AskTheManager.com

Management Training Blogwatch – Best of the Blogs

We scoured and we scrubbed and we were left with just few posts and articles worthy of making it into your reading rotation for all things Management Training.

Perhaps it was the holidays and everyone was taking off between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, but we simply struggled to find more than just a handful of very good posts from the past five weeks. (The pickings were so slim we even had to include two of our posts into the mix.)

Although not from a traditional Management Training Blog, we recommend the first post below: excerpts from a great interview with Dilbert creator Scott Adams. A worthy read.

Tags: Management Blogs, Management Training

New York Times – Hardcover Business Best Sellers – January 2009

A quick review of the January 2009 New York Times Hardcover Business Best Sellers list and you wouldn’t know we were in a recession. Where are all the financial survival guides? Where are all the “end is near” and Nostradamus tomes?

Instead of the expected flight to junk journalism full of the “how to” books that actually apply to no one, this month’s list is surprisingly loaded with many decent biographies, smart historical perspectives and controversial statistical analyses that require a deeper level of thought than we need for, say, Dave Ramsey’s The Total Money Makeover (Number 8 this month).

Of the quality highlights on January’s list, Outliers at Number 1 could be one of the best books released in 2008. In this great read author Malcolm Gladwell poses the question: why do some people succeed, while those with more talent/brains/brawn never reach their potential? For those of us who still think we can grow up to be anything we want, Gladwell’s challenge of our belief in the self-made man is as uncomfortable as it is depressing. Like we do with the rest of Gladwell’s work, the editors of AskTheManager highly recommend this book.

Another January highlight can be found in a great Warren Buffet biography by Alice Schroeder at Number 2. In fact, The Snowball is not only in the Top 5 on the NY Times list, it was also named to our list of the Ten Best Warren Buffet Books of All Time. Why would we release a list of the Top 10 Buffet Books? At last count, there were forty-seven Warren Buffet biographies currently in print, so we felt you needed a guide to decide which ones are worthy of your time. (To see our list of the 10 Best Warren Buffet Biographies, follow this link.)

The overall best read on this month’s list (showing its staying power more than three years after its release) is Number 11’s Freakonomics. As loyal readers of this blog know, Freakonomics is expected be released as a feature-length documentary later this year. (To read our recent interview with Freakonomics producer Chad Troutwine, follow this link.)

The Top Five – NY Times Business Hardcover Best Sellers January 2009 (to view the entire list, follow this link):

Tags: Best Sellers, Business Books, Rankings

Great Leadership Blog Worthy of Special Mention – CatchYourLimit.com

As our regular readers know, we produce four semi-regular Blogwatch series covering Time Management, Sales Management, Management Training and Leadership Development. In these series we attempt to help you cut through the clutter and discover great writing and great advice.

While we think we do a pretty good job of culling the crud, we sometimes overlook great blogs. When we do, we’re excited when readers bring these wonderful sites to our attention.

One of our readers turned us on to a great Leadership Development website that had not been a part of our Blogwatch series, called CatchYourLimit.com. This site and its accompanying blog are the brainchild of an innovative leadership consulting company known as Catch Your Limit.

What makes Catch Your Limit so innovative is their approach to management and leadership consulting that moves away from the starched shirts and toward what really matters: coaching; accountability; consistency and cleaning fish. (Long story, you have to read their About Us page to understand.)

Based on what we learned about this innovative consultancy and their great blog, we hereby amend yesterday’s Leadership Development Blogwatch and add the following post:

Transparency is to Employee Engagement as Failure is to Innovation

Leaders will never gain the trust of their employees, especially in uncertain times without a significant level of transparency. As innovation needs experimentation and failure, employees need transparency from leadership for engagement to take place.

One of the difficulties many organizations are facing is transitioning from a “corporate memo” top down communication culture to having honest and candid conversations with their employees. The former creates an environment of rumors, gossip and anxiety while the latter allows employees to feel a certain level of security remaining engaged and productive.

Like improving the economy it’s easier said than done. It isn’t easy to tell people they may lose their job. It isn’t easy to discuss a negative financial outlook…

(To read the rest of this article and other great posts on CatchYourLimit.com, please follow this link.)

