And Korn/Ferry says that “respondents representing a wide spectrum of industries and functional areas participated in the most recent Executive Quiz on January 23-25, 2009.”
So, this is real-time information coming from people who have a pretty big hand in creating new jobs—business executives. And, these are the guys who need to feel good about what the president is doing in this regard. If they aren’t positive about the help they’re getting from Washington, well, who else is going to stick their neck out to add new jobs to the economy?
The president has his work cut out for him with his State of the Union speech. Expectations are high, and that usually is a problem because it is hard to live up to over-the-top expectations.
But, President Obama has to start somewhere to show he’s concerned about the need help create jobs and drive some positive growth in the economy. The State of the Union would be a good place to start.
Again, I won’t hold my breath that he will, but I’m hoping, for America’s sake, that I am completely and utterly wrong about that. It’s the one time that I would love to be shown that I don’t always know what I’m talking about.
Now that the late-night television debacle starring Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien is (thankfully) nearing an end, let’s take a moment to briefly look back and contemplate the many management lessons that were at the heart of this sorry and very public spectacle:
• TV executives are not only out of touch and out of tune, but they get paid big money to screw up big-time. Never underestimate the ability of clueless executives to make shortsighted management decisions since they have no real idea how average people think and feel. And, know that these very same executives are more than likely to compound the problem by making even more stupid decisions as they flop around trying to deal with the original mess they created.
• Taking care of the staff is one of the Ten Commandments of Management. Real leaders know that they can’t succeed on their own, and they make sure that no matter what happens to them that their staffs get taken care of too.
“The Tonight Show employs about 190 people, including 60 to 70 who followed O’Brien to Los Angeles from New York last year when he switched jobs,” according to the Los Angeles Times, “[and] NBC paid to relocate 40 to 50 of those staffers, said a person close to show.”
And The New York Times says, “A representative from NBC’s side of the negotiations confirmed that last-minute haggling over payouts to the staff members is the chief reason an announcement had been held up, with O’Brien’s representatives seeking as much as $12 million to cover those not under contract who will lose work once he leaves the show.”
If you do the math on this ($12 million divided by 190 Tonight Show employees), you get about $63,000 per employee, although some key staffers probably have special deals and will get more than that. Still, you’ve got to admire O’Brien for continuing to turn the screws to NBC and its idiot executives, both in his late-night routine and on behalf of his staff.
“It’s been a busy day for me,” he said on his show Tuesday night. “I spent the afternoon at Universal Studios’ amusement park, enjoying their brand-new ride, the Tunnel of Litigation.”
Although the network calls O’Brien’s actions “nothing more than a PR ploy,” his manager, Gavin Polone, begs to differ with that knee-jerk reaction.
“It is not a ploy or a strategy,” he told the Los AngelesTimes. “Conan’s first priority is and always has been to take care of the employees of the show. He paid them out of his own pocket during the strike when NBC laid them off … [and] we are fighting hard to get as much as possible to these people who are going to be out of work.”
Real leaders earn the respect and loyalty of those they lead by caring about what happens to those who follow them. That doesn’t come to an end when things get tough, because that’s when people count on their leaders the most.
I don’t know what kind of leader Conan O’Brien is, but I do know this: Standing up for his people when they need it most will build an even stronger bond with all of them. They’ll follow him anywhere because they know he’ll be there for them when the chips are down.
That’s what real leaders do. It’s a shame that so many executives—like the overpaid morons at NBC—don’t get that, but that’s why the network is in the fix it’s in today. And, it’s why NBC needs to clean house and hire some real leaders who understand that even in today’s disposable-employee society, top-down loyalty to the rank and file still matters.
There’s a lot you can learn from visionary business leaders, but in my book, there is just one thing that truly sets them apart from everyone else: an almost fanatical commitment to a clear and unwavering philosophy that drives their every decision.
For famed investor Warren Buffett, it’s the simple notion of putting good people in place and then staying out of their way, or delegating “to the point of abdication,” as he told The Wall Street Journal.
And for the late, great Peter Drucker, it was a philosophy built around the revolutionary notion that modern management had the power to transform an organization.
In the case of Glen W. Bell Jr., “the innovator and entrepreneur who tapped an unsated hunger for Mexican fare … by creating … Taco Bell,” according to the Los Angeles Times, it came down to his “recipes for success” that could be condensed to three basic rules:
* You build a business one customer at a time;
* Find the right product, then find a way to mass-produce it; and
* (Hold a firm belief that) an innovative product will set you apart.
Bell died this week in Southern California at age 86, but his “innovative product” was the simple taco.
