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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:

read more…

Business School is a thought virus

I’ve been doing a lot of examine-your-own-thoughts work in recent months. Sometimes, it seems like a good idea to re-examine unquestioned assumptions and stories to find out whether they’re actually doing you any good. For example, there’s a wonderful story in business schools that “a job in consulting prepares you for anything!” Sadly, it’s just a myth. A job in consulting doesn’t actually prepare you for anything except being a consultant. In fact, the skills are among the least transferable of any profession I know.

Then it hit me: that’s what business school is all about. It’s all about perpetuating a bunch of stories about how the world works, what’s important, etc. And sadly, many of the stories have remained unchanged for decades, whether they play out in real life or not.

My friend Aaron just left for business school. I need to make sure we talk every night before he goes to bed. I’ll ask him what he learned that day, then tell him other stories that contradict it. If he has enough different stories, he can choose the one that works best in any given situation. Sticking with a 100-year-old story to deal with a world-of-today,  however, is something we can improve on.

Wow. Does anyone really believe scripted friendship is sincere?

shudder I just called Crowne Hotels to make a hotel reservation. Then I called back to make a slight change. Both times, the account rep greeted me with a chipper, “What is your name so I may have the pleasure of serving you today?” While they sounded friendly, that script is awful. Am I supposed to believe that right out of the gate, they find the mere thought of serving me is pleasurable? If so, how’d Crowne Hotels do it? Can I take their trainer’s training, and turn people into Zombies for my business, next?

Actually they sound like fundamentally friendly people who have been given a really awful script to read. The script made me feel oddly … unclean. Like someone I was just meeting had been told to insinuate themselves beyond my boundaries so I would think well of them. Even really friendly people reading scripts sound like people reading scripts. And when a script says, “It’s my pleasure to serve you,” I don’t believe it for an instant. The subtext is, “I’m scared spitless I’m going to lose my job unless I read this godforsaken quote from a Harlequin Romance word-for-word.”

If you hire truly people-oriented people, let them go off-script. They’re people-oriented, they’ll figure out what to say. Believe me, we customers can tell the difference. And we appreciate it! It’s nice to have a real conversation with a real person who really cares about helping me out. At least, that’s why my script says I’m supposed to say here…

Is being nice worthwhile?

I just had this exchange of answer/email/response on LinkedIn on the topic of: should you be nice?

The original question:

Is there power in being nice, with people in general or as a management tool?I’m reading the new book “The Power of Nice” because it was sent to me by Bzz Marketing. It is quite interesting and turns what everyone should do anyway (IMHO) on its head slightly.

Call it pay it forward, golden rule, random acts of kindness, the book makes the point that this is good business, good for your health and good for your overal happiness.

Do you agree, or is this just so much psychobabble?

My reply

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.

Clarification added 1 hour ago:

I notice many of the respondants are personal and executive coaches. So take us with a grain of salt. Perhaps the I-bankers and Swim-with-the-Shark types can give us their perspective? Too bad Leona Helmsley is no longer with us–she could argue the other side.

The author wrote back

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

My reply

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.

All the best,

Stever

The 11th Hour: What would the economic system look like?

I just saw The 11th Hour, Leonardo DiCaprio’s new film about the state of the planet and what it will take for us to clean things up. It’s the first such movie I’ve seen that actually presents the start of a vision of the kind of world we’ll need to create.

One conspicuously unanswered question is: what would the economic system have to look like in a sustainable world? Almost by definition, growth could no longer be used as a goal or measure of success, since we would not be designing for obsolescence, and would be reusing as much as possible, thus limiting the total amount of stuff being cycled through the world’s material-goods inventory.

What would a successful business’s goals be?

How would we decide to allocate money and resources?

Since a developing countries fall back on non-green technologies because they’re cheaper to build and develop, what would we do to prevent that? Would we just give them money? Technology? What would that even mean? Would we suspend the idea of money for the time it takes to transfer the technology to them, and just work for free?

I have absolutely no ideas on this one, but would love to hear from some folks out there who can conceive of economic systems.

Cooking the numbers, nationally, to present a tasty inflation report

I was just reading an article in the Boston Globe about the trade deficit hitting a 4-month low when I stumbled across these two paragraphs:

In a second report, inflation at the wholesale level jumped sharply in July, rising by 0.6 percent, far above the 0.1 percent increase analysts had been expecting. The bigger-than-expected jump reflected sharply higher energy prices.

