Shifting Paradigms- An Interesting Endeavor

So here I am again talking about shifting paradigms and why that is so critically important at this juncture. Based on my experiences of the last few years, but especially the last few weeks I thought I would share and discuss "the road less traveled".

As my partner brilliantly explained several months ago, a paradigm is how we see things. It represents our "filter" or belief system. As you might suspect it plays a huge impact on how we do our jobs, live our lives, and view change as either a threat or an opportunity.

One of my clients is engaged in paradigms shifts in two fundamental areas that are both very different, yet intertwined. They are involved in the "business" of philanthropy. Actively seeking donations and dollars from people to invest in the infrastructure of health care delivery. I talk about at least two major paradigm shifts because at minimum that is what we are dealing with.

The cost and delivery of health care in the U.S. has reached critical mass. You can debate where the "fault" lies, but at this stage does it really matter? We have millions of under-insured and uninsured in the system. As the economy continues to falter those numbers will increase, not decrease. In addition to the cost dimensions of the crisis we are reaching critical mass in yet another dimension of delivery- the availability of trained health care professionals at every level, from primary care physicians to nurses and other related skills.

We have relied historically on employer and government based systems to provide much of the care. As employers "get out of that role" we will see increased pressure on the government side. Health care organizations are also seeing more patients "present" or access care through the emergency room, the least efficient way for that to occur. It is also the most expensive and providers are being forced to "write off" more and more care. As the economy declines I fear that trend will increase rather than lessen.

The philanthropy model in many cases has the "grateful donor" as its core. The grateful donor is based on care being provided to a loved one or the person themselves and their willingness to give something back. There is also the approach of providing for the less fortunate as a sense of "noblesse oblige". My concern is that neither of these models addresses the root causes of the problem.

Another client, also in the health care "business" is engaged in an effort to address issues like cost management, efficiency, reduced reimbursements, and other issues as well. Like many businesses engaged in such a culture change the tools of benchmarking, cost reduction, lean delivery, and others are being evaluated and implemented.

Next week, I am going to have the opportunity to talk about Web 2.0 or "social networking" with a group of business people and why it is relevant to them.

What ties all of these things together is that each requires a paradigm change, a new way of looking at things. That change is behavioral and emotional, not just systemic.

I have written a great deal about the concept and criticality of engagement over the last few months. Engagement is the art and science of successfully executing a paradigm shift. Done successfully the organization enjoys significant competitive advantages in productivity, profitability, and sustainability. Done unsuccessfully or attempting to execute change without considering engagement and you have a melt down. Can you say Detroit or the financial services debacle?

I had the opportunity to read an interview with Roberto Sebutal, CEO of Itau Unibanco in the McKinsey Quarterly. I am attaching the link for you here: http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Organization/Change_Management/Transforming_a_high-performing_company_An_interview_with_Roberto_Setubal_2312

I would suspect that most of you like me, have never heard of him before. He is the CEO of a financial institution that by market capitalization represents one of the top 20 banks in the world.

He may be my new hero. The interview describes his decision to boldly embrace a new paradigm and embrace a change strategy in an organization that was performing well and considered highly successful both internally and externally. Mr. Sebutal was a visionary who saw the need for change and embraced it before his institution was in crisis. His strategy also embraced some things that would bring terror to the average Boardroom, among them:

• Decentralization of decision making to the lowest appropriate level.
• Creating forums for people involved in the decisions to have input and challenge "conventional wisdom" without fear of retaliation.
• Changing the human resource management systems to include; hiring "right", performance management, compensation delivery, and other key behaviors and metrics.
• Making commitment to the new culture mandatory for continued employment and either allowing or encouraging individuals who couldn't or wouldn't make the change pursue other options.
• Building transparency into the decision making processes for both employees and customers.
• Holding himself and his executive team personally accountable for role modeling the appropriate behavior.
• Recognizing it is a journey rather than an event.

When asked where the bank was in the transformation process he responded " we have been at the process for about three years, I see us as being about halfway there."

Mr. Sebutal didn't just execute a change program, he is leading a paradigm shift. The other interesting thing is almost all of the key initiatives he discussed are about people and relationships rather than about systems and numbers. He is creating commitment rather than compliance and building upon a foundation of trust rather than systems.

So my point is that the paradigms we are currently using are going to have to change. The old ones simply aren't relevant and they aren't working.

If you take a look at Sebutal's approach and my Compliance to Commitment model(TM) you might just see some parallels.......

