• We are waiting for another person to act, be accountable, respond positively, say “Yes”, …
  
• We are waiting for the right moment when we have time, when we finish our degree, when we feel good, when the opportunity is right, or when we….
  
• We are waiting for our new budget, our friend, somebody to ask us, other people to start, ….
  
• There is never enough money, there is never enough trust, there is never enough time, …
  
• Others resist change, others aren’t capable, others aren’t interested, others aren’t available, …
  
• I don’t have enough resources, I don’t have enough authority, I don’t have enough support, …
  
• It’s too risky, it’s not important, It’s not a leap improvement, It’s not worthy, …
• He/She is not on board, we are not all aligned, the plan is not perfect,

By Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Susan Berfield, Newsweek:

“It won’t surprise too many people to hear that loyalty, trust, and engagement at work have been diminished during the Great Recession: We all know talented people who have become disaffected. Maybe we’re even one of them. Put all those people together, and it becomes a daunting managerial challenge. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founder of the Center for Work-Life Policy, took stock of the situation at some of the world’s most powerful corporations, including Ernst & Young, General Electric (GE), Goldman Sachs (GS), Intel (INTC), and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), all of which are members of the center’s Hidden Brain Drain Task Force. Here are excerpts from Hewlett’s new book, Top Talent: Keeping Performance Up When Business Is Down.

In these bleak times, companies are depending on their star performers as never before. Organizations need their top talent to be in peak form—firing on all cylinders—so they can succeed in a market that is the toughest in living memory. How are employers handling this challenge? In a word, badly.

To start with, leaders are seriously distracted. Caught between clamoring clients and vaporizing value, a CEO understandably might find it hard to focus on talent. People issues tend to translate into layoff strategies: How many should you let go? How should the cuts be distributed? Should you act surgically and strike deep or should you dribble out the reductions over time? When it comes to talent management, CEOs are also hamstrung by outmoded thinking. In times like these—marked by massive losses and rising unemployment—it’s tempting to imagine that there’s no need to worry about motivating talent. People are so grateful to have a job, the conventional thinking goes, that they can be relied on to contribute 110%. Right? Wrong.

Cutting-edge research from the Center for Work-Life Policy’s Hidden Brain Drain Task Force reveals the danger in conventional assumptions about sustaining high performance in tough times. Consider these critical and disturbing data points: In the wake of a mass layoffs, voluntary attrition can be deeper than the cuts themselves. A Center for Work-Life Policy survey shows that between June 2008 and January 2009, 14% of college graduates lost their jobs—of these, 32% were fired but an additional 68% voluntarily left their jobs. Participants in the Hidden Brain Drain strategy sessions were brutally honest when commenting on the impact of the current round of layoffs: 64% were considering leaving, and 24% were spending most of their time actively looking for another job. Those who stay report feeling disengaged, of being caught in long-term limbo: 74% of participants talked about being paralyzed, 73% felt demoralized, and 64% felt demotivated.

What’s an Executive to Do?

Overcommunicate. Everyone’s anxiety level is already off the charts. Silence from those supposedly in the know only makes it worse. When leaders don’t provide information, even the prized people whose positions seem safe start second-guessing what’s going on. The resulting rumor mill inevitably undermines trust. “You have to have the courage to talk, even if it’s just to say: ‘We don’t know,’” says Kathryn Quigley, head of talent management for the Americas at Credit Suisse (CS). “But whatever you do, you must say something, because people interpret saying nothing as meaning something bad.”

Take Charge of Your Talent

High performers thrive on acing challenges and surpassing goals. In tough times, many of the performance measures set up in rosier days no longer apply. Asking your top performers to pursue them anyway only sets up your best people for failure and creates bitterness and distrust. Smart managers channel team energy toward goals that are achievable in the current environment. Don’t assume everyone on your team knows the most productive use of her time. Under stress, even talented people often make bad decisions about which projects to focus on and how. You may have to become more of a micromanager to ensure that people are not only working hard but also smart.

Develop a Fair Restructuring Process

 The “terms of disengagement” matter. Poorly handled layoffs leave a bad taste in the mouths of those employees shown the door and those picked to stay. Wayne Cascio, a business school professor at the University of Colorado Denver, looked at 18 years’ worth of downsizing data and found that even though expenses drop in the wake of large layoffs, revenues tend to drop, too—often disproportionately. This is because the remaining workers are coping with survivor syndrome—the anger, fear, anxiety, and decreased risk taking that follow a mass firing. One way to reduce the number of redundancies is by a creative use of flexible work arrangements. Accounting giant KPMG has developed an imaginative contingency plan called Flexible Futures, which was designed to decrease payroll costs while at the same time maintaining the firm’s deep commitment to its people. In January 2009 the firm gave its 11,000 U.K.-based employees four choices. They could volunteer for a four-day workweek and a 20% reduction in base pay; they could opt for a four-to-twelve week sabbatical at 30% base bay; they could opt for both; or they could stick to their current situation. “We were trying to deal with reality but also give employees some control over their own destiny,” says Rachel Campbell, head of people for KPMG Europe. To date, 85% of KPMG’s U.K.-based employees have signed up: The most popular choice is option three.”

