Is Your Leadership Encouraging Screen or Face Time?

Is your obsession with order, driving your company to input more data, generate more reports and distracting your employees from delighting your customer.
Yesterday a hundred megabyte drive was sufficient storage, today it's in the terabytes. The drastic reduction of costs associated with data storage is allowing companies to save, compile and sort to discover incremental performance of their people. This incessant need to measure, control and create predictability within the business may be having a counter intuitive effect on the company and its staffs abilities to serve the customer. In order to successfully use this data it needs to be converted into actionable information. Which means someone is entering the data, another is determining the relevancy, and your managers are reading it to take actions. What use to be a single document is now a dashboard full of meters, indicators and controls. The barrier is that while your assessing the information who is serving the customer.

If you think of this as Screen Time (Data collection, Information assessment, and Dash Board Controls) verses Face Time (human to human interactions). What is your Screen Time to Face Time ratio? What are your front line employees and their managers Screen Time to Face Time Ratio? If your like many companies your supervisors are becoming less capable of managing people (Face Time) and more capable of managing information (Screen Time). The inherent issue with this, is that as you try to move that information to action, your people can no longer effectively engage them. They have stopped building their people strengths by spending too much time on Scree Time.

Great Leader vs. Great Manager Is There A Difference?

When you are confident that you are a good Manager, does that mean that you are automatically a good Leader? Leadership should not be considered to be the same as management. They are different, yet not in the way most people presuppose. Leadership is not something that requires a specific personality profile, such as one requiring charm or a sense of inquisitiveness. Leadership is not a replacement for management nor is it to be thought of as being even better than management. Leadership and management are two distinctly different systems that must both be alive and complimentary in every successful organization. Management is more about system interactions, processes and accountability that keep the organization running. Leadership is directly responding to change and the use of it applied to improving or supporting others.

The challenge is to combine great leadership with great management, skillfully balancing the two. Do you see your company as being over managed and under led? Are you developing your leadership capacity? Additionally, have you identified someone within your organization as the next leader?

Two Fold Increase in Alignment, Engagement & Accountability

Are You An Impostor?

Many leaders in their quiet moments (who ever has those?) think that they are impostors. This is a phenomenon that prevents people from accepting their own accomplishments. They feel that somehow they bluffed, got lucky, or deceived others on their way to the top and never feel confident of the decisions they are making or how they are leading others. What would amaze many employees, and many citizens, is that this is not uncommon.
Perhaps more amazing is that most of these leaders are anything but impostors. They have worked hard, taken calculated risks, and made many smart decisions in their rise to the top. And despite their lack of personal confidence, they continue to be successful. Perhaps it is not in spite of, but because of, the way they see themselves that they are able to rely on others more easily for help and demonstrate great leadership by not going it alone.
If you are interested in learning if you you suffer from this and are not sure you can take a quick assessment at LaliMunro.

Meeting Tips: Do you give adequate time to the important things?

At the end of the year, I was shopping for a new laptop (I'm a bleeding-edge technology junkie) to take advantage of some tax benefits. I must have spent hours sorting through the labyrinth of possibilities. And part of this selection process was to maximize value. I put more time into this $2,000 purchase than I put into much more important decision I needed to make.

I will spend 30 minutes driving from Costco to Target to save $25 dollars on a new telephone, while I would easily spend $2,000 on an additional option on my car just to make the transaction easier.

There is a real gap for people and organizations in how they allocate time against the importance of a decision.

You may decide to acquire a company, rush to the purchase, and spend more money than you have made as an organization since you have been in business. Even if it took you ten years to make that much money, you might not contemplate the oddity of your expediency.

I was speaking with a superintendent of a very successful school district the other day over lunch. And he shared with me how school boards can take five minutes to discuss and approve a $50 million budget and then spend 30 minutes on a $1,200 item three weeks later. This is likely not surprising to any of you that have led an organization and handled a role with P & L responsibilities. It is still very disturbing.

When faced with minor decisions, move on. Don’t waste your time; it is too valuable! When faced with important, significant decisions, however, take the time to consider the impact even if it means walking away from the deal. What is often missed is all the regrettable outcomes that are unforeseen when you rush your decision making.

Every Rule Has an Exception. Especially this One!

For every rule, it seems like there’s at least one exception—and often many.

The rule in book publishing: If you have one success, repeat it until it is no longer profitable to do so! Your audience expects a certain style and expertise from you, and will generally be disappointed if their expectations aren’t met. And sequels often succeed (at least financially) if the first effort was well-received, so authors have substantial motivation to continue in the same vein.

The co-author of Just Asked Leadership, Eric Vrooman, and I have been looking for an interesting topic for our next leadership book. We could go deeper into the “how to” of Just Ask Leadership; we pretty much have all the content developed from the training program we created. But if you follow in the footsteps of others, it doesn’t really feel like your path.

We’re not only thinking about being exceptions to the rule, we’re thinking about writing on that very subject. What are notable exceptions to the rule? And, more specifically, when is it a good idea to break from convention?

I watched a TV drama recently where a genetic specialist, who was charged with helping people get pregnant, raised her daughter to be pro-life. When her fifteen-year-old daughter gets pregnant, however, she pleads with her to get an abortion. Abortion is, of course, a polarizing subject—too big and weighty to reduce to a single case—but clearly there was an exception here to the genetic specialist’s rule: every life is sacred and must be protected at all costs.

The other day, my daughter was writing a paper for school regarding her feelings about WWII. She began the paper by explaining her rule: War is bad. Then came the exception: When a psychopath takes control of a country and attempts to take control of the world forcibly, war is necessary. My other daughter has a teacher who gives a backpack full of homework on a daily basis and expects it to be done on time. Does this rule apply to her, the teacher, when it comes time to meeting her own grading deadlines? Regrettably, no.

Rick Diamond (CEO Breathe Laser) and I had rules about expenses for our employees at ACI, and we had exceptions to the rule for the owners: not a very good idea, we learned.

What are the consequences to violating rules—conventional ones and the ones you set for yourself or loved ones? When do exceptions reveal problems with the rule and when do they reveal problems with the rule’s followers or enforcers? And what exactly is at stake? Respect, certainly. But does the pregnant daughter respect her mother less (for violating her own teachings) or more (for demonstrating her love and concern for her daughter)?

To what degree are rules the product of values and beliefs?

What is the point of having rules if exceptions are bound to come up?

What rules do you follow, what exceptions do you make, and how do you justify them?

We’re still feeling out if this subject is book-worthy, and would love to hear your thoughts and stories.

Meeting Tips: Time is Money

If you earn $50,000 per year, your per-minute rate is approximately $0.40 cents.