Tags: Leadership, leadership development, Management Blogs, management resources

Best of the Leadership Development Blogosphere

We scoured the Leadership Development posts and articles for the past several weeks to find just those precious few that deserve your attention:

Tags: leadership development, leadership news and views, Leadership Weblog

The Best of AskTheManager.com – 2008

One of our regular readers sent us a nice email last night wishing us, among other things, a Happy New Year. We know it wasn’t just a mass email sent to everyone in his address book because he requested we write this post today.

Specifically, he asked us to list the Top Ten Articles on AskTheManager.com for 2008 based on page views. No wanting to disappoint, we dove into our Google Analytics and found some surprising articles at the top of the list.

Looking back on our first six and a half months of providing leadership advice and general business wisdom to the masses, we occasionally used this blog to vent about or introduce issues and topics that only barely related to leadership development – though we always tried to tie these back to the leadership, where possible.

Sometimes we were successful, and sometimes it was clear we were just using AskTheManager.com as our own personal soap box. Of course, it is our soap box to use as we wish…

Today’s article speaks more to what you, the readers, wish. Based on what you read when you visited, here are the Top Ten AskTheManager Articles for 2008:

1. The Best and Worst Presidential Leaders in History – This was the second article in a three-part series that proved to be the most popular posts on our site last year. Published in September, all three articles in this series drew an enormous amount of attention, with the second in the series being our most visited page in 2008. The AskTheManager editors spent months analyzing the leadership records of all forty-two US Presidents to name our best and worst.
2. So You’re the New Sales Manager – How Are You Going To Get Their Attention? – The first in a three-part series, this article detailed how one sales manager who took over an underperforming team and turned them around in very short order. We highly recommend all three posts in this series for any new sales manager.
3. Coming Soon to a Theater Near You: Freakonomics, The Movie – The incredible popularity of Freakonomics (the book) must have spilled over to posts about the upcoming movie, as this was the only ATM December article to make the Top Ten and our most popular post that wasn’t part of a series. This article provides insight into the 2009 release of the much-anticipated Freakonomics documentary via a Q&A with the film’s producer, Chad Troutwine.
4. The Top Ten Leadership Books of All Time – Originally published in June, this July version of the list included more explanation about each of our choices and proved to be a more popular read than the original. In case you’re wondering: more than six months later, we stand by our rankings.
5. TheManager Digresses – The Paparazzi Must Die! – Our first attempt to use this blog purely for our own selfish purposes, this post detailing the “dangers” of the celebrity-chasing paparazzi and how to combat them proved to be very popular with the hoards seeking more information about Jennifer Aniston’s latest love. Go figure.




6. The 25 Most Annoying Business Phrases – It was either our out-of-the-box thinking or the 800-Pound Gorilla that compelled us to select among the thousands of annoying phrases we hear in everyday business life and take a 30,000-foot view to come up with the most annoying twenty-five.
7. The Six Worst Business Email Etiquette Mistakes Ever – Although we absolutely hate when businesspeople employ the use of stationery in their emails, that faux pas only made Number 4 on our list of twelve in this popular second post in a two-post series.
8. Damn the Voters, Bloomberg Believes He is NYC’s Only Choice – Emperor Bloomberg’s successful push to bypass the electorate and change the law to benefit him still steams us almost beyond words. It seems many of you were likewise affected, making this post one of the Top Ten of 2008.
9. Knowledge Hoarders & The Mack Truck Theory – While the topic of knowledge hoarding can be a real yawner when compared to Emperor Bloomberg, Jennifer Aniston or Freakonomics, this post still ranked in the Top Ten largely on the strength of those looking for ways to combat this practice in their own workplace.
10. Managing Up When Your Boss Refuses to Lead – We clearly struck a nerve with this post detailing the epidemic of ineptness plaguing business “leaders” today as it received nearly 500 unique page views in just two short months. We were compelled to write this article after witnessing more than a dozen instances (in just one week) of intelligent middle managers dumbing-down their approach and acting like victims because their respective supervisors happen to be complete buffoons. (We never know where our muse will come from.)

As we look ahead to 2009 and beyond, we’re hopeful that our posts, articles and opinions can help managers become leaders and leaders become more effective stewards of their businesses. The editors of AskTheManager thank you for your continued support.

Tags: leadership development, Links to Leadership Resources, Management Advice, Management Blogs, Rankings

Leading in the New Millennium: Pay for (Lack of) Performance

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair

Although Sinclair’s words were uttered in 1935, they ring especially true when applied to the leadership void we face today. While Sinclair, a socialist, didn’t speak these words to decry the inattentive state of management during the Great Depression, his words speak volumes when applied to the CEOs, boards of directors, and other executives of the failed and failing businesses of this Great Recession.

