Most Executives Are Complete Boobs (or “Why the Recovery Won’t Happen”)
If you are banking on corporate executives to make the high-level market decisions that will pull the world out of this spiraling recession, you’re betting on a nag. Most executives not only don’t know how to do executive-level work, they couldn’t do it if they did.
Executive work is not line work, nor is it very similar to that of lower-level managers. Executives should be looking out past two years — out beyond to five, ten, even twenty years out — looking at how to manage the strategic uncertainty of the corporation. It’s a tough job that requires a type of thinking that few can do. Current executive managers, even C-level ones, are simply not up to the challenge. read more…
Back in 2008, I wrote an “anonymized” story about meeting up with a very high potential and our conversation. Although I wrote it a long time ago, it recently had two interesting comments from Alex and Ken Shepard. Alex I don’t know but Ken is the leader of the GO Society and has been a long-time proponent in my life. It’s always great when people of his caliber and prestige read my stuff. They both wrote with some advice for this guy, but years too late. I wrote in 2009 about the death of this high-mode individual, being a bit more honest than I had been.
I thought that I would address some of their points.
Because I believe that intelligence above a certain point is not only not helpful to you, it’s maladaptive. “Tim’s” experience is illustrative of what I have learned about high mode individuals, people who have an excessive capacity for work. read more…
Make Money with Executives by Preying on Ideologies, Not Profit Motive
You would think that given the choice between following a belief and following a (and this is important) sure thing to make money, that business people would chuck out toss their beliefs in an instant if they could make a buck. Business is business, after all.
And you’d be entirely wrong.
One of the weirdest things about reading real research on business is how much of what you are told is Absolutely True turns out to be Fabulously False. It turns out that contrary to what business managers and entrepreneurs tell us, they are not all about the money. At least not when it comes to the firm making money.
It’s all about ideology.
And if you’re smart, you can use this to manipulate them into doing what you want them to. read more…
Michael Bates, who has been a frequent commenter on this blog, was recently given the nod by the Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza as one of the best State bloggers. Michael’s blog, Batesline, covers the goings on in Tulsa and the greater state of Oklahoma. I met up with him when I was down in Tulsa last month, but nary a peep about this!
Congratulations for another nod for all your hard work in keeping Oklahoma informed!
If you’re old enough to bother reading this, you likely can look over your life and see the points at which you have changed your mind. Or finessed one of your pet theories of life. To you this seems like a normal process, one that comes with aging and growing.
It’s not.
You’re weird.
And it makes people see you as wishy-washy or “compromising”. More after the jump. read more…
Like everyone else, I do a good deal of summer reading on the way to here or there. Or simply waiting for my baby to stop screaming. (Poor GERDy kid!) In addition to the mindless Kindle reading, which I’ll have to list elsewhere simply because I have no idea how to pull off my list from it, I’ve been busy with a bunch of research for a book I’m working on for someone else and some stuff that I’m trying to move off my own plate (finally).
The partial list, in no particular order, after the break. read more…
Back in season one of his show, The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling penned a prophecy of GenX’s end. By taking a look at it, you GenXers can see what lies in store for you at the end of your life.
The episode is “One For the Angels” starring the incomparable Ed Wynn as Lew Bookman, a barely making it, apparently single, aged, Lost Generation sidewalk peddler who gets a visit from Death.
I’ll be doing spoilers. The episode isn’t available online, although pieces are on YouTube. I invite you to watch, and then meet me below the summary that follows.
- “One of the Angels”, Part one (poor)
- “One of the Angels”, Part two (good)
- “One of the Angels”, Part three (good)
Hulk misunderstood. Puny humans always trying to kill Hulk. Hulk smash puny humans!When you are bigger than everyone else, you are much more likely to get hammered for irritating people. It doesn’t matter if that’s physical size or “work” size, where you have the capability to do a larger job than the people around you.
This is one of the key problems of Hidden High Potentials (HHPs). Work comes in different sizes, and people’s capability comes in different sizes to match it. When someone who is bigger comes into the room, people can sense it. It’s not as immediate as when a beautiful person comes in the room, but it’s pretty quick that people know that the warp of the room has shifted.
