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This is the last of three posts that I'm writing based on some great presentations I heard at the Inc. 500 conference in Washington, DC last week. The primary keynoter for the conference was leadership guru Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great and the new book, How The Mighty Fall. I had never heard Collins speak before and when I found out he was going to be speaking in my hometown zone, I signed up for the conference.  It was the right decision. Jim Collins is a fantastic speaker. He offers incredibly rich and though provoking content delivered with the passion and energy of a world class evangelist.  If you get a chance to hear him speak, take it. You won't be sorry.

In the meantime, I thought I'd share with you the top 10 to-do's for leaders that he offered at the end of his two hour segment.  (These are paraphrased based on my notes.) It's unlikely that all ten will resonate with you, but my guess is that you (like me) will find at least two or three that hit home.  Here they are:

1. Download the free Good to Great diagnostic tool from JimCollins.com and use it as the basis for assessment, conversation and planning with your team.


2. Answer these questions for your organization:  What are the key seats on our bus and are those seats filled with the right people?


3. Establish a personal board of directors for yourself.  When you create your board, choose the members based on their characters, not their accomplishments.


4. Get young people (i.e. Gen Y's) - the right ones - in your face.


5. Turn off your gadgets and create some regular white space for thinking.


6. Build a leadership council for your organization to engage in dialogue, debate and disagreement.


7. Check in on your questions to statements ratio and set a goal of doubling it in the next year.  An early mentor to Collins observed that he seemed to be more interested in being interesting than being interested.  That's what caused Collins to focus on his own questions to statements ratio.


8. Start working on your stop doing list.  (A good reason not to start trying to do all ten of these tips at once.)


9. Make sure that the core values and purpose of your organization are established early.  It will be too late to do so when the tough times inevitably come.


10. Set your BHAG's (Collins' acronym for Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals) 10 to 15 years out based on your experience to date.

Some pretty compelling ideas here aren't there? Which ones hit home with you?  What idea could you follow through on in the next week and what difference do you think it would make?

 

This week I'll be sharing some insights I picked up at the recent Inc. 500 conference in Washington, DC.  Today's comes from Jet Blue's founding CEO, David Neeleman who was one of several terrific speakers at the conference.

Lots of people in the United States are familiar with Jet Blue and have experienced the energetic service, seat back TV's and Terra Blue potato chips that the airline is known for. What may not be as familiar is the story of Jet Blue's founder David Neeleman and that he is now involved in starting his fourth airline. The first was Morris Air which was a regional carrier that began as a travel agency. In his Inc. presentation, Neeleman told the story of being approached by Herb Kelleher, the legendary CEO of Southwest Airlines, and being asked if he wanted to sell his company to Southwest. Neeleman idolized Kelleher and told the audience that he would have sold Morris to Southwest for a lot less than he did to get the chance to work with Kelleher.  Neeleman hit the ground running at Southwest and started pushing big changes on a number of fronts.  Five months after getting there, Kelleher took Neeleman to lunch at a Ruth's Chris Steak House in Dallas and told him he was fired because he was just too impetuous. Neeleman told us he cried after that conversation.

But he kept going. After leaving Southwest, he took what he learned and helped start another airline called WestJet. A few years later, in 1999, he started Jet Blue. The company grew rapidly through the next decade and was one of the few airlines to retain profitability after 9/11.  Neeleman tried to operate Jet Blue by three principles that he shared with the Inc. audience:

1.    Flawless execution in everything that touches the customer.
2.    Treat employees so well that they become ambassadors of the company's brand.
3.    Make it right with the customer.

Principle number one was what made things so tough for JetBlue when they kept a plane load of passengers on the tarmac at JFK airport for nine hours during the Valentine's Day blizzard of 2007. While acknowledging that keeping the plane on the tarmac that long was inexcusable, he pointed out that Jet Blue was not the only airline who made that kind of mistake that day. They got most of the bad press though because they had established such a strong reputation for flawless execution. That's when principle three came into play. Under Neeleman's leadership, Jet Blue made it right with the customer through a public apology, introducing a Customer's Bill of Rights and issuing around $30 million worth of flight credits to passengers who were inconvenienced that day. 

Still, that was the beginning of the end of Neeleman's days at Jet Blue. The board named a new CEO later that year and Neeleman was named chairman of the company. A year later, he had left the company completely because he missed the day to day excitement of being CEO. He told us that leaving Jet Blue for good was the second time he cried.