$100K $0.80
$200K $1.60
$300K $2.20
$1 Million $8.00

These figures start adding up. The total cost of a meeting for a small-to-midsize organization might be $1,000 per hour. In larger companies, the compensation packages of the leadership team alone can reach $10,000-plus an hour.

Why is it important to know these figures? Simply put, time is money, and per-minute figures help clarify whether a meeting is worth it, how long it should be, and who should attend. The per-minute figures help ensure that the organization's most valuable employees are not wasted--not even for a minute.

Are you and your team clear about the purpose of the meeting? Has the agenda been properly scrutinized and honed? Are the meetings kept on track? Is it essential for everyone to be present for the entire meeting? These are questions you ought to ask, so that the cost doesn't exceed the potential benefits.

Why Work Sucks: And what are you going to do to fix it - Interview with Cali & Jody - Part II

Click to go to Part I of the interview with Cali & Jody

Gary Cohen: What successes and failures have you had with ROWE since you started your new organization? What was the context that allowed for the success and failures?
Jody: There have been countless successes with ROWE since our organization, CultureRx, has spun off from Best Buy. Each person who says “My life is better now because of the ROWE mindset” or “I’m producing 20% more now than I used to”, or “I won’t be taking a position at another company for more money because they don’t have ROWE” is a success story. ROWE teams become more productive, are more engaged in their work, retain their best employees, and in general, are much happier.

Cali: When the ROWE movement is stunted in an organization, it’s due to leadership not walking their talk. We were working with an organization awhile back where the CEO had communicated to the employees that ROWE was going to be their future. We brought the employees about halfway through their ROWE migration and at that point in time, the CEO became very, very uncomfortable about the reality that was staring him in the face. In order to get to increased productivity and engagement, he realized he would need to let go of the traditional control he had. He’d been used to having control over employees’ time and physical location, but in a ROWE, you’re not paying for a chunk of time. You’re paying people for a chunk of work. In this particular organization, the ROWE migration ceased. This was extremely unfortunate because the employees had had their eyes opened to a much more efficient, common sense way of approaching work – which would make them much happier – and it was snatched away from them.

Gary Cohen: Changing any culture is difficult at best. What were the obstacles that you faced during the change?
Cali & Jody: The biggest obstacles to this culture change are:
1) The power of time. Today, the workplace operates under this equation: Time + Physical Presence = Results. This is an old, outdated, out to lunch way of looking at things. Time and physical presence mean nothing. Every day, people are sitting in their cubes for hours on end, but they might not be producing anything. Managers have a false sense of security that if their employees are sitting in their cubes, they’re producing. Not the case.
2) The beliefs we have about the way work should happen.
3) Judgment (Sludge) – [defined in a separate response]

ROWE is a grassroots change. It’s bottom-up. This scares leadership in organizations because they fear that their control is going away. Control over things that don’t matter does go away, but the new control is all about whether or not outcomes are being reached. This is a very difficult shift for managers to make because they’ve been trained to be hall monitors. The new generation of companies, though, will be all about results – and their managers will be, too.

Gary Cohen: If a company was not willing to take on such massive change, what one small step could they take that would provide inspiration for further change?
Cali & Jodi: Depending on the size of your organization, there are different strategies for moving into a ROWE. If you’re an organization of more than 500 people, we’d recommend identifying one group to pilot ROWE. Once success occurs and there’s data to show, the rest of the organization can move in chunks. This way, the culture change moves at a good pace. In an organization of 500 or fewer, have the leadership team read Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It and engage everyone in a discussion about the pieces of a ROWE that are most appealing and most nerve-racking. The discussion will lead to a few things you can focus on that will move you closer to the ROWE mindset.

Gary Cohen: Is there something in the timing of human development and this mix of generations (Boomers, X, & Y) that makes ROWE work today or would this always have worked?
Cali & Jody: Interesting question! The ROWE mindset would always have worked. We actually heard from a ROWE fan with a point of view that ROWE has always existed. Thousands of years ago, people had to figure out the most efficient ways to reach their outcome – eating. That’s ROWE. If you have to find food to stay alive, you’re probably not going to spend your time chatting with the people around you. That’s ROWE.
The mix of generations just provides the perfect scenario for the benefits of ROWE to be experienced. It could be easy for Boomers and Traditionalists to dictate to X and Y how they need to approach work. However, that severely undermines efficiency and holds organizations back from what they could be producing.

Gary Cohen: What type of companies does this work for and where would you expect it to fail?
Cali & Jody: ROWE works in every organization. Focusing on results is something every organization in the country – in the world – should be doing. ROWE makes that real. The only way ROWE fails is if the people in the organization don’t take accountability for making it happen.

Gary Cohen: If all things are currently working well in an organization (good margin, motivated work force, and clear and compelling mission) is ROWE something I should know about or investigate? And why or why not?
Cali & Jody: If things are working well in an organization, looking into ROWE would be a very smart move for two reasons: 1) how is “doing well” defined? And how “well” do you want to be doing? You can always go higher. 2) ROWE is inevitable. With technology improvements and societal demographics shifting, ROWE will be everywhere. The question isn’t if organizations will change, but when. And those that shift soonest will have the advantage.

Gary Cohen: What tends to be people's first reaction to ROWE when they learn about it?
Cali & Jody: When people learn about ROWE, they form a pretty concrete opinion – either they like the idea and see the benefits or they don’t like it and think it won’t work. One side or the other – not too many folks land in the middle.

Gary Cohen: How do you respond to those reactions?
Cali & Jody: We spend our time on the people that can see the benefits of ROWE. It’s tempting to focus on those that are adamant ROWE won’t work – to keep trying to convince them of the benefits. The reality is that if they really are adamant about their point of view, it’s best to let them see the success stories occur around them. Energy is best spent on those that can see the opportunities.



Gary Cohen: How do you get around the issue of leaders and the myth of control that is so prevalent in our culture? What breaks down the power and control in organizations so they can move to a ROWE? (Interview continued tomorrow)

Related Blog Posts:
Why Work Sucks! And How to Fix it. Interview with Cali & Jody - Part I
Why Work Sucks! And How to Fix it. Interview with Cali & Jody - Part 2
10 Questions to ask to begin a Results Oriented Work Environment - Part 3
13 Guide Posts to a Results Oriented Work Environment - Part 4

Leadership Definition

Social Media finds 10 Red Ballons - That is incredible!

About the DARPA Network Challenge

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems.

The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of 10 moored, 8-foot, red, weather balloons at 10 fixed locations in the continental United States. The balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roads.

A group from MIT headed by Riley Crane found these 10 red ballons in 8 hours 52 minutes. It makes you wonder with that level of thinking how many crowd sourcing miracles this world can accomplish.

