Birthday Card for Liberty

I was looking for a speech I gave a long time ago and found this instead.  It seems timely for today, America’s birthday.  It was taken from a story I told to a modern day group of ‘game-changers’.  There were the mystical-sounding ‘rules of engagement’ and then my translations into what I thought they needed to know about applying them to the achievement of their vision of liberty.

Liberty Warriors: The Rules of Engagement

1. Water moves over rocks and ground; it parts around boulders and carries the sand. The warrior is persistent, even in the face of ignorance, adversity and derision, and is flexible enough to overcome the seemingly insurmountable obstacle.
2. Recognizing the futility of separating logic from emotion, the wisest leader enters the mind with the heart and the heart with the mind. The warrior stalks the quarry in the most vulnerable places with the most effective tools.  Where there are few warriors, they remind themselves all that they must be both warriors of the mind and warriors of the heart.
3. The elders have advised, act as though you have two faces on the same head, one to lead, one to follow; one to look forward, one to look back; one to listen and one to see. The warrior is not solely a leader or a follower, but embodies the best characteristics of both.
4. That which the farmer sows is not what the sorcerer reaps, nor does the brewer feel the intoxication. Each warrior brings a context for warriorhood: a lived life of circumstance.  The race is not to the swift… time and chance happen to all.
5. A corner brings together the three dimensions, yet itself has no volume.  Such is the warrior a container for valued treasures; the size is unknowable, but humility and self-knowledge increase it. The warrior knows his own box well before attempting to think out of it.

I concluded by exhorting them to go forth, knowing their own minds and their own hearts, and then guide others in discovering that their hearts and their minds crave liberty as they do.  I expect that a good many did and I hope they are celebrating today, together in the hope that we will all come out of our challenges, stronger and more flexible, as individuals, teams, a nation, and a global family.  As I hope you are.

The Place of Experience in Hiring Decisions

Sometimes someone in a group email discussion says something so well, you have to wonder why they haven’t been blogging about it.  Mark Talaba, blogger at Talabesian-Coordinates had this to contribute on the issue of experience as an indicator in hiring decisions:

“Some people – in the process of acquiring experience – have made lot of other people miserable, and have caused teams to underperform.  Such persons may yet have a ‘history of success’ – but as success can arise from many factors, not the least of which is a team’s ability to perform despite handicaps, even successful exploits are not a reliable indicator.

“One real tragedy of making “experience” a primary indicator in hiring decisions is that, during the past 20 years, there has been such fluidity in the job market that some really bad team players have had the opportunity to turn a series of short-term jobs (which used to be a red flag) into an enticing story of “broad-based experience.”  (A good topic for some investigative reporting!)

“As the concept of Coherent Human Infrastructure takes root, and as organizations come to realize that Coherence and Role are the ‘missing pieces’ of the Quality-of-Hire/Talent Management puzzle, I believe that demand for a pre-hire assessment of ‘teaming characteristics’ will grow exponentially.”

I have to agree.  It’s pretty well known in entrepreneur circles that many of the CEOs who’ve failed in that job a few times are more desirable recruits than the virgins, at least to less Coherent VCs.  In contrast, the interns, collectively, have virtually no experience.  It’s their teaming and their Coherency that make them so amazingly productive.  (Another episode of The Intern Diaries will be here shortly…)

The Intern Diaries: Week Four

Around the fourth day after Mr. Sperm meets Miss Egg, differentiation begins.  (If you slept through high school biology, differentiation is when cells start to get specialized.)

Ok, biology lesson is over.  I was just mulling over how week four of the Interns could be subtitled, The Week of Differentiation.  It isn’t that they weren’t fully formed individuals when they arrived.  It’s how we see them and assign work to them that’s undergone some subtle changes.

Lindsay is continuing to work on social marketing optimization because she’s a star Communicator.  Not surprising.  This line from her Role-Based Assessment pretty well covers why I wanted her for this project:

She will quickly make contacts throughout the organization and get to know almost everyone. She is especially cooperative and will also try to do almost anything she is asked to do. Her focus is on interpersonal interaction and trying to get everyone to work together harmoniously. She won’t do this by direct means but by attempting to broker the arrangements that bring people together in a positive manner. As a result, she is likely to be respected by those she has contact with.

But we needed to get the database cleaned up so despite the fact that she also had this in her report: “She will not want to do organizational tasks…”, there she was in the conference room with some others, working on exactly that task, with music emanating from someone’s laptop, a pile of snacks, and the sunniest of good natures.

Meanwhile, Kartik, the Action Former, whose report included the following, managed to reorganize, clean up, and optimize my consultant certification files.  Here’s Kartik in a nutshell:

This candidate is the type of employee who can be found in the front of the group with marker in hand, developing a list of things that need to be done or important points or assignments. He is the consummate organizer. The key is that he does not organize for the present but as a way of getting things ready for the future. His style is one of handling many things simultaneously. He believes that multi-tasking in a rapidly evolving environment is essential to keep on top of everything.

The others too have their unique qualities and it’s amazing how much more productive they are when we recognize them, give them work they enjoy, and celebrate the results.

