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The Eleventh Commandment: Thou Shalt Kill

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Amazing. Utterly amazing.

The New York Times is reporting that Churches are now attracting teenagers to the church by having “Halo” nights. That’s when teenage boys get together and play a videogame that’s rated “M” for mature (which means teenagers can’t purchase it without a parent’s permission).

First of all, isn’t there a commandment about “Honoring Thy Father and Thy Mother?” Shouldn’t the churches require parental permission? Remember the bum standing outside the liquor store, buying alcohol for teenagers in return for a few bucks. This time it’s the church buying violent videogames. This does not sound wholesome.

(Of course, we just came off the Catholic-Church-as-teenage-sex-ring scandal, so I’m not sure we should be surprised.)

But let’s say it’s fine for the church to override parental wishes, since they have a direct line to God and the parents, presumably, do not.

They say it’s harmless fun. They must not know how to use Google. It took me less than 30 seconds to visit the American Psychological Association’s web site and look at the 2005 survey of 20 years’ worth of videogame studies. Playing violent videogames heightens aggression, both short-term and long-term.

Now I wasn’t raised in a Judeo-Christian household, so I don’t know the Bible in great detail. But an Orson Wells special on Nostradamus I saw as a kid outlined Armageddon in brief terms (and without attending Bible study classes, it’ll have to do). One of the highlights was when people acting in the name of God and the Church began doing the devil’s work, all the while believing they were doing God’s work.

I would say luring teenagers to Church by exposing them to non-parentally-approved games that are known to increase violent behavior just might fit the bill.

Omigosh, IHOP so totally doesn’t get it

An International House of Pancakes recently opened in Harvard Square.

Harvard Square is in the midst of Harvard University, and is populated mainly by college students. It was once a really hip, cool shopping area, and is now occupied almost entirely by banks and huge ATM bays. Who hangs out in Harvard Square? Teenagers, college students, and grad students.

IHOP recently opened a restaurant in Harvard Square. It’s right across the street from the Kennedy School of Government, chock full of grad students. But for some reason, IHOP business may not be too good. So their windows have huge signs advertising their specials: SENIOR SPECIAL, 50% OFF! and KIDS EAT FREE TUESDAYS.

Wow. Omigosh, wow. They’ve located their restaurant in the heart of a neighborhood whose occupants are between the ages of 18 and 25, largely unmarried, and virtually without kids. Are they really so clueless that they think a SENIORS SPECIAL and KIDS EAT FREE will increase their business? Or maybe they’re niche marketing to the six families in the area who have senior citizens or young children.

We’re taking a trendy, hip, cool shopping area and turning it into a wasteland of financial institutions and IHOP. This is progress?

What is personal integrity?

 A friend asked:  What is personal integrity? Does a person have personal
integrity when their personality is integrated, or what?

Interesting question. One meaning is that you act congruently with our values, tell the truth as you see it, etc. This is “integrity” n the sense of having societally-accepted good values like telling the truth and keeping your word.

For the structural meaning of integrity–that bridge has structural integrity–it means all parts of a system are aligned in support of  the system’s function. In a human, it would correspond to having minimal conflicts, clear values, acting in accordance with those values, and acting consistently enough over time that you actually anage to produce the results you want in your life.

That’s my interpretation, at any rate.

Questions for reflection:

  • Do you have personal integrity in the honesty sense?
  • Does your business?
  • Does your life have personal integrity in the structural sense?
  • Does your business?

Is "nice" good business or just wishful thinking?

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Click here to hear this article as a podcast.

I’d like to share with you a LinkedIn exchange I had on the topic of whether Being Nice is a good business strategy.

Questioner Is there power in being nice, with people in general or as a management tool? … Do you agree, or is this just so much psychobabble?

Stever

I haven’t read “The Power of Nice,” though I’m amused that we’ve created a culture where we believe we have to make a case for treating each other nicely. It can certainly be better business to screw people. Prof. Howard Stevenson of Harvard Business School did a study about that years ago. He concluded that being unethical did, indeed, pay, but it produces a world we don’t want to live in, so we tell stories like, “Being ethical is good business.”

In my life, I find when I’m centered and calm and at my best, I naturally want to be nice to people, and it feels darned good. And yeah, there’s more and more research supporting that position.

Questioner Are you saying there are times when the best thing to do is “screw people”?

Stever

The “best thing to do” depends on your value system. In business, if you value profits over people, you can sometimes maximize profits by screwing people. Nicotine-enhanced cigarette, anyone? Unethical behavior is common in business. The Conference Board did a study showing 60% of all people interviewed over a wide range of companies and industries routinely were asked to do unethical or illegal things. That makes it the majority way of doing business. That says to me that unethical behavior is more normal in the workforce than being female. (Copy of the study is available in PDF form here. See page 22.)

Personally, I value people over profits. I would love to live in a world where, if a business can legally, but unethically, make a profit, it would go out of business regardless of profitability. I used to stand up in meetings and point out when we were doing something unethical. Now I’m self-employed; honest self-examination isn’t a survival trait in corporate America. What was a survival trait, however, was the willingness to help everyone convince themselves that the profit-maximizing choice was also the ethically and morally “right” choice.

My own life has been a continual effort to deepen my integrity and building a life that aligns with my values. It disturbs me to see people damage their own integrity through self-denial.

That’s why I quoted Prof. Stevenson’s research. There’s this very comforting, but empirically false story that we can somehow maximize our business fortunes and our ethical/moral fortunes in one happy bundle. When we adopt the story, we get to have it all. When we face tough choices with very real tradeoffs between being a “good businessperson” and being a “good human being,” we relieve ourselves of having to confront the real choice, since our little story lets us maximize people OR profits, and claim that in the long run, our decision was magically best for both.