Leadership - Top 5 Questions Leaders Should Ask Their Team

In our interview with Bill Treasurer earlier this week he offered some insight into what questions leaders should ask their team or organizations:

1. Where are we playing it too safe, as a business, and why?
2. How am I, as the leader, contributing to our playing it too safe as a business?
3. What business situations and/or goals are worthy of the application of peoples’ courage?
4. What would it take for people to be more willing to take risks, make smart mistakes, and be more courageous?
5. What actions can I take, as a leader, to be a better role model of courageous behavior?

Top 10 Questions To Building Courage

In our interview earlier this week with Bill Treasurer he offered these top 10 questions he asks to help an organization build courage:

1. What do we want to become as a business?
2. How can courage be applied to help us get to where we want to be?
3. Where are we playing it too safe, as a business?
4. Where is courage most needed, but often avoided, in our business?
5. Why do people avoid being courageous even though it is needed here?
6. What courageous actions from the past are we most proud of?
7. Where in the past did we fail to act courageously?
8. What are our “pink elephants” – politically sensitive, don’t-go-there areas that need to be acknowledged and addressed?
9. What would it take for people to be more willing to take risks, make smart mistakes, and be more courageous?
10. Once everyone starts behaving more courageously, what do we hope will be different?

Top 6 Ways To Build Courage & 5 Ways to Handle a Down Economy

A continuation of the interview with Bill Treasurer. Bill Treasurer is founder and Chief Encouragement Officer at Giant Leap Consulting (GLC), a courage-building company that exists to help people and organizations live more courageously. Bill is also the author of Courage Goes to Work (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2008), a book about how to inspire more courageous behavior in workplace settings. He has been cited by 100s of newspapers and magazines and has published many other books. Interestingly he was also on the US High Diving Team making over a 1,500 dives at 150 feet. Now that is courage! I asked Bill to be interviewed because of the connection his work has with Just Ask Leadership. It takes a great deal of courage at times to ask certain questions. How you ask, as Bill points out, is just as important.

Gary Cohen: You talk about building courage. How does one do strength building of this mental muscle?

Bill Treasurer: Below are some tips for helping you be more courageous at work:

· Be Mindful of the Risks of Not Risking. The risk of inaction is usually more perilous than the risk of action. As you consider a risk, be sure to be clear about the dangers of not taking the risk too!

· Ask the Holy Question. Here are the four most important words you’ll ever learn in the English language: what do you want? Most people don’t take the time to answer that question with specificity. Those who do, however, are in a much better position to figure out the actions they need to take in order to get what they want!

· Have Something to Prove. Take on challenges that cause you to have to prove yourself to yourself. When the going gets rough, having something to prove can be a source of energy and motivation.

· Make Forward-falling Mistakes. Making no mistakes is just as dangerous as making too many. Have a “mistake ratio” – a good balance between not making enough mistakes and making too many. As long as you’re the mistakes you make are forward-falling, you’re making progress.

· Harness Fear. Fear is a normal, natural, and necessary part of the work experience. While uncomfortable, fear has energy. And that energy can be useful when facing tough challenges. Harness your fear by spending time with it. The more you experience the thing that you’re afraid of, the more desensitized you become to it.

· Jump First. The best way to encourage those around you to be more courageous, is to be more courageous yourself…first! Ask yourself when was the last time you did something courageous that probably left a favorable impression on the people you work with. When did you last Jump First!

Gary Cohen: Leaders often get to a place of comfort where they are simply playing defense and protecting what they already have. How does your book and ideas help these leaders see the issues of playing defense versus staying on offense – with the skills that brought them to their current position?

Bill Treasurer: I emphasize the importance of considering the dangers of playing it too safe. Safety, when it causes an obsession with protectionism, or worse, immobilization, can be a very dangerous thing. Every risk can be divided into two; the risk of action and the risk of inaction. Too often, “safe” leaders make decisions after accounting for one (the risk of action) and not the other. Smart leaders also ask, “What is the risk of not taking the risk?”

Gary Cohen: In today’s economy, defense or survival seems to be the operating mode of many businesses. Do you have some ideas that would help leaders of organizations be more successful in these down cycle times?

Bill Treasurer: Workplace productivity and morale are taking a nosedive in the current economy. According to one recent poll, at least three out of four workers say that productivity is down, mistakes are up, and customer service is taking a major hit. Leaders have a big job to do during a down cycle. Here are some tips:

Be steady. As pressures mount in your own work, take a deep breath and try to be a little more cool, calm, and collected yourself. It may be easier said than done, but it’s a fact that people choose to follow level-headed, even-handed leaders.

Be straight. In good times and bad, workers want—and deserve—the truth. Avoid tiptoeing around tough issues and give it to them straight—no spinning or sugarcoating. And to reign in the predictable and pernicious gossip, hold regular “rumor hunts”—ongoing meetings where employees can air the latest rumors and hear the facts directly from you.

Be focused. Right now it’s easy to give in to distractions—taking your eyes off the ball and letting people and projects fall by the wayside. Don’t. Keep people laser-focused on what needs to be done—key priorities for the foreseeable future—and, at least for now, have daily status calls or check-ins.

Be gutsy. Fear can play to your base nature. Commit to rising above it and elevating yourself and your team. Stop talking to employees about what keeps you awake at night, and start talking to them about what gets you up in the morning.

Be hopeful. If there was ever a need for a can-do spirit, it is now. No downplaying the economy or giving false reassurances, but choosing optimism over pessimism, encouragement over discouragement. Start by walking the talk—making it clear, with words and actions, that as difficult as things are right now, the team is better off dealing with what “is” and facing the challenges head-on with hope and determination.

Gary Cohen: I am wondering in your work with leaders if you see asking questions as a courageous act and if so how?

Bill Treasurer: I am sure that it takes courage to ask leaders some types of questions. That said, I think asking the right questions can provoke courageous behavior. And the questions need to be asked in a way that the leader’s ears can hear. So “how” the question is asked is just as important as what question is asked. If you ask a question because you want to make the leader feel small, or because you want to punish the leader in some way, that spirit will come through and the leader will shut down. Like Oscar Wilde once said, “Whenever there is someone in authority, someone resists authority.” So before asking a hard-hitting question to a leader, check your own motive and intention.

Gary Cohen: Can you share with me an example when the question that was asked was courageous and what took place because of that question?

Bill Treasurer: I once coached a senior executive who had just gotten demoted because his boss felt that he wasn’t acting bold enough. The senior executive explained, “I don’t get it. I do everything the company and my boss wants me to do. I am a good and loyal soldier!”
I asked, “How might it serve you to stop acting like a good soldier and start behaving like a good leader?”

