If you have to prove it . . .

In discussing the early stages of the 2008 financial crisis, author William Cohan wrote about an interview that Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz had on March 12.  During the interview, Schwartz said "We put out a statement that our liquidity and balance sheet are strong, and maybe I should expand on that a little."

Cohan reflected on this statement with a reference to Walter Bagehot's comment in 1873:  "Every banker knows that if he has to prove that he is worthy of credit, however good may be his arguements, in fact his credit it gone."

Many people rely on statements of quality in lieu of demonstrated, consistent performance.  

Reference:  William D. Cohan, House of Cards:  A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street (New York, Doubleday, 2009), p. 35.

Reviewing Goal Setting; Kinder and Kinder

It is good for leaders to review the basics on Goal Setting.  One of the best discussions I know about goals setting is Kinder and Kinder.  They list four simple principles.

• Goals Must Be Achievable 
• Goals Must Be Believable 
• Goals Must Be Measurable 
• Goals Must Have Deadline

We constantly set goals, however, sometime we violate these basic principles.  Review these principles from time to time and confirm that goals meet these criteria.


Reference:  Jack Kinder, Garry Kinder, and Val Ivanov, Building the Master Agency (Cincinnati, National Underwriting Company, 2002), Chapter One: Planning, pp. 1-21.

Grit for Success: Duckworth at TED

Great TED Talk recently posted on their website.

 “Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality. Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint.”

 

Link to TED page:  http://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_the_key_to_success_grit.html

Sources for Poetry: Le Guin, Endrezze

April is National Poetry Month.

Two poem recently caught my attention because they came from unique sources.

The first is "Anonymous Is Coyote Girl" (2000) by Anita Endrezze.  It uses a newspaper article to provide the background for her poem.

(Excerpt)
From a newspaper photo and article about my godfather, James Moreno, East Los Angeles, 1950. 

 (Three police officers took a brutal beating in a wild free-for-all with a family, including three young girls.
 From left, James, 19, and Alex, 22, in jail after the fracas 
on the porch of their home at 3307 Hunter.) 

    Jimmy is staring off the page, hands in his pockets. 
    A four-button dark shirt. No bruises, 
    but he looks dazed. 
   Alex wears a leather coat and a polka-dot shirt, 
   which is in itself a crime. 
   Nowhere is there a photo of a young girl 
   with a face carved like a racetrack saint, 
   eyes with all bets called off, 
   grinning like a coyote.


The second is "The Hill Yoncalla" (1999) by Ursula K. Le Guin.  It uses letters from a pioneer who was on the trail to Oregon in 1843.  The footnote for the poem states:  "All word of this poem are take from 'The Letters of Roselle Putnam,' edited by Sheba Hargreave, Oregon Historical Quarterly 24, no. 3 (1928)."

(Excerpt)
   Yoncalla is not a town nor a place of man's creation
   nor of white man's naming
   but it is a hill round and high and beautiful

   I can get five pounds of dried peaches
   for one pound of butter

   the nearest neighbor is three miles off

   our little cabin quite a comfortable little place


Link to "Anonymous Is Coyote Girl":  http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/238976

Reference for "The Hill Yoncalla":   Ursula K. Le Guin, Sixty Odd:  New Poems (Boston, Shambhalal Publications, 1999), pp. 39-41.

Jackie Robinson: courage, team unity; Public Radio Interviews

With the release of the movie "42", there are many interviews connected to the movie as well as Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in baseball.  There were two great interviews on Public Radio discussing the movie and the event.

Actor Chadwick Boseman plays Jackie Robinson in the film.  On 6 April 2013, Scott Simon interviewed Boseman on National Public Radio.  In that interview, Boseman talks about reflecting on a character when portraying him on the screen.

"And I think you learn something from every character, every character you play. As you do that, you find parts of yourself that you didn't know. So, in order to find those characters, you dig into yourself and say Jackie Robinson was a courageous man. So, what is courage to me and what is discipline to me?"

Looking at the initial weeks when Robinson played baseball, KPCC's John Rabe interviewed Jim Becker on 9 Aptil 2013.  Becker is the last surviving newsman at Jackie Robinson's Major League debut.

