Author: Joan V. Gallos

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Joplin, Missouri: A Celebration of Resilience in Tornado Alley

I live in the Midwest, close enough to Joplin, Missouri to know where it is and to know people who call that city home.

The devastation from Sunday’s record tornado was shocking and sad; and the story has dominated TV, online, and print news as people struggle to make sense of the depth of the losses. Predictions of continued bad weather this week seem like a low blow from Mother Nature to the residents of “tornado alley.” 

Disasters have a sensational quality to them in today’s 24/7 media world. Look, for example, at the big name news anchors and personalities rushing to broadcast from small town Joplin, Missouri: Brian Williams, Anderson Cooper, Diane Sawyer, Harry Smith, Al Roker of the Today Show, and others.

The surreal photos of the town post-tornado and the media’s hype of and about them might lead us to miss something more subtle yet important in this story: the power, dignity, and importance of resilience.

Resilience is the ability to cope, adapt, and strengthen in the face of challenge, trauma, or stress. It’s a learned skill that increases with use.

Students of leadership spend countless hours and dollars trying to acquire resilience. I’ve spoken in past posts about it as the #1 Leadership Skill (see January 19 in the blog archives) and about how current and aspiring leaders can build theirs (January 21).

Midwesterners, if the people of “tornado alley” are any example, have a natural resilience – and they, thankfully, have lots of it. 

Those who lost everything this weekend quickly turned their energies to helping others and to planning to “get things back in order.”

A young Red Cross volunteer from Joplin listened calmly last night as an incredulous Anderson Cooper questioned her repeatedly about why and how she was able to do that when she had personally just lost everything. The young woman seemed genuinely surprised by Cooper’s question. She had “only lost a lot of stuff,” she noted.  Then looking Anderson square in the eyes she added, “And so what?” Helping was the right thing to do. She never thought of anything other than finding the Red Cross station and doing her part.     

Interviewee after interviewee talked with Cooper about salvaging what they could, rebuilding, coming back stronger, solving the problems Mother Nature had dealt them. They were thankful their losses were not greater. Many spoke of hope. Their beliefs in their capacity to rise to the challenge were obvious.

To quote Dave Adams, a resident of Reading, Kansas, another small Midwestern town leveled by this weekend’s tornados:

“I think for the most part people here have that American spirit. They’ll take this as just another bump in the road. I’m really optimistic,” he said[1] about rebuilding a town where half of the city’s business were destroyed and a significant percentage of its homes gone or severely damaged (including his own).

Resilience: taking life’s challenges as another bump in road. It’ll serve you – and others – well.

[1] Brad Cooper (2011). In Kansas, Small Town Vows to Fight for its Life. Kansas City Star, May 24, p. A11.

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Avoiding the Misery of Yves Saint Laurent: Happiness Strategies When L’Amour Fou (Crazy Love) is Not Enough

Pierre Berge, the long-term lover and business partner of the late fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, has been in the news. Friday marked the U.S. release of a French documentary about the relationship between the two men, and everyone is abuzz about the film’s attention to the frantic 2009 Christie’s mega-auction of the more than 700 art objects the men jointly collected during their 50 years together. The film’s title: L’Amour Fou – in English, Crazy Love.

Saint Laurent was complex, as creative genius often is. The relationship between the two men anything but simple, as relationships mixing the personal and professional rarely are. The art was indeed something – and the auction netted close to $500 million dollars. And Saint Laurent was a colorful public character with an enviable array of riches beyond the astounding collection: he had talent, fame, fortune, physical attractiveness, a profitable outlet for his creative expression, a comfortable life surrounded by beauty, a long-term relationship with someone who cared, influence in his field and beyond, access to people and international opportunities, and more.

I was struck, however, by Berge’s comment in a New York Times interview: Saint Laurent “was a very, very unhappy, unhappy guy.” He lived in misery and depression despite his success – and “even with a wonderful collection.” He eventually descended into alcohol and drugs.

The story begs the 64 thousand dollar question: what does it take to make someone happy? Think about your life. What makes you happy? Chances are your list includes the expected: a good job, family, friends, success, home, life partner, contribution. But even having it all doesn’t assure happiness. Just look at Saint Laurent.

Harvard psychologist and author of Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert, offers insights into why that is so. Basically, we’re all poor predictors of what will make us happy: choices we make in the short run don’t deliver as anticipated. Couple that with the fact that everyone wants happiness – it ranks above money and health, according to research by University of Illinois professor and happiness guru, Ed Diener – and you can see the problem.