Then he and I talked about the difference between management and leadership, and between loyal compliance and loyal disobedience. We discussed how being a good soldier had, up until this point, defined his career, but how it had now started to become a drag on his leadership potential. He was playing it too safe, under the excuse of being a good solider. He and I set out a plan for him to behave more boldly and more leader-like. Within a year’s time, he not only got promoted, he got a raise as well. More importantly, he had made an important shift from being a safe manager to a bold leader.

Courage in Leadership - Discussion with Bill Treasurer

Bill Treasurer is founder and Chief Encouragement Officer at Giant Leap Consulting (GLC), a courage-building company that exists to help people and organizations live more courageously. Bill is also the author of Courage Goes to Work (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2008), a book about how to inspire more courageous behavior in workplace settings. He has been cited by 100s of newspapers and magazines and has published many other books. Interestingly he was also on theUS High Diving Team making over 1,500 dives at over 100 feet. Now that is courage!

I asked Bill to be interviewed because of the connection between his work and Just Ask Leadership. It takes a great deal of courage at times to ask certain questions. How you ask, as Bill points out, is just as important.

Gary Cohen: Bill Treasurer, you have a unique background that would seem to inform your work today as the leading courage consultant around the world. Can you tell us how you came to where you are today?

Bill Treasurer: I started my company, Giant Leap Consulting, in 2002, after spending 6 years as an executive in Accenture’s change management practice. I named the company Giant Leap Consulting because I used to take “giant leaps” for a living. I am a former member of the
U.S. High Diving Team who overcame a debilitating fear of heights to, eventually, perform over 1500 high dives from heights that scaled to over 100 feet – three times higher than the highest platform in the Olympic games. Thus, it was my own personal encounters moving through fear, and therefore gaining courage, that set me on my path.

Gary Cohen: What question were you answering in writing this book?

Bill Treasurer: How can courage, which we know is so essential to living a full life, be built, strengthened, and consistently applied in workplace settings?

Gary Cohen: Who is the audience you had in mind in writing your book?

Bill Treasurer: The old adage rings true; change starts at the top. Thus the main audience of the book is leaders and managers – people who have the power to put courage inside people (encouragement).

Gary Cohen: You must be very proud to be one of the bestselling books in China.
What is it about your message and the culture of China that is making your book
sell off the shelves?

Bill Treasurer: Having the book become a bestseller in China was a wonderful surprise. It made me really think about the motivations and ambitions of Chinese workers. Business readers in China seem captivated by the idea of being more courageous at work. What is as intriguing as the book becoming a bestseller, is the number of readers who are writing positive reviews about the book…as of yesterday the book had 43 reviews. An unusually high number by most standards.

Gary Cohen: What have you learned about the Chinese culture that would help leaders in different countries be more successful in doing business in China?

Bill Treasurer: That business in China is to be taken very, very seriously! This is not the China of old, making cheap and low quality products. China today is fast-becoming a first-world superpower in every sense of the word. Western leaders who aspire to do business in China would be wise to drop any notion that somehow the Chinese are less business-minded. Western leaders would fare far better by adopting a learning and listening posture, instead of swaggering into China full of Western ego and arrogance.

Gary Cohen: Courage is one of the words that you hear in leadership courses. It is often talked about in terms of heroic leaders like Mother Teresa, Gandhi, or Martin Luther King. Often those sitting in one of these leadership sit-and-soak-it-up-type training events don’t really know how to connect with that type of courage – you know, the life-is-on-the-line type because most leaders today are not facing life or death situations. How does your view of courage help the leader who is not heroic and still wants to be a great leader?

Bill Treasurer: We need to steal courage back from the gods and bring it back to us mortals here on earth. When we create such a high standard for courage that it’s only attainable by spiritual, political, or military heroes, we push courage beyond our grasp. What’s needed is a more tempered, everyday courage. Courage doesn’t need to be grandiose to be effective. Each person has the capacity to demonstrate their courage in small, but important ways every day. The most essential element involved in being courageous is to not let fear dictate your actions.

Gary Cohen: Bill, you talk about three types of courage in your work. Can you help me understand those three types and give an example of how we would see them in the workspace?

Bill Treasurer:Nearly all courageous acts can be divided among three forms of courage. They are:

TRY Courage: The courage of first attempts, pioneering efforts, and stepping up to the plate (initiative). We see TRY Courage in action when people pursue “stretch
goals”, for example.



TRUST Courage: The courage of relying on others, assuming that other people have positive intentions, and embracing vulnerability. We see TRUST Courage being applied when workers give coworkers or bosses the benefit of the doubt, without scrutiny or suspicion.

TELL Courage: The courage of assertiveness, voicing honest opinions, and communicating without hidden agendas. We witness TELL Courage when workers speak the unvarnished and hard-to-hear truth in order to help the organization remain true to its values.

Gary Cohen: You have worked with some of the nation's largest corporations in helping them build greater courage in their culture to move forward. Can share your most rewarding engagement and what made it that way?

Bill Treasurer: I was fortunate to work on a Native American reservation in rural Oregon. I was brought in to help the Native Americans, along with a leading management consulting company, launch a new high-tech call center. My company helped the Native Americans and the management consulting company define a set of core values that would help them become a world-class commercial enterprise. It was very meaningful work, because the call center would produce sustainable jobs that were far more professional and lucrative than the jobs being produced by the reservation’s gambling casino.

The work was unlike any other we’ve ever done, and produced a unique set of core values - literally and symbolically. Not only were the core values written down, they were also symbolically rendered as paintings. I talk about this unique engagement in Courage Goes to Work. There was a bunch of TRY and TRUST Courage being displayed throughout the engagement!

Gary Cohen: You talk about building courage. How does one do strength building of this mental muscle? [See post for later this week]... (Interview Continued)

• Top 6 Ways To Build Courage & 5 Ways To Handle A Down Economy


• Top 10 Questions To Build Courage


• Top 5 Questions Courageous Leaders Should Ask Their Team

Leadership Assessment Demo

Ask Don't Tell Leadership - eBook

Ask Don't Tell Leadership - How To Create Alignment, Engagement, & Accountability

Top 10 Questions You Should Ask in Strategic Planning

Scott Glatstein, President of Imperatives, shares with us the Top 10 questions you should ask in doing strategic planning and why!