We came across this article and wanted to share with you. The results of some of these statistics are quite stunning–  that our nation’s young people are currently at the highest rate of unemployment  (54% of people aged 16-24 in the US for the month of September were unemployed!) and the devastating consequences this has and will have upon a generation of Americans, as well as the upon our nation. We hope this article will bring to light this emerging crisis and we can together think about solutions to counter-act what is occurring. Our youngest workers are our future and future leaders, and we need to nurture, and employ them, for the health of our nation! 

From Newsweek, by Peter Coy:

“Bright, eager—and unwanted. While unemployment is ravaging just about every part of the global workforce, the most enduring harm is being done to young people who can’t grab onto the first rung of the career ladder.

Affected are a range of young people, from high school dropouts, to college grads, to newly minted lawyers and MBAs across the developed world from Britain to Japan. One indication: In the U.S., the unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds has climbed to more than 18%, from 13% a year ago.

For people just starting their careers, the damage may be deep and long-lasting, potentially creating a kind of “lost generation.” Studies suggest that an extended period of youthful joblessness can significantly depress lifetime income as people get stuck in jobs that are beneath their capabilities, or come to be seen by employers as damaged goods.

Equally important, employers are likely to suffer from the scarring of a generation. The freshness and vitality young people bring to the workplace is missing. Tomorrow’s would-be star employees are on the sidelines, deprived of experience and losing motivation. In Japan, which has been down this road since the early 1990s, workers who started their careers a decade or more ago and are now in their 30s account for 6 in 10 reported cases of depression, stress, and work-related mental disabilities, according to the Japan Productivity Center for Socio-Economic Development.

When today’s unemployed finally do get jobs in the recovery, many may be dissatisfied to be slotted below people who worked all along—especially if the newcomers spent their downtime getting more education, says Richard Thompson, vice-president for talent development at Adecco Group North America, which employs more than 300,000 people in temporary positions. Says Thompson: “You’re going to have multiple generations fighting for the jobs that are going to come back in the recovery.”

What’s more, the baby boom generation is counting on a productive young workforce to help fund retirement and health care. Instead, young people risk getting tracked into jobs that don’t pay as well, says Lisa B. Kahn of the Yale School of Management. That would mean lower tax payments for Social Security and Medicare.

Only 46% of people aged 16-24 had jobs in September, the lowest since the government began counting in 1948. The crisis is even hitting recent college graduates. “I’ve applied for a whole lot of restaurant jobs, but even those, nobody calls me back,” says Dan Schmitz, 25, a University of Wisconsin graduate with a bachelor’s degree in English who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. “Every morning I wake up thinking today’s going to be the day I get a job. I’ve not had a job for months, and it’s getting really frustrating.”

ANXIETY AND FEAR

The case for action is strong. Governments should act now before the damage gets even worse, argues David G. Blanchflower, an economist at Dartmouth College who recently served on the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England. He’s not sure what will work, but he favors trying everything from subsidizing education and training to cutting minimum wages for young people and trainees. “It has to be now,” says Blanchflower. “It can’t be in two years’ time.”

Most analyses of youth employment focus on people aged 16 to 24, which includes everyone from high school dropouts to wet-behind-the-ears college grads. But in this era of rising educational requirements, some people don’t start their careers until their mid or late 20s—and these young college grads are taking it on the chin as well.

According to a BusinessWeek analysis, college graduates aged 22 to 27 have fared worse than their older educated peers during the downturn. Two years ago, 84.4% of young grads had jobs, only somewhat lower than the 86.8% figure for college graduates aged 28 to 50. Since then, the employment gap between the two groups has almost doubled.

Robert I. Sutton, author of The No Asshole Rule, a management book, says he’s seeing “more anxiety and fear” among his students at Stanford University.

For more go here… http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_42/b4151032038302.htm

From the BBC:

“Elinor Ostrom has become the first woman to win the Nobel prize for economics since it began in 1968.

Ms Ostrom won the prize with fellow American Oliver Williamson for their separate work in economic governance.

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences is the last of the six Nobel prizes announced this year. Since 1980, it has gone to Americans 24 times.

Last Friday, US President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – though this aroused some controversy.

BBC economics editor Stephanie Flanders said the judges had rewarded work in areas of economics whose practitioners’ “hands were clean” of involvement in the global financial crisis.

