factor is, in reality, a "hard-edged economic driver." From an abundance of research, consider just four studies:...
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Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur
Stuart Skorman, a former hippie turned dot-com mogul, offers lessons from his spectacular wins and equally disappointing losses.
Stuart Skorman, a former 1960s hippie-turned-dot-com mogul, launched the online video store Reel.com in 1997 and sold it three years later for $100 million.
Since then, Skorman has created several other companies, earning and losing millions of dollars in the process. For example, Skorman was one of the founders of the organic supermarket Bread & Circuses, which was later purchased by Whole Foods. He also launched Hungryminds.com, which went belly up after only one year, losing $20 million, half of which came straight from Skorman's own wallet. In his memoir-cum-how-to Confessions
of a Serial Entrepreneur: Why I Can't Stop Starting Over (Jossey-Bass), Skorman shares the lessons he learned along the way from his spectacular wins and equally disappointing losses. He spoke recently with BusinessWeek.com staff writer Stacy Perman.
Edited excerpts of their conversation follow...
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Steve Jobs' greatest presentation
Our communications coach mines Jobs' introduction of the iPhone to offer five lessons for making an unforgettable pitch.
After a gorgeous afternoon of golf a few days ago, my nephew seemed anxious to get home, even skipping out on my invitation to dinner. He's a graduating high school
senior, so I assumed he wanted to hang out with friends. I was partly correct. He wanted to hang out with friends in line for the new iPhone.
Leave it to Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs to create a frenzy that gripped every gadget fan in the country. The hype, however, started with what I consider Jobs' best presentation to
date—the introduction of the iPhone at the annual Macworld trade show in January. After watching and analyzing the presentation, I thought about five ways to distill Jobs'
speaking techniques to help anyone craft and deliver a persuasive pitch...
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Your brilliant second career
Your work experience makes you a valuable commodity. Figure out how you want to parlay it into a new career for yourself.
have always wondered how a kid in his second year of college is supposed to pick a major and then, a couple of years later, dive into a career. At that stage in life,
most folks know almost nothing about the range of careers that are available and have so little life experience. It's no wonder that, in survey after survey, midcareer
professionals report that they "fell into" their areas of specialization. Few, if any, of us, after all, have childhood dreams of becoming a procurement manager, a process
engineer, or a human resources information systems analyst. And yet, here we are. What's exciting these days is that, with average job tenures getting shorter and
shorter and big-company lifetime jobs already a thing of the past, more and more midcareer professionals are finding job happiness in Chapter Two careers—sometimes in
radically different areas from the gigs they've held for the first 15 or 20 years out of college. Still, sitting in your cubicle at XYZ Corp., it can be hard to imagine
yourself taking the necessary steps onto a wildly different career path. Here are some ideas for getting started...
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Learning to make the move to CEO
Robert Simons is the Charles M. Williams Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.
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| "There's a realization that they only have so much time left."
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You're a successful senior executive with 20, 25 years of experience under your belt. You've made your mark and stand just 1 or 2 rungs from the position of CEO.
Now what? As faculty chair of Harvard Business School's Advanced Management Program (AMP), Professor Robert Simons has seen many such executives in his classroom. While
they come from countries around the world and from a variety of industries, they share a common characteristic. "They're at a point where it's valuable for them to stop and
reflect," says Simons, a specialist in accounting, management control, and strategy implementation. "Most are well along in their lives, with grown families. They want to
make a difference and do great things, but when they step back, they see that they've been in a bit of a rut, running between e-mails and meetings all day. There's a
realization that they only have so much time left, and that if they want to do something, they've got to move" ...
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How Much of Leadership Is About Control, Delegation, or Theater?
The flood of writing about leadership continues. It reflects our fascination with what many believe to be the most important influence on organizational performance.
In a thought-provoking book published last year, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton suggest that the overriding impact of leadership on performance is a myth, or at
least only a half-truth. 30 years ago, in reviewing research on leadership, Pfeffer concluded at that time that actions of leaders most often explain no more than 10% of performance. Such things as a company's operating environment, the economy in
general, or its long-run success or failure account for more of its current performance.
Findings published since then have done nothing to change Pfeffer's mind. But he also concludes that it may be quite important for leaders to perpetuate the myth of having significant control over performance...
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Five Steps to Better Family Negotiations
| A typical strength of family negotiations is that family members generally prefer to reach mutually acceptable outcomes in their negotiations.
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Negotiations between family members who own a business are different—different from negotiations between non-family members and also different from negotiations
between family members who don't have a business. This is because family relationships are distinctive kinds of relationships, and having a family business raises the
stakes of—and often complicates—a family negotiation. Consider first what sets family relationships apart...