An Afternoon With Bob Dylan...

I had the opportunity to spend the afternoon with Bob Dylan today; not literally of course, but in my car traveling between client engagements. Maybe it was the fact that it was a beautiful afternoon, a rarity in Oregon this early in the season, my mood or whatever. It gave me a opportunity to listen deeply to someone I believe to be one of the greatest poets and storytellers of this century. One of his songs about "Maggie's farm" was especially compelling with the lines "I have so many ideas in my head I think I may go insane" and another "the more you try to be yourself the more they try to make us all the same". Pretty profound stuff, especially if like me you find yourself occasionally traveling to the beat of a different drummer.

My time this week is being spent differently, yet somehow the same.

I spent yesterday morning with a deeply committed executive and community steward who is embarking on a new role to create a system of philanthropic outreach in multiple communities to address the issue of health care costs. Our discussion was about a new paradigm both for the team he will be working with and the communities they serve and the donors they aspire to cultivate. Philanthropy has traditionally been interpreted as charity. We are trying to redefine it as an investment in both a societal infrastructure that is critical and as a potential economic engine to catalyze a stalled economy. It is also vitally important to him that this team see him as a resource and coach rather than an "imposer" of corporate solutions. In his own way he wants to build an infrastructure and relationship based on commitment rather than compliance. An endeavor I applaud.

This morning I had a chance to speak to a group of human resources professionals about "hiring right". I deliberately chose to take an esoteric track and talk about attributes and commitment rather than profiling and skills assessment. I truly believe than technical skills are not enough. When I look back at the model created by Roger Deprey, the Human Resources Pyramid; Paul Hersey's Situational Leadership, and Ron Willingham's congruency models I see a lot more potential about creating engagement and the resulting benefits than I do with DISC or other profiling techniques. I am not saying profiling for skills and attributes lacks validity or value, I just don't think they create engagement. I took the tack this morning that the first step in creating real engagement is your selection process. Hiring "right" is as much about values and cultural fit as it is abouts KSA's, maybe more.

Tomorrow and the next day I am getting an opportunity to work with a cross functional, multi level group including supervisors, union stewards, and executives on conflict resolution. The fact that we are doing it at all and doing it in "mixed" groups is a brave experiment for this organization. The first step of addressing an issue is admitting you have an issue. I am intrigued and excited about my opportunity to work with this group on their "maiden" voyage of a training like this.

Perhaps because I am so committed to it I see all three of these endeavors as people and organizations taking a step towards recognizing and embracing the power of relationships and people as well as the importance of "systems" in addressing the issues that face us as both business people and members of society. Maybe I am just seeing things and Dylan and I have that "insanity" from too many ideas in common. I wonder.

I don't think the current paradigms are going to work, we are going to have to challenge, experiment, "fail", and try again.

In the meantime if you get the chance to spend an afternoon with Bob Dylan I strongly recommend it. If you really listen it will tell you a story and make you think, and I think that is what great poetry and great music are supposed to do......

Failure, Loss, and Other Character Builders

Steve Tobak, Jeffrey Pfeffer, and Stanley Bing are three of my favorite author/bloggers these days. All three are well respected authors with multiple books under the belt and the reputation and credibility to be very comfortable not being politically correct. As you might suspect the state of the current economy has given all three plenty of material to work with as they both proactively share their views on how we got here and respond to the questions of others.

All three have spent some time lately talking about leadership and character and what it takes to achieve and maintain true leadership stature. The topic of failure is especially an interesting one.
I spend a bit of time on the social networking site LinkedIn (have you seen what’s on TV these days) both asking and responding to questions. For those of you unfamiliar with it, LinkedIn is kind of FaceBook for those of us with 40 in our rear view mirror.

I have always been intrigued with what constitutes failure for different people so on Sunday evening I posted a three part question:
· What is your most significant “failure” to date?
· What did you learn from it?
· What if anything would you do differently?
Well, I got to tell you folks, did I apparently hit a hot button. Within 24 hours of my posting my question I had over 25 responses from all over the world! So far as of right now with less than 48 hours into it I am up to 46 answers and counting!
The answers themselves are very interesting. They range from philosophical to analytical with everything in between. About one in three actually answered all three of the sub-questions. Some of the responses were deeply sincere and intimate, they really gave me a brief window into the people behind the answer and I have added several new “connections” as a result.
Although I tried not to pre-bias the responses I received; I agree with Tobak, without “failure” you never really appreciate success and take the risks necessary to make meaningful progress. I also believe failure is when you stop trying and just embrace the status quo.

