Now, this is an old post, however, it made me laugh again today when i reread it. So , I’ve decided to re-post it. Sometimes I lead a church youth/teen class and I really enjoy it, but I think younger kids speak their minds out with a lot more freedom that is beautiful hearing - its always a hilarious experience! I just love kids, they are so unpredictable and funny. Throughout the years I’ve read some funny quotes and prayers from children and as I was cleaning my files today …

So, a Christmas post is in order. I have been thinking about it for days, no kidding, and have had no success in the arenas of Big Ideas. Or little ideas. And I am ever so fearful-horrified of glibness at this particular moment.

Let’s start with the fact that a lot of people who deserved better (or didn’t, for that matter) are having truly crappy-rotten Christmases. And it pains me personally—one case at a time ad infinitum.
Sure, the auto industry made its own mess by and large, but I honestly teared up yesterday listening to a little (”little”?) NPR story about a 15-year-old family-run restaurant-tavern directly across from the main gate to a GM plant that closed down indefinitely last night.

While the global economy began slowing down in late 2007, forces transforming the face of business trace back more than a decade. Over that time period, technological improvements have made it ever easier to start and scale a business. Convergence went from being a cliché to a reality. Companies from countries like China, India, and Brazil burst onto the world stage. The global slowdown coupled with the credit crunch in late 2008 accelerated these forces.

If sagging employment and dwindling economic prospects led historians to term the 1930s the Great Depression, perhaps it is appropriate to tab today’s hyper-competitive market where competitive advantage dissipates in a heartbeat the “Great Disruption.”

In 2009, managers will realize that they are no longer dealing with a crisis; they are dealing with a condition. In the Great Disruption, companies simply can’t anticipate that today’s competitive advantage will last for more than a few years. Former Intel Chairman Andy Grove anticipated this more than a decade ago when he wrote, “Only the paranoid survive.”

While companies might want to return to the corporate equivalent of comfort food–cost-cutting and a focus on the core business–the Great Disruption won’t allow it.

Some companies have been developing their innovation abilities for years. They are in good position to seize the opportunities that always present themselves in tough economic climates. Companies that are in the beginning of the innovation journey need to accelerate capability-development efforts or will find themselves simply unprepared for the fight ahead. Industries that had already been grappling with disruptive threats for years–like newspaper companies–will face intense pain as they struggle to find a safe haven in today’s brutal economic climate.

Thriving in the Great Disruption requires a particular breed of innovator. Specifically, innovators should look to master three disciplines:

1. 
   Placing a premium on progress. While more and more companies recognize the name of the game is transformation, the tolerance for blind experimentation has never been lower. Innovators will need to continue to find creative, cheap ways to bring their ideas forward. Fortunately, they can tap into a plethora of powerful tools to facilitate rapid learning.
2. Mastering paradox. Leaders in most Fortune 500 companies grew up in an era where they could succeed largely by exploiting their existing business. Today’s leaders need to master both exploitation and exploration. They need to develop the ability to rely on precise data in their core business and intuition and judgment when they are creating new growth businesses. They have to live the old F. Scott Fitzgerald mantra, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the same mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
3. Learning to love the low end. In the dark days of October and November, consumers flocked to discounters like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s. Increasingly value conscious consumers and hungry low-cost competitors mean that innovators have to learn how to love low-end business. That doesn’t necessarily mean that companies have to slash prices. Rather, they have to figure out how to deliver what consumers in low-end segments consider value.

The world of innovation is going through important changes. A generation ago, many thought innovation was unpredictable and random. Those with this perspective would either leave innovation to “creative geniuses” or seek to intentionally insert unpredictability into their innovation efforts (picture unfocused brainstorming efforts with attendees dressed in ridiculous costumes).

Over the past generation, path-breaking academic research and work by companies like Procter & Gamble and IBM has shown how innovation can be managed like any other corporate process. We’re not yet at the point of perfect predictability, and there still are many important innovation questions that are difficult to answer. But innovators have a playbook that can help them even in these highly uncertain times.

The innovation genie isn’t going back in the bottle. Entrepreneurs and corporate innovators will continue to introduce disruptive innovations that transform existing markets and create new ones. In fact, the Great Disruption demands that companies make innovation a strategic priority, or suffer the consequences.