We all want something that we’re not very good at getting for ourselves – and as a result, some version of the Yves Saint Laurent misery story could easily become our own.

Accomplish much. Live out dreams, passions, and talents. Choose a path – and a partner, hobby, and vocation – that we think will make us happy. Work hard. Build a credible and influential track record – and end up unhappy. A sobering thought.

We don’t help the world or ourselves when we’re miserable. And Saint Laurent’s story reminds us that, even if we’re content, we’re apt to run into unhappy others in unexpected places. Fake it ‘til you make it strategies are, well, fake. They can’t be sustained over time. What will get you closer to the happiness prize – and help others do the same?

Research and experience support two routes: (1) embrace mindfulness, and (2) give yourself permission to change, grow, and develop.

You don’t need to be a Zen master to employ the first. Mindfulness is basically training yourself to stay alert to the present and to enjoy it in all its richness.

On any journey, it’s easy to get bogged down in the details and complexity of the travel, focus excessively on the destination – are we there yet? – and fall into complaints about what and how long it takes to arrive.

An alternative: engage every moment of the trip. Enjoy the scenery, the newness of each place, your progress. See detours and delays as opportunities. Find splendor in the rush, the surprises, the unexpected. If Gilbert’s research is right, by the time you arrive at your final destination, you’ll wish you were somewhere else anyway. You might as well enjoy the process of getting there.

Second, give yourself permission to experiment and to change. Deepak Chopra, in Why is God Laughing: The Path to Joy and Spiritual Optimism, makes a case for how fear and ego lock us into patterns of behavior. We keep on doing what we’re doing even if it no longer works for us – or, worse yet, even if it never worked.

Happiness is, after all, more than happy feelings, concludes Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology, in his hot, new book Flourish. It’s finding ways to spend time daily on the things that matter – and being honest with ourselves about how we actually use our time and about what really matters most.

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Leadership and Followership: A Dance of Equals

My colleague, Ira Chaleff, an expert on the study of followership, has created a great video to illustrate the importance of leader-follower collaboration and the active role of followership. You can find it on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cswrnc1dggg

When sending the url, Ira wrote:

 

A couple of years ago after returning from Buenos Aires, I took beginning Tango lessons. I was surprised and enthralled to find the teacher, Sharna Fabiano, spending time in every lesson to impress upon us the nature and importance of the follower and leader roles. She had us practice each role, regardless of gender, so we developed an appreciation for what our partner needed from us in our role. Sharna used creative exercises to give us a visceral feel for how to lead or follow, well or poorly. Recently, I invited Sharna to demonstrate the different ways in which the follower role can be done and the resulting positive or negative impact on the leader. To my delight, she enthusiastically agreed to participate in this project.

From this collaboration I have produced a video, "Tango: The Dance of the Leader & Follower," that utilizes the wisdom and grace of Sharna, who is the founder of Tango Mercurio and the Tango Mercurio Community Orchestra in Washington, DC and one of America’s most highly regarded Tango instructors. Through her and her partner Isaac Oboka, we gain new insights into how the partner in the follower role can bring out the creativity of the partner in the leader role. In the final sequence, Sharna demonstrates how a strong follower can steady a leader who has lost balance – something leaders in every sphere of life require at one time or another.

Ira’s website, The Courageous Follower, provides a good listing of articles on empowered followership.  Enjoy!

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Women Leaders Dominate: Truth or Fiction?

Media coverage on gender and leadership has been interesting of late. I celebrate reports of women’s  progress – and wonder about the impact of the messaging on men and boys.

The world is changing, no question. And so are the skills needed to lead in it. But all the hype can distort reality and make us complacent about work yet to be done to create that level playing field for all women.

Cover stories in Newsweek on “The Beached White Male,” “The Traditional Male as an Endangered Species,” and “Hillary’s [Clinton] War” (in the issue also featuring “150 Women Who Shake the World”) tell a story of role reversal and more. (Just contrast the visuals. You’ll see what I mean!)  Hanna Rosin’s powerful “The End of Men” in The Atlantic and other such pieces on the topic reinforce the message: women rule – literally! 

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And last week, the Independent  Television Service (ITVS) and PBS announced a new 50 film series, “Women and Girls Lead,” to air over the next three years. The project reflects the large number of documentaries in the pipeline on the issue and a proactive strategy for creating “a sustained conversation” about women’s evolving global impact.