There was also a question about character on LinkedIn; are you born with it, or is it shaped over time. Once again I have a bias. You may have the attributes, but until they have been tested you really don’t know about your character.

One of the people I got to “meet” as a result of my question was an awesome young woman from Canada (I can say she is awesome because I checked out her profile on LinkedIn and got to read some of her questions and answers)
As part of our exchange she shared with me some of her own personal experiences about failure, loss, and the building of character.

A few years ago she had a beloved pet that had aged and developed health issues to the point where she and her mother thought it might be in the animal’s best interest to put it down. Among other issues the dog had gone completely blind. They chose not to and the great part of the story was the pet’s ability to adapt to its infirmity and persevere for two more years without too much deterioration in its quality of life. The story became even more compelling when a series of other events occurred in her life including:
· Her Mother’s diagnosis with cancer
· Major surgeries for both her father and father in law
· A diagnosis of infertility
She said she draws some of her inspiration from her conversation with her Mother about her (her Mothers’s) terminal diagnosis. Her mother told her “just as Baby (their pet) adapted, I will adapt and persevere”.
Currently her mother has continued to fight her disease and she has soldiered on through the other “speed bumps” that life has put in her path.
So where am I going with this. I believe in this time and in this place it is character and the willingness to learn from “failure” that will define true leaders, not MBA’s and technical skills. It is engagement and trust and relationships, not capital and technology. We have relied on those for too long and look where we are as a result.
True leadership and character and formed and tested through adversity. Show me someone who has never failed and I see either a leader; who recognizes that failure is when you quit, or a score keeper who plays not lose rather than to win.

I also think leadership comes as a gift from others; when you have lost and persevered you have started to build not only the “skills” to lead, but the empathy and compassion that true leadership requires. You don’t get that in graduate school, you get that in life.

As to my young friend I see real leadership in her future. She has suffered adversity and persevered, she has the courage to soldier on, and she has a wonderful articulate way of sharing her experiences as a way not to evoke sympathy, but rather to create empathy. That my friends is what true leadership is based on….

The Ides of April

Maybe it is a desperate desire for Spring to really arrive or watching the roller coaster of the market, but I sense a need and an opportunity for change.

Once again I have had an opportunity to do some reading and a lot of thinking. A while back I had the opportunity to participate in a survey/study on what makes Human Resources an effective business partner. I just got the results and they weren't terribly surprising to me. The authors wisely pointed out that many of the suggestions regarding HR as a function related to other "staff" functions as well. The big three certainly do:

• Your function needs to exist in the context of the larger organization. Great HR systems, accounting systems, etc do not exist in a vacuum. They need to be integrated into the business. For those of you in an agency or not for profit the business is achieving the organizational mission. The fact that the objective is not a return to shareholders doesn't give us an excuse not to perform effectively and efficiently.
• You need to be value added. It is easy to hide behind compliance or other rules and regulations to explain to our customers why they can't do what they believe they need and want to do. If it was always easy they wouldn't need us. I like to think that when I was involved as an internal HR practitioner I saw myself as a consultant. My job was to provide technical expertise and facilitation to my "clients". When I say facilitation that's what I mean as well. Human resources is a function not a department. We should be sure that management and leadership of our organization both possesses and demonstrates core competency in things like setting expectations, giving feedback, and even administering compensation. Those are tools we should be providing to them, not doing for them.
• Own your space. By this I mean that you need to see yourself as an organizational peer and make sure you have the credibility to pull it off. That means that as well as competency in your discipline you need to be competent about your business. You don't get a seat at the table by either waiting to be invited or by not being able to contribute as a thought partner when you are invited to play.

I also had an opportunity to read a blog post by Stanley Bing on BNET. Like Jeffrey Pfeffer, Bing takes the "mba's" to task. He points out that much of our graduate business education is based on theoretical statistical models and systems; many of which he believes and I agree got us where we are today. We love systems and technology in the U.S. and they are valuable tools if they are used to empower people. Too often they are not, they are vehicles to reduce headcount or costs.