As The New York Times explains it, “Bell, a fan of Mexican food, had a hunch that ground beef, chopped lettuce, shredded cheese and chili sauce served in the right wrap could give burgers a run for the money. The problem was which wrap. Tacos served in Mexican restaurants at the time were made with soft tortillas. … The solution: pre-formed fried shells that would then be stuffed. …They were such a hit that by 1954, Bell and a partner opened Taco Tia, his first restaurant selling only Mexican-style food.”
Taco Bell came along when Bell finally got tired of partners holding him back. He took off on his own and launched the chain in 1962, eventually selling it in 1978 for $125 million. Along the way, “we changed the eating habits of an entire nation,” Bell wrote in his autobiography.
But the success of Taco Bell, according to Bell, was more than just hard-shell tacos. He believed in the power of knowing his limitations and letting go.
“I’m an entrepreneur, not an administrator,” he said. “Taco Bell prospered because I recognized my limitations, hired professional managers to make up for them, and knew when to let go.”
If you spend the time to really study visionary leaders like Bell, Buffett, Price and Drucker, you know that the never-ending commitment each has to their overriding leadership philosophy is what separates them from the average manager or entrepreneur.
In other words, Glen Bell’s great trick wasn’t inventing the hard-shell taco; it was his “recipes for success” that guided him long before (and well after) he came up with his signature product.
That’s what makes visionary leaders so different, and it’s something to remember the next time you make a late-night “run for the border,” because without leaders like Bell, ours would be a much different world indeed.
I find myself doing a lot of things differently during this year of the Big, Bad Recession, and here’s one of them—I am buying a lot more from Costco.
I’ve been a Costco member for many years, but I was always hit or miss about doing much shopping there. This year, however, when things are tough all over, I find that I am appreciating all that Costco has too offer, including great prices on most everything (including gasoline), a Costco-branded American Express card that kicks back a sizable rebate once a year, and, a cheerful and happy workforce that seems genuinely engaged in their jobs.
The New York Times obituary of Price said he “altered both the American landscape and the American way of shopping by founding (in 1976) Price Club, the first nationwide members-only discount warehouse.” Price Club merged with Costco in 1993, and a lot of Sol Price’s business philosophy and innovation not only lives on today, but also has helped to fuel much of Costco’s huge business success under its own visionary CEO, Jim Sinegal.
Costco under Sinegal has embraced, to its everlasting credit, Sol Price’s philosophy of treating—and paying—its workers well.
As columnist Dean Calbreath noted in the San Diego Union-Tribune, “Price Club’s written policy was that workers would be paid at ‘close to the highest prevailing wages in the community. … Even today, Costco pays its workers an average of $19 per hour, compared with less than $11 at Wal-Mart. And Costco provides health care coverage to 90 percent of its workers, compared with about 50 percent at Wal-Mart.”
“Price believed,” as columnist Calbreath points out, “that the corporation’s chief duties were to obey the law, please customers, please employees and satisfy stockholders, in that order. ‘We think the stockholder comes last,’ Price told Wall Street analysts in 1985. ‘But if you do the other three jobs well, [the stockholder] will be taken care of.’ ”
Price also kept his salary fairly low (a practice that Costco’s Jim Sinegal follows), and, “In an age when some of his peers were making 40 or 50 times the median salary of their workers, Price kept his salary at around a 10-1 ratio. (Today, the ratio at America’s top firms is more like 500-1.)”
In my book, this singular concern for his workforce makes Sol Price the father of employee engagement. He understood that treating employees fairly by rewarding them well for their hard work would pay big dividends in the long term because happy employees who are treated well and fairly compensated just work harder and give more of their discretionary effort.
And Price’s forward-thinking philosophy continues to this day at Costco under the enlightened leadership of CEO Sinegal.
This may also explain why I can’t stand shopping at Wal-Mart, yet I love to cruise the local Costco. Every Wal-Mart I’ve ever been in has an unappealing feel to it that I just can’t put my finger on. And, every Costco that I have shopped in gives me the exact opposite impression. In my book, it’s more than just the merchandise and the building that makes a great shopping experience. It’s the people.
Treating people well sounds simple enough, but as we have seen in this year of the Big, Bad Recession, even something as simple as that gets ignored by far too many organizations. Workers are angry at how they have been treated this year, and rightly so, but there is not much they can do about it when double-digit unemployment is the order of the day.
Managers and executives everywhere would do well to follow the philosophy of Sol Price and Jim Sinegal, and treat employees well. They are, after all, an organization’s most important asset.
That’s just business BS for all too many executives, but that wasn’t the case with Sol Price. We should all mourn his passing and hope that his outlook on life, and people, becomes something that a lot more of our so-called business leaders in this country take some time to ponder—and embrace.
