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The Umbrella Man: How Do You Make Sense of Him?

48 years ago last week, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on a clear and sunny day in Dallas, Texas. Standing beside the motorcade as the fatal shots were fired was a lone man dressed in black holding an open black umbrella.

Who is the umbrella man? 

Take a look at New York Times best-selling author (Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography) and Academy Award-winning filmmaker Errol Morris’s new short.

Then let me know (a) what have you learned from it about how humans make sense of their world, and (b) how will understanding all that make you a better diagnostician and a better leader?  

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Leaders, be thankful! You’ll thank me for the reminder– and help yourself along the way

This week in the U.S., many gather with family and friends to give thanks for our many blessings.

In today’s rough-and-tumble work world, it can be easy to lose sight of things for which we can be thankful. The global economic downturn has made work and life tougher – no doubt about it. The bottom-line matters more when there is less margin for error. And everyone is being asked to do more with less.

Leaders can balance the strain with a conscious focus on positive sentiments, like hope, enjoyment, compassion, and thankfulness.

Health and wellness research consistently confirms the physiological benefits: immediate positive changes in heart rhythms, as well as neural, hormonal and biochemical reactions that drop blood pressure, muscle tension, and stress hormones. Scientists at UCLA found that optimism strengthened immune functioning. And, forgiveness – letting go of resentment for a perceived offense (including forgiving yourself for not being perfect or where you thought you’d be at this point in your life) – decreases blood pressure, cortisol, and other hormones associated with heart disease, immunity disorders, and more.

Feeling good helps you weather the storms you face – and make progress on things important to you.

Need a little help given where things are in your life?  Try the following reasons to be thankful:

Take time and celebrate:  Yes, 80 is the new fifty!  U.S. Census figures have confirmed that the number of people living to age 90 and beyond has tripled in the past three decades and will quadruple by 2050. Stay healthy – and the odds are with you to have plenty of time to accomplish what you want to accomplish. Take pressure off yourself to have and do it all now, and celebrate where you are.

Let legendary pop singer Tony Bennett be your model. His new album "Duets II" – which is darn good, I might add – soared to No. 1 on the Billboard 200, a first for Bennett in his career and making him at 85 the oldest living act to reach No. 1. [Click on the album title and listen to a sample.]   

Get moving and be smarter:  The literature on exercise is conclusive: moderate amounts of regular aerobic exercise produce chemical changes that promote new brain cells in the part of the brain essential for learning and memory. Yahoo, positive news for aging brains!  Anyone can get smarter!  

Indulge and avoid guilt: Analysis of seven studies (with more than 100,000 subjects) found chocolate consumption associated with lower rates of stroke, coronary heart disease, blood pressure, and other cardiovascular conditions. The British Medical Journal reported chocolate eaters had decreases of 37% in risk of cardiovascular disorders and 29% in risk for stroke, but warned chocolate’s benefits come when eaten in moderation.  A prescription to eat chocolate – thank you, doctor!   

Relax and enjoy: NPR has a super series of Tiny Desk Concerts for a quick break in a long day. Last week they posted their best ever. Take a few minutes, click on the link, and enjoy. Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, Chris Thile And Stuart Duncan: Tiny Desk Concert Notice the musicians’ joy and passion for their work. May you find yours! 

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! 

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Depression and Executive Overload: We’re In Over Our Heads So We Better Learn to Cope Better

Andrew Weil has been making the media rounds with his new best seller, Spontaneous Happiness. His exploration of depression as a rising global phenomenon caught my attention.

Weil, an M.D. with an interest in wellness, points to the growing body of research on links between rising global wealth – and the adoption of the modern Western lifestyle (sedentary, solitary, stimulus-overloaded, indoors, technology-filled) and diet (processed and engineered) that goes with it – and higher global rates of depression.

I look at Leslie Chang’s award-winning Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China and see a case study of what he means (and one way to understand China’s distinction in having the highest female suicide rate in the world).

Closer to home, 1 in 10 people in the U.S. today are on depression medication. This includes millions of children. The World Health Organization projects by 2030, more people world-wide will be treated for depression than any other health condition.

Plain and simple, countries with the least developed lifestyles have the lowest rates of depression. “There seems to be something about modern life that creates fertile soil for depression,” says Martin Seligman, father of the field of positive psychology (and author of Flourish, discussed in an earlier post).[1]

Concludes Weil: our “ancient brains” just aren’t equipped for 21st century life (and we’d better start doing something to keep them and the bodies that fuel them in good working order).  Amen. 

So are you going to do anything different in your life for knowing this?  I ask because Weil’s message isn’t really new.

Fourteen years ago, Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan warned us[2] that modern living is just too darn hard – that over an increasing portion of our lives, there’s a mismatch between the complexity of what we need to know and understand to function productively and the human capacity to grasp it all. The result: increasing stress and a struggle to develop more sophisticated ways of thinking and learning to respond.  The flattening of the world has only magnified that.