That has led to Neeleman's fourth act which has been to start an airline called Azul in his country of birth, Brazil.  Azul began operations in December 2008 and six months later was the third largest domestic airline in Brazil.  It was a lot of fun to watch how excited Neeleman was in describing what Azul is doing for Brazil and how it is changing the lives of people who have never before had the opportunity to travel by air.  Since Neeleman speaks Portugese, he is able to take full advantage of the weekly flights he takes on Azul to work with crew members and talk with customers.  The man is clearly very happy and passionate about what he is doing.

In addition to being impressed with his entrepreneurial spirit and his vision, I was really struck by Neeleman's resilience. He made enough money when he sold Morris Air to Southwest that he really didn't need to ever work again. That wasn't for him, however. When he got fired from Southwest and nudged out of Jet Blue, it would have been easy for him to give up. Sure, he had his cry, but he kept going.  His philosophy on life, he told us, is "It's really not about what happens to you in life, it's about how you deal with it."

That strikes me as a very important philosophy for all leaders. Another is embedded in some questions Neeleman asked the audience as he closed his remarks. Does your company (or organization) matter?  Would anybody miss it if it was gone?  If you can crack the code on why your organization should matter to people, he said, you'll be successful. 

What is it that your organization does that matters to people? What could you do to make it matter more?

I'm taking some time to feed the mind this week by attending the Inc. 500 conference taking place in Washington, DC.  There have been some notable speakers on the agenda including Good to Great author Jim Collins and Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. The most thought provoking speaker I've heard so far is the CEO of Zipcar Scott Griffith.

By now, you've probably heard of Zipcar, the car sharing service that is sprouting up in metro areas around the U.S. and the world. (Maybe you're a Zipster yourself.) Backed up with some great technology, the Zipcar model is pretty simple. You join the program for a modest annual fee.  When you need a car you reserve one online or on the phone. You walk to your car's reserved parking space and unlock it using your Zipcard.  You drive away for a low hourly fee which includes your gas and insurance coverage. When you're done, you park the car in its spot, lock it up and walk away.

Before you conclude that this post is an ad for Zipcar, let me explain what really rocked me about Griffith's presentation.

He began by sharing what one of Zipcar's co-founders told him when he was recruited to join the company in 2003.  The goal, Griffith said, was to turn a political movement (sustainability) into a big company. That is one big vision.The Zipcar mission - to enable simple and responsible urban living - is elegant in its simplicity.

Griffith and the Zipcar team are delivering on the vision and the mission. In his Inc. talk, Griffith noted that the majority of people in the world live in metro areas and on average drive their cars a few hours at a time for a few hours a week. In the United States, there are more cars than people and for the average U.S. family, the annual cost of transportation is 19% of household income. By using the car sharing service, the average Zipster is able to reduce their household transportation budget from 19% of income to 5%. Since the average household income of a Zipster is $80,000, they're saving around $11,000 a year by using the service. Looking at the bigger picture, every Zipcar in service takes about 15 to 20 personal vehicles off the road and the overall fleet reduces fuel consumption by 32 million gallons a year. In case you're wondering how the company is doing, they've gone from no revenues as a start up seven years ago to a projected $130 million this year.

In wrapping up his conference remarks, Griffith offered seven lessons he's learned while leading Zipcar:

1.    Get the business model right.
2.    Use information as a competitive advantage.
3.    Keep it simple.
4.    Build a values based culture.
5.    Sell the steak, not the sizzle.
6.    Have a worldview.
7.    Innovate yourself along with your company.

All seven points make a ton of sense to me for leaders in both the private and public sectors. The ones that really have me thinking are the last two. I realized today that I have a big opportunity to think more about how my worldview informs the work my company is doing. My guess is that progress there will spur the personal and company innovation that Griffith calls for.

Which of Griffith's seven points seems to present the biggest opportunity for you?  What difference could it make to focus on it?

In the early morning on September 8, I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep. I read a little bit of news and among the stories were a number on the presidential elections in Afghanistan and the early indications of widespread voting fraud. The other main story around Afghanistan that evening was the appointment of General McChrystal as the new U.S. Commander. He was named to come up with and implement a  new plan. I'll blame it on the semi-conscious state of being up in the middle of the night, but after my reading, I logged onto Twitter and posted the following haiku:

New team and new plan.
Wish them luck. They'll need it since
Karzai stole the votes.

