Corporate Leaders are Abandoning Ship
Posted on February 22, 2012 | No Comments
Categories: Communications, Guest Blogger, Leadership
Today’s guest post is from Bob Herbold, the former Chief Operating Officer of Microsoft Corporation and author of What’s Holding You Back: 10 Bold Steps that Define Gutsy Leaders
We read a lot last month about the shameful leadership of Francesco Schettino, the Costa Concordia cruise ship captain who steered his vessel into risky, uncharted waters and then abandoned ship when it ran aground. The saga continued to play out last week when a group of survivors filed a hefty lawsuit claiming gross negligence and fraud. The defendants “acted in a severely reckless and willful, wanton manner, with complete disregard for the safety, lives and well-being of the plaintiffs,” said Marc Bern, a lawyer representing the passengers.
I’ve spent all of my life working in industry, first at Procter & Gamble, then as COO at Microsoft, and for the last ten years as a consultant. Along the way, I’ve met hundreds of high-level business leaders and I’m here to tell you, this captain’s behavior mirrors failures I’ve witnessed on a first-hand basis far too often over the course of my career.
Let’s take a look at three major leadership gaffs on the part of the ship’s captain and a few corporate examples that I find equally embarrassing:
The Real Difference Between Management and Leadership
Posted on February 20, 2012 | 3 Comments
Categories: Books, Leadership
The following is an excerpt from One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership (you can get your copy here). This post focuses on the difference between management and leadership. I would love to hear your thoughts on how the two are different so please share your ideas in the comments at the end of the post.
You are a leader. Management and leadership are not the same thing. The difference is simple: you manage things; you lead people. Admiral Grace Murray Hopper coined this elegant, clear distinction. Yet there is still a lot of confusion on this point.
Management is task-focused. It is short term. It is a series of checklists and to do’s that ensure the work gets done. It is taking actions to hit a budget number or deliver a project on time. Management is how we execute tasks to achieve a specific desired outcome. Said simply, it is the movement of personnel, materiel, and tasks with an exact set of measurable results in mind.
Managing things consumes a large portion of our time. It requires forms, reports, meetings, analyses, and documentation. If left unchecked, such tasks will consume every available moment in the day. Sometimes it seems all we do is work on tasks related to managing the organization. When that happens we can easily mistake management for leadership. The logic underpinning that confusion goes like this:
A Simple Formula for Business Success
Posted on February 15, 2012 | 4 Comments
Categories: Communications, Customer Service, Guest Blogger, Leadership
Today’s post is by John Spence – author of Awesomely Simple – Essential Business Strategies for Turning Ideas into Action. He’s going to take hundreds of thousands of pages of information and boil it down into a simple formula for business success. Seriously. Here’s John…
As global markets become increasingly more competitive and financial turmoil worldwide continues to put pressure on nearly every type of business, I have had more and more organizations approach me to assist them in finding ways to be more competitive and successful in today’s economy. Although there is absolutely no “one size fits all” solution, to me the absolute most powerful strategy is to make sure that the core elements of your business are running so incredibly well that your customers absolutely love doing business with you and are eager to tell their friends, family and colleagues about your products and services. All the marketing tricks, ads and social media efforts in the world simply cannot overcome poor quality or lackluster customer service.
That is why for the past 19 years my career has focused exclusively on studying the fundamental elements of business success. Traveling worldwide at upwards of 200 days a year, I have worked shoulder to shoulder with some of the best (and worst) business leaders of our generation. I’ve also maintained a strict regimen of reading a minimum of 100 business books a year since 1989.
In preparation for writing my book Awesomely Simple, I compiled all of my research and reading down to a single page that I called my “Strategy Map.” This single piece of paper represented more than 175,000 pages of reading on business excellence and an additional 5,000 pages of interview notes and survey results from my work as a consultant and trainer. I then took all of that information and tried to uncover the pattern… the formula for business success. Well, here is what I came up with:
(T+C+ECF) x DE = Business Success
Let me take you step-by-step through the elements of this equation.
Entrepreneurship – the Tech is the Easy Part
Posted on February 13, 2012 | 4 Comments
Categories: Entrepreneur, Innovation, Leadership, Sales, Strategy
Tech is easy. Execution is what matters.
There. I said it.
Why is it that so many entrepreneurs believe the tech is the be-all, end-all? Where did the notion come from that if you have nothing more than a killer application, website, algorithm, or any other combo of 01001010101110110 that you can build a multibillion dollar company? (I probably just dropped an f-bomb with that combo of digits).
Wrong.
It’s about executing, people (note the comma in this sentence is *very* important).
Sure, you need good tech. It must solve a problem. But once it’s built, you have to execute. That’s a whole different skill set than writing code and drawing wiring diagrams. Think about how many awesome technologies went the way of the dodo because the company simply failed to execute. Lots of them.