This was an interesting and eventful year, to put it mildly, and the top blog posts and “Last Word” columns that readers reacted to were equally interesting and provocative. I love the comments, and if I had one wish for the new year, it would be to get a lot more of them from a lot more of you.
So, here again are my Top 10 Blog Posts and Columns of the Year, 2009 edition:
1. The Last Word: SHRM’s Lon O’Neil—International Man of Mystery (June 28). Reader comment: “I love the International Man of Mystery analogy. … No question SHRM should be focused now on leading the charge(s) of practically helping many of the people/former SHRM members who have been—or may be—sitting at those tables but have been ‘benched’ by shorter-sighted companies in this unique HR career season. I believe it’s time for a SHRM leader who exemplifies the Golden Rule. This is not a time for SHRM (or the profession) to play hide and seek, but to remember there are real people behind those 250K membership numbers. Let’s all remember how we treated others in the two weeks following 9/11 and emulate that.”
2. Boss Basics: The Delicate Art of Managing Layoffs (March 12). Reader Comment: “For the past five years, everybody’s had the same dream: to find work that doesn’t feel like work, where every day is a new challenge, where what you do really matters to your company—and to you. In a period of economic doldrums, it’s natural to let that dream fade—to hang by your bloody fingernails to the edge of your desktop, even if the job you’re holding doesn’t pass your personal desirability test.”
3. Most Overused Business Buzzwords? Here Are Some You May Know and Love (August 27). Reader comment: “At the end of the day—I can usually tell when someone is leading up to reinforcing their position with the use of this phrase. However, at the end of the day it really doesn’t bother me that much. Really, it bothers me in the morning, maybe in the afternoon, but not at the end of the day. I’m just too darn tired having waded through all of the other cute phrases everyone uses to impress me with their business acumen.”
4. The Last Word: Bad Beyond Belief (April 3). Reader comment: “Well there seems to be a lot of Stupidus Maximus running around these days. Hope the governor of Illinois gets nominated, too.”
5. Boss Basics: You Don’t Need Special Training to Talk to Millennials (July 9). Reader comment: “Yes! Millennials do not have antennae and several heads. Read comments about the boomers from 40 years ago, and (then) comments about the Millennials. It is difficult to tell the difference. Millennials are doing what most people do when they are in their 20s. They are asserting and/or trying out their identities. They are experimenting. The fact that they are asking for things like regular feedback is not a bad thing—unless the manager is afraid to establish expectations and actually manage.”
6. The Last Word: Hunkering Down and Getting Back to Basics (June 30). Reader comment: “I want to see more practitioners [at SHRM’s annual conference], true frontline HR pros who are in the trenches daily teaching practical stuff. … [A]s for the gross tonnage of bloggers, I’ve gotta agree—there was gross tonnage. Too much blogging on the swag and how hot it was, and very little substantive content on the show, speakers and sessions. A lot of that likely having to do with the fact that the gross tonnage of bloggers were out drinking until 5 a.m. each night and never really were fully ‘present’ or coherent during the conference. Ha! I like that the bloggers were there … but I wish they represented the blogging community in a much better way. Know what I mean?”
7. Watching People Get Fired: This Is Entertainment?(April 10). Reader comment: “[This is] truly disgusting, and a perfect example of how far we’ve fallen in this country. My guess is that the producers of this tasteless and cruel garbage believe they can’t go broke underestimating the level of schadenfreude in the U.S. right now, and think they’ll make big bucks off people’s desire to see someone worse off than themselves screwed over by their employer and co-workers. Can gladiatorial games, throwing people to the lions, and Caligula, be far behind?”
8. Are Women Really Better Managers?(July 29). Reader comment: “Over the last 30 years, I have reported to about as many women as to men. Although women tend to get the job done, they seem to overcompensate to prove that they are just as good as men, making them virtually impossible to work for. Sorry, girls.”
9. The Last Word: Dirty Work Required (November 16). Reader comment: “The question is not whether managers are doing the tough stuff. The greater question is whether our managers are doing the right stuff. And, at the expense of leadership, whether we can afford managers at all!”
10. No Surprise: New Survey Says Cost Cutting Has Damaged Worker Morale (September 25). Reader comment: “To be so cavalier yourself in attacking all manners of leadership, including general management and HR (“ham-fisted,” “less-than-skillful”), trivializes the situation and is inaccurate in the totality of the issue. Yes, firms today are going to have to deal with fallout morale issues, but they aren’t necessarily due to the mismanaging insults you tossed out above.”
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