The list is in.

Be sure to read the brief article on #1 SAS; it's a fascinating bounty of best practices. 

I stumbled across an interesting article in a recent European issue of Fortune that explores the dollar-value of corporate virtue and, in particular, trust.  Perhaps you'll find it interesting, too.

This morning I received a rather humorous email alleging, "A magazine recently ran a Dilbert Quotes contest, eliciting quotes about real-life Dilbert-type managers submitted by their employees.  Here are some of the best submissions from corporate America..."

Alleged Dilbert-Manager Quotes.pdf (99.48 kb)

We have to do a lot of this these days, don't we?

Squaring of the circle...

In our personal budgets, we must find ways to make 1+1=3.  Or 5.  Or 7.

In our organizations, not only must we find ways to  s t r e t c h  limited financial resources, but also to periodically work with square pegs currently functioning (or failing to) in round holes.

Regardless the hurdle, an ability to think outside the proverbial box is paramount. 

Sometimes, when I'm working with a group that's struggling to think outside the box -- or simply...creatively -- I'll pass out six toothpicks to each person and make this request:  "Using these 6 unbroken toothpicks, create 4 equilateral (equal sided) triangles."

For several minutes, most participants struggle.  They create pentagrams (!) and beaver dams, but they rarely create four equilateral triangles without great effort, rule-breaking, or toothpick snapping.  And almost always, there are gaps/voids and overlapping toothpicks.

But then, with the briefest guidance and in one fell swoop, they solve the riddle. 

All I have to say is, "Think three dimensionally."

And blammo...they make a pyramid.  A 4-sided structure comprised solely of equilateral triangles.

The problem, of course, lies in our 'mental constructs.'  Too often, we think 1 or 2 dimensionally.  We look at problems myopically or traditionally or quickly...failing to turn them over in our minds like rocks in a dryer. 

Maybe you've heard the maxim, "If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten."

Hogwash.

It's worse than that.  This assumes a polyanna, static view of ecosystems and the world which, of course, is unrealistic.  The truth is much harsher: If you do what you've always done, you'll get run over by progress, eaten by competitors, or forgotten by history.

So, the next time you or your family or your organization face a seemingly intractable or 'unsolve-able' problem, think of the toothpicks.

If they (through the formation of Egypt's pyramid, one of humankind's most enduring structures) can remind us the value of creativity and innovation, then many of life's most daunting problems are half-solved.

After all, once the solving-scheme is organized, the rest is often a matter of time and sweat, not whether and if.

Solve on.

Decisions, decisions, decisions.

We make countless decisions each and every day...every hour...every minute.

And most decisions aren't that hard.  We go with our gut, we experience 'behavioral shorthand' and know how, for example, to wind our way to work each morning without even thinking about it or, in the case of tougher decisions, we think, we pray, we seek counsel. 

But you know as well as I do that some decisions are very, very difficult.  Unimaginably gut wrenching.  Consider the sort our President is wrestling with this very week.  Or the sort our Supreme Court wrestles with each and every day.  Or the sort a grieving adult-child faces as her dying parent is placed on life support. 

And some of these decisions are in the oven for months...for years.  Indeed, they are very long in the making.

To describe this protracted 'deciding,' I use the analogy Decision Hill.

The first segment of Decision Hill is the ascent.  This is the acknowledgment that a decision, generally a complex, multifaceted one (and often an emotional one or one that will have 'tentacles' affecting others or 'collateral effects' beyond our immediate imagination) needs to be made.  Consider a neophyte playing chess with a grandmaster or a naive child wandering alone in the dark.  Neither is fully aware of the errors of his/her ways, much less the unknown and potentially devastating consequences that might follow an initial, innocent, well-intentioned mis-step.  In fact, consider the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger tragedy...or the pre-strike intelligence the NSA possessed on terrorists before the horrors of 9/11 in NYC.  Neither of these examples represent one huge or glaringly obvious oversight on anyone's part so much as an incremental, microscopic accumulation of residue...of tiny error after tiny error which, in the particulate, seem invisible, yet in the aggregate, seem enormous.

The ascent takes a very, very long time.

We wrestle with complexities.  With our emotions.  With possible outcomes.  We recall the past, we look to the future, we strategize, we visualize moves and countermoves, we think of the people who will be affected by our choices, we fall to our knees, we seek others' counsel, we T-chart the pros and cons, we flip coins, we toss coins in fountains, we wander and wonder, we rule things in and rule things out, we sleep on it, we eliminate outliers and finally...finally...after the grueling and the slogging and the swinging and the fighting and the traversing many meters to the top...we arrive, crestfallen, at the apex of Decision Hill.

And we straddle the tippy-top of this mountain.  We feel its enormity beneath and around us.  We accept the hollowness within us.  We long for the connectedness and renewal around us.  And we stare into the fog and darkness and storm and wonder if the heavens are with us. 

