Clearly I have NOT mastered this fine art of getting things done, as it has been a month since I last posted something.  Since then, however, I have been educating myself in the fine art of managing my time and the productivity of others.  I am currently availing myself of interns, with whom I am getting systemic changes accomplished that daily demands would have me ignore.  Like moving into Cooler Email, for instance, lock stock and barrel for managing my business from software-as-a-service.  There’s more to the story — stay with me.

Without some troops I would not tackle a project like shifting the locus of my business from my computer to another system so that others could share it.  Having that locus of control shifted makes many things possible that weren’t possible before.

While I have them (before they move on with their REAL lives), Ipek (on the left) and Semih (on the right) are making possible this transition to Cooler Email and other great tools of productivity.

On a related topic, I attended a business gathering last evening where we talked about execution of strategy.  The overarching theme of the evening was that for there to be a shift in the collective consciousness of bringing our heart to the business world, and not just our head, we all need to work for the common good and make decisions with the common good in mind, not just our selfish interests.

This is a theme of mine, and fortunately not JUST mine!  Working for the common good means that as we go about our regular work, we bring in the fine art of considering how what WE do will impact others.

I have helped Semih find a school where he will get his MBA, and I will help Ipek get a job.  I met these two young adults through an earlier intern, Orcun, whom I helped find a job and in doing so I lost him as an intern.  He replaced himself by introducing me to his two friends who needed internships.  THAT, my friends, is the FINE art of getting things done!  When I released my need for Orcun to be my intern, little did I know that I would end up doubling my workforce of interns!  My deciding based on the common good turned out to be good for me, good for Orcun, and good for Ipek and Semih.

I think that’s the way the world REALLY works, and it is NOT intuitive any more than leaning into the curve on a motorcycle is intuitive.  It is a choice, and in the end things get done that should get done, even though in the beginning we don’t see the whole picture.

Workers in China focus on performance, which means they focus on their strengths not their weaknesses.  There, according to Marcus Buckingham’s research, 73 % of workers focus on their strengths, and 27% focus play to their weaknesses compared with the United States where only 14% spend most of their day focusing on their strengths.  We need to build our jobs to fit our strengths.

In the U.S. we believe our strengths are what we are good at, except we may be good at it and we hate it!  We CAN do it, but it drains us.  A weakness is an activity that weakens you.  A strength strengthens you. The assignment from Marcus for the audience was to take a pad of paper, draw a line down the middle, and over the course of the day note what you’re doing and also whether you loved doing it or loathed doing it.

Marcus points to 4 clear signs of strengths:

1.  Success – you feel effective
2.  Instinct – you look forward to it — you like doing it
3. Growth – your synapses are firing, you are in the flow, inquisitive and focused
4.  Needs how do I feel after I have done it?  Did it fill a need I have?

At end of the week, pick one activity that you loved and write a strengths statement that is specific and general at the same time.  In his funny way of sharing a story, Marcus told of when he was interviewing Rosa.  He picked the verb “interviewing.”  Drill down to the specifics of what you really liked about that.   Marcus got specific around interviewing.  “I only like to talk to you if you are really good at your job.  I want to explore why you excel.”  That is specificity around the verb “interviewing.”

End up with 3 strengths statements, and do it twice a year.  Do the same self-evaluation for what you loathe.

Now, as a manager, what about the people you manage? How will you discover your peoples’ strengths, and help them play to those strengths?

Furthermore, what is your strategy to manage drainers — activities that need to be done and you loathe doing it?  Here are some choices.
1. Stop doing it
2. Team up with others who are strengthened by it
3. Offer up your strengths until it is what you do all day
4. Perceive the need, then use a strength to neutralize your weakness
5.  Suck it up and do it

First be honest about what weakens you.  Move your job so the best of your job becomes most of your job.