So how can you get better at execution? Here are a few thoughts:
A Personal Interview with a Great Leader
Posted on February 8, 2012 | 2 Comments
Categories: Guest Blogger, Leadership
The people in my professional network are awesome. Occasionally one of them is gracious enough to let me grill them on the subject of leadership. John Petrucci is one of those guys. He’s one of the most down-to-earth people you’ll ever meet and that’s part of what makes him an exemplary leader. You can read all about his accomplishments at the end of the post. Here’s my conversation with John about leadership. All of us can learn a thing or five from him!
Mike Figliuolo: What’s the most rewarding part of leading people?
John Petrucci: The most rewarding part is derived from supporting them. Supporting associates gives them the opportunity to develop to their fullest potential. To know folks you support have grown to be better, more productive associates, citizens and human beings is tremendously satisfying to a leader.
When someone asks me what my greatest professional accomplishment has been, I always respond with the name of an agent I supported while an agency manager at Allstate. I was able to help her see what she could become, and then was privileged to watch her become that person. It doesn’t get any better than that.
Mike: What’s the biggest mistake you see leaders make and how can they avoid it or recover from it?
The Real Reasons You Didn’t Get the Job
Posted on February 6, 2012 | 4 Comments
Categories: Career
Interviewing for a new job is an exercise in humiliation, fear, and confusion. Whether you’re interviewing for a job at a new company or just changing roles at your present employer, the process is nauseating.
You do everything you can to put your best foot forward. You get your suit pressed. You make your hair look nice. You remove spelling errors from your resume (you *do* do that, don’t you?), and you pop some Altoids before interviewing.
You meet with a dozen or so great people who act like they’d love to have you as their colleague. At the end of the process, you’re super duper excited to get that offer for the new role.
Then the call comes.
Rejected.
Then they tell you the “reasons” you didn’t get the role but you can’t help but question them…
“Oh we thought you were great but we’ve changed the role requirements.”
“You were a perfect fit and we had a hard choice between two great candidates”
“You’re overqualified for the role and we didn’t want you to be bored.”
“Your urinalysis came back positive for weed and PCP.” (okay… so this one is kinda legit)
Wanna know the real reasons you didn’t get the role? Here they are.
Leadership and Decision Making – A Personal Interview
Posted on February 1, 2012 | No Comments
Categories: Books, Leadership
So for the first time ever, I’m including a recorded interview as today’s blog post. I was recently interviewed by Yongho Shin on the subjects of leadership, the U.S. Army, decision making, and other leadership topics. The interview is about 30 minutes long and should be a good listen during your morning coffee.
Yongho Shin is a peak performance advisor and former member of the official TEDx Team of TED Conferences who has attracted audiences of over 35,000 people in seminars and over 225,000 through online events and programs. He regularly interviews the world’s top experts on peak performance and living your best life. You can learn more about Yongho and listen to other interviews he’s conducted on his website.
Also, please leave your thoughts in the comments below if you’d like more of these audio and video posts. Happy to post more things like this as they come about but I want to make sure it’s something you readers want. Let me know what you think.
So for your listening enjoyment, here’s my interview with Yongho. Click the microphone to listen.
Mike Figliuolo interview by Yongho Shin
- If you want to learn more about leadership and decision making, grab yourself a copy of One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership. There are plenty of suggestions in there for how you can be a more decisive leader. CLICK HERE to get your copy.
Great Leaders Live Balanced Lives
Posted on January 30, 2012 | 5 Comments
Categories: Balanced Lifestyle, Books, Leadership
The following is an excerpt from One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership (you can get your copy here). This post focuses on having a balanced life and the importance of keeping things in perspective. If you’re burned out, you’re worthless. Here’s an example of how I keep myself in balance and the obvious question to you is “how do you keep yourself in balance?”
It is easy to get wrapped up in your work. If you have chosen your profession well, you are darn good at what you do and take a great deal of satisfaction away from doing it well. Unfortunately it is easy to forget that there are other people out there who want some of your time. Your family and friends need your attention. There are also other passions worth pursuing outside the office. Taking part in activities you enjoy will keep you centered and add meaning and fulfillment to your life.
Unless you have a mechanism to tear yourself away from the office you might find yourself trapped in the mindset of “I’ll do (insert enjoyable thing here) this weekend when I’m off work” or “I’ll do that when I retire” or “I’ll get to that someday.” Someone who reads my blog shared a great maxim on this point: “Someday is not a day of the week.” We would all do well to keep this in mind and act accordingly.
My great-grandfather adopted a quote as his maxim to remind him to live life. He always said “Enjoy life now because you’ll be a long time dead.” He did not coin the phrase but he used it frequently. The saying has made its way through a few generations of my family as something we say on a semi-regular basis. Regardless of how it is phrased, the key point is we must have balance in our lives which entails living our lives while there is still breath in our lungs.
Without a frequent reminder to do what you truly enjoy and have passion for, you might not notice your life slipping by.