The economics prize was not among the original Nobel awards, but was created in 1968 by the Swedish central bank in Alfred Nobel’s memory.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited Professor Ostrom, who teaches at Indiana University, “for her analysis of economic governance,” saying her work had demonstrated how common property could be successfully managed by groups using it.

She told Swedish television that she was “in shock” at being the first woman to clinch the award, adding winning had been a “great surprise”.

Meanwhile, Professor Williamson, the academy said, developed a theory where business firms served as structures for conflict resolution.

The University of Berkeley California academic has argued that hierarchical organisations such as companies represent alternative governance structures, which differ in their approaches to resolving conflicts of interest.

“Over the last three decades, these seminal contributions have advanced economic governance research from the fringe to the forefront of scientific attention,” the academy said.

The pair will share the 10-million Swedish kronor (£910,000; $1.44m) prize.

Last year, American academic Paul Krugman won the prize, in recognition of his analysis of trade patterns and where economic activity takes place.”

To read more…http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8302662.stm

In the Harvard Business Review’s September issue, a fascinating, if not slightly shocking study result was published:  As a market, women represent a bigger opportunity than China and India combined, but companies doing a poor job of serving them.

“Women now drive the world economy. Globally, they control about $20 trillion in annual consumer spending, and that figure could climb as high as $28 trillion in the next five years. Their $13 trillion in total yearly earnings could reach $18 trillion in the same period. In aggregate, women represent a growth market bigger than China and India combined—more than twice as big, in fact. Given those numbers, it would be foolish to ignore or underestimate the female consumer.

And yet many companies do just that, even ones that are confident they have a winning strategy when it comes to women. Consider Dell’s short-lived effort to market laptops specifically to women. The company fell into the classic “make it pink” mind-set with the May 2009 launch of its Della website. The site emphasized colors, computer accessories, and tips for counting calories and finding recipes. It created an uproar among women, who described it as “slick but disconcerting” and “condescending.” The blogosphere reacted quickly to the company’s “very special site for women.” Austin Modine of the online tech publication The Register responded acidly, “If you thought computer shopping was a gender-neutral affair, then you’ve obviously been struck down by an acute case of female hysteria. (Nine out of ten Victorian-age doctors agree.)” The New York Times said that Dell had to go to the “school of marketing hard knocks.” Within weeks of the launch, the company altered the site’s name and focus. “You spoke, we listened,” Dell told users. Kudos to Dell for correcting course promptly, but why didn’t its marketers catch the potentially awkward positioning before the launch?

Most companies have much to learn about selling to women. In 2008 the Boston Consulting Group fielded a comprehensive study of how women felt about their work and their lives, and how they were being served by businesses. It turned out there was lots of room for improvement. More than 12,000 women, from more than 40 geographies and a variety of income levels and walks of life, responded to our survey. They answered—often with disarming candor—120 questions about their education and finances, homes and possessions, jobs and careers, activities and interests, relationships, and hopes and fears, along with their shopping behavior and spending patterns in some three dozen categories of goods and services. (You can learn more about the survey and take an abridged version of it at www.womenspeakworldwide.com.)

We also conducted hundreds of interviews and studied women working in 50 organizations in 13 fields of endeavor. Here’s what we found, in brief: Women feel vastly underserved.

Despite the remarkable strides in market power and social position that they have made in the past century, they still appear to be undervalued in the marketplace and underestimated in the workplace. They have too many demands on their time and constantly juggle conflicting priorities—work, home, and family. Few companies have responded to their need for time-saving solutions or for products and services designed specifically for them.”

To read more go here:

http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/2009/09/the-female-economy/ar/1

If you are a woman, do you agree: do you feel under-served, ignored, or undervalued by companies? If you are a man, what are your thoughts? And what are the opportunities that you now see, (as a consumer? as a leader within a company?)

Envision a nation or society where the goal or main concern was caring about other human beings–caring about their wellbeing, caring about the poor, caring about helping others vs putting self first to make an easy profit.  If this were the case, there would most likely be no Enron, no mortgage crisis, probably no economic downturn at all.

Of course, P&G still cares about making a profit, as the measurement or goal outcome from putting hearts and people first is, the bottom-line– increasing the dollars spent by consumers. Still, to learn about, and hopefully model our own companies after the P&G model is crucial and valuable to truly changing the upside-down values of our society’s companies. 