Responsibility of  a Leader

The job of a leader is to lead people to a better future.  A leader needs optimism.  If you are not motivated that way, you are a pessimist.  How to get agreement from those you are leading is by providing CLARITY, so that people can taste the milk and smell the honey.  There is a vividness about the future, and it is painted in a way that we can see ourselves in that future.

A leader needs to know:

1.  Who do we serve?  Exactly who, not something vague.  Giuliani focused on reducing crime as his focus.   Make a choice, be vivid.
2. What is our core strength, edge, then paint it vividly. Not something vague like “our people are our core strength.”  It’s too vague.  IPhone’s core strength is not partnering!  They have other core strengths, that’s not one of them.

3. Tell me the one score we are going to use.   The Balanced Scorecard is good for management, lousy for leadership.  Marcus gave a prison example where the leader said, “We serve the prisoner.”  Whether right or wrong, he was clear.   What measure?  The recidivism rate is the measure of success — if successful in creating that future, they will keep prisoners from coming back.
4. What action can we take today??   Giuliani, as an example of a leader, cleaned up New York City and his measures were to remove graffiti and have cab drivers wear collared shirts.
In his keynote, Marcus kept coming back to fears, saying that real leaders create momentum when they measure specific actions because specific actions calm our fears.  That is brilliant.   What stops us from focusing on our strengths is our fear that our weaknesses will damage us.  If we are following a capable leader into the future that is vividly expressed with one or two clear measures of success, we can then move confidently forward.  If our managers are focusing on our strengths with us, we can then enjoy our work and make our greatest contribution.

The appeal — to the American audience, not the Chinese one — was to up the ante on our game.  Get clear about our strengths and use them in service of a clear and vivid future.

Orson Wells says in his very special voice,”We will sell no wine before its time.” You can see this wine commercial for Paul Masson on YouTube. This blog is not about wine, though. It is about timing.

I understand why to sell no wine before its time — the wine isn’t ready to be consumed!  It would not taste right, it would reflect badly on the wine maker, it would “leave a bad taste in our mouth” (pardon the pun) from the experience.

What about the timing for discovering the world revolves around the sun, and not the other way around?  It took over 1000 years from the first person’s assertion of the earth revolving around the sun, not the other way around, before Copernicus gained credibility for this novel view of reality!   Indeed, Nicholas Copernicus was destined to put forward the theory of the earth’s motion at a time when the idea could be heard. During an earlier era Aristarchus declared the same, too early in mankind’s receptivity to gain credibility.   Although true, truth found no champions.

A modern forward-thinking mind, Dean Kamen, invented (among other things) the electric scooter Segway. His intention was that they replace cars for local transportation but they proved too expensive. I see them downtown upon occasion, driven by the neighborhood “safety cops.” Kamen, according to Fortune Magazine (May 3, 2010), has learned that change takes time and a group effort. Indeed Wilbur and Orville flew, yet it took another 50 years before flying was mainstream.

Although adoption curves have their own timing, they are shortening by and large.  For example, the speed of change is lickety-split on the web. My wonderful social media intern, Audrey Vernhet, informed me recently that Facebook could cost money in the next few months. I am NOT ready to climb on that adoption curve!

Speaking of adoption curves, I wonder when business leaders will take up the accountability for being trustworthy and hold each other to account for the position power they hold?  See www.trust-in-leaders.com for an opportunity to comment by completing the research request.  I welcome your thoughts.

This is the fifth year I have had the pleasure of judging the International Collegiate Business Strategy Competition in San Diego at the Bahia Resort.  Students come from all over the world to compete in this simulation of a real business, and it is an excellent learning experience for them, win or lose.

While this video is a long, amateurish video (I did it) of 20 minutes or so, the contents are worth watching for the joy of seeing professionalism at a young age.  The team included Ryan Rotariu, CEO; Asia Snook, VP Marketing, Kim McIntyre, VP Operations and Michelle Plamondon, VP Finance. Their challenge — to make executive team decisions while running a public, international company over a seven year period.  This is a stellar executive presentation to their “board of directors,” of whom I was one, in the Intercollegiate Business Strategy Competition (ICBSC), at the end of year six of the simulation.