It’s even cool to be a feminist again. The Daily Beast reports authors like Kathleen Parker, who angered feminists with her book Save the Males, have had a public change of heart. "I’ve become a born-again feminist after decades of feeling that feminism had veered off course,” to quote Parker. The reality for women in the Middle East changed her mind. "The struggle for free expression in cultures that condone sacrificing women to men’s honor gets the blood pumping again."[1]

The good news in all this: women have new levels of power, opportunity, and visibility. They should. Women are now the majority of the U.S. workforce, managerial class, college graduates, and enrollees in graduate and professional programs like medicine and law – with similar trends evolving globally. Two career families in the U.S. are the norm, and it’s no longer an anomaly for women to bring home the bigger slab of the bacon. The number of women heads of state continues to increase across continents and cultures. Surprisingly, even preference for male children has been declining in traditional societies like South Korea, China, and India. Parents in the U.S. now favor the birth of girls more than 2 to 1.

The opportunities and competition in a global economy have moved things faster than consciousness-raising and legislation ever could. Nations need to get on the bus, or be left behind.  Quote Rosin:   

“As thinking and communicating have come to eclipse physical strength and stamina as the keys to economic success, those societies that take advantage of the talents of all their adults, not just half of them, have pulled away from the rest. In 2006, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development devised the Gender, Institutions and Development Database, which measures the economic and political power of women in 162 countries. With few exceptions, the greater the power of women, the greater the country’s economic success.”

I saw this illustrated powerfully on a recent trip to China: the throngs of eager young women moving into the cities and economic development zones in search of work, training, mentorship, and advancement – and moving from job to job when advancement and management training come too slow.

During a trip to Boeing Shanghai, for example, a young administrative assistant assertively sought my time and “leadership wisdom.” She finds Americans more willing to teach and mentor than Chinese bosses; and, she added, “how will I advance if I have to wait to be taught?”  Amen, sister!

The press frames all this as the end of male dominance. My university experiences don’t support the claim. Take a gender lens on issues like academic salaries, endowed chairs, tenure, upward mobility as the result of advancement through informal networking, institutional leadership, the number of women college presidents – you name it – and the world doesn’t seem that much different from when I entered the academic game. [See previous post on women faculty at MIT for more additional data.]

And remember the socializing power of colleges and universities: they train and model professional life and values for coming generations of leaders. What’s the gender message sent and damage done?

A recent study of Princeton undergraduates is a clue. It reports women underrepresented in the university’s highest profile leadership positions and as recipients of its highest academic prizes for more than ten years – and in “marked contrast to the earlier days of coeducation.”

These are smart, competitive, high achieving women at an institution filled with diverse opportunities and supports. So explain the decade-long phenomena described as “men up front, women behind the scenes. Men at the top, women somewhere else. Men operating for public recognition, women for personal satisfaction.”[2]

Who taught Princeton women that they need to be “poised, witty, and smart – but not so witty and smart as to be threatening to men,” as the report tells us those smart, competitive, high achieving young women concluded?  Sounds 1950’s Leave It to Beaver to me.

Progress toward gender equity? Absolutely. Opportunities? Unlimited. Women’s leadership? Essential and growing in impact. Role reversal? No.  We’ve come a long way, baby – but we’re not there yet.

[1] http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-03-06/newsweek-cheat-sheet-hillarys-war-and-150-women-who-shake-the-world/

[2] http://paw.princeton.edu/issues/2011/05/11/pages/3779/index.xml

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Leadership Lessons from Mom

Happy Mother’s Day! I’ve not thought much about the links between motherhood and leadership, but today gives good reason to.

People struggle to understand leadership and how to do it. Take a lesson from mom and a process you’ve known your whole life. You’ll see leadership in a whole new way.

Like good mothers, good leaders are those who . . .

  • Create – and with a leap of faith and the deep giving of self, give rise to that which did not exist before
  • Hold and protect until the newly born is able to stand alone
  • Exhibit qualities important for the development of others, such as affection, nurturance, and belief in human capacities to learn and change
  • Teach, encourage, and socialize to important values and norms
  • Reward accomplishments with increased freedom and responsibility
  • Balance respect for differences with equity and fairness to all
  • Convey they have a tiger in their tank so that they don’t need to let it out often (as in Don’t make me call your mother!)
  • Are open, accepting, and approachable but never a buddy
  • Earn respect for their actions over the long haul
  • Love what they do and those they work with.
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We Like Our Leaders Perfect

Americans have a yearning to believe not only in a hero’s good deeds but in his goodness as a person.[1]

The quote is from a provocative piece in Newsweek about Greg Mortenson (of Three Cups of Tea fame) and his quick fall from grace following allegations by 60 Minutes and an expose (Three Cups of Deceit) by Into the Wild and Into Thin Air author Jon Krakauer of fabricated claims in Mortenson’s memoir and about his charity’s school-building in Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as serious questions about his non-profit’s financial dealings and management.

