As a story in The Miami Herald put it, “Inspired by the vision and words of President John F. Kennedy, the American space program catapulted from serial launch pad failures to a successful lunar landing in only eight years. The Apollo moon project cost $21 billion (the equivalent of at least $150 billion now), employed 390,000 Americans and gave the nation a common goal during a difficult time.”
The race to put someone on the moon certainly had Cold War tensions to help fuel it—we had to get there before the Soviets did—but it also was the product of President Kennedy’s grand vision and an infatuation that Americans had with space. It also took incredible managerial leadership, particularly in the science community, to focus our national effort on a complex and difficult goal.
“The Apollo program had a tremendous impact on the United States,” Space Foundation chief executive Elliot Pulham said recently in the Los Angeles Times. “It built national pride and, more importantly, it influenced a whole generation of children to study hard to become scientists, engineers and astronauts.”
But, it’s also a national effort that we would be hard-pressed to duplicate today. As the Herald story soberly notes:
“Today, there’s no lack of ambition and goal-setting at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which is mapping long-range plans for a lunar base and eventually a human mission to Mars. But funding falls far short of what will be needed, Congressional support is anemic, and many ask if Americans—pummeled by economic woe, burdened by profound security threats, preoccupied with their iPods and their BlackBerrys—are still capable of being rallied to a cause that once galvanized the nation.”
Yes, it’s hard to imagine that Americans could be rallied around something like the space program back in the 1960s, but that was the beauty of both the grand vision from JFK and the well-orchestrated management effort to see the vision through.
The sad thing for me as I look back on the space race today is this: Despite all the money and effort that went into it, we couldn’t send anyone to the moon again next month or next year, even if we wanted to.
Former NASA administrator Michael D. Griffin made this point in Sunday’s Washington Post when he wrote, “What is most striking about this 40th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon is that we can no longer do what we’re celebrating. Not ‘do not choose to,’ but ‘can’t.’
“Only in human spaceflight,” Griffin added, “do we celebrate the anniversary of an achievement that seems more difficult to repeat [today] than to accomplish the first time. The United States spent eight years and $21 billion … to develop a transportation system to take people to the moon. We then spent less than four years and $4 billion using it, after which we threw it away. Not mothballed, or assigned to caretaker status for possible later use. Destroyed.”
That’s the lesson I take away from the race to the moon: We had the supreme vision and management know-how to get it done, but we lacked the long-term perspective to build on such a difficult and complex goal and to use it as the steppingstone to much, much more.
In my personal experience with the Millennial generation—I hate the nonsensical and meaningless Generation Y tag that some use to describe them—I have found that there is no one way to characterize or manage them. The three Millennials that I am closely related to are as different as any three people you would find on a street corner. And the classroom of Millennials that I teach writing to each semester at a local university follows this same pattern.
In other words, there is no single way to manage or deal with the Millennial generation, just as there is no single way to manage any other generation that exists in today’s workplace. Any experienced executive should know this, and that’s why I am scratching my head at the huge industry that seems to be springing up around helping train managers to “deal” with Millennials.
Here’s one example, from The Washington Post: “High atop the august Tower Club in Fairfax County, overlooking the glass-and-steel edge city of Tysons Corner, business coach Anne Loehr is teaching 20 executives, mainly baby boomers, how to crack one of society’s most vexing workplace problems—how to deal with their youngest employees or clients.”
The Post story goes on to discuss how Loehr’s seminar helps managers and executives, at a cost of $25 each, to do a better job communicating with the Millennial generation. It also hints, somewhat skeptically, that this is more about making money than any real communications stumbling block that can only be solved by a paid consultant.
“The collective fretting over Generation Y—also known as the Millennials—has turned into an industry for entrepreneurs such as Loehr,” the Post story points out. “The former … hotel executive, based in Reston, VA, is a ‘leadership coach’ and generational guru, one of several who market themselves to corporations, the military, and federal and local governments as anthropologists interpreting today’s 70 million to 80 million 20-somethings or early 30-somethings.”