The 2008 recession is an economic firestorm unlike anything the country has seen since the Great Depression. But 2009 is shaping up to be a trigger for an unprecedented surge of innovation that may be one of the most important turning points in the last 100 years.

While things are undoubtedly more difficult these days, downturns in the economy are a necessary part of our economic lifecycle and in many cases, they create the greatest economic opportunities. Just as a forest fire can reset nature’s lifecycle, a recession can clear the business landscape, sprouting innovation and growth.

History is ripe with examples of companies and industries that have started and flourished as a result of market dislocations.

Out of the Panic of the 1790s (recessions were called panics back then), came Eli Whitney’s cotton gin which ushered in a new era of manufacturing. The Panics of 1837 and 1857 led to the Morrill Tariff, which to this day underlies the tariff policies of many countries.

One of the darkest depressions spanned from 1873 to 1896 but ended with the “communications revolution”–the invention of the telephone. This depression also gave us GE and Edison’s incandescent lightbulb, so I guess you could say: “out of darkness, came light.” Over time, these innovations transformed the US economy into one no longer dependent on agriculture — thereby rendering Whitney’s cotton gin obsolete.

During the Panic of 1907, Ford (the car company, not the President) came along and redefined the way we think about operations and manufacturing–driven by the efficiency of the assembly line, strong labor practices, and a product price that the working class could afford–and empowered a nation of drivers that vastly expanded the footprint of mankind. It was another automobile manufacturer–General Motors–that during the Great Depression, redefined the modern corporation. Add to that Keynesian economics and the New Deal, and the US hasn’t seen a depression since 1933.

What we have seen since the Great Depression is a mirror of the past: boom and bust, with each bust begetting a new wave of innovative, cultural, and economic revolutions. The recession of 1953 brought us the US Small Business Association and the landmark ruling of Brown vs. Board of Education, forcing desegregation in US schools; another recession four years later ushered in the Civil Rights Movement; the 1973 oil crisis marked the birth of the personal computer and the birth of biotechnology via its founding company, Genentech; the recession of the early 1980s gave us–for better or worse–Reaganomics and the proliferation of PCs, led by Microsoft, IBM, and Apple. The invention of the World Wide Web and the commercialization of the Internet coincided with the recession of the early 1990s (which really started in 1987 with Black Monday), and out of the ashes of the dot-com bubble came companies such as Google, Amazon.com and eBay, with new business models that have upended the way we innovate, transact commerce, and communicate.

Times of economic contraction create dislocation in free markets. Smart entrepreneurs recognize this market opportunity and create “engines of change.” 2009 will present a massive platform for innovation and will be a watershed moment for business creation.

I believe this not just because of the events of history, but also because of the current technological landscape: this is an era of nascent technology, ever increasing in speed, breadth, and scope.

It’s become the mantra of the moment: “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” Leaders everywhere are struggling to make sense of the worldwide economic crisis, to learn lessons that will guide them and their companies going forward. My worry is that too many leaders are learning the wrong lessons — they are becoming conservative and risk-averse, they are searching for every opportunity to scale back and do less, they are cutting first and asking questions later.

It’s a natural response–and a huge mistake. Yes, a crisis has a way of concentrating the mind. Economic crises tend to focus the minds of business leaders on inputs: labor costs, capital spending, marketing budgets. My one plea to leaders in 2009 is that they not lose focus on the most critical output of their organization — the strength of its bonds to customers.

As the business environment gets tougher, meaner, more unforgiving, customers are going to get even more selective about whom they do business with. And what’s more important, in a world of shrinking demand, smaller margins, and scarce resources, than the depth and quality of your connections with customers? Now more than ever, companies and their leaders have to figure out how to stand out from the crowd, how to stand for something special, how to offer a positive alternative to the status quo. Customers want to do business with companies that share their values — and customers look to how organizations behave in dark times as a test of their values and character.