It just makes good business sense.

Happy ending: Lindsay has a project beginning Monday that is totally about communicating with people, while Kartik will get a great new organization project!

The Intern Diaries: Week Three

Another amazing week with the Super Six.  Watching them become a subculture is fascinating.  They work intensely on their own, then pair off, then they cluster.  They draw each other in and something wonderful happens.  You can see the attachments as if they were drawn in the air above their heads.  And because they are all so very Coherent (such a special quality, we have begun to capitalize it,) this crazy entrepreneurial world we inhabit doesn’t faze them, even when we are approaching warp speed.

After only two weeks, during which the first five were oriented, given assignments, put through our standard four hour consultant/agent training, and let loose, we asked them to present their projects at our weekly management meeting.  (Our sixth, only being with us for two days operated the technology – they integrated her into their subculture right away!)  And present they did, PowerPoints and all.

So what did I learn from them this week?

Most of the time, Role trumps age and experience.

In plain English, who you are is more important than what you’ve done.  Yes, I did know that in the intellectual sense.  But it never ceases to amaze me, and amazement is the substrate within which you get new appreciation.  You no longer just know.  You *know*.

The Intern Diaries: Week Two

Week two and all our five interns are hard at work doing their thing while I marvel at how unique each one is, just as predicted by their Role-Based Assessment.  And today we agreed to bring on a sixth starting next week.  Another strong Action Former, the perfect addition to our Intern Action Team!

These Action Formers are the organizers on the team, the detail people, those who revel in the chance to learn to do everyone’s job.  What better for our Vision-oriented exec team than those who want to carry out our dreams?

This newest intern started another internship, but instead of giving her a project to manage, they sent her outside to meet people.  Now there are some Action Formers who might like that but not this one – she is strictly an ‘inside’ person.  No wonder she’s asked for a chance with us.

I’m sure they interviewed her at length and certainly read her resume.  (I don’t bother with either.) People who are of each Role will tend to have certain things as typical in their career history and behavior, but the only way to tell for sure what Role someone is, what style they truly have mastered and are comfortable with, is to use Role-Based Assessment.  People can go into jobs and do things because of necessity or outside pressure.  They can make mistakes and be unhappy.  They will vary in their level of coherency.  The ONLY way to cut through all the distractions and find out what the person is really like is to assess them using Role-Based Assessment and save yourself the grief of finding out too late that what they seemed to be in an interview or on a resume is not what they are really like where the rubber meets the road.

Rubber meets road on Monday and new intern will join her peers.  She’ll fit in well and maybe even make some friends in the process.  Most important, she, like the others, will get to play on a team where the coach doesnt tell you what you’re doing wrong, but what you’re doing right.

And I’ll have that market research I’ve been wanting.

The Quadruple Bottom Line

A customer sent me an email after my last post, A Family is a Team, saying it was “good to confirm my belief that your research and work is grounded in an understanding of human relations, not just work relations.”  Got me thinking about the ‘Triple Bottom Line’ – often expressed as ‘people, planet, profit’.  It’s a great idea, that you can put human capital and your ecological footprint on your balance sheet.  But he’s got me thinking that this doesn’t go far enough.

The operative word is relations.

When Triple Bottom Liners calculate the value of people, they do things like count their graduate degrees.  Ok, it’s a start but, really, a lot of overeducated people don’t bring more value to most enterprises, especially the ones who think it makes them better than other people.

Relations.  That’s the operative word.

Until we understand what happens when people relate – how they create synergetic value – and how to measure it, we’ll continue to ignore the wellspring of corporate creativity and never know when it’s running dry and what to do about it.

Why do we tolerate unproductive relationships at work when we don’t tolerate them at home?

A Family is a Team

My uncle Phil passed away late Monday night and today was his funeral.  He was around 93 or 4 as far as I can calculate.  As we gathered at the cemetery, it was eerily reminiscent of a virtual team team coming together for some face time.  Some people see a lot of each other, some are only seen at the obligatory times of life transitions.  And some stay in the shadows and are never seen.  One is the subject of brief discussion.  No one’s heard from him in years and no one seems to miss his presence.  No, I think, it’s exactly like a team.  You don’t get to choose your relatives and, most of the time, you don’t get to choose your team.   You work with what you have, respect each for who they are, and try your best to do what needs to be done.

Phil went to work every day, selling fur coats in New York City, well past his 90th birthday.  After Jeanette, my aunt and his life partner of over 50 years, died, age caught up with him.  A leg infection finally stopped him from taking the subway from Forest Hills every day. It was at that point that I realized we had more in common than family.  We were hidebound entrepreneurs that had no intention of ever hanging up our boots.  But now he was resigned to moving in with his daughter and her husband.  They took him to work with them – they run a small clothing shop – but there isn’t room on a team for two who want to do the same thing.  Especially when one has no industry experience and flagging energy.