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Al Gore's $100 Million Makeover
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| Former Goldman Sachs exec David Blood cofounded Generation Investment Management with Gore. The firm now has nearly $1 billion under management. |
Not long ago, he was the butt of jokes--lockbox, earth tones, a postelection beard. Then he dusted off an old slide show and jumped with both feet into the private sector. The untold story of how an epic loser engineered what may be the greatest brand makeover of our time.
Al Gore is a funny guy. And, for his $175,000 speaking fee, he tells this story: after leaving the White House and heading back to Tennessee sans motorcade--"in a rented Ford Taurus," he sniffs--he and Tipper stop to get a bite to eat at a Shoney's,
"which, as you may know, is a low-cost family restaurant." The people in the restaurant "made a huge fuss...over Tipper." Then, a man spies Gore and stage-whispers, "Didn't he used to be the Vice President? He's fallen so low." Peals of delight from the
audience. Gore smiles back. It's a nice moment. Former Goldman Sachs exec David Blood cofounded Generation Investment Management with Gore. The firm now has nearly $1 billion under management. But wait, there's more. Later, he goes on, he attempts the
same story in Nigeria. Punch line, laughter, applause--no problem. The next day, an official at the airport yells out to him, "Call Washington!" Hmmm. "What could be wrong in Washington?" he muses, scratching his chin. "That's when I remembered it could
be a lot of things." The crowd goes wild. Come to find out, Gore explains, a reporter in Nigeria had lost a bit of the story in translation. "Vice President Al Gore announced yesterday that he and his wife, Tipper, have opened a low-cost family restaurant called Shoney's and will be running it themselves," Gore intones. By the time he landed
in the United States, the story had hit the wires, and he was--again--the butt of jokes on Leno and Letterman. Three days later, he received a handwritten note from Bill Clinton, congratulating him on the Shoney's deal. "We like to celebrate each
other's successes in life," Gore deadpans to uproarious laughter. Funny guy, indeed. In one well-delivered anecdote, Gore manages to make fun of himself, the election, his relationship with his former boss, the Bush administration, and the media--and
still come out on top...
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Can CEOs Cure Cancer?
"If you are going to have a successful corporate program, it has to be directed from the top," says William Weldon, the CEO of Johnson & Johnson. He could be talking about cost-cutting initiatives or a new talent-management protocol. Instead, he's talking about cancer prevention.
Weldon is chairman of the CEO Roundtable on Cancer, an association of bigfoot leaders, mostly from Big Pharma, who have joined forces to create best practices for
anticancer policies. Launched by former GlaxoSmithKline CEO Robert Ingram--at the urging of former President George H.W. Bush, who lost a child to cancer--the organization
last year created a "CEO Gold Standard" plan. Among other things, it requires companies that sign on to cover the full cost of cancer-related treatments that
traditional insurance plans often balk at, from cancer screening to nutritional counseling to experimental treatments. They also ban smoking, not just inside their corporate buildings but outside on the grounds as well. So far, 13 companies have
gone for the gold, including J&J, software developer SAS Institute, and drugmaker Novartis...
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Leadership is a muscle
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In the business world, we're schizophrenic about leadership. We instinctively prize innate leadership. And although companies are clearly in
the leader-creation business, how far does the tolerance for believing that you can grow your skills go?" |
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Bobby Fischer was playing chess at age 6. Mozart wrote his first symphony at 8. Could it be that Jack Welch was firing direct reports at 9?
There's a long-standing debate about whether leaders are born or made. But let's not revisit nature versus nurture. Instead, let's ask a weirder question: Could it be that
your point of view on this issue is what actually makes you a better or worse leader? And if so, is nature or nurture the more career-enhancing POV? This psychological
puzzle starts with the research of Stanford's Carol Dweck. Her latest book, Mind-set: The New Psychology of Success, should be on every business manager's bookshelf. Dweck
has found that individuals succeed or fail based on how they think about intelligence. She says people have one of two mind-sets on the matter...
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Sales management mastery
Turn Your Sales Effort Into a Rocket Ship of Results
There's a war in today's business world—it's called "sales." And, if you want to win the war and get more market share, you must get yourself some true warriors. You need top producers. It's the top producers respond perfectly to rejection by becoming more
effective. They become more aggressive when someone is brushing them off. They're more persuasive if someone isn't buying. Top Performers know that the sales process is a
science. They understand that they must operate like scientists, constantly moving toward the sale. If you want to achieve maximum productivity and double your sales in
less than 12 to 15 months, you must ...
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Forging a sales culture across your organization
Culture is defined as the shared attitudes, experiences, beliefs, and values of individuals in the same work environment—at least in the context of the business world—and most companies have a broadly defined organizational culture that provides its employees a means to fulfill the corporate mission.