1. What’s your marketplace promise?
a. Identifies whether a clear promise exists
b. Asking the same question across the organization tests alignment
2. Lots of companies make promises they don’t keep; why should the marketplace believe yours?
a. Identifies whether the company has thought beyond the t-shirt slogan
b. Determines whether there is understanding of how the promise is delivered
3. How do your products and services deliver on the promise?
a. Checks to see if the marketplace offerings are aligned to promise made
4. Has the end-to-end customer experience been mapped to ensure it aligns with the promise?
a. Identifies the key touch points and sensitizes the company to heretofore ignored drivers of preference and success
5. Do hiring and training practices create a company culture poised to fulfill the promise?
a. Tests to see how serious the company is in driving their promise through their people
6. Are internal processes managed holistically across silos with a critical eye toward their effect on the customer experience?
a. Tests awareness of breakdowns that can occur when processes cross silos
b. Tests awareness of the effects of every process on the customer’s image of the company
7. How do you gather feedback from your market-facing employees regarding potential improvements to your business processes?
a. Tests lines of communication and respect for front-line employees
b. Offers insight into management’s awareness of the market and the organization
8. Do you have any business processes you believe are strictly internal and have no bearing on the customer? If so, why are you doing them?
a. Offers an opportunity to point out that everything the company does should, in some way, serve the customer promise. If it doesn’t, it shouldn’t be done.
9. How do you ensure new IT systems support delivery of the marketplace promise?
a. Tests linkage between the development of tools and their effect on the customer experience. (“I’m sorry sir…the system just won’t let me do that.”)
10. Do your employees embrace the tools you’ve provided or do they view them as a hindrance to doing their jobs?
a. Identifies potential disconnects that could stymie strategy implementation:
i. Employee doesn’t understand role and thus sees no value in the tool
ii. Employee understands role but tool does not enable employee to fulfill the promise
iii. Employee has not been properly trained

Sometimes A Job Badly Done Is The Job Description's Fault

by Gary B. Cohen

Usually when employees fail to fulfill the expectations their job descriptions raise, their superiors work with them to improve their performance. If that fails, they are sent packing. Such firings--and all the hurt feelings, wasted time and tried patience that accompany them--aren't always avoidable, but leaders shouldn't overlook the part the job description can play. Sometimes it's the job description that should be sent packing, not the employee.

Poorly written or conceived job descriptions abound. Some are too much about the skills and knowledge the employee should have, rather than about responsibilities. Others are what I would call "results descriptions." They say what should ultimately be achieved but nothing about how to achieve it. Still others might be called "vision descriptions." They speak mainly of the hoped-for growth of the position and/or organization. Read the rest at Forbes

From Success to Significance - Giving Back in Education

Those who know what drives me to achieve, know that it starts with educational challenges and learning differences. The emotional pain I went through feeling "less than" continues to push me today.

We all need to find our way to give back to help those who are struggling along the way. Some may be driven by urgency or need (What is the most important issue the world is facing today?). Others maybe driven by personal experience, like I am.

How do you want to move your life from success to significant? I want to do it in the world of education and here are three great programs that I support:

College Bound is an innovative program which uses college students to communicate the benefits of higher education to children in elementary schools. Started in 1994 by the McBride Foundation (New Mexico), over 150,000 students have since learned about the importance of personal responsibility, staying at grade level, and the opportunities created by higher education. Now that the high school dropout rate has risen to an alarming 60% at some inner city high schools, we believe it is urgent that impressionable children be exposed to the exciting opportunities available to them if they pursue their education.

Outward Bound is a non-profit educational organization that serves people of all ages and backgrounds through active learning expeditions that inspire character development, self-discovery and service both in and out of the classroom. Outward Bound delivers programs using unfamiliar settings as a way for participants across the country to experience adventure and challenge in a way that helps students realize they can do more than they thought possible. Customized courses provide curricula developed for struggling teens, groups with specific health, social or educational needs and business and professional organizations. Expeditionary Learning Schools Outward Bound offers a whole school reform model to more than 150 elementary and secondary schools throughout the country.

We help individuals and teams achieve their potential and develop the leadership skills needed to serve others and care for the world around them. Today Outward Bound serves 70,000 students and teachers annually.

All Kinds of Minds is a not-for-profit organization that translates the latest research from neuroscience and other disciplines on how children learn — and vary in their learning — into a powerful framework that educators can use in the classroom.

Our professional development courses offer not only breakthrough ideas but practical solutions for educators to unlock the potential of all children who learn differently.

Are you creating the value of your salary?

Last night at the fundraiser I was sitting next to a really terrific guy who spends his time similar to me as an Executive Coach. When he described his career he mentioned that he worked for General Mills in Human Resources. One day he realized that he had to put his suite coat on to walk down the hall for a meeting if he did not want to get any strange glances. It seems to have been the culture. And he thought how wild that was, this is not for me he said to himself.

Soon after he decided to work for a small company about 120 employees in the suburbs and down the hall from his cube was the OPMer's (Owner President Manager) office. He then reflected how different it was coming to work and realizing that every dollar paid to him was one that the OPMer was not going to pay himself. This observation had not hit him in quite this way before. When he worked in the food business it was a long distance between him and the shareholders - felt like it was miles away - The idea of every dollar spent on his salary is a dollar that does not go to a shareholder (via dividend or retained earnings) was way to far removed. It was then his career really began, because he wanted to keep delivering on the value return to his OPMer. Do you understand your value proposition to your owner? Are you delivering a great return? If your the leader do you think your organization understands this value trade off deeply?

Tim Brown Chief Executive of Ideo - It's all about the Question

This interview with Tim Brown, the chief executive and president of IDEO, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Tim Brown, chief executive of Ideo
Corner Office

Q. What were the most important leadership lessons you learned, and how did you learn them?

A. My very first professional design job was with this little company in the north of England. And they were an old company, straight out of the Industrial Revolution, that made woodworking machinery. They’d never hired a designer before.

Over six months, I redesigned all of their equipment for this one piece of the company. Toward the end of that, the chairman said: “Hey, Tim, I really like what you’ve been doing while you’ve been here. I want to take you to all our other divisions around England, and I want you to advise the people running those businesses what they should do about design.”

I was 21 or 22 years old. Here was this guy who was chairman of this relatively large company in England, taking the advice of me, this really young person. For some reason, he trusted what I was doing. I was bringing in new ideas, he liked them and he wanted to share them around the company. So I tripped around in his Jaguar for a couple of days and we visited all these factories.

And that for me was a really important learning about how the best ideas or important ideas or new ideas can come from anywhere in an organization.

Here I was, kind of the least important person in his company, yet he thought the ideas that I had were interesting enough that he wanted to share them elsewhere.

That is something that I’ve continued to really believe — that you don’t know where the best ideas are going to come from in the organization. So you’d better do a good job of promoting them when they come and spotting them when they emerge, and not let people’s positions dictate how influential their ideas are.

Q. And how does that manifest itself in the way that you run IDEO?

A. I’ve gone to great lengths to try to encourage what I call an emergent culture at IDEO, where people understand that it’s essentially their responsibility to have good ideas. Not about the work they do every day — we all have to do that — but about new ideas for the company. What are we going to do next? What fields are we going to work in? What are our new big things?