Seven years later, psychiatrist Edward M. Hallowell offered a different slant in Harvard Business Review in “Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform” – an article that remains one of the most read HBR reprints today. Hallowell spoke of an increasing number of patients reporting symptoms similar to those of attention deficit disorder without having that disorder. Their symptoms were merely the brain’s natural response to stress, stimulus, and overload: impatience, as well as diminished capacities for problem-solving, resilience, focus, memory, and creativity. Talented executives became “frenzied underachievers.” 

We can all do better than that – and have to, given today’s fast-paced world. Suggestions for how from my most recent book, Reframing Academic Leadership.[3]

Learning to Cope in a World on Over-drive

Healthy leaders care for themselves and build vitality by attending to five key areas: boundaries, biology, balance, beauty, and bounce.

Boundaries: Got to have ’em, got to maintain ’em. Human are programmed to take in the emotions of others. That’s why we feel better around positive, high energy people. Negative emotions hamper brain functioning. Don’t dwell on them. Hallowell suggests interacting with folks you like every 4 to 6 hours, especially during stressful periods, to promote positive feelings. 

Biology: Take better care of your body, and it will take better care of your brain. Increase aerobic exercise, eat better (more fruits, vegetables, lean proteins; less sugar, white flour, processed foods), stay hydrated, limit caffeine and alcohol, improve sleep patterns. The evidence for these is overwhelming, and neuroscience confirms that healthy brains develop new circuitry to compensate for the normal loss with aging.

Balance:  Balance flows from willingness to attend to the diverse needs of mind, body, and soul. Try mindfulness to train the brain to focus amid distraction. Stress is eased with learned relaxation. Negativity is countered by conscious focus on positive sentiments (empowerment, love, care, appreciation, forgiveness, compassion). Deal with fears of overload by remembering you can handle it – and you will. Weil suggests cultivating times of silence and limiting email, television, disturbing noise, and internet use.

Beauty: Find it for yourself: it feeds the soul. Nature and the arts are obvious choices. “Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable,” said playwright George Bernard Shaw. Weil touts the added physical benefits of time spent outside, including Vitamin D (which is vital for brain health).

Bounce: Resilience comes from recognizing that we always have choice in interpreting and responding to events, keeping things in perspective, trusting one’s instincts, practicing new behaviors and responses, and reflecting on the consequences. It is helped by learning to “wear life loosely” and by reaching out to others for social connections. Weil reminds us that social interactions are a powerful safeguard of emotional well-being. 


[1] Andrew Weil (2011). “Don’t Let Chaos Get You Down.” Newsweek. Double Issue (November 7 and 14), pp. 9-10.

[2] Robert Kegan (1994). In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

[3] Based on materials in Lee G. Bolman and Joan V. Gallos (2011). Reframing Academic Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Chapter 12.

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Finding that right job: Write a resume that’s you

Last night was our Bloch Executive MBA Alumni Celebration. The topic of job hunting and resume writing came up in a number of conversations. This morning, this from ForbesWoman came across my desk. I pass it on with a few words of advice on career self-management (and with pride on how well our graduates are doing on that front).

Putting your best foot forward to find the job of your dreams requires understanding both your past and your future: what you have done and the skills and experiences you take from that work, and the passions and interests you have for where you want to use those next.

In a tough economy, people can easily forget that. Discouragement or feeling stuck where you are is an understandable response. Understandable, but not helpful – or even true. There are jobs out there for those needing employment and for those seeking advancement. You need to think about how to position yourself for them. 

A first rule of thumb: network, network, network.  A nomination to an employer is always better than a cold call. Second is persistence: no is just the first step to yes!  Don’t be discouraged. Finding fit takes time.  Third, learn to present your full package – that’s where the resume comes in. Writing a good one is a work of art – and the content expected will vary by industry. 

In the academic world, for example, we tell all – submit anything less than a resume of double-digit size with a list of your entire publication record and you look like a lightweight. Give a twenty-plus page resume to a Fortune 500 recruiter, and you’re out.

Who are you professionally?  What excites you? What have you done of which you are most proud? What’s unique about your accomplishments?  How do they fit the position you seek?  What story does your job history tell?  Make sure someone reading your resume will find all that.

The world is your oyster!  Go for it. 

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Final Cut: Words to Strike from Your Resume

If you’ve applied for a job recently, you’ve probably looked over that 8½ x 11” summary of your career more times than you can count—and tweaked it just as often—in pursuit of the perfect resume.

But before you add another bullet point, consider this: It’s not always about what you add in—the best changes you can make may lie in what you take out.

The average resume is chock-full of sorely outdated, essentially meaningless phrases that take up valuable space on the page. Eliminate them, and you’ll come off as a better, more substantial candidate—and your resume won’t smack of that same generic, mind-numbing quality found on everyone else’s.

Every word—yes, every word—on that page should be working hard to highlight your talents and skills. If it’s not, it shouldn’t be on there. So grab a red pen, and banish these words from your resume for good.