As reported in the New York Times this week, President Obama is now considering a change in the plan for Afghanistan that he committed to six months ago.  According to the Times' report, a worsening situation on the ground, the fiasco of the Afghan elections and a dire assessment of the future from General McChrystal have prompted a series of debates among Obama, the vice president, the secretaries of State and Defense, the national security advisor and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs on what to do next. The options being discussed range from a significant increase in troops to a reduction in forces.  Along with the debate on options comes a debate on whether the objective of the mission is nation building, controlling Al Qaeda, some combination of the two or something in between.

My point in this post is not to rehash the headlines but to consider  the process of how a leader changes his or her mind on a very visible and important decision. It's pretty much guaranteed that no matter what Obama eventually decides to do he will be loudly criticized for the decision from one quarter or another. It's tough to go back on a high stakes decision even if the situation has changed so much that the original objectives are no longer in play. That's probably what the economist John Kenneth Galbraith had in mind when he said "In the choice between changing one's mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof."

What about you? When have you had to reverse a major decision? What process did you go through in evaluating whether or not to change course? If you were advising Obama, what questions, factors or criteria would you encourage him to consider as he considers a change in direction?

Have you ever felt like you were being watched? I'm not trying to induce panicked paranoia here, but if you're a leader you should be feeling that way. The more senior a leader you are, the more you're being watched. You need to pick up what I call a big footprint view of your role because, as a leader, your actions have a much bigger impact than you may realize.

That's a lesson that Linda Hudson learned when she became a business unit president at General Dynamics back in the 1990's. Hudson, who is now the president of the land and armaments group at BAE Systems, described her first few days as a BU president at General Dynamics in a "Corner Office" Q&A in Sunday's New York Times. Wanting to make a good impression in her new role, Hudson picked up some new suits at Nordstrom's and, as part of her ensemble, learned some interesting ways to tie a scarf to complement her suits. She showed up as president on day one looking really sharp. The surprise came on day two when, as she described to the Times, she ran "into no fewer than a dozen women in the organization who have on scarves tied exactly like mine."

When you're the leader, people take their cues from you. When you're aware of it, this can work for everyone's benefit. If you aren't aware of your footprint or ignore its impact, you can quickly set yourself and the organization up for failure.

So, with your leadership success in mind, here are five tips for how to successfully live with a big leadership footprint:

Have a Plan:  Before you start each day, review your schedule and ask yourself, "What am I trying to accomplish in each of these meetings?  What impression do I want to leave with this person or group?  What do I want them to think and how do I want them to feel?"  A little bit of pre-game planning can go a long way in leveraging your footprint for positive effect.

Check Your Sense of Humor:  Senior leaders are often quick witted people with sharp and ironic senses of humor.  They can be used to making wise cracks in order to put people at ease and establish connection with others.  Nothing wrong with that. It's a good thing. As a leader, however, you have to be much more aware of the level of appropriateness of your jokes. President Obama learned this when he made cracks early in his administration about Nancy Reagan holding séances and comparing his bowling skills to a Special Olympian. He caught some deserved heat for those remarks and probably learned some lessons about how poor humor choices can distract attention from what you're actually trying to do.

Think Before You Speak:  This tip goes along with checking your sense of humor but there's more to it than that. As a senior leader, your days of "just thinking out loud," as you mull through a problem are over. There are stories upon stories of leaders who casually tossed off a comment or an idea only to be surprised later that people acted on things they were just mulling over. If you're going to brainstorm out loud as a leader, make sure everyone knows that it's a brainstorming session and not a decision making session.

Leave Air in the Conversation:  Just as a fire needs oxygen to continue burning, conversations need to have plenty of air in them for people to feel comfortable contributing. Senior leaders often get where they are because they've shown a track record of decisiveness and scoring a lot of "class participation points" in conversation. The problem comes when those approaches continue unabated when they reach senior levels. They end up sucking the air out of the room. Most people are going to defer to a senior leader who is dominating a conversation. If you don't want them to clam up and do want to get their best ideas, dial it back a bit on offering your own ideas.