And that can cause you a lot of problems.
People get threatened by things that are bigger than they are. They are afraid that they can’t control you when you start going off about something. Even more frightening, they see that you are “bigger” than they are and know that people have a tendency to follow bigger people. That makes you a double threat.
Take a look at what happens when you are physically bigger.
Awhile back, a guy in my neighborhood had to be down in the courthouse. His wife works a different shift, and he brought his three year old boy down with him. The boy isn’t bad for a three year old, but he’s really big — like his dad — and looks like he’s five. The boy was simply being a boy, according to all accounts, but was noisy.
Dad is six foot, six inches (~ 2m) and probably weighs 230 lbs (104 kg) when he’s down to nothing but muscle. This is a very big guy. I like him, but he is very imposing.
And that’s the problem. read more…
In my lessons on the Tao of Joe: Redeeming Our Stories, I’ve pointed out that the patriarch’s model was to forget well before he ever forgave. Forgetting not only the wrongs, he forgot those who had wronged him (in his case, his brothers).
Joseph named the firstborn Manasseh (Forget), saying, “God made me forget all my hardships and my parental home.”
[Genesis 40, The Message]
It’s important because if you’ve a Hidden High Potential, you’ve likely got a lot of resentments. And not just about work.
It wasn’t just the Jewish Bible. Will Shakespeare agreed, often enough to use the formulation several times over the years. Take, for example, King Lear’s words: read more…
My RSS feeds have been down for awhile, apparently, depending on how you access them. And the earlier fix took down all the category pages, archive pages and even individual posts. Yikes! Should’ve seen it but didn’t. Your RSS feed should be http://feeds.feedburner.com/RequisiteWriting regardless.
This is a good argument for outsourcing your IT.
I’ve been reading the fascinating You’re in Charge, Now What?: The 8 Point Plan
The passage that struck me today is a short one about how a marketing guy, Jeff Killeen, handled the culture shock of starting as CEO at GlobalSpec. GlobalSpec is an engineering-focused company, and here he talks about the struggles he had both in developing a relationship with technical genius & founder, John Schneiter, and the engineers of the company. If you work with engineers or developers, this is relevant. read more…
Last time we looked at why you don’t have a mentor, and focused on the Hidden High Potentials. Today, let’s look at the generational parts of Why You Didn’t Get a Mentor. This is specific to the United States, but you may find it applicable (or not) if you live elsewhere.
It turns out that those born from around 1961 to 1982 (there is a little bit of fuzz around these dates, but not much) were highly unlikely to find a mentor unless they were born at the end and could find one within that same birth cohort. Let’s look at why being part of this generation affected mentoring. read more…
One of the things that Elliott Jaques and Katherine Cason discussed is that most people seem to develop over time according to general pathways. That is, your capacity for work increases over time generally along a predictable path once you get into your 20s. Dr. Jaques saw this in his work with people over time — he did work with Glacier Metal Company for some twenty-five years — and even put the tracks into his graphs over time.
It sounds pretty deterministic, and maybe people can make themselves get more capacity to do higher level work. I have no idea. It just seems that most of us do not do this. We pretty much get onto a path and stay that way.
It turns out that people who share a growth path have an uncanny way of understanding each other. This gets weird, but it has a lot to tell you about mentoring.
And why you, as a hidden high potential, had an almost impossible time to find one. If you have had a good mentor or mentors in your life, you can go back to what you were doing. If not, let me show you why it was important and not having one really doesn’t say anything bad about you. Or the people you wanted to mentor you. read more…
The disaster in Japan is devastating to see. Although my friends in Japan are all safe, many of their friends and family are still missing. The death count is high. The destruction is staggering.
I don’t want to make light of the horrible tragedy, and indeed I pray for them and wonder what we can do to help. This is a discussion about some of the after effects based on scenarios run years ago.
The prognosis is bad. read more…
Greg McElroy’s alleged Wonderlic score has been leaked and it’s created a buzz. The Wonderlic is a part of the bevy of tests the NFL puts draftees through and generally measures what is known as “general mental ability”.