So back to your original question… I’ve had a very happy, satisfying, successful life on many levels, and have forgone chances to get a lot richer, legally, in ways that would have compromised my personal sense of integrity.

You may be different. If you prefer profits to people, then yeah, the best thing for you may be to screw people. I suspect if you do that, you’ll find yourself at life’s end surrounded by people you don’t like very much, with fewer happy memories than you might like. But that could simply be MY wishful thinking. I’m sure there are people who’ve been total jerks their whole life, accumulated huge fortunes, and died quite happy and quite oblivious to any suffering or harm they cause to others.

The good news is that you get to choose who you’ll be.

Be afraid, particularly of batteries

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Have you seen this story? Our Boston leadership (and I use the term loosely) is once again promoting terror, fear, and ineptitude, in one happy package. An MIT student had a “bomb hoax” on her shirt.

“Hoax” implies she was trying to pull one over on the police. No, she had a piece of wearable electronics that (a) looks NOTHING like a bomb–it looks like two batteries and a breadboard, and (b) had no intent to blow up or deceive anyone.

They’re almost proud as they discuss how, thanks to her cooperation, they didn’t shoot her dead on the spot.

So what’s the point of this story? My takeaway is that their security people are scared by a battery and a piece of wire that doesn’t even remotely resemble a bomb. That doesn’t fill me with confidence. Yet they seem to want to tell us that they somehow saved us from some would-be evildoer.

Is this the world we’ve created? Where inadequately trained security people can’t tell the difference between AA batteries and a bomb, and we’re proud of our restraint in not killing a science student in our overreactive frenzy? Absurd!

Fewer finance jocks are attending business school. GOOD!

An article in the New York Times says that fewer finance jocks are attending business school. All I can say is: Good! In fact, it’s good for everyone.

The Wall Street jockies whose only real interest is in making a buck can go make their money unimpeded by anything like the knowledge of what a company actually is, other than its financial characteristics.

And the business schools. Ah, the business schools. Currently, they churn out mainly investment bankers, private equity managers, and hedge-fund managers. Maybe at lost last, those doobies will bypass the MBA campuses and let the business schools return to teaching people who want to run companies how to do it.

I’ve long lamented that many business schools have remarkably few students who are actually interested in running businesses. Most are just interested in making a quick buck. In fact, it’s sort of a common joke that whatever career the MBAs are most pursuing today is probably headed for a big crash in the near future. My biggest fear about the hedge-fund trend is that like the junk-bond trend of the 80s/early 90s, the internet bubble of the late 90s, and the real estate bubble of the early 2000s, hedge funds just might turn out to be a bubble too. If so, when it pops, all those “geeks just wanna have funds” guys who don’t really care about much except enriching themselves will tumble right back into MBA programs, thus sucking up the time, resources, and curriculum once again from programs that would otherwise serve us by teaching people who actually care about business.

Yow! Am I cynical, yet? It’s tough being an American who actually cares about business as a driver of a safe, sane, sustainable world, rather than viewing it simply as a tool for a few white guys at the top to get obscenely wealthy.

Remembering everyone else who died on 9/11/2001

Today is September 11, 2007. There are plenty of people out today, celebrating the firefighters, rescure workers, and World Trade Center denizens who lost their life in the terrorist attack of 9/11. My friend from business school, Andy Kates, was one of those.

The destruction of the World Trade Center was a shocking event, made all the more shocking by the incredible visuals repeated over and over for days in all forms of media. The people killed in the attacks are worthy of our remembrance, as are any and all people who die.

So today, let’s remember some others who died on September 11, 2001. These folks died with little fanfare, and we didn’t start wars to avenge them, and we’re not even noticing their deaths. Yet they deserve as much of our remembrance and respect as we have to give.

Let’s remember the tens of thousands of people who died from simple old age on September 11, 2001, after being parents, children, brothers, sisters, friends, and neighbors to those in their lives. Or those who died from cigarette-related causes (1,205 in America) or died in automobile accidents (134). and cancer (1,500). Still others worldwide died as victims of genocide, children died from malnutrition and dehydration, families were killed in wars, and some folks died from plain old accidents.

Many, many people died on September 11th. Let’s honor all of them, and remember that we’re all in this Human Race together, and we can share our sympathies, efforts, and remembrance with everyone.

Idiotic business policy of the week goes to … Verizon Wireless!

I canceled a Verizon Wireless account before the end of my contract, incurring a $200 penalty. No problem. I was fine with that.

I went to the web site to pay my final bill. “Web site temporarily unavailable. Try back later.” it said, after I entered my username and password. They sent me bills, each bill said very clearly at the top, “Pay your bill online at www.VerizonWireless.com.” Every time, the site was “temporarily unavailable.”

Finally today I get a phone call from a live person, informing me that I can’t pay by the web–my account has been canceled. Instead, I must call a 1-800 number (but not the one on the bill, of course), press 0 to bypass all the prompts, and speak to a live person.

Can you believe that? Someone cancels their account, and you give them explicitly wrong instructions as to how to pay their bill, deactivate their web account, and leave them in the dark until you finally pay someone to call them.

Don’t be Stupid! Actually try your own services once in a while to make sure they’re usable by your customers!! Please, Verizon!

Can you hear me now?

Caught off-guard by the CEO? Try integrity. You might like it.

I was just reading a blog post on David Maister’s BLOG (David is one of the world’s experts on managing professional service firms) about a time he was caught off guard when a CEO publicly questioned his integrity. How should he have responded? What he did was to remain silent until the discussion continued. That tactic scares the bejeezez out of me.

He suggests that a consultant’s nonverbal response is essential and advocates practicing non-silence responses until they can be delivered smoothly. I disagree. Here’s what I wrote:

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