We’re still a few months away from the first of many Lehman Perp Walks, though it’s important to note we believe that Sinclair’s quote can be equally applied to the senior leadership of Lehman as it could to the senior team at Enron.  

Enron and Lehman: Two Peas in a Pod

Let’s compare Ken Lay and Dick Fuld – two monosyllabic managers with their eyes on their own bank accounts and little regard for their employees or their shareholders.

Enron’s Lay claimed he had no responsibility for and little understanding of the risky and illegal ventures of his management team that bankrupted the giant company.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Assuming Lay was telling the truth when he feigned ignorance regarding the schemes that brought down Enron, it’s easy to assume that he did not want to understand – he was making too much money in his ignorance.

Lehman’s Fuld claims his company and he were, in effect, victims of the housing and credit crisis. Dick Fuld made over a half a billion dollars during his 14 years as CEO of Lehman – that hardly qualifies him for victim status. Moreover, Fuld made his hundreds of millions all while allowing his company to dive into riskier investments requiring insane amounts of leverage.

When Fuld is finally brought to answer under oath for the enormous bankruptcy he orchestrated (his congressional testimony in October was a joke), he will no doubt claim he didn’t fully understand the credit default swaps and other risky investments his team was helping create.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

So What Must We Change?

Clearly shame and public humiliation aren’t enough to sway America’s CEOs to always act responsibly and in the best interest of the company’s shareholders. Case is point: Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain recently requested he be awarded a bonus of $10 million for 2008. Without going into Merrill’s ‘08 financials (or lack thereof), let’s just say that Thain proved, if nothing else, he has incredible nerve. (Boards of failed companies, generally, don’t even face shame or public humiliation – they just move on like carpetbaggers.)

Given the speed at which many companies are collapsing, it seems that even the alleged pay for performance packages that reward a CEO for some short term positive movement of a company’s share price are ineffective. Fuld had the gall to argue in front of congress that he delivered terrific shareholder value during the first 13 of his 14 years as CEO. Big deal, Dick, tell that to the September 2008 shareholders and employees.

Leaders as Stewards

CEOs, like US Presidents, serve at the pleasure of their constituents. Presidents serve at the pleasure of the American citizens; CEOs, allegedly, serve at the pleasure of the shareholders (the owners of the company). No matter how many years of prosperity a CEO has delivered (via shareholder value), a sudden bankruptcy that destroys a 158-year old company proves that the CEO was no steward; that personal gain (including stroking his own ego) was his primary (and possibly his only) goal.

If our business leaders fail to act as stewards, then our boards must act. If our boards fail to act, shareholders have little recourse beyond civil remedies that generally fail to change behaviors. Civil penalties for underperforming and/or incestuous boards are insufficient to stem the tide of bad leadership we’ve faced over the past decade.

Perp Walks for Boards

It’s time we criminalized the lazy, incestuous boards who fail to protect the shareholder. It’s time that more than a few directors received several years behind bars for every billion in shareholder value they failed to protect.

If you think what we’re requesting is akin to advocating the death penalty for jaywalking, you’re way off base. We asked someone who sits on three Fortune 500 boards (who spoke to us on the condition of anonymity) what made them feel they were qualified to sit on so many boards while leading another large company as CEO. Their response: “Listen, I get about $100,000 from each company for four meetings a year. I think I can handle it.”

Four meetings a year – unfortunately, that’s how far too many board members view their duties. What’s worse is that your “performance” (i.e. networking) on one board leads to appointments to other boards. Rock the boat, and you’re not asked to join the other boards.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Amazing how a socialist like Sinclair can teach us so much about capitalism.

Tags: Digression, leadership development, leadership news and views, leadership observations, leadership traits

Time Management Blogwatch – December 2008

For what it’s worth, we cobbled together the best of the time management blog posts and articles from this past month of procrastination fascination.

Lest you think we’re kidding about the drivel that fills the time management blogs, imagine reading the thousands of posts we rejected including one that detailed how business travelers should stay on the lower floors of hotels to save time in the elevators.