I’ll let you read the details and sort through the hundreds of blogs, posts, websites, news stories, and online sources about the story to get to the truth.

I’m more interested in what all this says about us – and about why Mortenson’s grand story, as Krakow notes, went unchecked for years.

Plain and simple, we prefer our heroic leaders perfect, saintly, and on a pedestal.

It’s hard for us to look too close because we’d have to see them as human and acknowledge that imperfect or flawed people can still do great things.

Hampton Sides ties our preference for “neat” heroes to the quintessential American longing for the guy in the white hat – the perfect personification of our nation’s strengths and Manifest Destiny through a monochromatic Puritan lens.

I see it another way. If heroes are perfect, then I’m off the hook. Ordinary people like me don’t have to step up, speak out, take risks, or take a chance. We can just wait for the next perfect ones. And when their humanity begins to show, we can use our new-found social media capacities to take them down at break-neck speed too – or, as we do with our political leaders, throw them to the pundits and vote them out of office as soon as we can. Once free of these disappointing human beings, we can search for another perfect leader and again place all our hopes, dreams, and needs on that person. And the beat goes on.

There’s a simple alternative that will serve us better. We can all look for the leader within and act. Accept the fact that despite our foibles and imperfections, we can do great things – and in the process, learn  compassion for the imperfect others attempting to do the same.

There’s something deeply heroic – deeply American – about that.  

[1] Hampton Sides (2011). Shattered faith: What the fall of Greg Mortenson tells us about America’s irrepressible longing for heroes. Newsweek. May 2, 2011. pp. 5-6. Available online at http://www.newsweek.com/2011/04/24/shattered-faith.html

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In Celebration of Sidney Harman: Career Self-Management at Its Finest

Sidney Harman died last Tuesday at 92. If you don’t know much about Harman’s life, you need to. It stands as a model of career self-management at its finest: a passion for learning and creative problem solving wedded to solid values, a love of life, and a willingness to use his talents across a range of projects and sectors.

The key to a good and long life, Harmon once mused, is restless curiosity. His fueled technology and business successes that revolutionized the audio industry – I still have the groovy Harman/Kardon stereo speakers I bought in graduate school – as well as his political activism, philanthropy, love of the arts, and stints as a college president, Jimmy Carter’s deputy Secretary of Commerce, and Executive Chairman of the edgy, born-again Newsweek (now in partnership with Tina Brown and the online Daily Beast.)   

You can read details of Harmon’s life and leadership in his autobiography, Mind Your Own Business: A Maverick’s Guide to Business Leadership and Life – or in the many tributes following his passing.

I call attention to the confidence that his skills and experiences were transferable across time and industry, his willingness to get in there and do something – “lead the revolution” – even when others had given up or failed, his refusal to take himself too seriously – “Want a little Shakespeare? The kid is ready.”[1] – and his positive determinism.

Just weeks before his death on learning about the cancer that would quickly take his life, Harman penned an upbeat, sassy My Turn column for Newsweek entitled “Hey Cancer: Go Stand in the Corner.”[2] Life is  for living, working, and enjoying the things you love to do. Harman wasn’t naïve or in denial about his health. He just wanted to continue living his life as he had always done: deliberately and fully, nothing on hold as he faced down “the dragon.”

During chemo, he planned to prepare his lectures for his University of Southern California class, study Newsweek’s recent operating reports, read, listen to music, and work on his new book entitled Geezer Golf. “This is a hell of a good time to finish it,” Harmon wrote.[3]

The New York Times eulogized Harman as “a scholar of boundless energy and utopian ideas,” and that’s what set him apart from the crowd and prepared him for a diversified career.

I want the courage to live and work every day the way Sid Harman did. He knew who he was and brought that with confidence to every table. He loved what he did – or changed things up when needed to keep life fresh. What about you?