This makes me wonder: What is it about the Millennial generation that makes us unable to communicate with or understand them? Why do we now suddenly need paid consultants like Anne Loehr (who, as the Post points out, puts on “corporate seminars and one-on-one sessions that go for $500 to $2,500”) to figure out how to deal with younger workers? Is this something we really need and can’t figure out on our own without a pricey “leadership coach”?
You know the answer to that: It’s not, and we don’t. Good managers have ALWAYS had to figure out how to deal with a variety of different generations and personalities in the workplace.
The notion that the Millennial generation is so unique and different from generations before them is nonsense. They are different, yes, but so is every other generation, and it’s something that managers have dealt with long before pricey leadership coaches came along and decided we needed their services.
Frankly, the whole notion of a management coach is a silly concept that we could do without, but that’s another gripe for another day. Still, I think you have to question your ability as a manager if you have to spend money for a “leadership coach” to teach you how to talk to a segment of your workforce.
If you can’t figure out how to manage Millennials, you have far bigger issues than any pricey leadership coach can help you with. It’s akin to flushing the money down the toilet and just about as useful too.
If you appreciate really good business books—the ones that are truly insightful, inspirational and demand that you keep them close at hand—a title like The 100 Best Business Books of All Time pretty much hits you over the head and says, “Read me!”But I’ve been disappointed in books like this before, as I noted last summer when I reviewed another title that claimed it had compiled lessons from “the best management books of all time.” That certainly was a wild overstatement, but pretty much par for the course when you get an author (or two) with a limited or narrow view of business and management.
I have a surefire way to spot a book like that, and it’s simple: Look to see how the authors feel about Peter Drucker. If you have studied or understand business much at all, you certainly know that Drucker is considered to be the father of modern business management. Any book that purports to be a collection of the greatest business writing ever needs to have something by Drucker. If it doesn’t mention him at all, it’s a good indication that the authors/editors don’t have the foggiest notion of what constitutes great business thinking. You should close the book as quickly as possible.
That’s why I feel I can recommend, with a few reservations, The 100 Best Business Book of All Time. Authors Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten’s list includes not one, but two Peter Drucker classics: The Effective Executive and The Essential Drucker (but, oddly enough, not his best and most groundbreaking book, The Practice of Management). Any business book compilation that lists two from Drucker has immediate credibility with me.
There are other pluses, and few minuses, that I found in The 100 Best Business Book of All Time. Some of them include:
Plus: Listing a Dr. Seuss book, Oh, the Places You’ll Go, as one of top 100 business books. Some might quibble with this, but that just shows they haven’t actually read much by Dr. Seuss. He’s full of great observations and lessons about both business and life, but I actually think the better Dr. Seuss title in this regard is the underrated but insightful I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew.
Minus: Throwing in not one, but two Marcus Buckingham titles: First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths. Given that Buckingham essentially says the same thing Drucker did about playing to strengths and not weaknesses, why would you read Buckingham when you can get it from the master instead?
Plus: Including such modern titles as The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, Leading Change by John Kotter and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni along with all-time classics such as Dale Carenegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and Winston Churchill’s Never Give In!
Minuses: Missing some great books such as Robert Sutton’s The No Asshole Rule, DisneyWar by James B. Stewart or anything by Harvard professor Michael Porter, who wrote the Five Forces of Strategy and Competitive Advantage (although the authors mentioned some of Porter’s Harvard Business Review articles instead).
Overall, I’d give The 100 Best Business Book of All Time a B-plus. It’s a good book to help you get a sense of what great business thinking is, but it has some flaws. And maybe in the real world, that’s about as good is it gets.
Years ago, I heard Pat Riley speak to a business group about motivation and management. This was in the 1980s when Riley was coaching the Los Angeles Lakers to multiple NBA championships, back when he had great teams with great players like Magic Johnson, James Worthy and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Riley was always a master motivator, and although I don’t remember a lot about his talk, what burned into my brain that day was his answer to a very simple question from the audience: How do you get star players making millions of dollars to perform at their best? In other words, how do you motivate those who can’t be motivated by money?
