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Archives for February 2010

An Example of Bad Management

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This is the opposite of how managers should think of their employees. From Leadership Skills for Managers:

Students of American automotive history know that at one point in Ford’s history, Henry Ford appointed himself as the maker of all decisions — large and small. Believe it or not, he actually had corporate spies skulking around, trying to catch his managers in the act of making decisions by themselves. Needless to say, productivity declined, as did morale.

Profits plummeted as well. Not until 15 years later did the company make a profit and the managers make their own decisions.

Don’t be Negative: You Can Always Find the Positive

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Negativity is all a matter of perspective. Negative people can make any situation, no matter how great, seem like the end of the world. And positive people can make any situation, no matter how bad, seem great.

Mark Sanborn illustrates this well with a common story in his book You Don’t Need a Title to Be a Leader: How Anyone, Anywhere, Can Make a Positive Difference:

An old favorite joke of mine illustrates the positive attitude of a person who takes responsibility for his or her life, even in those circumstances they don’t completely control.

Twin boys were born to two happy parents. But as the children grew, the parents noticed a dramatic difference in the outlook each had on life.

One boy was completely negative. His perspective was consistently one of gloom and doom. No matter what happened, he was downhearted. He was able to find a rain cloud in the sunniest sky.

The other boy was buoyant and looked at everything positively. No matter what happened, he could find the silver lining in the darkest cloud.

The parents began to worry that each child had a problem. So one Christmas they attempted a bold experiment to try to change their son’s dispositions.

For the boy with the negative attitude, they bought the most wonderful gifts: a new bike, a train set, board games, and other fun diversions.

To the boy with the positive attitude, they gave a pile of horse manure.

On Christmas morning, the boy who was negative was led into a room containing all his wonderful gifts. But rather than being delighted, he complained, “The bike will become dirty and scratched the first time I ride it, and the other toys will break or wear out.”

Their other son, upon seeing the pile of manure, shocked his parents by instantly shouting in glee.

“Why are you so excited?” they exclaimed.

He replied, “With all this manure, there’s got to be a pony in here somewhere!”

My point? When something bad happens, the challenge is to search for the pony, not with the naive enthusiasm of the boy in the story but with the informed optimism of a leader.

And, of course, this is biblical:

1 Thessalonians 5:16-18: Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

5 Key Characteristics of Effective Leaders

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Here are 5 key characteristics of effective leaders, from Mark Sanborn’s You Don’t Need a Title to Be a Leader: How Anyone, Anywhere, Can Make a Positive Difference. Effective leaders:

  1. Believe they can positively shape their lives and careers.
  2. Lead through their relationships with people, as opposed to their control over people.
  3. Collaborate rather than control.
  4. Persuade others to contribute, rather than order them to.
  5. Get others to follow them out of respect and commitment rather than fear and compliance.

The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint

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Edward Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within is a fantastic — and humorous — article on the abuse of PowerPoint. I highly recommend checking it out.

In it he talks about how PowerPoint is commonly misused, how to use PowerPoint right, how to avoid the boring use of bullet points, and how bad PowerPoint deserves part of the blame for the Challenger space shuttle disaster back in 1985.

The one problem is that the article is not available online for free. However, an abbreviated version called PowerPoint is Evil appeared in Wired a few years ago. It’s worth checking out; and if you’re interested, you can obtain the entire article at Amazon.

Leadership: Applying Beliefs to Real-World Situations

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That’s what a good leader does, because good leaders are governed by a set of guiding principles and core ideas. In his book Leadership, Rudy Giuliani makes this point well in regard to his own leadership:

Great leaders lead by ideas. Ideology is enormously important when running any large organization.

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My goal as a leader was to apply my beliefs and philosophy to real-world situations. As mayor, I insisted that everyone on my staff should concentrate on the core purpose of whichever agency or division we oversaw.

In politics, even more than in business, the reply to queries is far too often “Because we’ve always done it this way.” My goal was to move the agenda forward with every action, to back strong beliefs with specific plans of action.