Career Objective

My first few resumes had a statement like this emblazoned top and center: “Career objective: To obtain a position as a [insert job title here] that leverages my skills and experience as well as provides a challenging environment that promotes growth.”

Yawn. This is not only boring, it’s ineffective (and sounds a little juvenile, to boot). The top of your resume is prime real estate, and it needs to grab a hiring manager’s attention with a list of your top accomplishments, not a summary of what you hope to get out of your next position.

Experienced

You can be “experienced” in something after you’ve done it once—or every day for the past 10 years. So drop this nebulous term and be specific. If, for example, you’re a Client Report Specialist, using a phrase such as “Experienced in developing client reports” is both vague and redundant. But sharing that you “Created five customized weekly reports to analyze repeat client sales activity”—now that gives the reader a better idea of where exactly this so-called experience lies, with some actual results attached.

Also eliminate: seasoned, well-versed

Team Player

If you’ve ever created an online dating profile, you know that you don’t just say that you’re nice and funny—you craft a fun, witty profile that shows it. Same goes for your resume: It’s much more effective to list activities or accomplishments that portray your good qualities in action than to simply claim to have them.

Instead of “team player,” say “Led project team of 10 to develop a new system for distributing reports that reduced the time for managers to receive reports by 25%.” Using a specific example, you show what you can actually accomplish. But simply labeling yourself with a quality? Not so much.

Also eliminate: people person, customer-focused

Dynamic

While resumes are meant to highlight your best attributes, some personality traits are better left to the hiring manager to decide upon for herself. There is a difference between appropriately and accurately describing your work skills and just tooting your own horn. Plus, even the most introverted wallflower will claim to be “dynamic” on a piece of paper because, well, why not? When it comes to resumes, keep the content quantifiable, show tangible results and successes, and wait until the interview to show off your “dynamism,” “enthusiasm,” or “energy.”

Also eliminate: energetic, enthusiastic

References Available Upon Request

All this phrase really does is take up valuable space. If a company wants to hire you, they will ask you for references—and they will assume that you have them. There’s no need to address the obvious (and doing so might even make you look a little presumptuous!). Use the space to give more details about your talents and accomplishments instead.

In a crummy job market with a record number of people applying for the same positions, it takes more than a list of desirable-sounding qualities to warrant an interview. Specific examples pack a punch, whereas anything too dependent on a list of buzzwords will sound just like everyone else’s cookie-cutter resume. So, give your resume a good once-over, and make sure every word on that page is working hard for you.

This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse.

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Find Your Own Voice: 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice Revisited

If you’ve ever taken a writing course, you’ve probably read Strunk and White’s classic, The Elements of Style. A review of the book at its 50th anniversary – one of the most read articles from The Chronicle of Higher Education over the last two and a half years — is worth a read (and you’ll find it below). May it free your inner writer!    

Clear and compelling writing is essential for leaders – it’s a way to connect with others around a shared agenda. Equally important, doing it well is professional development. To write well you need to think well. Working to tighten and clarify your prose helps you tighten and clarify your thoughts. If you’ve ever worked to write a good executive summary of a huge report or an abstract for a complex piece of research or analysis, you know what I mean. The capacity to craft a persuasive written argument (or email, memo, or report) is a talent that will set you apart from the crowd.    

Advice from The Leadership Professor: work on your written communication skills. Don’t assume they are old hat in the Twitter age. Get some solid rules under your belt for how to form strong sentences, cogent paragraphs, and evidence-based arguments that sing. As you’ll see below, the rules of writing are worth remembering, but you may not have gotten all you need. The process of deliberately thinking about the choices you make in your writing and the impact you want to have will go a long way. 

My primary writing rule has stood the test of time, I’m proud to say: find your own voice and learn to use it to your competitive advantage. Finding your voice doesn’t mean letting it all hang out, IM style. It means  knowing how you like to connect with your audience through words, what makes your messages clear and memorable, and how you can best bring your understandings and perspectives to relevant others so that they can learn from them. All writing is personal and interpretive: how does yours acknowledge and reflect that?

Elements of style – fundamental. Style without voice – empty. Style + voice – impact. 

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50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice[1]

By Geoffrey K. Pullum

April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved and admired throughout American academe. Celebrations, readings, and toasts are being held, and a commemorative edition has been released. I won’t be celebrating.

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.

The authors won’t be hurt by these critical remarks. They are long dead. William Strunk was a professor of English at Cornell about a hundred years ago, and E.B. White, later the much-admired author of Charlotte’s Web, took English with him in 1919, purchasing as a required text the first edition, which Strunk had published privately. After Strunk’s death, White published a New Yorker article reminiscing about him and was asked by Macmillan to revise and expand Elements for commercial publication. It took off like a rocket (in 1959) and has sold millions.