Am I suggesting that leaders rule out layoffs, investment reductions, or budget cuts? Of course not. But I am proposing one simple discipline: to balance out the urge to purge with a zest to invest. Make it mandatory that every time a brand or department or business unit moves to scale back and reduce costs, it also moves to stand out and strengthen relationships. Every tangible cost cut must be matched by a tangible burst of creativity that makes a meaningful statement to customers about what the company stands for.

The good news: The best ideas cost little or no money, so it’s possible to satisfy budget demands without disappointing customers. Not easy, but possible. Small gestures of kindness, good cheer, surprise and delight, can send huge signals — especially in perilous economic times.

For years now, as I have addressed executive audiences around the word, I have urged leaders to ask themselves one simple question: If your company went out of business tomorrow, who would really miss you and why? I first heard this question from advertising genius Roy Spence, who says he got it from strategy guru Jim Collins. Whatever the original source, the question is as profound as it is simple — and worth taking seriously as you evaluate how to navigate through this economic crisis.

Why might a company be missed? Because it’s providing a product or service so unique that it can’t be provided nearly as well by any other company. Because it’s forged a uniquely emotional connection with customers that other companies can’t replicate. Precious few companies meet any of these criteria — which may be why so many companies feel like they’re on the verge of going out of business, even in good times.

Today, with times as bad as they’ve been in decades, this simple question becomes more urgent than ever. So eliminate waste, slash budgets, reduce headcount if you must. But balance every financial cut with an investment of creativity aimed at customers.

Remember, in an age of excess supply and shrinking demand, if your customers can live without you, eventually they will.

In a recent blog post I wrote:

An economic world turned upside down makes it easier to take a fresh look. This can open the door to making changes that will benefit you and the most important people in your life, now and in the long run….The crisis, in other words, can make it easier to experiment with new mental models or attitudes about your career and how it fits with your life’s purpose, and it can serve as a catalyst for your own reinvention, as a leader in all parts of your life.

A useful investment, then, especially at the beginning of a new year, is to take some time to clarify what’s most important to you as a leader, as you see it now and in the future. In my book I refer to this as being real. It’s is a necessary component of your foundation as you cultivate your leadership identity and advance your leadership capacity to the next level. Here are a few exercises (adapted from the book) that can help. There’s no risk in trying them!

1. Look back at where you have come from.

Think back over your personal history and identify the four or five most important events or episodes in your life, the moments that have defined who you are today. Tell the story of these events, in chronological order. For each one, briefly describe the impact the event had on your values and on your direction in life.

2. Define your personal leadership vision.

A statement of your personal leadership vision provides a focus for your long-term and short-term actions. It’s expected that you will revise it over time. It will be of most use if your vision is a compelling image of an achievable future, a story or picture that inspires. Describe the kind of leader you want to become, including the most important goals you have for the contributions you want to make to the world - your legacy — by writing a short history of your future (your life and career) between now and 2025. What will you be doing in 2025 and what impact will you be having?

3. Take the four-way view

This exercise gives you an understanding of how you are focusing your attention on your four life domains today. It shows how you manage the allocation of your time and energy–the amount of attention you pay to various people and projects in your life–and so helps you assess whether you’re actually doing what you care about doing. Complete this chart.

In the first column, distribute the percentages (100% divided across the four domains) based on how important you think each area of your life is, at this point in your life (it is understood that these percentages vary over time). In the second column, distribute the percentages to indicate how much time and energy you actually spend in each area. In the third column, indicate how satisfied you are with how things are going in each domain by circling or bolding a number from 1 to 10, where “1″ = “not at all satisfied” and “10″ = “fully satisfied.” In the bottom right cell, circle/bold the number that best represents how satisfied you are with life in general. Now, the fun part: Reflect on what’s important to you, how you focus your time and energy, and how satisfied you are in each of the four areas, and overall.

Readers, what are you doing to prepare for 2009?

“They gave us a whole can of soda” was how my octogenarian mother-in-law explained a recent experience when her plane was kept on the ground an extra hour for de-icing. Monica was not complaining; she was framing the delay as a positive. This veteran traveler knows that delays are inevitable.

My mother-in-law’s attitude might serve as a good reminder for anyone who is seeking ways to cope with forces that seem to threaten the economic stability we have come to count on. Falsely, as it turns out — but nonetheless many of us may be tempted to think that the recession is a personal attack on us. Recessions as severe as this are equal-opportunity levelers; that is, most of us suffer.