But departments oftentimes compartmentalize their goals because their culture is too narrowly focused on individual functions—not shared across the organization—and sales often operates as an independent business unit, receiving little institutional support. Most companies would acknowledge that their mission is to ensure a healthy bottom line and build a strong customer base. And when you examine all the functional areas within an organization, sales bears the burden of fulfilling this mission. But you can ensure that your company's individual functions support the corporate mission by supporting and embedding a sales culture in your organization.
Measuring Your Sales Culture
To determine whether you have a sales culture, answer the following questions:...
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The top 12 presentation mistakes
Mistake #1: Overlooking "Murphy"
If it can go wrong, it will go wrong.
This mistake basically means that you walk into the room where you're going to present and something is wrong. LeRoux tells a story about a multimillion-dollar sales
presentation to which "Murphy" paid a visit—in the form of missing curtains and a boardroom window overlooking a huge pool surrounded by bikini-clad swimmers (you can
guess what the attendees looked at instead of the presenter). Remedy: Visit important presentation rooms at least a day in advance. If that's not possible, have someone take
pictures from different angles and email them to you.
Mistake #2:...
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Top 10 toughest questions - asked and answered
Regular emails from readers ask hundreds of questions each year. Patterns emerge about the toughest situations you face in your organizations.
These are the ten toughest, but most frequent, questions you send my way.
I’ve written a how-to piece to answer each question you’ve asked. These articles address and answer your toughest questions.
1. How to Deal With a Negative Coworker: Negativity Matters
Some people exude negativity. They don’t like their jobs or they don’t like ...
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Work like you're showing off
Factors That Drive High Performance
In my 27 years of working with a wide range of companies and organizations, from Fortune 500 companies to HR associations to small businesses, it has become painfully
obvious that, as the old saying goes, success “isn’t rocket science.” My job is to discover and report what high performance organizations and individuals have in common.
What do they do that others don’t? How do they think? What differentiates extraordinary performers from everyone else? It’s a shock to some people to learn that high
performance factors seldom have to do with superior talents or skills, and have much more to do with the simple act of making choices. I’ve come to think of high
performance as showing off. Showing off, as I define it, isn’t about bragging or arrogance...
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Much Too Golden Years
Fat cat chief executives are almost always used as Exhibit A in the national debate about the rich getting richer.
Bolstering that case is a growing body of evidence showing that a burgeoning cohort of chief execs are getting lush compensation deals that last long after they've
driven out of the corporate parking lot. Take Edward Whitacre Jr., who retires this month as chairman and chief executive of AT&T. On his watch, the company grew
from a regional telephone provider to the country's leading provider of wireless, broadband and regular phone service. AT&T now has more than 100 million customers
and $63 billion in operating revenue. Though its stock price rose 57% in the last year alone, "over the five fiscal years through 2005, Whitacre received $85.2 million in compensation, while total shareholder return was negative 40.3%," according to
The Corporate Library, a corporate governance research firm. The Library, in turn, gave AT&T's (nyse: T - news - people ) board a "D" for overall effectiveness.
But Whitacre's golden parachute has quite the platinum lining...
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Kindness pays dividends
It might sound like an oxymoron, but Steve Harrison is a business ethicist. He's worked at the outplacement firm Lee Hech Harrison for 25 years helping fired employees get back on their feet.
In that time he's witnessed some pretty despicable behavior by companies. With the bad comes the good, though. And it's the kind behavior that he discusses in his new book,
The Manager's Book of Decencies: How Small Gestures Build Great Companies (McGraw-Hill, $24.95). Aside from just being a nice person, Harrison argues that small gestures such as...
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Good-for-you grilling
There's nothing wrong with occasionally indulging in a juicy cheeseburger and creamy potato salad at a barbecue.
But do it all summer long and a hot dog here and a handful of potato chips there may start to tip your scale. Rick Browne, host of the PBS TV series Barbecue America and
author of The Big Book of Barbecue Sides, traveled the globe for his upcoming book, The Best Barbecue On Earth. When it comes to cookouts, he says, we tend to overdo it. "Most
parts of the world, they cook the meat, fish or fowl with a little salt and a little olive oil to enhance ...
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Top Star-Spotting Restaurants
What makes a restaurant popular with the rich and famous?
"Not being able to get in," says Jerry Della Femina, the colorful ad man whose eponymous restaurant in East Hampton, N.Y., is a magnet for millionaires. He is only half joking. And though he insists his staff doesn’t play the "sorry, we’re fully committed"
game, he knows other restaurateurs do, for the simple reason that, "even among the rich and famous, life in the high school lunch room never ends. Everyone still wants to sit with the in-group. They don’t want to be with the poor and unknown, they want to be
with people just like them."...
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