I understand second hand that they participated in this simulation for a measley 1 college credit, and returned to college from the San Diego competition to take finals (they are undergraduate seniors).

Anyone who has presented results will be sufficiently impressed with their thoroughness of analysis, and indeed they did win against three competitors in their “world” of four competitors.  Enjoy!

Larry and I had occasion recently to dine at the University of San Diego (my MBA Alma Mater) with Frank Partnoy and several others from the Corporate Director’s Forum.  Pictured here to Frank’s right is Cindy Richson, an expert in corporate governance and critical member of the organizing committee of the Corporate Governance Conference that Larry chairs each year since its inception five years ago.  The group was gathered to discuss next year’s January Corporate Governance Conference.  I was there as a spouse, so my view of the event was somewhat different.

My fascination was with Frank Partnoy, law professor at USD.  First of all, he’s a very approachable and funny human being.  Second, he is the most entrepreneurial lawyer/professor I’ve met in a long time.  But third, and most fascinating to me, is the list of books that he has written, all seemingly devoted to uncovering the dirt on Wall Street and the investment world.

These books are entitled, in the order they were written, F.I.A.S.C.O.: The Inside Story of Wall Street Trader, followed by “The Match King,” about Ivan Kreuger, the infamous “Match King.”  Kreuger was known as the “Match King” because he held monopolies on the sale of matches in many countries, but his financial empire extended to banking, construction, film, mining, paper, railways, and telephones. He was a statesman as well as a financier, and usurped Jack Morgan as the leading lender to Europe. He rescued France from bankruptcy, and nearly saved Germany. He charmed everyone, from President Hoover to Greta Garbo to the journalists who put his boyish face on the covers of Time and The Saturday Evening Post. Kreuger favored perception over reality. He believed financial statements were an art, not a science. When asked to name his three rules for success in business, Kreuger advised “silence, more silence, and still more silence.”  He was found dead with a bullet through his heart.  He was labeled by some pretty significant historians, among them John Kenneth Galbraith (a favorite of mine) and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. as the greatest fraud in history.

Frank’s most recent book is called “Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Risk Corrupted the Financial Markets.”  I can honestly say that I have not READ these books, cover to cover, but I have met Frank, and he’s a man with a mission and it’s a mission I heartily endorse.

Here’s what his website (www.frankpartnoy.com) say about Infectious Greed.  “Recent corporate scandals have brought our attention to the dangerously complex and unregulated financial practices of some of the world’s most successful companies. Frank Partnoy, author of the riveting business bestseller F.I.A.S.C.O.: The Inside Story of Wall Street Trader, brings his impressive understanding of complex financial transactions and legal expertise to a fascinating tour of the institutions, scandals, and business cultures that brought us to this moment. In tracing the evolution of increasingly complex derivatives’ use over the past fifteen years–and an appetite for risk and return that made it possible–Partnoy demonstrates that despite the media’s narrow focus on Enron, it was only the tip of the iceberg. The culmination of a steady erosion of personal and institutional control, today’s financial landscape is loaded with ticking time bombs with far greater potential for harm and loss than any other period in our history.”

Go Frank, go!  I hope this latest book sells as many or more than your previous books, and that the people who should learn their lessons do so.  The dinner was delicious, and thank you again for sharing your roasted garlic.

This is the most important message we could hope to take into ourselves right now, given the despair that is so easy to soak up around us, seeping into our attempts at holiday merriment.  This message puts the authority for our futures back into our own hands.  (It does have a Christian quote or two, but they don’t have to be Christian thoughts.  Every religion brings this message in its own verbiage.  Listen from that universal place).

There isn’t really anything to say about this gift from Earl Nightingale, except it is worth the half-hour required to soak up the encouragement and the guidance.  I’ll stop now, so you can do just that!