Managers might do well to keep this in mind as they seek to keep their teams engaged. Our culture is one of aspiration; it sparks our quest for improvement as well as our desire to innovate. Fueling that aspiration becomes all the more critical when attitudes and resources are compromised. So here are some ways to keep aspiration alive while dealing with hard realities.

Know what you cannot do. This part is easy. None of us can make our customers buy our products or services. We can wish for the economy to improve, but we cannot make it so. Therefore, we must accept what is given us and find ways to do what we can do.

Know what you can do. This part is tough. But as legendary basketball coach, John Wooden, put it, “Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.” Think about how you can prepare your team to think and act differently, in light of tough economic conditions.

Know that you must execute. Lucy Kellaway, writing in the Economist’s “World in 2009,” says that while salaries and perks are diminished, there will be an increased focus on execution, that is, getting the work done. Managers must keep this idea paramount as they nudge their teams forward.

As much as managers may seek to bolster team spirits, they must do so in the spirit of “eyes wide open,” being cognizant of what individuals on the team are going through. Some folks may be laid off; the rest may wonder if they are next. “Rah-rah” does not work. But seeking to take control of what you can control is a sign that no matter the economic climate, you are seeking to make a positive difference.

Accepting reality is no excuse for giving up. We may decide to abandon a project for lack of funds, or even a change in market conditions. That decision is not the same as giving up the company; perhaps the project will be revived in the future when the market swings upward once again. Rather, it is an acceptance that a change has occurred — and that we in turn must change our expectations.

This week’s question for Ask the Coach:

Once again, I hired the perfect person, I thought, and he’s turned out to be a nightmare. Why is it so hard to hire the right person?

Hiring the right people is not as simple as it sounds! Millions of managers ask themselves this same question every day. I asked my friends Geoff Smart and Randy Street (HBS ‘97), co-authors of the instant New York Times bestseller Who: The A Method for Hiring, if they would answer this question. Following is their answer.

GS & RS: It’s hard to hire the right person because managers use “voodoo hiring” methods that don’t work. Unsuccessful hiring is every manager’s #1 problem. They don’t teach you how to hire in high school, college, or even at Harvard Business School!

Hiring managers who invent their own approaches, most of which are horrible, not only waste time, but also produce a 50% failure rate on average. And, in tough economic times like these, getting your business’s house in order from a talent perspective is of paramount importance if you are going to weather the storm.

We conducted the largest research ever done to solve this problem of unsuccessful hiring. We distilled 13 years of consulting insights across hundreds of companies, performed exclusive interviews with over 20 billionaires and 60 other CEOs and investors to collect their best advice and stories on this topic, and completed a university-sponsored scientific study of 313 CEO careers.

What did we learn? We learned 7 things that managers can do today to improve their hiring success rate from 50% to 90%. We call this the “A Method For Hiring.”

1. Write a written “scorecard” with quantifiable outcomes you expect a person to deliver. It’s time to be precise — not fuzzy.
2. Identify what elements of your culture you must have in candidates.
3. Source the best candidates using your network and think twice before over-relying on ads, job boards, and recruiters.
4. Consider paying a much bigger referral bounty to your employees who source A Players who are hired. One high performing company, for example, pays its employees a $100,000 hiring bounty for people who are hired (paid out $10k per year for 10 years of start date if both the referring party and the referred party are still employed).
5. Select the right person by conducting at least one extremely thorough, 3-hour, chronological interview. Really dig in. Find out for each job the person has had: 
• What was the person hired to do?
• What were his or her biggest accomplishments?
• What were his or her mistakes?
• What would his or her bosses say about them (which can be verified with reference checks).
• Why did he or she leave?
6. Watch out for red flags like: candidates who don’t take responsibility for past mistakes, or who speak poorly of most of their bosses. Watch out for the 20 behavioral derailers that Marshall Goldsmith writes about in What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.
7. Sell candidates by remembering the 5 Fs of what candidates care about:
• Fit (with your company)
• Family (support for joining your company)
• Freedom (to make decisions)
• Fortune (and glory)
• Fun

You can do it. Master the A Method for Hiring. Enjoy more career success. Make more money. Have more time.