This was most unfortunate for the field of English grammar, because both authors were grammatical incompetents. Strunk had very little analytical understanding of syntax, White even less. Certainly White was a fine writer, but he was not qualified as a grammarian. Despite the post-1957 explosion of theoretical linguistics, Elements settled in as the primary vehicle through which grammar was taught to college students and presented to the general public, and the subject was stuck in the doldrums for the rest of the 20th century.

Notice what I am objecting to is not the style advice in Elements, which might best be described the way The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy describes Earth: mostly harmless. Some of the recommendations are vapid, like "Be clear" (how could one disagree?). Some are tautologous, like "Do not explain too much." (Explaining too much means explaining more than you should, so of course you shouldn’t.) Many are useless, like "Omit needless words." (The students who know which words are needless don’t need the instruction.) Even so, it doesn’t hurt to lay such well-meant maxims before novice writers.

Even the truly silly advice, like "Do not inject opinion," doesn’t really do harm. (No force on earth can prevent undergraduates from injecting opinion. And anyway, sometimes that is just what we want from them.) But despite the "Style" in the title, much in the book relates to grammar, and the advice on that topic does real damage. It is atrocious. Since today it provides just about all of the grammar instruction most Americans ever get, that is something of a tragedy. Following the platitudinous style recommendations of Elements would make your writing better if you knew how to follow them, but that is not true of the grammar stipulations.

"Use the active voice" is a typical section head. And the section in question opens with an attempt to discredit passive clauses that is either grammatically misguided or disingenuous.

We are told that the active clause "I will always remember my first trip to Boston" sounds much better than the corresponding passive "My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me." It sure does. But that’s because a passive is always a stylistic train wreck when the subject refers to something newer and less established in the discourse than the agent (the noun phrase that follows "by").

For me to report that I paid my bill by saying "The bill was paid by me," with no stress on "me," would sound inane. (I’m the utterer, and the utterer always counts as familiar and well established in the discourse.) But that is no argument against passives generally. "The bill was paid by an anonymous benefactor" sounds perfectly natural. Strunk and White are denigrating the passive by presenting an invented example of it deliberately designed to sound inept.

After this unpromising start, there is some fairly sensible style advice: The authors explicitly say they do not mean "that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice," which is "frequently convenient and sometimes necessary." They give good examples to show that the choice between active and passive may depend on the topic under discussion.

Sadly, writing tutors tend to ignore this moderation, and simply red-circle everything that looks like a passive, just as Microsoft Word’s grammar checker underlines every passive in wavy green to signal that you should try to get rid of it. That overinterpretation is part of the damage that Strunk and White have unintentionally done. But it is not what I am most concerned about here.

What concerns me is that the bias against the passive is being retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don’t know what is a passive construction and what isn’t. Of the four pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken diagnoses. "At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be heard" is correctly identified as a passive clause, but the other three are all errors:

"There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground" has no sign of the passive in it anywhere.

"It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had" also contains nothing that is even reminiscent of the passive construction.

"The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired" is presumably fingered as passive because of "impaired," but that’s a mistake. It’s an adjective here. "Become" doesn’t allow a following passive clause. (Notice, for example, that "A new edition became issued by the publishers" is not grammatical.)

These examples can be found all over the Web in study guides for freshman composition classes. (Try a Google search on "great number of dead leaves lying.") I have been told several times, by both students and linguistics-faculty members, about writing instructors who think every occurrence of "be" is to be condemned for being "passive." No wonder, if Elements is their grammar bible. It is typical for college graduates today to be unable to distinguish active from passive clauses. They often equate the grammatical notion of being passive with the semantic one of not specifying the agent of an action. (They think "a bus exploded" is passive because it doesn’t say whether terrorists did it.)

The treatment of the passive is not an isolated slip. It is typical of Elements. The book’s toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules. They can’t help it, because they don’t know how to identify what they condemn.

"Put statements in positive form," they stipulate, in a section that seeks to prevent "not" from being used as "a means of evasion."

"Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs," they insist. (The motivation of this mysterious decree remains unclear to me.)

And then, in the very next sentence, comes a negative passive clause containing three adjectives: "The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place."

That’s actually not just three strikes, it’s four, because in addition to contravening "positive form" and "active voice" and "nouns and verbs," it has a relative clause ("that can pull") removed from what it belongs with (the adjective), which violates another edict: "Keep related words together."

"Keep related words together" is further explained in these terms: "The subject of a sentence and the principal verb should not, as a rule, be separated by a phrase or clause that can be transferred to the beginning." That is a negative passive, containing an adjective, with the subject separated from the principal verb by a phrase ("as a rule") that could easily have been transferred to the beginning. Another quadruple violation.

The book’s contempt for its own grammatical dictates seems almost willful, as if the authors were flaunting the fact that the rules don’t apply to them. But I don’t think they are. Given the evidence that they can’t even tell actives from passives, my guess would be that it is sheer ignorance. They know a few terms, like "subject" and "verb" and "phrase," but they do not control them well enough to monitor and analyze the structure of what they write.