We have a new friend, Kim DeMotte, whom we met at a fabulous conference last month for people who want to build on their success to expand the good they can bring to the world. At a dinner, Larry and Kim struck up a conversation about corporate governance, and Kim said some things that resonated with Larry and myself.

First, you have to trust people to do a good job, and in this instance we were speaking of someone holding the job of CEO. When a CEO reports to a board, how do you govern that CEO such that they are responsible AND allow them to do their job, their way.

In this video with Kim, you can get it straight from “the horse’s mouth,” (sorry Kim, not a literal translation)… Kim is an advisor to the corporate world. He lives in St. Louis. What you should know about Kim, in addition to his comments here on corporate governance, is that he authored a book called “The Power of No” in which Kim (and contributors) illustrate just that! Get the book, it’s excellent!  I particularly appreciate Kim’s straight talk.  No muss, no fuss, just straight talk.  We could use more of that today, with a sagging low in trust of leaders in this country (and elsewhere, we don’t on the corner on that malady).

In the name of mission (and I would say some think mission is vision, so I’m including vision here also), do the right thing. Clear communication enables a whole host of positive effects. Too many wus’s won’t take a hard stand, set a clear boundary, say no. Amazingly enough, some of the most mature, noble looking men fall into the trap of being too nice, and mucking it up for everyone from the top of an organization down to the last person to feel the effects of poor leadership.

To that I say, “Cut it out!” Get Kim’s book, read Susan Scott’s “Fierce Conversations,” and go back to the mission. Whatever doesn’t fit the vision and the mission, do not tolerate.

Just as I begin to gain some early confidence in myself within LinkedIn, Facebook, albeit pretending to be on Twitter, here comes 3.0.  If you really asked me what can I DO in Web 2.0… well, nobody has ever said, “You stupid person, that’s not what you do on Twitter.”  And I must confess it has entertainment value for me.   And if you haven’t waded into the social media waters you’ve been left behind, stranded on a dry desert island.

Malcolm Gladwell says, in his latest book Outliers, that it takes 10,000 hours to achieve mastery.  I’m not there!

That said, I am armed and dangerous.  This picture is my computer (MacBook Pro) and on the keyboard, just in front of the Fortune Magazine article about Web 3.0, rest my two Flip Video HD cameras.  My new hobby is interviewing people who have something valid to say about trust in leadership, and I have successfully surrounded myself with more and more conversations on this topic.  Hence, the building library of interviews on my website.

On some days I could convince almost myself I’m gaining some proficiency, then I go to an event such as the one sponsored by the San Diego Software Industry Council (SDSIC), an inquiry into “What exactly is Web 3.0?  No one has the answer, but there are some cool tools associated with whatever it is.  I have been perpetually challenged to figure out what meta-tags describe my blog, for instance.  Here’s a cool shortcut to doing that:  It’s a web service called Open Calais, created by ThomsonReuters.  I just submitted the above text to Calais, and I was presented with all the meta-tags, blogging just got faster and easier! Check it out.

Dimitry Shapiro, “Chief Disruptor” and Founder of Veoh Networks was on the panel.  Whether he’s right or he’s wrong, he is convincing!  His observation is that to be web savvy, you need to know the google search commands as a BASIC skill.  Dimitry refers to www as the “Wild Wild Web”, and strongly suggests Web 3.0 would be a “structured web with reputation.”  Words like “semantic web,” “reputation systems,” “open research,” were terms bantied about,  in the midst of sharing links to other great sites;  “Feedly,” a Firefox plug-in that brings in user-selected inputs from Google Reader, Twitter, RSS feeds in easy to read magazine style format;  Open Publish for blogging;  Huffington Post.

Dimitry, like me, is interested in trust, his specialty is the media.  He calls it journalistic integrity and he says we used to have it.  The “Bloggosphere, Twittersphere have made the world,”according to Dimitry, “a very scary world.”