It was interesting, I was having a discussion with my son the other day about our current economic situation with a focus on Detroit. He informed me that a big part of the issue was the lack of personal accountability for the work performed by individuals and protected by the unions. I remember being his age and believing that as well; until I had an opportunity to work in a collective bargaining environment that fully embraced the philosophy of capitalism and Frederick W. Taylor. For those of you that don't remember, Taylor was the "father" of scientific management, the concept that managers manage and workers do what they are told. Add to that the Calvinist concept of pre-destination and you have a kind of industrial elitism that still exists in many industries and organizations.

I am not an apologist for the UAW, but our history of not so benevolent autocracy contribute significantly to the history of labor relations in America.

I think it is telling that we still call the skills surrounding understanding behavior and people "soft" skills while managing machines, systems, and numbers are "hard" skills.

You have heard me and others talk about the return on investment from creating truly engaged organizations. It would seem many of the skills required to do this are "soft" skills.

For those of you that are in the HR profession or other related areas that would be interested in the results of my colleagues study, drop me an email and I would be glad to forward you the summary.

As always your comments and thoughts appreciated.

Yes, Virginia We Still Need Leaders!

I saw question on LinkedIn this week that really kind of caught me off guard. It was asking why we can't outsource management like other "non-core" functions.
That explains a lot to me about where we are in our current relationships between stakeholders and the financial crisis. One response to that question was that we already had outsourced management- their role is to represent the "owners" interest in interacting with customers.
Hmm, not much of a stakeholder viewpoint there.

I read a couple of excellent articles on BNET this week. The first was by Jeffrey Pfeffer, the professor and author from Stanford. He was talking about the real lessons we should be learning from the Detroit meltdown. He points out that indirectly the leadership of the auto industry has inferred that much of the issue can be laid at the feet of the UAW- that paying for health care and retirement benefits represents $1500 to $2000 per vehicle. He examined it a little deeper and said he believes the bigger issue is the $6000 per vehicle difference in revenue per vehicle between Detroit and Japan! He said he got those numbers from an industry report that is no longer published, because of resistance from the Big three.

Pfeffer says the real problem is one of desirability; American production vehicles are not as desirable so the big three has relied on incentives to create sales rather than design innovation, quality and other differentiators. He also talks about the the billions that GM and Chrysler paid out to appease shareholders. The Japanese reinvested in better equipment, better technology, and financial reserves. His indictment is that the people running Detroit (and Wall Street) have been obsessed with the numbers to the detriment of listening to customers and employees.

Steve Tobak talks about similar leadership failures in high technology and other industries- can you say AIG or the financial services sector? One of the things I have noticed over the last few months is a resounding silence around personal accountability from industry "leadership". He goes on to say we need to get it- we are not a global monopoly anymore. Customers have choices and will act on them.

We blame it on the economy, we blame it on the unions, and now we are itching to blame it on the Chinese for buying up our debt!

I have talked before about true engagement, your customers and your employees, and the resulting benefits. I have also discussed the issue Pfeffer focuses on ; we need real leadership, not management by the numbers. I am not suggesting that numbers aren't an important consideration, but I would submit if you focus on the core activities you need to create true engagement the numbers will follow.

The role of the leader is to create clarity for the entire organization, the role of management is to remove the ambiguity between the larger vision and the individual employee's job. If we have gotten to the stage where we truly believe that we can outsource those things we truly are in deep trouble.

Brands, Lighthouses, and other Icons

“Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships”
Charles Simic

Last week as I mentioned in this blog I had a chance to talk with my sister in law; a very talented communications professional, about iconic brands, connections and related concepts.

We talked about what creates an iconic brand, she felt the elements include among other things:

A defining brand truth. Think about the concept of a defining brand truth. It articulates value statement not only to your customers, but also to your employees. It allows them to commit rather than merely comply.

• A set of in transient principles. Great brands refuse to compromise on their principles. They may change a process or a look, but they retain their essence. What they represent is foundational and consistent.
• Great brands are iconic. Think about great brands. Brands like Porsche, Mercedes, Xerox, Kleenex, McDonald's, Starbucks and others. They are a benchmark. Their "brand" is instantly recognizable.
• They create and reinforce an experience. Think about that. Great brands literally create expectancy. You don't just go there or dine there; you experience them in a variety of ways.
  
• They are inspirational and aspirational. As we have talked about with the new definition of engagement a great brand creates a pride of affiliation. Employees and customers take pride in their association with the organization; they champion the product or brand. They become benchmarks.
  
• Great brands are enduring. They continue to deliver value to their stakeholders; shareholder, employee and community.