There is of course nothing wrong with writing passives and negatives and adjectives and adverbs. I’m not nitpicking the authors’ writing style. White, in particular, often wrote beautifully, and his old professor would have been proud of him. What’s wrong is that the grammatical advice proffered in Elements is so misplaced and inaccurate that counterexamples often show up in the authors’ own prose on the very same page.

Some of the claims about syntax are plainly false despite being respected by the authors. For example, Chapter IV, in an unnecessary piece of bossiness, says that the split infinitive "should be avoided unless the writer wishes to place unusual stress on the adverb." The bossiness is unnecessary because the split infinitive has always been grammatical and does not need to be avoided. (The authors actually knew that. Strunk’s original version never even mentioned split infinitives. White added both the above remark and the further reference, in Chapter V, admitting that "some infinitives seem to improve on being split.") But what interests me here is the descriptive claim about stress on the adverb. It is completely wrong.

Tucking the adverb in before the verb actually de-emphasizes the adverb, so a sentence like "The dean’s statements tend to completely polarize the faculty" places the stress on polarizing the faculty. The way to stress the completeness of the polarization would be to write, "The dean’s statements tend to polarize the faculty completely."

This is actually implied by an earlier section of the book headed "Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end," yet White still gets it wrong. He feels there are circumstances where the split infinitive is not quite right, but he is simply not competent to spell out his intuition correctly in grammatical terms.

An entirely separate kind of grammatical inaccuracy in Elements is the mismatch with readily available evidence. Simple experiments (which students could perform for themselves using downloaded classic texts from sources like http://gutenberg.org) show that Strunk and White preferred to base their grammar claims on intuition and prejudice rather than established literary usage.

Consider the explicit instruction: "With none, use the singular verb when the word means ‘no one’ or ‘not one.’" Is this a rule to be trusted? Let’s investigate.

Try searching the script of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) for "none of us." There is one example of it as a subject: "None of us are perfect" (spoken by the learned Dr. Chasuble). It has plural agreement.

Download and search Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). It contains no cases of "none of us" with singular-inflected verbs, but one that takes the plural ("I think that none of us were surprised when we were asked to see Mrs. Harker a little before the time of sunset").

Examine the text of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s popular novel Anne of Avonlea (1909). There are no singular examples, but one with the plural ("None of us ever do").

It seems to me that the stipulation in Elements is totally at variance not just with modern conversational English but also with literary usage back when Strunk was teaching and White was a boy.

Is the intelligent student supposed to believe that Stoker, Wilde, and Montgomery didn’t know how to write? Did Strunk or White check even a single book to see what the evidence suggested? Did they have any evidence at all for the claim that the cases with plural agreement are errors? I don’t think so.

There are many other cases of Strunk and White’s being in conflict with readily verifiable facts about English. Consider the claim that a sentence should not begin with "however" in its connective adverb sense ("when the meaning is ‘nevertheless’").

Searching for "however" at the beginnings of sentences and "however" elsewhere reveals that good authors alternate between placing the adverb first and placing it after the subject. The ratios vary. Mark Liberman, of the University of Pennsylvania, checked half a dozen of Mark Twain’s books and found roughly seven instances of "however" at the beginning of a sentence for each three placed after the subject, whereas in five selected books by Henry James, the ratio was one to 15. In Dracula I found a ratio of about one to five. The evidence cannot possibly support a claim that "however" at the beginning of a sentence should be eschewed. Strunk and White are just wrong about the facts of English syntax.

The copy editor’s old bugaboo about not using "which" to introduce a restrictive relative clause is also an instance of failure to look at the evidence. Elements as revised by White endorses that rule. But 19th-century authors whose prose was never forced through a 20th-century prescriptive copy-editing mill generally alternated between "which" and "that." (There seems to be a subtle distinction in meaning related to whether new information is being introduced.) There was never a period in the history of English when "which" at the beginning of a restrictive relative clause was an error.

In fact, as Jan Freeman, of The Boston Globe, noted (in her blog, The Word), Strunk himself used "which" in restrictive relative clauses. White not only added the anti-"which" rule to the book but also revised away the counterexamples that were present in his old professor’s original text!

It’s sad. Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White, and the result is a nation of educated people who know they feel vaguely anxious and insecure whenever they write "however" or "than me" or "was" or "which," but can’t tell you why. The land of the free in the grip of The Elements of Style.

So I won’t be toasting 50 years of the over-opinionated and under-informed little book that put so many people in this unhappy state of grammatical angst. I’ve spent too much of my scholarly life studying English grammar in a serious way. English syntax is a deep and interesting subject. It is much too important to be reduced to a bunch of trivial don’t-do-this prescriptions by a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can’t even tell when they’ve broken their own misbegotten rules.

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Geoffrey K. Pullum is head of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh and co-author (with Rodney Huddleston) of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

[1] http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 32, Page B15

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TGIF – Let The Wild Women of Kansas City Show You How

It’s Friday. Time for a spirit lift. I know just the thing.