P&G’s identiftied core values are…Integrity, Leadership, Ownership, Passion for Winning, Trust.  Do you or does your company have core values that are followed? What about a purpose?  To read more about P&G’s values and mission, go here: http://www.pg.com/company/who_we_are/ppv.shtml

And a good article about P&G’s value-led system by Rosabeth Moss Kanter that is worth reading can be found here: http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/kanter/2009/09/fall-like-a-lehman-rise-like-a.html  Although,there was an example of P&G’s values-put-first given here where Kanter recounts P&G”s work in Brasil, where, spurred by a slipping  market, P&G employees took note of some of the realities of Brazilian families’ lives and noted that they spent too much time washing cloth diapers by hands, so of course, introduced disposable diapers to the consumers.  While I see the value in saving time, (and increasing P&G’s Brasil market profit), what about the enormous environmental down-side of changing an entire market from cloth to plastic diapers?  I was just wondering about if this really was a positive change for Brasil’s families and country, or, if this just appeared to be a good change but long-term would have negative consequences for the environment, health and well-being of Brasil and its people.  When a company has such far-reaching impact on whole groups and nations, there must be thoughtfulness in every choice made.  Your thoughts?

Andrew Carneige’s impact on the US is still evident in many ways today. In particular, the great buildings he provided for cultural advancement as a way of giving back to the community. He had 5 ‘laws of the mind’  he used to guide his focus and, consequently, drive his results. They are just as appropriate today as they were in Carneige’s time.

They are:

1. Fix your goal firmly and precisely in your mind. Precision is key.

2. Determine what you intend to give in return for reaching your objective. In his case, it was often buildings and public works. So clearly giving back was a key ingredient to his success, it wasn’t just a nice thing to do with his wealth. When you give back, others continue to use your services and products so a self-fulfilling prophecy gets established.

 3. Establish specific dates when you intend to have achieved your goal.

4. Create a definite plan and commit it to writing.

5. Read your plan twice a day. Keep it top of mind. What you focus on is what you get.

Great words to live. And there is tremendous evidence that Carneige’s formula works. What is the goal you want to achieve.  How about using this 5-step plan to make it become a reality!

An interesting list of 13 common, habitual practices our nation’s management uses that don’t work:

From Business Week, by Aubrey C Daniels, to read full article go here: http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/aug2009/ca20090811_861931.htm

With executives under fire for driving their companies into the ground—and taking the economy with them—it’s time for a managerial paradigm shift that focuses on the root of all booms and busts: individual behavior. Many time-honored management practices, such as layoffs, yearend bonuses, and automatic pay raises, actually reward employees’ bad habits and punish good behavior, often with devastating results.

These practices stem from theories of performance that have little to do with the science of learning. As such, they result in many mistakes initiated by senior leadership at great cost. They’re endorsed for the best of reasons but fail to lead to the desired result.

So why do so many organizations continue to embrace faulty practices? My 30 years of experience with Corporate America have led me to believe most business leaders are trained in the math of balance sheets, not the science of human behavior. They don’t understand that you can’t change organizational behavior without changing human behavior. Only when managers understand the basic principles of behavioral science and apply them skillfully will they realize the full potential of their employees and their organizations.

A Chance for Change

While management in general is proving challenging today, there is a silver lining to this current economic crisis: It provides a rare opportunity for managers to rethink and reform the way they run their organizations, using an approach grounded in science and research rather than in dubious habits. Businesses have been wasting time, funds, and resources on the same tired approaches for years. This crisis can actually provide us with a chance to start fresh and set in motion a sea change in the way we manage behavior and performance.

Please see a slide show featuring 13 universally used, but ultimately ineffective, management practices—and prescriptions for how to change them.

Alexander Kjerulf is “Chief Happiness Officer” and consults globally to change businesses and work environments from stressful and anxious to places of fun and happiness. Two great posts:

“the top 10 seriously cook workplaces” names and shows workplaces that have the best work atmosphere (including of course Google, but also Red Bull London and MindLab in Denmark, and Pixar. http://positivesharing.com/2006/10/10-seeeeeriously-cool-workplaces/

A thought-provoking post about why employee performance reviews are not only a waste of time, but also damaging to motivation. Tell us your thoughts? http://positivesharing.com/2008/01/performance-reviews-are-a-big-fat-waste-of-time/

Dan Gilbert’s Quicken Loans has a great idea for a blog, called WHat’s the Diff http://www.whatsthediff.com/about.html

“a blog all about the things that make the difference in business and in life. Most of the time, it’s the little things. But every so often it’s something really big. At Quicken Loans, our team members cite “the ability to make a difference” as the biggest key to their job satisfaction. We consider this one of the most important facets of our company and corporate culture. So, we decided to search the planet for things that make a difference. Everyday, we want to celebrate those that make a difference and call out those that don’t. It’s that simple.”

What a great idea for a blog!

We came across this great article posted by Rosabeth Moss Kanter on her blog http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/kanter/ and we wanted to share.  From Kennedy’s life we can take away some significant leadership lessons:  leading with a purpose, making a difference, perseverance, staying true to roots and family: these qualities in leadership truly matter and are worth cultivating in our own quests and lives.

Ted Kennedy’s Leadership Lessons By Rosabeth Moss Kanter