Q. What other important leadership lessons have you learned?

A. As a design consultant, I get to work with all kinds of interesting people who are leaders of their own businesses. So I constantly learn from watching some of the great leaders do what they do.

A. G. Lafley is a great example. I’ve spent a lot of time with him over the last seven or eight years, until he retired. I’m a member of his design board at Procter & Gamble, and we would get together every four months, and the various divisions would come and show their work.

He was willing to get involved really early on in new ideas — not in a way where his opinion was overly influencing what was happening, but where his support would really push an idea along quickly. I learned a lot from him in terms of style of leadership, which was involved without being dictatorial. He seems to see his role as constantly reminding teams of what they should be focusing on, rather than telling them whether they’ve got the right idea or not.

Somebody else I worked with a lot is Jim Hackett, the C.E.O. of Steelcase. He’s somebody who, no matter how compelling and short-term an issue might be, is always forcing the conversation up to being strategic. How are we thinking about this long term?

As a designer, I’m always looking for solutions to the problems I see in front of me. And the big trick to being a successful designer is always making sure you’re asking the right questions and focusing on the right problems.

It’s very easy in business to get sucked into being reactive to the problems and questions that are right in front of you. And it doesn’t matter how creative you are as a leader, it doesn’t matter how good the answers you come up with. If you’re focusing on the wrong questions, you’re not really providing the leadership you should.

Q. Can you talk more about that?

A. I do think that’s something that we forget — as leaders, probably the most important role we can play is asking the right questions. But the bit we forget is that it is in itself a creative process. Those right questions aren’t just kind of lying around on the ground to be picked up and asked.

When I go back and look at the great leaders — Roosevelt, Churchill — one of the things that occurs to me is they somehow had the ability to frame the question in a way that nobody else would have thought about.

In design, that’s everything, right? If you don’t ask the right questions, , then you’re never going get to the right solution. I spent too much of my career feeling like I’d done a really good job answering the wrong question.

And that was because I was letting other people give me the question. One of the things that I’ve tried to do more and more — and I obviously have the opportunity to do as a leader — is to take ownership of the question. And so I’m much more interested these days in having debates about what the questions should be than I necessarily am about the solutions.

Q. But answers are often rewarded more than questions, right?

A. That was one of the things that used to make me feel very, very insecure as a business leader — thinking: “Am I supposed to have all the answers? Because I know I don’t.” Then I finally came to realize, well, nobody else has all the answers, either. It’s just that somehow we’ve got this culture of having the answers. It’s partly the media, you know, and some sort of self-image that business leaders have. And partly it’s about trying to convince the stock market that things are all fine. It’s all of these things added together.

To some degree, it’s a cultural thing here in America. It’s a little different when you go to other parts of the world. But I’m personally perfectly comfortable admitting that I don’t know the answers and that I’m more interested in the questions anyway.

Q. What have you learned to more of, or less of, over time?

A. Read the remainder at New York Times

The Many Faces of Leadership - AMCF - Seminar

The Association of Management Consultants Firms hosted a daylong event at the Union Club in New York this week. It reminded me of my days working in British Parliament. You know that feeling of clubish collusion. Where the walls are adorned with men in wigs Rembrandt type paintings and the furniture is old warn leather and very comfortable to slouch in.

A note arrived that read, ‘please be dressed in suite and tie and ladies in appropriate alternative attire at the Union Club.’ As well we must observe the ban on cell phones, so they needed to be turn off while in the club. This presented a problem to me on many levels, and the most immediate one is that all my notes for my talk were on my iPhone in a, speech app. When I received the note I thought perhaps my reputation from the Trump Tower, The Windows of the World, The Boston Ritz, The London Savoy or some very over rated French Bistro in Paris had put my name on some watch list. In each of those clubs at sometime or another I could be heard uttering the words, “I have been kicked out of better places than this.” It was because in each circumstance I was not suitably attired. Sadly, today I cannot be that rebel, I was an invited guest, I would be dress in the 'nines'. And I am always on better manors as a guest in someone else’s home than in my own.

When I arrived the first session had begun and what a treat it was. Michael Useem who is the Director at The Center for Leadership and Change Management at Wharton Business School and one of the most popular professors on Leadership. I say treat because I have really been enjoying his book Leading Up. It is a book that I have been recommending to clients of mine who are not at the CEO position in their organizations. Michael is an amazing teacher, his ability to engage, retain, and synthesis information and then provide it back to the audience is truly remarkable. He was offering up a checklist for leaders to follow much like what a pilot goes through at the beginning of a flight.

1. Have a Vision, Mission, Strategy and Execution plan.
   
2. Communicate what you have in mind that honors them.


3. Don't Forget to honor the room.


4. Communicate your character

Say it so it sticks (Get book Made to Stick it's great!) Don't underestimate what you want them to remember!

1. Understand and use decision management
   
2. Appreciation for the fact that we each have predictable errors (Predictably Irrational). The better we do the worse our decision making is.


3. Remember it is about the mission not about you.
   
4. More active listening to those below on an organizational hierarchy.
   

After Michael’s session Joe Grano who has written the book You Can’t Predict a Hero: From War to Wall Street, Leading in Times of Crisis and myself, author of Just Ask Leadership: Why Great Managers Always Ask The Right Questions, were put on a panel together with Dr, Kembrel Jones, Associate Dean, Wharton School of Business as the moderator. The idea was to get two leaders that had divergent styles to mix things up with each other. Wow! This was challenging for me. I wanted to be both respectful, gracious and strongly disagree with Joe’s point of view, which I did. He seems to draw the parallel that leadership is about heroics. And his stories were about his heroic efforts in War and on Wall Street. The stories he told were interesting, even spellbinding and the life experiences he had seemed like right out of a movie from fox holes in Vietnam, to a titan of finance on Wall Street to being a producer of a Broadway smash. And no matter how I tried, and I did try, I could not seem to pierce his iron toughness. He was charming and a quick wit to divert attack or too much confrontation. He very much reminded me of my first coach and mentor John Kunz, who was the former head of Dun & Bradstreet. John grew up on the streets in New York and learned to be tough early on. Joe seem to have an answer for most things, he was reassured, a bit bigger than life really. And somehow he is what I think of as the leader of the past. He reminds me of the living breathing version of John Wayne. I believe that different businesses take different types of leaders and I am just wondering if this is what the military and Wall Street leadership is all about? It is difficult for me to conclude this given some of the warmest leaders I know have come from Goldman Sachs. And the Generals that I interviewed did not strike me as bigger than life characters.