MG: Thanks Geoff and Randy! This is great advice. To learn more about the A Method for Hiring, go to www.whothebook.com or email Randy Street.

Readers: Do you have a hiring nightmare to share? Do you have hiring techniques? Please send share them with us!

Heavier-than-usual mail deliveries are a familiar part of the holiday season. But the heap of letters waiting for my husband and me, after a recent three-day trip, was truly extraordinary. The reason for our new-found popularity quickly became apparent as I sorted through the envelopes. More than three-quarters were requests for donations, sent by a breathtaking array of nonprofit organizations. While some came from groups we’ve supported for years, others were from organizations that have never before gotten - or sought - contributions from us. Many of the prospective recipients are active in our local community. Others are serving the needs of people in countries around the globe. Every one of these nonprofits is doing “good.” But we cannot possibly support them all. And so every letter provokes the same tough question: “Write a check or add the envelope to the recycle pile?”

Challenging as that question is, it’s a whole lot less challenging than the question many of those letter writers and their boards are finding they have to ask, namely, “What must we say ‘no’ to now?” With the economy worsening by the day, the demands on nonprofit organizations of almost every sort are exploding. Even leaders who have become masters of making a little go a very long way are finding their resources stretched to the breaking point. An article in the November 11th special Giving Section of the New York Times, for example, reported that the demand for food aid had risen 20 percent since June in areas of the country with the healthiest economies and 40 percent in those with the weakest. And unlike the letters that collect in my mailbox, these appeals show up live.

Not surprisingly, many Americans are responding generously. A recent article in the Boston Globe closed with the story of a woman who confessed - as she left her third load of gifts at the Home for Little Wanderers, a nonprofit that cares for kids referred by the state’s Department of Children and Families - that she was spending more on donations this year than she was on the rest of her family.

Nor is she alone. According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, contributions to nonprofits that address basic human needs, like food and shelter, appear to be holding steady, or even increasing slightly. For the most part, however, the news is grim. In mid-November, the Bridgespan Group conducted an online survey of nonprofit leaders to understand how their organizations were faring and the steps they were taking to cope with the recession. The results are sobering: 75 percent of the respondents reported that they were feeling the effects of the downturn, and 52 percent have already experienced cuts in funding (with the majority citing losses of more than 10 percent of their total funding). The most common response: redoubled efforts to raise more money. So the odds that those fund-raising appeals will end, when the year does, seem awfully small.

Hard times force hard choices - for nonprofit leaders and for those who support them. The best advice I’ve heard about how to make those choices is fundamentally the same on both sides of the philanthropic equation: Be clear about what matters most, and focus your resources there. For nonprofits, this means protecting your core programs and staff - the ones that have the greatest impact on the people and causes you serve - and cutting back, or discontinuing altogether, other less, essential activities. Civic-minded, business-oriented board members can be especially helpful here, both because you can play a pivotal role in asking the hard questions that lead to clarity, and because you can provide essential back up when hard decisions have to be implemented. And when we’re home alone with our checkbooks? The same principle applies: Be explicit about the impact you want your philanthropic dollars to have and then be willing to make hard trade-offs so that you can direct your giving accordingly. Who knows? You may just find yourself making choices like those of the donor called out in the Boston Globe.

The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has announced that they’re going to stop suing people for pirating music on P2P networks. For people under 30 years old, this has been the cause of much rejoicing. For those over 30, it may come as a surprise that the record companies were suing random individuals for sharing MP3s in the first place.

So they’ve stopped suing customers. Does this mean the beginning of music companies singing (and file sharing) barbershop harmonies with the likes of BitTorrent, Limewire and Kazaa?


To find out, the first question must be: what did the RIAA hope to gain from the lawsuits in the first place? It couldn’t have been for the financial gain. Not only did they lose as often as they won, but many of their intended victims didn’t even bother to show up in court. It wasn’t for the artists. Musicians weren’t seeing any benefit and wondered aloud what happened to the money that was collected because it certainly wasn’t sent to them.