His answer was equally simple: You motivate superstars by appealing to their pride, to a greater sense of purpose. In Riley’s view, you must appeal to that part of them because “a champion needs a motivation above and beyond winning.”
I’ve been thinking about Pat Riley’s philosophy this month while watching the men’s and women’s U.S. Olympic basketball teams compete for gold in Beijing. From my perspective, the U.S. teams should never lose in Olympic basketball, and I don’t say that from an overblown sense of national pride, but rather, because the United States clearly has the best basketball talent in the world, bar none. Yes, the rest of the world has improved a great deal—largely by having so many of their athletes training and playing here in the States—but none can field teams with as much top-to-bottom talent as the United States.
But as most business executives know, having the best collection of talent doesn’t mean that you will produce the best collective team effort from that talent, as fans of the U.S. men’s basketball team know all too well.
The men’s team struggled to win a bronze medal in Athens in 2004, and it was embarrassing to watch so many great players perform so poorly together.
So, Team USA basketball took a different approach after the Athens debacle—work to put together a team with the same level of talent, but focus more on motivating the players to work together with a greater sense of purpose.
So far, it seems to be working. As a story in The New York Times pointed out: “For three summers now, [USA basketball executive director Jerry] Colangelo and [head coach Mike] Krzyzewski have demanded commitment, established rules. The sport’s most leveraged megamillionaires have enthusiastically acquiesced. Here, Kobe Bryant and LeBron James and the rest have played spectacularly but professionally. … But by and large, the histrionics of recent tournaments have disappeared. The fine line between fun and fatuous has not been crossed. ‘It’s not about intimidation,’ said Jason Kidd, who, at 35, was brought here as an example of a longtime star disinclined to gyrate and pose. ‘We’re not showboating. We’re not showing anybody up. It’s about playing the right way.’ ”
Yes, it seems to be working, with highly-paid NBA superstars like Bryant and James putting aside their egos for the greater good of the American team.
This just goes to show you: In international basketball, in business and in life, just getting the best talent or paying workers a lot of money doesn’t always guarantee success. There’s a lot more to it than that, including blending the talents of your workforce together to make the whole much, much greater than just the sum of all the parts.
If you didn’t know that before, you certainly should get the message from watching the U.S. Olympic basketball teams.
It’s like the late, great Peter Drucker said a long time ago: “Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations. … [In short,] management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”
Leave it to our friends at the Society for Human Resource Management to take something simple and straightforward and make it more complicated than it needs to be.
Every year after its annual June conference, SHRM blasts out an e-mail touting the best-sellers at the SHRM bookstore from the most recent conference. I wrote about it here last year, noting: “They say you can tell a lot about a person by the books they read. If that’s true, what does this list of the top-selling books purchased at last month’s Society for Human Resource Management annual conference in Las Vegas tell you about the HR professional in the 21st century?”
Well, the 2008 book list is out from the SHRM conference last month in Chicago, but rather than simply listing the top-selling books (unranked) as they have in the past, SHRM has added this little caveat at the top of this year’s list: “Following are just some of (emphasis added) the top selling books, software, videos and accessories at this year’s Annual Conference event in Chicago, IL.”
I get adding software and videos to the list, but releasing a list of the “Top Sellers from the SHRM Annual Conference” (as their e-mail touts) that is only a partial list is just plain silly. What genius at SHRM thought this approach would work? It’s just another (albeit small and stupid) example of how all too often, SHRM is focused on the wrong things.
At any rate, here is the top-selling book list from the SHRM Chicago conference, partial or not. And my admonition from last year still applies: There’s some kind of message here; can you figure it out?
= Member Only
pretty much hits you over the head and says, “Read me!”But I’ve been disappointed in books like this before, as I noted last summer 