At the recent 2011 Starr Symposium (Age Becomes Us: Leading, Empowering, and Building Capacity Across the Generations), the lunch crowd jumped to its feet for a spontaneous dance when The Wild Women of Kansas City – oh yes, there are official ones in town — offered their rendition of the Gloria Gaynor classic “I Will Survive.” To feel the spirit, take a look at what a simple IPhone captured. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cioK-DKS-xQ

If you look carefully, you will see writer and activist Gloria Steinem, social justice activist and co-founder of the United Farm Workers Union Dolores Huerta, and The Leadership Professor enjoying the moment. (More on the substance of this amazing symposium in future posts.)

For a better visual and audio experience with The Wild Women, click on http://la.myspace.com/video/vid/3485641 or check out a few of their songs generously offered at http://www.myspace.com/wildwomenofkansascity 

Spontaneous and audacious dancing encouraged – preferably with your office door opened!

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What if everyone in town wanted to be a school teacher?

I live in a city whose urban school system has been in chaos since the 1970’s. On January 1, the district  loses its state accreditation to no one’s surprise. The State Commissioner of Education has now asked the Kansas City Missouri School Board to resign rather than risk being removed. It’s a mess – and has been for some 40 years (and despite the best efforts of some very good people).

It’s easy to point fingers – at the Board, parents, taxpayers, the superintendent who jumped ship after a slim few years in the job (or many of his predecessors who did the same), teachers, the teachers union, teacher preparation programs, families who fled the district, and more. It’s hard to find a way out.

An interview with Finland’s Minister of Education, Henna Virkkunen, got me thinking. How could we create a city/regional/national culture that really values its schools?

We espouse public education as the foundation for an educated citizenry and strong democracy. How could we really live that?

As our public school system sinks deeper into the morass – along with those of many other urban centers — my city is launching a campaign to become the entrepreneurship capital of the nation. I can’t help but wonder, what if we decided to become the public education capital instead? 

What if everyone in town – especially the best and the brightest – wanted to teach in our public schools rather than start their own business?  Devoted themselves to study and preparation so as to obtain the coveted career prize of a teaching job?  What would a community do to promote teaching and learning at that high level?  What would have to change? Any suggestions?

Some excerpts below from the interview with Henna Virkkunen (conducted by Justin Snider, contributing editor of The Hechinger Report) to see where a different scenario for Kansas City – for your city, for our country — might take us.

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It’s well-known that Finland’s teachers are an elite bunch, with only top students offered the chance to become teachers. It’s also no secret that they are well-trained. But take us inside that training for a moment — what does it look like, specifically? How does teacher training in Finland differ from teacher training in other countries?

Virkkunen: It’s a difficult question. Our teachers are really good. One of the main reasons they are so good is because the teaching profession is one of the most famous careers in Finland, so young people want to become teachers.

In Finland, we think that teachers are key for the future and it’s a very important profession — and that’s why all of the young, talented people want to become teachers. All of the teacher-training is run by universities in Finland and all students do a five-year master’s degree. Because they are studying at the university, teacher education is research-based. Students have a lot of supervised teacher-training during their studies. We have something called "training schools" — normally next to universities — where the student teaches and gets feedback from a trained supervisor.

Teachers in Finland can choose their own teaching methods and materials. They are experts of their own work and they test their own pupils. I think this is also one of the reasons why teaching is such an attractive profession in Finland because teachers are working like academic experts with their own pupils in schools.

How are teachers evaluated in Finland? How are they held accountable for student learning?

Virkkunen: Our educational society is based on trust and cooperation, so when we are doing some testing and evaluations, we don’t use it for controlling [teachers] but for development. We trust the teachers. It’s true that we are all human beings, and of course there are differences in how teachers test pupils, but if we look at the OECD evaluation — PISA, for example — the learning differences among Finnish schools and pupils are the smallest in OECD countries, so it seems that we have a very equal system of good quality.

What do you think the U.S. can and should learn from Finland when it comes to public education?

Virkkunen: An educational system has to serve the local community, and it’s very much tied to a country’s own history and society, so we can’t take one system from another country and put it somewhere else. But I think that teachers are really the key for a better educational system. It’s really important to pay attention to teacher training, in-service training and working conditions. Of course, the teachers always say we also have to pay attention to their salaries. But in Finland, it seems that the salaries are not the main reason it’s an attractive profession. Teachers aren’t very badly paid. They earn the average if you look at other academic professions.

In the U.S., it’s estimated that 50 percent of new teachers quit within five years. I suspect it’s different in Finland. Is teaching seen as a lifelong career in Finland?

Virkkunen: Teaching is a lifelong career in Finland, but right now we are doing an evaluation of why some teachers leave their jobs. The rate isn’t very high. It’s often men who leave, as they find jobs with higher salaries. We have to develop some kind of mentoring system because the new, young teachers need support. Often the feedback I hear from young teachers is that it is not easy to cooperate with parents, for example, so that is one of the areas where young teachers need support from their colleagues.