We posted our thoughts on the popular social networking site and got some terrific insights and opinions from others as well. They ranged from brand as promise, to brand as purely a marketing tool or tactic. I think there is room for both.

There were also some interesting discussions about whether organizations start out striving to create an iconic brand, or iconic brands happen over time. I believe that iconic brands are deliberate. The “crafter” starts with a premise rather than just a product. I don’t think that can be created by a group of marketing professionals alone, no matter how talented. It must be planned and systemic. I also see a convergence between iconic brands and true engagement.
If you examine some of the things I have discussed previously in my writing about true engagement you come across Pepper and Rogers definition of the old engagement model: the intellectual, behavioral, and emotional model. At the intellectual level people (your employees and hopefully your customers) agree with your vision statement or brand premise. At the behavioral level they start to operate with a sense of brand loyalty, they seek out your product or service. At the emotional level they go further; they recommend you to friends and family.
Pepper and Rogers go on to describe new levels: the levels of best product or service, and the pride of association. To me that describes being a benchmark, and finally achieving almost cult like status. Does every brand seek or achieve that level- no, but I would submit that is what differentiates an iconic brand from a regular brand. Do we really believe that just happens coincidentally? Or that the marketing department can create that kind of affiliation by itself?
Pepper and Rogers also describe that this true engagement can only be built upon a foundation of trust, and that you will never enjoy greater engagement from your customers than you enjoy from your employees.
To be iconic, both your employees and your customers must trust you and what your brand represents. They go further indicating that a 2003 survey indicated that outstanding service represented the compelling “buying” decision in 51% of the consumers surveyed and over 80% indicated they would terminate a relationship because of a bad experience. So to a great extent your employees are your brand.
Is it just me or do you notice a significant degree of correlation between my sister in law’s elements of a great brand and Pepper and Rogers description of the elements of engagement? They both require a huge investment in developing and nurturing relationships.
You might be asking yourself – where are you going with this? Okay, I’ll get to my point. Our future is dependent on trust based relationships; not technology, not product innovation, but relationships.
I want to explore that through a couple of different avenues.

Exploring Engagement
In my last “corporate” job I was an executive with a financial services organization. As a credit union we really felt like we owned the market on the relationship thing. Credit unions like to point out- we are member owned. We have members, not customers. I remember being told we have 90,000 members. Being an outsider and therefore not very bright I asked – “how do we define members?” Boy, did that cause a shit storm!
It turned out that we defined “member” essentially as anyone who had an account with us. We were pretty bummed out when we applied metrics closer to the ones espoused by Pepper and Rogers and found out most of our members were not members at all, they were customers, and frankly not all that engaged.

We spent almost three and a half years developing and implementing an engagement strategy. It included all the elements that are included in both Pepper and Rogers and my sister’s model. We built it from the inside out. At least for a period of time we enjoyed the fruits of that endeavor, we went beyond a financial organization to creating true engagement with the financial metrics to validate our claim. I won’t bore you with the details. If you are interested they are available in my previous white paper- New Paradigm for Credit Unions. I can’t say whether they have transcended the boundary to iconic or merely enjoyed an interlude. That is for others to judge.
One of the other models I would like to examine is my sister in law’s iconic brand. I won’t specifically identify it, but I assure you, you would immediately recognize it. They have taken it beyond a beverage to creating affiliation and brand loyalty. They aspire to do that with other brands they own and manage. They are doing that through a systemic multi faceted approach that includes both external and internal branding.

A Call for a New Leadership Foundation
In the credit union industry and in fact across financial services we have looked for our “leadership” and new strategies to come from two primary areas- finance and operations. I think if you were to examine the career paths of the vast majority of CEOs in both banking and credit unions you would find that one of those disciplines represents their career path. In fact as a culture I think the U.S. is much more comfortable with leaders coming from these “hard” disciplines. We revere technology and product. We tend to shy away from relationship based strategies. Our labor relations legal infrastructure is in fact one of the most archaic and adversarial in the developed world.

Our top business schools also tend to focus much more on “operational” and financial skills rather than communications and the skills around building trust and engagement. Current headlines are screaming that the MBA degree is largely responsible for the current financial crisis and demise of so much of our economy. How interesting that we absolve ourselves of any responsibility for reinforcing that culture through our hiring and succession planning activities.

I will go out on a limb and make myself even more unpopular by stating that much of what we teach would it in what my colleague Ty Warren would describe as “mapping” skills. We claim to revere leadership, but we teach and reinforce mapping.