I am struck over and over how often the notion of Just Asking is not part of the leadership conversation. When Michael Useem was speaking and he asked the question what else should be on this checklist – I remained quiet to see if anyone would raise 'asking questions'. And not to my surprise, not a person in this room raised it. And yet when I asked this audience if they ask more than they tell when leading all but one said yes – which is significantly different than the usual 27% I see from most audiences I speak to. And yet they don’t label it as a significant part of their leadership until I present. How is it that the obvious is so hidden to so many? Are leaders really that afraid that if they ask questions that people will see them as weak?

Joe says he uses the 95 / 5 rule. Let it be their idea and ask them questions 95% of the time but 5% it is command and control. The interesting thing was all the examples of leadership he gave was about the 5% not the 95%. Wouldn’t you think it is the 95% of the time that one would spend there time on, rather than the 5% of the time when it was your call. How does making it your call make it leadership. There just seems something a bit off about that balance. The great part about leadership is so many different styles work. Although you may not care for a certain style it simply means that you would not be lead by that person.

I continue to enjoy all these experience that are opening up for me by having written the book. And it is great in today's technology rich world that I can share these experiences with a larger audience. The book was hard work and still is - getting it out to readers who would enjoy it. And the experiences are the frosting on that cake. I am grateful to those who have chosen to read my blog and those that are reading Just Ask Leadership.

Leadership - How to ask the right questions

Question-based leadership only works if managers don't provide all the answers. Here's how to focus on being a facilitator, not an oracle

by Gary Cohen

What are the right questions for leaders to ask?

Like notorious law school professors who interrogate their students until the "truth" appears, many business leaders hold meetings where they pepper employees with rapid-fire questions. But too often managers' questions are designed to show off their own knowledge rather than actually solicit new information or ideas.

Question-based leadership is certainly preferable to the command-and-control model but not when.... Read Full Article in BusinessWeek.

Leadership - How to ask the right questions

What are the right questions for leaders to ask?

Like notorious law school professors who interrogate their students until the "truth" appears, many business leaders hold meetings where they pepper employees with rapid-fire questions. But too often managers' questions are designed to show off their own knowledge rather than actually solicit new information or ideas.

Question-based leadership is certainly preferable to the command-and-control model but not when

Simple side of complexity - Leadership in chaos - Interview

Today it is my great pleasure to interview Gary B Cohen author of a great book that I've just read called "Just Ask Leadership – Why Great Managers Always Ask the Right Questions."

Gary, as President and co-founder of ACI Telecentrics grew that company from two people to 2,200 employees and reached $32 million in sales at the company’s peak. ACI was recognized as one of Venture Magazine’s Top 10 Best Performing Businesses and Business Journal’s 25 Fastest Growing small companies. Gary is partner and cofounder of CO2 Partners, LLC operating as an executive coach and consultant. His clients run a wide range of organizations – from small entrepreneurial companies to multi-billion dollar enterprises.

Trevor: First of all Gary – thanks for taking the time in your busy schedule to answer a few questions for my Simplicity Blog.

Gary: It is truly my pleasure, and thank you for being willing to share my ideas and the book, Just Ask Leadership, with your audience. As you can see from the title, it would be difficult not to respond to a fellow Asker. Don’t be surprised, though, if I take the opportunity to ask you a few questions as well.

Trevor: I really enjoyed reading your book and found many similarities in your philosophy to my own about business, management and leadership. Not least the need for Simplicity. Do you think some managers make things too complicated?

Gary: Yes and no. To me it really depends on the situation. If you are referring to leading others, yes. If you’re referring to leading an organization, I would say no. I believe many of today’s crises are a result of the complexity of our operating systems. Leaders are applying linear solutions to complex systems.

In a discussion the other day with Joseph Grano, who is currently Chairman and CEO of Centurion Holdings and formerly Chairman of UBS, Joseph stated that it’s not that CEO's are unaware of the complexity of their organizations, but that they’re unaware of the complexity of the products their organizations offer. Leaders don’t and can’t understand every aspect of their organization, nor should they try. They put their organizations at risk when they do. Instead, they need to learn the right questions to ask and where to direct these questions. When leading people, both straight forward and more complex strategies are necessary.

The straight forward aspect of leading is really simple – Just Ask. If leaders did that more than Just Tell, they would see vast improvements in their organisations’ performance. What I don’t want people to believe is that any question, in any tone, will do. The types of questions – and they way they’re delivered - are equally important. Counter to popular opinion, there is such a thing as a Bad Question!

On the complex side of people leadership, leaders would benefit from understanding the brain and how it takes in and stores information. People favor certain types of information and disconnect from others, which has a huge impact on outcomes in organisational trade-offs.

By understanding the workings of the brain, leaders can ask questions that cut through thinking processes and create improved outcomes.

Trevor: The images of a leader telling people what to do rather than asking questions still persists in many organizations. Do you think this style is changing fast enough? Read Full Interview at Simplicity

List of Best Leadership Events – Top Events for CEO’s

Top 16 Leadership Conferences - Research indicates that the top CEO’s of large enterprises get asked to speak on average 3.4 times per week. These are some of the top conferences that they speak at and that are well attended by the top leaders today. This list is a compliation of research done by; Weber Shandwick, Business Week and Burson-Marsteller The Studies Reveals the Top Most Valued Podiums for CEOs and C-Suite Executives. If you want to know where the thought leaders are presenting follow the links to the top leadership events:


1. World Economic Forum
2. TED
3. Aspen Ideas Festival
4. Milken Institute
5. Clinton Global Initiative
6. CECP Board of Boards
7. Chief Executives’ Club Boston
8. The Wall Street Journal Conference “D”
9. Forbes Conference
10. Fortune Conference i-Meme
11. World Business Forum
12. Detroit Economic Club
13. Economist Global Agenda
14. CFO Magazine
15. Consumer Electronics Show
16. Wharton Leadership

Leadership Conference September 17th in Minneapolis

Leadership summit hosted by The George Family Foundation, with support from Target, Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal, and Fredrikson & Byron, featuring Bill George (Fmr Chair and CEO, Medtronic), Marilyn Carlson Nelson (Chair and fmr CEO, Carlson Companies), John Donahoe (Chair and CEO, eBay), David Gergen (CNN and Harvard), and Anne Mulcahy (Chair and fmr CEO, Xerox) the evening of September 17th at Ted Mann Concert Hall on the U of MN West Bank.

This panel of esteemed leaders has dealt with crisis radiating from the White House, offices and boardrooms of global companies and their personal lives. The thought-provoking discussion will examine root causes behind many of the problems our country faces and the contributions leaders can make to address them.