There are no words to describe just how stupid you have to be to follow advice like that.

time management and what can’t be managed
We had a talk on Sunday at church about using our time more wisely. Most of the time I was telling myself–this isn’t for you, this isn’t for you. Because I am one of those people who is obsessive about making sure I get the most out of …

Thinking of improving your time management skills for your 2009 New Year’s Resolution? Do yourself a favor and don’t read the blogs, read a book: 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey.

Tags: Management Blogs, time management

Time Management Tools That Work – No Such Thing

If you’re a regular reader to this blog, you know we don’t put much stock in time management tips, tricks or techniques. We believe, like Stephen Covey, that you cannot manage time, you can only manage self. Any attempts, in fact, to manage time are just fruitless efforts that get you no closer to your goals.

Time management is about execution, organization and personal efficiencies. Sadly, you will not begin to execute simply by following a few time management tips; organization will not suddenly become second nature because you learned to use the calendar feature on Microsoft Outlook; and just because you can efficiently complete tasks doesn’t mean you are completing the correct ones or in the proper order.

True Time Management is about Effectiveness

Prior to the technological onslaught of time management tools, managers could be divided into two distinct groups: effective and ineffective. In the 1980s, a business leader who needed something done – and done right – knew which of his executives could handle the task. Back then we described this person as organized.

So what’s changed? As we examine our fellow managers today – those armed with a PDA synced to their Outlook, their CardScan machine, a CRM tool and their computer desktop – we notice very quickly that we can divide them into two distinct groups: effective and ineffective.

In the 1980s, truly effective salespeople – those who seemed to always win Salesperson of the Month – used index cards to keep track of their customers and prospects. This was their CRM tool; this was their version of Salesforce.com. They were slaves to their paper planners (yesterday’s Microsoft Outlook) and they never missed a meeting. Why were these salespeople so much more successful than their peers? Didn’t everyone have access to index cards and paper planners?

Why Technology Hasn’t Moved the Effectiveness Needle

While the tools technology has provided have slightly shifted the bell curve of effective leadership to the right, it’s no surprise to us that these tools have done little in the way of narrowing the curve. We are no more effective as leaders today than we were twenty, thirty or forty years ago.

To stick with the salespeople analogy: we find it almost criminal that today’s technological tools (whether CRM software or a CardScan machine) go largely underutilized by the unsuccessful salespeople people, while being exploited to their fullest by the Salesperson of the Month.

Salespeople, you see, more than any other group, stand to gain the most from employing technology in their daily work. So why don’t more of them embrace the very technology that has been proven to help them make more money?

People are Lazy, Procrastinating Do-Nothings

While we can think of a few choice descriptively redundant terms for the ineffective salesperson or manager, the truth is that personal effectiveness is not something that can be burned onto a CD and loaded on your laptop. Effectiveness – the essence of time management – must become part of your DNA.

The effective salesperson in 1984 who mastered the use of index cards had the desire and DNA to be successful. It’s likely he was not a “natural born salesman” and therefore had to work at it. Knowing this, he strived to add anything to his arsenal that would give him a leg up – even if it meant more work.

This element of human nature is still present twenty-five years later – we see it in the successful salespeople who learn every nook and cranny of the company’s CRM tool and go out of their way to master new technologies – but we still see these qualities in just a few salespeople on any given sales team. Technology has done nothing to move the effectiveness needle.

So it’s Hopeless to Attempt to Improve My Time Management?

Well, yes and no. Would you describe yourself the way Waffle House describes hash browns? That is, are you scattered, smothered, covered, chunked, topped, diced and peppered? If so, then you need a lot more just than technology to improve your time management (something you should start calling your “effectiveness”). May we recommend you internalize (that means read until you fully understand and live) 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey? (There’s a reason this book was voted the best leadership book ever written by the editors of AskTheManager.)

Alternatively, would you say that you’re generally effective; that you do a good job of cleaning your inbox; that people can count on you to get things done and that you’re only looking for something to help you recover a few minutes a day? If this describes you, congratulations, you are one of the lucky few who are either hardwired to perform or you’ve worked hard to achieve effectiveness. For you, we’d like to recommend something that’s helped us organize our contacts: the CardScan Personal v8 Card Scanner. This tool is great for the already organized and worthless to the lazy, procrastinating do-nothings.

The first step is recognizing you are a lazy, procrastinating do-nothing – this could save you a lot of money.

Tags: leadership books, Leadership Resources, Management Advice, time management