SEC standout quarterback McElroy’s problem is that his Wonderlic score is almost 2 times as high as the average NFL quarterback. And QBs are known as the smartest guys on the team (although centers and offensive tackles have higher scores). If a coach is going to add value to McElroy’s work as a player, he’s going to have to be able to “think bigger” so that he can provide context for this young guy.
And there’s the problem, according to Mike Florio of NBC Sports’ Pro Football Talk.
As the headhunter, we have the distinct pleasure of being the guys in the middle. This allows us to speak with the employer and the candidate and get the perspective of everyone involved. Because of this, we sometimes find ourselves in the line of fire from 2 different directions.
The candidate perspective in the current market is generally “who do I have to kill to get the job” and the employer side is usually, “we see no reason to hire you at this time since you are one of 1000 guys who wants our job and we’re in no hurry cause the job can get filled whenever we see fit with whomever we want.”
The job market has shifted, and the unemployed are being seen, he notes, as somehow being idiots for not being able to keep jobs.
Or having jumped from job to job over the years. As so many educated Generation X workers have been forced to do.
The New York Times saw it as a big enough of a problem to publish an editorial (“The Unemployed Need Not Apply“, 2001-Feb-19) describing the problem. It’s not just a feeling that you have: if you don’t have a job today, you are going to have a hell of a time finding one.
The message — “the unemployed need not apply” — has at times been explicitly stated in job announcements. In other cases, unemployed job seekers have reported verbal rejections after a recruiter or employer learned they were not currently working.
The Great Depression wasn’t that bad, as long as you had a job. Prices kept falling, but wages couldn’t. If you lost your job, there was something wrong with you. Welcome to the new old world.
What happens when you create a permanent unemployed class who were previously working and earning a good living? It’s not that they are falling on bad times but falling into a permanent, unending joblessness. This is a social danger, but it will be ignored until it is too late. Sooner or later, they’re going to get their guns from the closet.
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Have you figured it out yet? There are things that I haven’t said, of course. Your job is bad for you not just because it’s not at the right level. It’s also not using the right language of achievement. You haven’t heard this yet, because we have needed to spend some time thinking about work levels.
And Flow. Do you remember when you last had that thrilling experience, to lose yourself in the work, to be beyond mastery, to feel the walls of your perception fall away? Somewhat akin to the alpha states achieved by some in Pentecostal worship services and raves.
When is the last time your work energized you rather than chewed you up?
But not all of us have options about work. But here’s some secrets for you that others won’t tell you.
During the lull between the main snow and the forecasted lake effect snows during this blizzard here in northern Indiana on Wednesday, our new baby decided to accelerate her arrival.
A lot.
Upshot is that we have a perfectly wonderful new baby girl — her and her mother are both doing fine — and are even back at home. But it’s but a further stretch on my already tardy posts following up on generational issues.
I’ll be back in no less than a couple of weeks.
Now back to the wee one.
Here is a response to the snarky “Letter to a Rising Generation” by the old-fogey C.A. Comer. Bourne was a university student when he wrote this. His style is a bit flowery but it was done for effect. My comments following.
This Older Generation
I read with ever-increasing wonder the guarded defenses and discreet apologies for the older generation which keep filtering through the essays of [this magazine]. I can even seem to detect a growing decision of tone, a definite assurance of conviction, which seems to imply that a rally has been undertaken against the accusations which the younger generation, in its self-assurance, its irreverence for the old conventions and moralities, its passion for the novel and startling, seemed to be bringing against them. The first faint twinges of conscience felt by the older generation have given place to renewed homily. There is an evident anxiety to get itself put on record as perfectly satisfied with its world, and desirous that its sons and daughters should learn anew of those peculiar beauties in which it has lived. Swept off its feet by the call to social service and social reform, it is slowly regaining its foundation, and, slightly flushed, and with garments somewhat awry, it proclaims again its belief in the eternal verities of Protestant religion and conventional New England morality.
Let’s start out the new year with the fortunes of the so-called 13th generation, the decried Generation X (born 1961 to 1979): you are totally screwed.