I have found that most traditional approaches to engagement are focused almost exclusively externally. We measure customer reaction, loyalty, and satisfaction. We spend billions in crafting marketing campaigns and strategies to capture them. I also find it interesting that the first two areas that organizations usually cut in financially stressful times are marketing and training- the relationship building things.
A few years ago I took a position that the most important “management” functions in organizations were going to be marketing and human resources management. I stand by that premise today and I would like to take through my argument as to how true engagement represents the appropriate hybrid of both disciplines.

A New Solution
It is easy to blame the unions or the business schools for where we are and how we got there, but the real issue is the American labor relations model which requires the negotiation on the effects of technology, but not its implementation and the traditional model of capitalism which rewards the shareholder at the expense of the stakeholder. Both are both huge contributing factors. I would submit that the codependency that accompanied moving from an agrarian to an industrial society contributed as well. We abandoned personal competency. The model almost makes engagement in that setting impossible.
It is still interesting for me today to talk with employers and individuals about the “systems” that are going to facilitate our recovery from the current recession. We are still looking for a technological solution rather than a relationship based solution.

My friends Pepper and Rogers say that organizations that successfully embrace an integrated engagement strategy enjoy competitive advantages in three key areas: Productivity, Performance, and Sustainability. I don’t know about you, but those represent my big three! The advantages are in the personal commitment that each person makes to the goals of the organization, not their technological superiority.
Now let’s examine the critically of the integrated solution. My colleagues in marketing play a critical role in building the baseline of engagement. They gather the information regarding the needs and desires of the served and un-served customer base. They report on our ability to interpret the customer’s requirements and meet or exceed their expectations. They identify the potential opportunities and create the framework for the trust between customer and vendor.

Let’s talk about what they can’t do by themselves. An earlier quote said,”to your customers, your employees are the brand.”

A quote from the Harvard Business Review puts it even more succinctly –
“Too many organizations focus on what customers think – to the exclusion of what employees think. Companies are more likely to be growing if employee’s opinions of the company are better than customers’.”

Guess what, your marketing department can do a great job crafting and shaping your brand, but your management team has to make it real at the individual level.

How important is the manager you ask? Well, that same HBR article puts it this way-
“One bad manager can pollute multiple levels of an organization, and poor management brings down employee morale, which spills over into the engagement level of customers.”
James L. Heskett, one of the authors of the Service Profit Chain says “….But it also requires actions. That is when managers are not managing by the values and cannot be admonished or retrained to do so (which rarely works), they have to go.”

Before you delegate this to Human Resources you need to stop and recognize that this is a systemic issue. In short this is a leadership issue. Too many times I see Marketing or Human Resources being put “in charge” of these initiatives. That is corporate speak for nobody else wants to manage it and address the fact that we may have to make real changes.
I can’t tell you how many times in my career I have seen organizations tolerate management performance that is unacceptable. I hear “He’s really a great manager except for the people thing.” Guess what, the people thing is at the core of engagement.

If we look at the failure of the financial institutions and the automotive industry I believe we will find that the key mistakes were made in these areas of engagement and leadership. It was not technology that failed us, it was people.

So I would challenge you to examine the elements of those sustainable brands and my Compliance to Commitment model™. I would submit you are going to find several common elements:
· They are about congruency.
· They are about clarity.
· They are experiential.
· They are shared by people.
· They are systemic and synergistic.
· They are built on the same foundation, the foundation of trust.

There is no magic solution to the times that we find ourselves in. I believe that only through creating and reinforcing models that incorporate trust, communications, personal competency, and personal accountability at every level will be find our way to a new model.

Melanie and I have chosen to build lighthouses. They don’t chart your path, they light your way. Each person has to plot their own course, but by creating a lighthouse you expose the rocks and the shoals.
We agree with Marcus Buckingham-
“ Today’s most respected and successful leaders are able to transform fear of the unknown into clear visions of whom to serve, core strengths to leverage and actions to take. They enable us to pierce the veil of complexity and identify the single best vantage point from which to examine our complex roles. Only then can we take clear, decisive action.
Effective leaders don’t have to be passionate. They don’t have to be charming. They don’t have to be brilliant…They don’t have to be great speakers. What they must be is clear.”

Isn’t it time to explore a new model before we lose another “icon”?
“Commitment is the act of being physically, psychologically, and emotionally impelled. It means that employees gladly give up other options.”
Ken Matejka, Why This Horse Won’t Drink, 1991