[1] Sidney Harman (2011). Hey, Cancer: Go Stand in the Corner. Newsweek. April 25, p. 9. Accessible at http://www.newsweek.com/2011/04/17/hey-cancer-go-stand-in-the-corner.html

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

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Who’s Leading Us:The 10 Most- Followed People on Twitter

I was surprised to see a recent list of the 10 most-followed people on Twitter.  While Twitter analysts have  complex formulas for measuring Twitter influence by counting tweets, tweeting frequency, mentions of another’s tweet, personal responses to less famous followers, and retweets, I’m OK looking at raw numbers to ask an important question. To whom do we accord power and leadership?   

If we listen to someone – and listen regularly – we cannot help but be influenced by what they think, say, do, and value. Look who’s got the ear of millions today – and millions of young people. What does all this say?

The 10 Most-Followed People on Twitter

1. Lady Gaga (7,941,444 followers)

2. Justin Bieber (7,032,265 followers)

3. Britney Spears (6,652,470 followers)

4. Barack Obama (6,531,868 followers)

5. Ashton Kutcher (6,261,483 followers)

6. Kim Kardashian (6,032,559 followers)

7. Ellen DeGeneres (5,745,455 followers)

8. Katy Perry (5,283,350 followers)

9. Taylor Swift (5,020,965 followers)

10. Oprah Winfrey (5,013,218 followers)

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Data from David Leonhardt (March 27, 2011). “A Better Way to Measure Twitter Influence.” New York Times Magazine, p. 18.

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Top Ten List: Executive MBA Learnings about China Today

The China trip is over, and we’re home tired but transformed. You can’t study and travel in China and feel otherwise. The world never looks as big nor China as overwhelming again. 

China is an amazing country where you taste the pace of change and development – and it is both exhilarating and exhausting.  Anything is possible; but the efforts required to navigate the culture, infrastructure, and realities of the country’s transition daunting. Recognizing all this at the core of one’s being is the purpose of the Executive MBA residency and the power of experiential learning. Translating that into executive judgment and rules for informed action comes with time and reflection. Students have been journaling to facilitate the process. I’ve been doing my own.

Below, my Top Ten list of what I hope students experienced in China. There are important learnings  embedded in each for their careers, leadership effectiveness, and global citizenship. 

1. If they were energized by the pace of action, the palpable excitement of our distinguished speakers (Chinese and ex-pats), and the sense of infinite (and prosperous) possibility, they learned something important about China today.

2. If they were exhausted by the pace of the action; the daily multi-layer challenges business and life require; the amount of information – sometimes conflicting – and planning needed to inform simple actions; and how plans changed, speakers cancelled, substitutes came, and traffic and government policies altered schedules despite high levels of planning, they learned something important about China today.

3. If they felt confused and awkward in knowing what rules (cultural, social, political, economic, ethical, governmental) applied when, they learned something important about China today.

4. If they were frustrated by a slow, erratic internet in a well-wired nation where cell phones work in  subways, in deserts and on mountains, along the Great Wall, and in the highest of skyscrapers, they learned something important about China today.

5. If they were surprised that Shanghai could differ so markedly and in so many ways from Beijing and both cities from Tianjin and the country side (and how different a 5 star hotel in each could be), they learned something important about China today.

6. If they were surprised (or shocked) by differing industry standards, safety measures, pollution levels, and technologies, they learned something important about China today.

7. If they experienced the predilection for luxury brands and shopping as the national pastime among China’s rapidly rising affluent — and were intrigued by their own feelings of winning through their wiles in the shops and markets, they learned something important about China today.

8. If they saw a blind eye turned so as to turn a profit, they learned something important about China today.

9. If they heard every speaker – whatever their assigned topic – touch on the importance of talent development and new HR policies to attract, retrain, and train China’s young, eager, and mobile workforce, they learned something important about China today. 

10. If they felt they learned a lot about China through this residency, but now feel how little they really know about this rising economic and political giant, they learned something important about China today,  about the demands of global leadership, and about the role of lifelong learning for leadership effectiveness.

BONUS:  The Bloch Executive MBA on a company visit to Lights Medical Manufacture Co., Ltd. in Tianjin pictured with the company’s founders, Dr. Li Shaobo and Ms. Wang Jinping, and senior leadership. (Photo compliments of Lights Medical.) 

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Day 10: Coming Home

Today is last minute errands, final things to see in Beijing, and suitcase packing.  For some, there will probably be final fittings with the tailor, if multiple alterations were required.

We check out of the hotel at noon.  Our group flight out of China to Newark is at 3:45 pm.  We leave late Monday afternoon, fly all day, and arrive home in Kansas City on Monday evening, recapturing the day we lost when we last crossed the International dateline.

I look forward to seeing my family — and to sleeping in my own bed tonight!