There is no charge to attend, but space is limited, so please RSVP via the following website:

Leadership Summit in Minneapolis

The ordinary and the extraordinary

Rabbi Michael Latz opens the service for Adam Rochlin's Bar mitzvah saying, "that having a Bar Mitzvah is very ordinary. It happens every weekend around the world. And yet this one is extraordinary for Adam and all of us participating in the service." I had several hours to consider this thought and realized how often those two events happen together.

As a leader we are often presiding over events that appear so ordinary for us and yet those ceremonies can be extraordinary for those being honored by achievement or tradition. How are you at honoring the extraordinary for others ordinary achievements?

Leadership Definition

Socrates sought to define important terms before having a debate. How productive can a debate be, after all, if terms are not agreed upon by everyone? The act of defining, however, is not always clear cut. In fact, it can lead to more debates.

In building a training program for leaders, I’ve given a lot of thought to definitions of leaders and leadership. Judging from the number of definitions of I’ve run across, it’s high time for a debate.

Here are a few debatable definitions that caught my attention: Read the rest in Leadership Excellence by Gary Cohen

Leadership and Trust

When you walk across the street, when your speeding down the highway at 65 miles an hour, why do you trust these perfect strangers driving in front of you and beside you with your life more than you trust people on your team with your career or the entire business?

This morning I was walking my dog around Grays Bay on Lake Minnetonka, and on one side of 101 was a very narrow space for he and I to make our way without getting hit by on coming traffic. As we walked I continually focused on the drivers and how much attention or lack of attention they were giving to their driving. And I began to wonder how often we trust our lives to perfect strangers and at times perhaps even more often have a hard time trusting those we know very well.

Are you struggling with trusting others?

Leadership is about understand the human condition?

We know from the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (TED Talk) that leaders find Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience when they maximize their skill against the most challenging of situations. This happens for the best leaders when they maximize how to help those they lead. They let go of their own need or satisfy their needs by satisfying the needs of others. When you cross this with how we know the world around you it begins to shed light further insight that may help you explore your own leadership understanding.

Leadership and Executive Coaching is all about understanding the human condition and helping our clients’ understand it for themselves. To do this effectively we use different mental models that help facilitate this development. One that you may consider is that we must know ourselves first before we can know another. Once we learn about others we are capable of hearing about ourselves and finally we are able to begin to understand the rest of the world around us according to E. F. Schumacher from The Guide For The Perplexed. This is a reasoned view of how we best obtain knowledge. If you begin to examine this framework it make so much sense. How can you possibly understand anything until you understand yourself? You are the compass, the meaning maker from all the sensory data you bring in. Until you know what are your drivers, what is important to you, what you believe in, what yours value are, what emotions cause what reactions how can you possibly understand what drives someone else. As you begin to explore others and see how they are similar and different from you, your experience will deeply inform you of the richness of the human life. It is only then that you will begin to accept how others see you. It is this point that could be interpreted at a more simplistic view of being able to see your blind spots, find your humility and avoid the all to conspicuous issues around narcissism.

The poet Shelly in provides deeper insight into exploring this by asking the question, what is it that others are needing from you? How is it the world presents itself to you? What does the world need from you? You bring uniqueness to the world. As you learn to understand this uniqueness you begin to see others and then you open yourself up to hearing what they need of you.

“There are no passengers on spaceship earth there are only crew,” said Buckminster Fuller. As leaders we must understand this role for ourselves by knowing what is needed of us. 

What is your killer experiment

Last night Jim McCarter, President and CSO of Divergence, a company that is solving major issues in the agriculture world by eliminating nematodes from our food supply, and I went to a fundraiser at Bill Danforth’s home in St. Louis. We were there to meet Secretary of State Robin Carnahan who is running for the US Senate seat in Missouri, following a long tradition in her family. Carnahan was sworn in as Missouri’s 38th Secretary of State in January 2005. “Carnahan’s family has a lengthy history of devotion to public service. Her father, Mel Carnahan, served as Missouri’s State Treasurer, Lt. Governor and Governor, and her mother, Jean Carnahan, was the first woman to serve Missouri in the U.S. Senate. Her grandfather, A.S.J. Carnahan, a congressman from south-central Missouri for fourteen years, was appointed by President John F. Kennedy to be U.S. Ambassador to Sierra Leone in West Africa.” According to her website.

What was a treat for me was that Dr. Bill Danforth, one of St. Louis’ most distinguished academic leaders and philanthropists, had invited what seemed like the hall of fame of the medical community. Jim and I started up a conversation with Dr. Phil Needleman, a former professor at Washington University School of Medicine where Jim’s had gone to school. Dr. Needleman made the difficult leap from academia into industry by becoming a top pharmaceutical R & D executive. This career led him to become a key developer of Celebrex helping 10s of millions of patients gain critical relief from pain.

“Philip Needleman spent 25 years at Washington University School of Medicine, where he was professor and chairman of the department of pharmacology. In 1989 he moved to industry, becoming senior vice president of Monsanto. In 1993 he became president of Searle Research and Development. He was also senior executive vice president and chief scientist of Pharmacia from 2000 to 2003.” According to the National Academy of Sciences.

Standing back and listening to Phil and Jim discuss Divergence latest findings was like watching a laser cut through ice. Dr. Needleman went right to the heart of Jim’s research and ascertained exactly what the next steps were and what progress would be made over the coming months. When we stepped away Jim explained to me that Dr. Needleman has a reputation for solving scientific problems in a rapid-fire manner. Meaning that when he looks at all the many issues associated with development of a drug, he determines which experiments could prove in the near-term that a project is headed for failure versus other experiments that just fill in the blanks but aren’t likely to doom the project. He is famous for saying, “What is your killer experiment to prove your point?” In other words what is the experiment that will validate or invalidate your point of view? When we spoke he was very clear, “I don’t go for the jugular (vein). I go for the carotid (artery) - it kills you faster.”

Many researchers don’t want to tackle the killer experiment because they are afraid of the answer. Not Dr. Needleman. He goes after the ones that will put him out of business first rather than getting stuck at the end of the development cycle only to find out it does not work and will never work.

In manufacturing this would be what is know as the theory of constraints where we attack the biggest bottleneck first, apply all resource against that issue and then and only then do we move to the next bottleneck. The difference is, in R&D all these are mental bottlenecks because the invention is still in progress. Dr. Needleman said to us time is much more important than other resources. You are in a competition for a new drug that will help people and build your company. You have a 70 month time horizon from start to trials and if you can identify early if the experiment is going to fail and learn your search will not bear fruit, you will save the organization both lives, time and money. He suggests that leaders in these organization need to have a great deal of courage because the bets our big and if enough of them don’t work then your position needs to be eliminated.

What is your killer experiment?