The intended goal then was just one: frighten the general public into not copying music. As an example, witness the threatening remains of the filing sharing site eDonkey:

If you steal music or movies, you are breaking the law.

And then it tells you your IP address has been logged.

So is the RIAA stopping lawsuits because it wasn’t achieving that goal? Hardly. Or rather, in 5 years and over 35,000 lawsuits, it hasn’t gotten anywhere near frightening people away from file sharing. It’s been estimated that tens of millions of people are exchanging illicit files at this moment.

And this moment.

And now, too.

Nabbing a fraction of a percent of the offenders might be worthwhile if that didn’t include the children, computer-less, homeless, and dead people that the they sued. To be blunt, the lawsuits were unabashedly ineffective, counterproductive, and, an PR morass that make La Brea look like a sticky mud puddle. They wiped out college savings accounts, attempted to get elementary school students to rat on their parents, and descended on parking attendants with full SWAT team armor. The only way for the RIAA to make worse PR for the music industry would have been to threaten to wipe out the hard drives of every person who’s got an MP3, any MP3, because it might be an illicit copy of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” — oh wait, they did that too.

At every turn, RIAA lawyers argued that such mistakes paled in comparison to the damage done to their corporate clients — billions of allegedly lost dollars — as if every downloader would have purchased the song if P2P didn’t exist. Hey, so their tactics didn’t distinguish between felons and bystanders. In their defense, they said, “When you fish with a net, you are going to catch a few dolphins.” With Ziploc-tight reasoning like that, it would seem that nothing would ever stop their lawsuit juggernaut.

Which is why they never intended on stopping.

The Stupidity Express was brought to its final stop for one powerful reason: money. They ran out of it. Lawsuits are expensive, and with the financial crisis combined with the fall in recorded music sales, the record companies (Warner, EMI, Sony, etc.) who fund the RIAA have been cutting back on their contributions and threatening to erase the organization completely.

The truth is, even with falling sales the record companies haven’t accepted the reality that music copying is here to stay. As an example, in the same paragraph that the RIAA stops threatening you personally with lawsuits, they switch to threatening your Internet connection. The RIAA won’t sue you, they’ll sue Comcast for not being vigilantes of copyright. The logic here is that they can launch fewer lawsuits, save some cash, and still stop you from BitTorrent-ing “Tiny Bubbles.”
Which is just as stupid.


It would be easy to stand back from the fray and say that the record companies should be smarter and figure out how to change their business model to adapt. But for anyone who’s ever worked in a corporation, with its hierarchy, politics, and rewards for immediate results knows that calling the established practices (and therefore your bosses) wrongheaded usually leads to working in a cubicle in the satellite office in Reseda.

That’s why it’s better for the average record exec to suggest that MP3 players be taxed to make up revenue shortfalls. Or that putting the Beatles or AC/DC on iTunes is wrongheaded — as if that will keep people buying albums. Or to use a tried-and-true strategy for falling profits: raise the price of CDs and downloads. In this, the real world, the record companies can and will try to use everything — even the law — to halt technology, rather than change themselves. Even if it seems insane to the rest of us.

What happens next is what happens to all companies beholden to technology. Railroad eclipsed by trucks. Radio relegated to top 40, oldies and edge-of-the-dial Pentecostals by television. The worldwide transport of blocks of ice evaporated by home refrigeration. Whale oil, buggy whips, petticoats, stone axes, and so on.* All were responsible for wealth ranging from the mansions of Newport to the best burial mound on the Steppe at one time, and now are all equally dead and gone.

At the moment, record companies are still making some people rich enough to buy gold coffins and as long as that’s true, the end of RIAA’s lawsuits isn’t about music companies embracing digital. It means business as usual, as they try to keep an old way of business and its obsolete technology on life support. Maybe someday, someone will figure out how to keep music and commerce together and alive, but that day isn’t today.**

*This is a bronze age orientation sketch by Mitchell and Webb for two stone age workers. Favorite quote: “Smelting may be fine for the lads.”

**As mentioned previously in this blog, one of the people hoping to do that is me, with my startup Jamseed. And one of the things I have going for me is being an outsider and not caught up trying to preserve the past.