The Labor Department said that core wholesale inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy costs, rose by a much more moderate 0.1 percent, even better 0.2 percent gain analysts had expected.

I don’t recall whether I blogged about this before (and I’m way too lazy to search my archives), but this is a really cool tidbit: Inflation numbers are cooked to make the government look good.

It turns out that inflation has really been going up a bunch over the last 20-30 years. Real income, that is, how much stuff we can buy if we spend every dollar we take home, has fallen for most of us. We can buy less today than we could 30 years ago. (This reflects the statistic that most of the economic growth since the 70s has gone to the top 10% or even the top 1% of the earners.)

As you can imagine, this makes the government look bad, no matter who’s in office. It made Reagan look bad. It made Bush 1.0 look bad. It made Clinton look bad. And it made Bush 2.0 look bad.

But Bush Administration 2.0 has been nothing if not brilliant at redefining reality. So in 2000, the Federal Reserve Board redefined inflation. Now we have “inflation” and “core inflation.” Core inflation is just like inflation, except they don’t include increases in energy and food prices. Those prices, you see, are too volatile, and might paint a misleading picture.

Hah! Those are also the most important components of measuring inflation, because neither is a optional purchase. If energy prices rise 20%, we pretty much have to pay that cost. It gets factored into our gas prices directly, and it gets factored into everything else we buy in the form of transportation costs, manufacturing costs, etc. When energy costs rise fundamentally, eventually, the cost of everything rises, and we can buy less stuff with the same amount of money. In other words, inflation.

Food cost isn’t quite so pervasive, but it’s even less optional than energy. You can go without turning on your A/C for a week. You may not like it, but you can do it. You can’t skip eating. So when food costs go up, they hit you immediately.

By creating this separate definition of inflation, the Government can now point to low inflation numbers and be surprised at how well we’re holding down inflation. Gee, isn’t that grand. It’s even lower than expected.

But for those of us who aren’t mired in self-delusion, inflation is how much more we have to spend on our lives overall, to maintain our standard of living. Perhaps that’s why Americans are now living with negative savings; real inflation has increased to the point where we can’t afford our lifestyles. Happily, however, if you just follow the Government’s lead and focus on “core inflation,” you’ll realize that maybe you’re hungrier, further in debt, and in financial trouble, but at least “core inflation” is low. Sleep well, while you can still afford that mortgage payment.

Tell your customers the truth

One thing to understand about corporate communications: your customers aren’t stupid. They’re at least smart enough to want to use your product. Treat them accordingly. I don’t understand who these communications doobies are who believe if you lie to people about their own experience, they’ll believe you.

My favorite of the day (I’ve heard it 3 times already) is, “Due to heavy call volume, there may be a wait to speak to a customer service representative.” Actually, the reason your customers are waiting is that you have inadequate staffing, underinvestment, and unusable online customer self-help tools. You may be fooling yourself by claiming otherwise, but your customers are keenly aware that your CEO is taking home a $50MM pay package instead of spending some of that money actually providing service.

Try telling the truth. It may result in your customers believing you.

Politics. Corruption. The destruction of democracy.

I don’t like to get too political too often, since my Blog is mainly about business.

But sometimes, the depth of our current incompetence is just too great to ignore. We’ve repealed Habeas Corpus, our Congress just approved Bush warrentless spying on Americans, and it turns out almost 200,000 weapons in Iraq are “missing” (can you say: probably in the hands of insurgents?). Oh, yes, and the weapons we were to deliver the Iraqis to help keep order? About 2/3 of those haven’t actually found their way to the Iraqi peacekeeping forces.

What would we be doing differently if we were actively trying to destroy world stability, bring down the American Democracy, and bankrupt America?

Oh, crap. Now I have to move my purple bracelet again.

Americans should be very worried about our future.

I just read an article in the New York Times documenting a teacher resigning when a student who didn’t remotely pass a class was bumped to a ‘pass’ to meet graduation rates for the school. While I can understand why incompetent school administrators might rely on false passes to keep their jobs intact, this is a pretty scary trend. If this is even remotely typical, we’re going to lose big-time in international commerce when our coddled-but-incompetent children try to compete against countries that actually hold their kids to performance standards.