So I’d call him when I was on the street in Philadelphia, walking from home to office to appointments, whenever I had a few minutes. We talked about business – mostly his – since in both our minds he would soon return to it and market intelligence would be vital to his commercial success.    My inputs were limited, but appreciated – the first day it was cold enough for people to wear fur, what the Walnut Street furrier was showing in his window, what the fur protesters were saying.  It was a way of staying in the game – being on the team.

Today we celebrated his place on our family team, we of rapidly declining numbers.  Among the mourners was a young man I didn’t remember.  But I recognized his name: Phil’s employer of many years, Neustadter Furs.

A work team becomes family.  It can be difficult to tell where one starts and one leaves off.

Get Out of My Facebook!

If this blog had a subtitle, it would be The Intern Diaries: Day 1.  They arrived today, our new flock of team members – one each for technology, operations, marketing, client services, and communications.  Such a wealth of new energy!

In between getting the drill on who’s who and what’s what around The Gabriel Institute and the obligatory pizza lunch, I tried to get their take on networking technology.  The biggest divide I could think of was LinkedIn vs Facebook, so I was curious where they stood.  They’re onto the economy and there’s no false hope here.  Despite the fact they have an average of another year or so to go, they have no illusions about the job market they’ll emerge into.  But as I expected, they haven’t tuned into LinkedIn for professional networking yet.  Now they all will, and they will be able to put us down as their first business experience – and we’ll be able to tell the world how they did.

We also gave them the HR warnings about being careful what’s on their Facebook page.  The stories flew, and a new dilemma was brought to my hopelessly out of date consciousness: What do you do when your mother wants to friend you on Facebook and you just don’t want her as your friend?

So this is for our new interns’ moms – and dads too.  We tried that ‘be a friend to your kid’ stuff in the 70’s and it didn’t work all that well.  You’ve done a great job, so relax.  We know – we gave your college son or daughter a Role-Based Assessment and that’s why we brought them on board.  They are coherent – the best measure of maturity and potential ever devised – and they have solid Role preferences which we’re going to respect and develop.

So get out of their friendship places and instead, get them to share their Role-Based Assessment reports with you.  You’ll be very proud.

And, by the way, thanks for trusting us with them.  We know they’re precious to you.

Recognizing Women

Last week was a nice one for women in business.  Xerox named Ursula Burns the successor to Anne Mulcahy, effective keeping the magic number of women CEOs of Fortune 500 companies on an even keel.  This is no small thing for my generation, the ones who gathered in ‘consciousness raising’ groups and thought about how our sons and daughters lives should give them the same freedoms and responsibilities.  We were not as happy when eBay’s Meg Whitman was replaced by a man.  Back then in the early seventies we’d hoped by the new millennium  it wouldn’t matter.  We thought things would even out more than they have.

But enough of this whining, Dr. Janice.  You got recognized this week too.  Jayson Saba, a top analyst in the human capital industry, cited your company’s product in a LinkedIn discussion of assessments and integrity.

When I read this, my first thought was, score one for women CEOs!  Then I came to my senses.  No one does any of this themselves.  It’s the team that was recognized and the team has no gender.

Ursula, I hope your team, too, has no gender, no race, no age, no singular culture.  And I hope you get to feel like it’s great to be a CEO when you have a great team that celebrates with you every moment of recognition.

Love in the Time of Economic Indicators

Matt’s in love.

This may seem pretty mundane given that it’s Spring and a young man’s fancy is supposed to turn that way.  But Matt is a first class Explorer.  Traveling man for a lot of his professional life.  Not exactly a bon vivant – too hardworking for that – but not a cocooner by nature.

When the economy was rocking, Matt was an executive in the human capital industry, hitting the bright lights in the big cities with pretty young things and being surprised when nothing evolved into the long term.  He’d lament, and I’d laugh and say, you need a Watchdog.  An Explorer needs the one who’ll make a home base for him (or her), even if those travels are just on the web or in the cerebral cortex.  But Watchdogs don’t go for flashdancing.  They’re more the ‘comfort food’ of the relationship world.

So I asked Matt if he was familiar with the theory of one of the world’s great economic experts who said something like this: when the economy is up, it’s easy to find a great job but harder to find love; when the economy’s down, good jobs are hard to find but love is easy.  He guessed Galbraith.  I laughed.  It’s Helen Gurley Brown, former Cosmopolitan editor and author of Sex and the Single Girl.  (I never actually referred to her as an economist but really, her pronouncement is more accurate than the predictions of the average pedigreed academic.)

Matt put it together pretty quickly and realized how distracting his success was to his goal of finding love.  He also admitted how right I was about who he’d really fit with.  But of course I had all the theory behind Role-Based Assessment at my disposal.

So here’s the moral of the story.  The economy is off and is likely to stay that way for a while.  You might as well look for love.  And don’t restrict yourself to the personal kind either.  (Caveat: Do not confuse love and sex!)

Find people you love.  You’ll know when you’re there because you can work easily with them and feel great about it.

Figure out how to create an organization with them and do something.  It doesn’t matter what as long as it’s something you enjoy doing together.  When the economic smoke clears, you might find yourself with everything you ever wanted – a great job and great love.