And we decide.

In an instant.

After the weeks and months or even years that preceded, we finally, exultingly, make a choice.

And this choice brings us -- in that singular moment -- from our ascension...to the second segment of our climb...the tipping point.

The slow boil is now a gas.

And with the clarity that cuts through the night like a knife through warm butter, we turn our eyes finally and fully toward the future.

The angst of deciding is behind us.

And we feel luminescent.  And buoyant.  And human again.

The weights slip off our shoulders, the bodice around our chest is loosed, the vice around our mind is broken, the chains around our ankles and neck and wrists are shattered, and we fall forward toward our destiny.

Like the child awaking to a pure and powdery snow on Christmas morning, it is the dawning of a bright, shiny, wondrous, clean, perfect day.

And we fall face-down upon our sled, grab the handles with shaky hands, and are restored and renewed.  We are officially in segment three: the descent.

Beloved gravity will do the rest.  Slowly, crunching...then quickly, now skittering...we gather speed and momentum and inertia and velocity...and we arrive, startlingly soon, at the bottom of the hill and find ourselves rocketing toward our future, snow spraying up all around us, ice crystals stinging our cheeks, laughter peeling all around. 

And like the shirtless, sledgehammer-wielding strongman at the summer fair, we are ready to slam forward into all the tomorrows that stretch out before us.

I want to encourage you today: It will get easier.  There is a top.  There is another side.  Even -- especially -- in the darkest moments of the darkest hours of the darkest days of the darkest seasons -- light shines on.  It always will.  It always has.  That's the benevolent nature of light.  It travels effortlessly and ceaselessly and swiftly across the darkest regions of the known and unknown universe to warm your skin.

That's all there is to it. 

Your charge...indeed, the only toll for your journey is pure -- and simple:

Believe

and

Keep Moving Forward

God speed.

The announcement by GM yesterday that, in effect, "Saturn is dead" is a tough, tough blow for many.  Not just employees and their families, but customers and so many others who developed an affinity for the little-brand-that-tried-but-just-couldn't.

I remember all too well studying Saturn in 1988 as a Case Study.  Just three years old then, it held so much promise: to be union free, to be collaborative, to be lean, to offer no-haggle pricing.

It really did aspire to be different and to survive outside the GM solar system.  But in the end, it proved to be entirely unprofitable.  It was mostly "all show, but no go."  The hype proved incongruent to the product.

The many reasons for its demise are clear to anyone who's been paying attention, but I'm certain GM's Saturn will be as infamous a Case Study as Johnson & Johnson's Tylenol.

My focus for today, therefore, is hardly to flog such a valiant effort on a ruthless industry battlefield.  (It'd be akin to picking on an airline, where survival is victory.)  After all, there are far too many cynics and observers who host rock-throwing parties in glass houses. 

No, instead, I simply wish to remind you that you are not the sum of your employment.  Not at all.

For the many who remain unemployed this day, or who will be in short order -- be it from Saturn or wherever else -- you are much more than your employment.

You are a human being, potential incarnate, and I lift you up today.

Keep putting one foot in front of the other.  Remember, it's not how many times you get knocked down, it's how many times you stand up.

As Bruce Lee used to say, "Walk on."

We all -- each and every single one of us -- present.

Just as we all sell and negotiate each and every day.  Life is one long dialogue about what to do, with whom, and in the context of finite resources...be they time, money, attention, energy, effort, etc.

When I am asked for recommendations on Presentation Skills, I always recommend http://www.presentationzen.com/. 

And I do so again today.

Presentation Zen is a crisp, clean, clear blog rife with countless book recommendations, videos, checklists, and other wonderful resources.

Enjoy and, if it benefits you, please share it with others.

Yesterday, Blockbuster announced they're likely to close 20% of their stores...approximately 960 in total.

They intend to install 10,000 kiosks (like Redbox) around the country.

Call me an idiot, but I think this is one of the worst ideas I've heard in recent memory.

If one wanted to revolutionize transportation at the turn of the 20th Century but insisted on keeping the horse...Henry Ford and countless others would have kept us in the stone age.  But no, they realized there was a better way.  And it wasn't ponies.

Kiosks are more of the same.

Hulu, Netflix, even public libraries understand this.  Now that's saying something.

The answer, Blockbuster, is not to perpetuate infrastructure.  After all, Redbox already has over 15,000 kiosks.  Why try to out-amazon Amazon or out-wal-mart Wal-Mart?  No, no, no.  That isn't the way forward.

The way forward is to envision where the market is GOING and then BE THERE when it arrives.

Think online, download, cloud computing, Kindle, iPhone apps...anything, please, other than more 'boxes on streetcorners.'