Biomimicry is a new discipline that studies nature’s best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems.  My husband Larry was introduced to Janine by her board member and lawyer in San Francisco, Susan McCormick.  Based on her enthusiasm, Larry bought Janine’s book, Biomimicry, Innovation Inspired by Nature.  He hadn’t been able to get that book out of his head, so when he learned Janine was speaking at the San Diego Zoo on October 2nd, he invited her to dinner and she accepted.

Larry envisions San Diego being part of Janine’s future plans for Biomimicry to commercialize some of the myriad of possible innovative products.  San Diego is an incubator city for technology and biotech in a collaborative way.  In attendance were Joe Panetta, President and CEO of Biocom, Duane Roth, CEO of Connect, and Ruprecht von Buttlar, Director of Connect’s Commercialization and Finance Programs.  They  tangibly substantiated the collaborative nature of our fine city.  Duane, for example, shared the growth of the Sorrento Mesa area into fifty research institutes today.

I like Janine, she’s genuine, warm and quick.  This video clip from our evening provides an example of her witty humor and her grasp of a future view.  Toward the end of dinner I couldn’t help myself.  I turned to Janine and said, “Most entrepreneurs are trying to develop ONE product.  Biomimicry is a veritable thing-a-thon!”  While we had a good laugh, it is true.  Biology makes way for so many innovations it is mind-boggling.  Janine’s book Biomimicry was based on research into at least 2,000 strategies for potential products that could be commercialized.  Need I say you should pick up a copy of that book?

This is Captain Mark Kohlheim, US Navy and SSC Pacific Commanding Officer.  At SPAWAR, he’s responsible for a whole lot of innovation for the world. They employ 4,200 people and operate like a not for profit with revenues of $2.5 billion.  In that workforce are 150 Ph.D.’s and 800+ masters degrees.  Most amazingly, they won the #1 best place to work in the United States!

Larry and I had an opportunity to hear Captain Kohlheim speak to an intimate gathering of MIT Graduates as a guest at the MIT Club the other evening.  I frankly wasn’t looking forward to it, thinking it would be a lot of war talk.  Boy, was I wrong!

Yes, there is the threat of a lot of stuff going wrong, and Captain Kohlheim is in charge of what he calls being on the “left” side of the boom!

There were plentiful acronyms, but Captain Kohlhiem brought me to attention with his capacity to look forward.  For instance, he said, “We are in a global economy, we need to be able to interoperate.  Everything we do as an economy is touched by cyberspace.  What is coming beyond cyber?  The coming ubiquitous environment is to become predictive.  We can’t do that right now.  But we need to.

SPAWAR is currently running 800 projects ranging from ocean to space, many revolutionary, disruptive technologies.  What Captain Kohlheim wants is to get to the next game changer!  He wants to create an unfair advantage.

This isn’t just a good idea.  It’s a process of mixing government/military with cooperative research and development agreements for technology transfer.  And it’s in San Diego!

I was struck by his observation that we do not generate enough scientists and engineers in this country and it’s a national tragedy.  But he is not only worried about that, just like in every other aspect of this rich, diverse resource in San Diego, he’s seeing that SPAWAR is doing something about it in the form of educational outreach programs.  “Society gets what they celebrate,” he said.

I am impressed with the opportunity to have this intelligent and informed military force here in San Diego working for innovation that transfers those innovations not just in keeping this land safe, but in helping this country to generate the next generation of innovations.

We live no more than five miles from the Old Town SPAWAR headquarters, and I had no idea!  I am grateful to have had this exposure so that now I can appreciate another of San Diego’s many rich resources for its contribution to the world, not just the United States.

This is what I heard, it is not an official report from SPAWAR, but I am sure I got enough of it right to appreciate the resource and speak to its power as a generative environment for innovation that makes a significant difference.  Captain, I salute you.