What’s something important but not widely known or well understood about public education in Finland?

Virkkunen: We teach all pupils in the same classrooms. We don’t have really good, top schools and very poor, bad schools. We are quite good at giving special support to students with learning difficulties. About 25 percent of our pupils receive some kind of special support, but in regular classrooms — often the teacher has an assistant in the classroom. We also think it is very important that there aren’t too many pupils per teacher. We don’t have legislation limiting class size, but the average class size for all grades is 21. In first and second grade, it’s 19.

We think we can have equality and good quality at the same time — that they are not opposites.

Our students spend less time in class than students in other OECD countries. We don’t think it helps students learn if they spend seven hours per day at school because they also need time for hobbies and of course they also have homework.

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Leadership Best Practices from Ronald McDonald

Every year the Hay Group does a study of the Best Companies for Leadership. I wasn’t expecting to find McDonald’s high on their list (#7).

Mea culpa, I wasn’t associating serious things like leadership best practices with Ronald McDonald. I stand corrected. We can all learn from looking at McDonald’s recipe for assuring the right leadership at all levels of the operation. The company emphasizes:

1. teamwork

2. proactive performance management with clear and consistent expectations and high standards

3. attention to education, training, coaching, and leadership development, and

4. leadership continuity through an impressive retention rate of over 95% of the graduates from the company’s internal accelerated leadership program.

The result is a strong, consistent corporate culture, with reliability in product delivery and innovation to stay ahead of the competition in a globalized, customer-centric, fast-changing, fast-food market.

How are you doing on important dimensions like teamwork, performance management, leadership education and training, and retention in your business? What could you be doing more or better?

To get you thinking, here are excerpts from the Hay report on how McDonald’s talks about the issues.

What are the leadership practices that differentiate McDonald’s?

It starts with having high standards. Performance management is at the core: we employ a 20/70/10 performance distribution model across the organization: 20 per cent at the exceptional level, 70 per cent significant and then 10 per cent needs improvement. We make sure we keep these standards high. Also, around talent, when we talk about people being ‘ready now’ and ‘ready future’, the ‘ready now’ candidate has to be someone who can be better than the incumbent over time. And, if every time you have an opening you put somebody in that’s stronger, you’re going to increase your organizational capability.

How is McDonald’s adapting to all the shifts that are happening in demographics, globalization and technology?

We’re a very team-based environment. So whenever we have a business issue, our natural inclination is to put together a team of people to look at it. It’s typically cross-functional and in some cases cross-geographic as well. This focus on team goes back to the restaurants. All you have to do is walk into a restaurant during the lunch "crush" and see 15 or 20 people working hard together. The whole culture revolves around working as a team. We’re preparing leaders for what they will face in the future, with two accelerated development programs for different levels of leader. There’s a heavy emphasis around technology, globalization and speed of change. The programs include a business simulation component; an action learning component, a lot of coaching, assessment, self insight and awareness.

Can you talk a little about what you’re doing on the goal setting and coaching side?

We have a pretty good process of cascading our major business goals to our business units. If there is one thing important at McDonald’s, it’s having this alignment of business strategies. I think our team-based approach helps immensely in this regard. We actually hire and promote people based, in large part, on their ability to be able to work effectively in teams. People are generally working at McDonald’s over the long haul. It’s not uncommon to find people at McDonald’s that have been with us 35, 40 years starting out at the restaurant level. So, I think the combination of all of these things drives a lot of alignment.

Beyond core financial results, how do you track the success of leadership programs?

We look at retention, which at 95 percent plus, is where we want it to be. And we look at the percentage of people who are promoted that come out of the accelerated development programs. This program has a big impact on retention. It’s actually one of the most visible signals of how much we are investing in you.

What are you working on for the future of leadership at McDonald’s, say 10-15 years from now?

Our CEO and COO have put together five strategy teams that we believe are going to help us continue our performance run. One is on talent management. We have a cross-geographic, cross-functional team that’s looking in particular at strategic workforce planning – anticipating what resources are going to be required to deliver against our business plans. We also plan to work more collaboratively as a senior team on developing top talent proactively. Third, we want to make sure that whenever we fill key jobs that we put a lot of discipline and rigor into the process. This helps us to improve our ability to make the right call on filling critical jobs – there is nothing more important than this. So far, this team’s work is paying off.

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For Shame, Forbes: Tarnishing a Gem in the Crown of Social Progress and Gender Equity

As I write, 104,778 people have viewed the Forbes article on the “10 Worst Stereotypes about Powerful Women.”

I’m curious. What did people learn from reading this? And what will they do with this information so that we never have to see another article about this topic again?

If you have been reading my blog this week, you know about mounting evidence of the links among gender, career success, and professional confidence. A quick summary for new readers: you need confidence to succeed!