We don't need a better record, 8-track, cassette, or dvd.  Au contraire.  What we need is a more seamless, frictionless, infrastructure-lite pull-thru delivery paradigm that keeps us coming back for more...without getting out of the car, swiping a credit card, or carrying a box to and fro.

What we need is what the FTP was to the five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy.

Bring it.  Please.  And then some.

I’m on an airplane now, straddling three cities in two days, and just wanted to share a few thoughts before they broke free like so many logs trapped in a tide pool.

In the early 90s, I had the great fortune to serve as one of several facilitators for a War Game hosted by Kodak in New York.  In attendance were executives from Hallmark, Wal-Mart, Apple, Sandia National Laboratories and, of course, Kodak.  Former PepsiCo CEO (then Apple CEO) John Sculley was there, along with other key industry leaders and thinkers. 

The topic was futuring, and I remember like it was yesterday – the CEO of Kodak stood before this group of eighty luminaries and commented, almost offhandedly, “I can’t envision the day when consumers won’t want to hold a photograph in their hands.”

Ooops.

I was stupefied.  Even little ‘ol me could see how wrongheaded this was, and I was a green outsider with nary three years’ experience.  Granted, the digital era was just upon us – cell phones were still the size of shoe boxes and Polaroid photos were cool at parties, but nonetheless, the outlines of the future were clear enough – hence, the War Game.

Fast-forward a decade.

Down from 57,000 to 10,000 employees or so – with the photography market primarily digitized now – Kodak failed to realize they were in the ‘memories’ business.  They mistakenly believed they were in the ‘photograph’ business.  The 2009 demise of Kodachrome color film (a seventy-four year success) is representative of their tragic and disappointing fall.

And the Ray-Ban that was once owned by Bausch & Lomb failed to realize they were in the ‘fashion’ business, mistakenly believing they were in the ‘highly engineered eyewear’ business.  That’s why today, the Ray-Ban we all grew up with is now owned by Italian behemoth, Luxottica.  (Oakley and the like cleaned RB’s clock in the late 90s and Luxottica gobbled up B&L’s namesake for a song.  But hey, maybe that’s okay; it’s easier to profit from salt-water solutions than try and manage unnecessarily complex, multinational eyewear manufacturing sites.)  To add insult to injury, Luxottica has now purchased Oakley, too, making the Italian manufacturer the largest eyewear company in the world.   

By the way, Avon and Mary Kay are not in the ‘cosmetics’ business, they are in the ‘hope’ business.  As long as they remember this, all the better. 

I see at the magazine stand the latest Fast Company issue noting that Nokia (who entirely upended Motorola by providing digital phones when analog was all the rage) is realizing they should be a ‘media’ company, not a cellular phone manufacturer.

Bingo.  Welcome to the epiphany, guys.  Enjoy competing with Apple, who realized this long ago.  And with NBC/Universal/Hulu and Google and Microsoft/Yahoo! and so many others who also populate the field.  It will be tough slogging for all players.  But it’s a game worth playing and one that must be played in order to survive.

I wonder who – which company – ‘known’ or ‘unknown’ will upend the media market for the next decade....

There are few, if any sanctuaries from the battles; no tide pools for organizations who want a breather.

So on and on it goes – organizations realizing more and more what business they should be in, or actually are in.

I wonder where Amtrak would be if, decades ago, they had thought to be in the ‘transportation’ business rather than the ‘railroad’ business.   

Whether you are the Girl Scouts of America, the University of Michigan, NASCAR, or the Catholic Church – you better know what ‘business’ you’re in¹.  What do you produce?  Whom do you serve?  What do you provide?  What (gag me with a spoon) is your ‘value proposition?’ 

Whether we like the jargon or not, we avoid the question(s) at our own peril.

(And don’t bother being the world’s best buggy-whip maker.  That market’s taken, and it’s a limited one.)

So how shall you proceed?

As usual, start with the simplest question: “If we went away, who loses what?”

Whether your organization is a synagogue, a national park, or the world’s best widget manufacturer, all must ‘serve some purpose’ and ‘answer some calling’ and ‘provide some value.’   Consider the market, unmet or unarticulated consumer/client/customer needs, and what benefit(s) you can provide in effective, efficient, unique, meaningful, or advantageously sustainable ways.

Because remember, the day will come when people won’t need to hold a photograph in their hands and, when it does, it’d be nice to know you’re still in the picture.

¹Relax – I don’t mean this ‘literally’ as in – “Business” with a capital B and ‘for profit’ and all that.  I just mean – know what you’re doing and why and for whom.

Among several others, I had a couple of specific, very interesting conversations in the past week (one with a CEO, the other with a researcher) that I thought I would pass along today.  In both, the opportunities and challenges associated with innovation and commoditization arose.

These visits were unrelated to one another, and days apart.  But in both sittings, I was told, "It's important for an organization to innovate more quickly than it is consumed from behind by its own commoditization."