"The day sent chills up my spine, and 66 years later it still does. I always said his failure would have been our failure, but the victory was his."

Becker also talked about how later in the season, the Philadelphia team was particularly hostile towards Robinson.  It was that hostility that helped unify the Dodgers to support Robinson.  Initially, half the Dodgers signed a petition against Robinson being on the team.  When an opponent attacked one of them, that caused the team to unite.


The Chadwick Boseman radio interview can be found here:  http://www.npr.org/2013/04/06/176357603/learning-how-to-steal-bases-like-jackie-robinsonay

The Jim Becker radio inteview can be found here:  http://www.scpr.org/programs/offramp/2013/04/09/31264/photos-jim-becker-last-surviving-newsman-at-jackie/

Buffett on Business Management

In The Warren Buffett Way, Robert Hagstrom lists the three management tenets that Buffett uses to evaluate companies.

1. Is management rational?
2. Is management candid with the shareholders?
3. Does management resist the institutional imperative?

In the case of institutional imperative, there are a few more details which Buffett looks for.

• The organization resists any change in its current direction.
• Just as work expands to fill available time, corporate projects or acquisitions  will materialize to soak up available funds.
• Any business cravings of the leader, however foolish, will quickly be supported by detailed rate-of-return and stategic studies prepared by his troops.
• The behavior of peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated.

 Robert G. Hagstrom, The Warren Buffet Way, Second Edition, (Hoboken, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2005), pp. 81-96.

Thinking Long Term as a Leader

In The Leadership Challenge by Kouzes and Posner, they give a few great examples on how leaders should look at the long term.  Significant changes happen in the long term.

Visions are future-oriented and made real over different spans of time.

• It may take three years from the time you decide to climb a mountain until you actually reach the summit.
• It may take a decade to build a company that is one of the best places to work.
• It may take a lifetime to make neighborhoods safe again for little children to walk alone to the corner store.
• It may take a century to restore a forest destroyed by a wildfire.
• It may take generations to set a people free.

Leaders should share their long term vision and commit to the short term struggles to reach that vision.

Joy and Ease: Approach to Travel and Life--Brody

Dylan Brody had a good radio essay on KPCC from Pasadena about approaching travel with a positive view.

"When we travel, we strive to project a sense of joy and ease so that we do not add to the general level of stressed negativity in the world around us."

Joy and ease are good watch words for approach stressful situations:  travel, traffic, work challenges, family tension.

A link to the story can be found here:  http://www.scpr.org/programs/offramp/2013/03/28/31090/dylan-brody-fight-the-malaise-and-turn-your-life-a/

Be the Top in Your Field

Often when someone starts to stagnant in a particular field or business, he starts to consider moving to another field.  Harvard Business Review recently had an article discussing this misperception.

In the article entitled "The Grass Isn't Greener", Evan Hirsh and Kastui Rangan state:

Your chance of getting superior returns is far better if you stay in your own industry and improve your performance than if you move into a new one.  It's a bit like having faith, when darkness falls, that the sun will return tomorrow.  You can pretty much count on it.

There are numerous situations where the initial tendency is to look externally, when the best approach is to look internally.  Focus within your organization and make improvements.  Focus within yourself and make improvements. 

Article:  Evan Hirsh and Kasturi Rangan, "The Grass Isn't Green," Harvard Business Review , volume 91, issue 1/2 (January-February 2013), pp 21-24. 

Good Quotes 2013

"As Sun Tzu said, 'Every battle is won before it's ever fought.'  It starts in the mind."
Jon Gordon in Training Camp

"Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership."
Colin Powell

"I hated every minute of training, but I said, 'Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion."
Muhammad Ali

"The world is not in your books and maps. It's out there."
Gandalf in The Hobbit.

"There did not seem to be brains enough in the entire group to bait a fishhook with."
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

"A King may move a man, a father may claim a son, but remember that even when those who move you be Kings, or men of power, your soul is in your keeping alone. When you stand before God, you cannot say, "But I was told by others to do thus." Or that, "Virtue was not convenient at the time." This will not suffice. Remember that."
From the movie "Kingdom of Heaven (2005) by Ridley Scott (IMDB link:  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0320661/)