I fear women will read this article and – tacitly or explicitly – find reasons to doubt that they have the right stuff for leadership and lose more of the confidence they need to craft careers of success and significance. Who wouldn’t if you thought that half the folks around you (and most of the folks in power above you) were still projecting all this old negativity on you?

Men who read the piece can have seeds of doubt planted – or reinforced – about their female co-workers.

In a week when men and women should celebrate another symbolic gem in the crown of social progress and gender equity as IBM appoints its first woman as CEO – Virginia Rometty joins the growing ranks of mega-corporation leaders that now include Ellen Kullman at DuPont, Meg Whitman at Hewlett-Packard, Ursula Burns at Xerox, Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo – 104,778 (and counting) people are having a refresher course on how to dismiss half the world’s population – and hold back progress on a host of fronts for us all.

All the traditional stereotypes are on the Forbes list – and Forbes Online kindly provides a slide show for those who don’t want to read the full article. The slides are a mix of actresses in their portrayal of fictional characters from movies and TV (e.g., Meryl Streep as the “frigid magazine editor” in The Devil Wears Prada and Glenn Close as the “back-stabbing boss” in Damages) with real women who are doing really important work. Each picture represents one of the negative gender stereotypes. Here’s where my blood began to boil.

It includes an unattractive photo of our successful, current Secretary of State (emotional), as well as associations of negativity with the photo of our First Lady (angry), the Head of the International Monetary Fund (masculine), our former Secretary of State (token), the President of Costa Rican (weak), a former Vice Presidential candidate (cheerleader), and the list goes on.

If I thought people were reading this article and standing in outrage that these associations were still happening in the year 2011, I’d feel better. But why do I fear snickers as the pictures of Hillary Clinton and others are passed around the water cooler instead?  And I am not going to even touch the racial issues in all this.

Enough Forbes! Enough media!  Seriously. We need stories that build the confidence and capacities of men and women so that they can bring their full talents to the range of contributions needed to succeed – and for our economy to rebound – in a fast-paced, global world.

Planting seeds of doubt reinforces the very thing this article hoped to counter! 

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Leadership, Gender, and Confidence: Another Take

Another take on leadership, gender, and confidence from Jill Flynn, Kathryn Heath, and Mary Davis Holt, authors of the new book, Break Your Own Rules: How to Change the Patterns of Thinking that Block Women’s Paths to Power – and good advice for women and men seeking to increase their impact. 

The book is a fascinating read – and a recommendation that women finally discard the rules that have traditionally guided their leadership (and have been seen as women’s “strengths”). Women are a mere 11% of senior leadership in corporate American, and that number hasn’t changed in 30 years. The authors suggest it’s time to think seriously about how to make that change happen. 

Their advice: out with the old, please, and in with the new.  Reframe the everyday beliefs that women bring about how to lead and do themselves in the workplace.  For example:

Traditional approach: focus on others — New advice: take center stage

Traditional approach: seek approval — New advice: proceed until apprehended

Traditional approach: be modest — New advice: project personal power

Traditional approach: work harder — New advice: be politically savvy

Traditional approach: play it safe — New advice: play to win

Traditional approach: it’s all or nothing — New advice: it’s both-and

I’m not doing he book justice, but I want to get back to the confidence theme from my last post:

In a recent post of the HBR site, the authors assert they found – and “by a wide margin” – that the primary criticism men have about their female colleagues at work is that the women exhibit low self-confidence.

imageThe authors concede this may partly be perception — men can interpret a willingness to share credit or defer judgment as a lack of confidence. But they also note that there is plenty of research that suggests women feel less self-assured at work. See yesterday’s blog post, for one example. Another is a 2011 workforce study by Europe’s Institute of Leadership and Management that reports:

Men were more confident across all age groups: 70% of the men reported high or very high levels of self-confidence, compared to 50% of the women

Half of women managers admitted feelings of self-doubt about their performance and career, 31% of men reported the same

Lack of confidence makes women more cautious in applying for jobs and promotions: 20% of men said they would apply despite only partially meeting its job description, compared to 14% of women.

The authors turned to their own data and identified four specific low-confidence behaviors cited by male and female managers alike:

Being overly modest. Men are more willing to take public credit for their successes. Women believe their accomplishments should speak for themselves. They may – or they may be overlooked by all the busy people around them.

Not asking. Not asking means you’ve lost the chance to get what you need.  No more need be said on that one!

Blending in. The authors note that some women go to great lengths to avoid attention in the workplace. They want to do their work, stay professional, and wait to be appreciated.  A perfect strategy for remaining invisible!

Remaining silent. Don’t speak up and you won’t get in the conversation – or the game.

The author’s conclusion: Career momentum is not just about adding job skills. It’s about changing everyday thinking and behaviors.  Amen! 

Glad I could bring you these helpful insights. I ask you to share them – and this blog site – with others interested in improving their leadership.  I’d love to attract more readers – and I have plenty more to say about how to lead and how to lead for greater impact.

So how am I doing?  I’m practicing the suggested new behaviors!  Are you?