I just love that.

We've all heard this sentiment for years, but rarely so pithily.  It is all the more important today, in this economy, as the desperate, shortsighted, or lazy are inclined to simply mimic whatever is working.  I believe the evidence is everywhere... from car manufacturing to failed credit default swaps.  Easy 'initial money,' when predicated on a sandy foundation of mimicry and commoditization cannot survive the stresses of change, diluted profits, or shifting consumer desires.

Here's to a more innovative America, and world.

Create on!   

Like ants in a mound, we all sense the vibrations of impending change.

In particular, I am feeling in my bones, perhaps for the first time ever, bona fide (sorry for the pun) traction in the Green Movement.  Similarly, I also sense the early tremors of a tectonic shift in Workplace Expectations in smaller, more nimble organizations.

The minority of "crackpots" are now becoming the mainstream, and with them... the trains are beginning to steam-up, rumble, and leave their respective stations.  The 'get on board' or 'get left behind' decision-point is now becoming less theoretical and more tangible.

On the topic of the green movement, the media is dripping with books like The World Without Us, The Earth After Us, and The Last Human and 'thought-experiment-documentaries' like Life After People are springing up through the cracks of every sidewalk.  Long overdue regulatory emissions and fuel economy standards have just passed, and now more and more grocery stores are charging a tax for consumers who use paper or plastic sacks at checkout.  (Even Michael Moore has joined the proverbial greenpeace parade, with his latest entreaty on what should be created in the wake of GM's bankruptcy.  GoodbyeGM,MichaelMoore.pdf (15.29 kb))

On the topic of shifting workplace expectations, there is a trove of research -- two decades old now -- that has tracked and highlighted and forecasted all the varying expectations between 'generations' in the workplace.  Given the recession and an average 40% loss in wealth among those with retirement plans, the 'social contract' between employees and employers is under assault and will result in a renegotiation of what truly matters.

I am running into more and more people, often in their sixties and seventies, who spent some fifty years away from their families to create a nest egg which barely remains.  "Why?" is pretty much all they can ask.  The 'deal' they made with the devil was a house of cards and, as the economy melts down, much of their 'earthly treasure' has become tragically diluted.

For all the parents who worked tirelessly, barely seeing their spouse or children in the mornings or evenings or on weekends, "why?" indeed.  The then-logical, selfless, and sacrificial decision by these millions to create income as a means to secure financial and familial stability has been wholly undermined by a few reckless risk-takers in the most opulent buildings in NYC.

As a result of coming to terms with 'the casino sets the rules,' more and more employees are accepting that 'the house always wins.'  And so, as Wall Street lands on featherbeds of bailout dollars and safety nets while Main Street shutters its windows and closes too many doors, individuals are taking stock and starting to reclaim what they can -- their lives -- for the benefit of their families and the sake of their own sanity.

I witnessed it just last night on Charlie Rose as he interviewed Claire Shipman and Katty Kay about their new book, Womenomics: Write Your Own Rules for Success.  In it, many startling admissions that, hitherto, would have been blasphemous.  But in the harsh sunlight of 2009, many people will say, "Of course."  Read it and decide for yourself, but I predict it will be one of a raft of such books to follow in coming months.  Books about owning reality, speaking truth, and reclaiming one's life on her or his own terms.

I am also hearing and reading more and more about such things as ROWE, Results-Only Work Environment as espoused by CultureRx and embraced by clients like BestBuy.  This is a trend I have seen coming for years, and it goes hand-in-hand with expectations held by many Generation X-ers, Y-ers, and Millennials (20-somethings).  Few within these generations will agree to be chained to a desk, tracked or monitored to within an inch of their life, or to serve as a cog within a large, cold machine.  Most of them will commit to accomplish results and be accountable, but not in exchange for balance, community, or altruism.  And most of them studied George Orwell's 1984 as required reading somewhere in high school. 

With all implosions and explosions, there is debris and fallout.  And following forest fires, be they accidental or prescribed, there is regeneration and new life.  New growth is the 'creative' that follows 'destruction.'  What will the Recession of 2009+ yield?  Only time will tell, but if the hairs on my arm are any indication, Bob Dylan's line was spot-on: the answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind.  People are questioning. 

As is the case every hundred years or so, this will likely prove to be a season, nothing more.  In time, the pendulum has a tendency to swing back.

But it is also possible that rather than a Season, we are dealing with a Genie or Pandora.  And they, once out of the bottle, lamp, or box, prefer to stay out.

Either way, I'm sure the questions and changes are welcome.  The way we worked throughout the Industrial Revolution is neither sustainable nor compatible with what is coming. 

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, with new and fervent questions come better answers.  And this, in the words of the "venerable" Martha Stewart, is a good thing. 

"The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them."

                                                                                                - Albert Einstein