And the Newsweek author who recounts this thinks it “makes sense.”
This is what happens when you don’t know what human rights really are — you end up trivializing the concept altogether.
Archives for January 13, 2010
The Three Areas in Which Any Organization Needs to Demonstrate Achievement
Rick Wartzman summarizes Peter Drucker in an article on why executives who devalue values are wrong:
For Drucker, these numbers surely would have been troubling. The way he saw things, any organization needs to demonstrate achievement in three major areas if it’s to be successful: generating “direct results,” “developing people for tomorrow,” and the “building of values.” If a business is “deprived of performance in any one of these areas, it will decay and die,” Drucker warned in The Effective Executive, his 1967 classic. “All three therefore have to be built into the contribution of every executive.”
10 Lessons from NBC's Bad Jay Leno Strategy
Advertising Age has ten lessons to learn from NBC’s failing strategy of moving Jay Leno’s show to prime time. The most significant one for all organizations, no matter what your industry, is this:
Cutting back on quality, even in a recession, can be brand suicide.
I cover this reality in more detail in my series on managing in a downturn.
The 50 Ugliest Cars of the Last 50 Years
BusinessWeek has a half-century of automotive eyesores.
(I happen to think that some of the ugliest cars around are still on the road. But, I’ll hold my tongue!)
Changing the Subject Line in Mac Mail
If you’ve ever wanted to do this in order to make the required action more clear in an email you’ve received but aren’t acting on right away, here’s how.
Review Once or Twice a Year What You’ve Actually Done
Peter Drucker, from Managing the Nonprofit Organization:
All the people I’ve known who have grown review once or twice a year what they have actually done, which part of that work makes sense, and what they should concentrate on.
I’ve been in consulting for almost fifty years now and I’ve learned to sit down with myself for two weeks in August and review my work over the past year. First, where have I made an impact? Where do my clients need me–not just want me but need me? Then, where have I been wasting their time and mine? Where should I concentrate next year so as not only to give my best but also to get the most out of it?
I’m not saying that I always follow my own plan. Very often something comes in over the transom and I forget all my good intentions. But so far as I have become a better and more effective consultant and have gotten more and more personally out of consulting, it’s been because of this practice of focusing on where I can really make a difference.
Only by focusing effort in a thoughtful and organized way can a non-profit executive move to the big step in self-development: how to move beyond simply aligning his or her vision with that of the organization to making that personal vision productive.
Executives who make a really special contribution enable the organization to see itself as having a bigger mission than the one it has inherited. To expand both the organization and the people within it in this way, the top executive must ask the key questions of himself — the questions I ask myself each August. Indeed, each member of the staff must do it, and each volunteer. And the senior people must sit down regularly with each other and consider the questions together.