Invite Feedback:  It's amazing how much you can learn when you ask questions like, "What do you think we should be doing?" or "What could we be doing better?" and take time to listen to the answers and act on them when appropriate. You don't just get better ideas and performance. Since you're the leader, you send a message about the kind of participation and problem solving that is valued in your organization's culture.

So, inspired by Linda Hudson's scarf story, those are five tips for living with a bigger leadership footprint.  I'm sure a lot of you have stories of your own about when you realized that things were different once you took on a bigger leadership role. We could all learn a lot from each other, so I'd love it if you'd share some stories of your "big footprint" moments and your best  tips for living with a bigger leadership footprint.

There's been a lot written in the past few weeks about the demise of humility in our culture. (See David Brooks' column last week for one of the most eloquent expressions of this problem.)  Fortunately, we still have some great examples of successful leaders who demonstrate humility. One of those is the Super Bowl winning former coach of the Indianapolis Colts, Tony Dungy.

I've admired Tony Dungy for a long time because of his capacity to succeed in the high stakes competitive environment of the NFL while maintaining grace and humility whether he's won or lost. Since I'm a huge football fan and Dungy is on the broadcast crew for NBC's Football Night in America this year, he has been on my radar screen a little more than usual these past few weeks.

What brought him to mind today was an interview I just heard with him on Dan Patrick's radio show while I was driving back from breakfast with a good friend.  One of the questions that Patrick asked Dungy was, "What would you have said to the new Chicago Bears quarterback, Jay Cutler, after his  team's  21 to 15 loss to the Packers in the season opener?"  I loved Dungy's response which was (I'm paraphrasing here):

I would have told him that it's OK, this is only one game. This is what the pressure's going to be like from now on and this has been a good learning experience. You can handle it and lead us to success from here.  It's going to depend a lot on how you show up in practice and handle yourself in the team meetings because the team is looking to you as the leader. This week's game is going to be really important because we don't want to start 0 and 2. You can do it and you're going to lead this team.

Imagine how you would feel if you were Jay Cutler listening to Tony Dungy. What is the Coach trying to instill in his player with those comments?  Some of the things that come to my mind are perspective, reframing the experience as a positive building block, confidence and belief in oneself, direction and resolve, clarity around the stakes going forward and the role he has to play. All of that in one brief sound bite.  I'd suggest that Dungy offers a great model for any leader that has to coach up a key player who's coming off a loss or a disappointment.

Of course, the other thing that Tony Dungy has received a lot of attention for lately is the role that he's played in counseling Michael Vick following the prison sentence he served for his involvement in dog fighting. Dungy has a long history of counseling prisoners and he talked about that experience in an interview with the Wall Street Journal last weekend.  In that article he shared what he tries to get across with prisoners:

"What I look for, [is] 'What do you want to do from here?' That's something my dad used to tell me all the time. When you're in a situation you can complain about it, you can feel sorry for yourself, you can do a lot of things. But how are you gonna' make the situation better?"

Dungy's emphasis on what one can do to shape the future is an approach that all leaders can and should adopt. None of us can do anything to change the past and we really don't know what the future will hold. All we can do is make the best choices we can right now to help shape the outcomes we hope to achieve. That's true whether you're coming off a season opening loss, ending a prison sentence or trying to get yourself or your organization out of a tough spot. 

There are a lot of leaders we can look to for both good and bad examples of what to do. Tony Dungy strikes me as a great place to start if you're looking for good examples of leadership.

Earlier this week, I was talking with an executive who's recently been promoted to run a business unit that earlier this decade was generating a few million dollars a year in revenue and this year will gross a few hundred million dollars. Through acquisitions and organic growth, the business could be twice its current size in a few more years. As we were talking about the changes she might have to make in her leadership style as the business grows, I remembered a conversation I had last year with another executive who was facing the same sort of situation.

In this earlier case, a senior executive of a real estate company explained to me that he was responsible for properties that generated $500 million in revenue and that because of reorganizations in the company he was going to now be responsible for $1 billion worth of properties. He told me that in the previous year he had travelled 225 days to appear at one property after another and he didn't know how he was going to pull off overseeing twice as many properties. My response was that one thing we knew for sure was that he wasn't going to travel 450 days in the upcoming year.

That was the ah-ha moment for him. He recognized that the natural limits of time were going to force him to change his approach. Oftentimes leaders get so caught up in the doing that they don't stop to assess whether or not what they're trying to do is actually physically possible. In his case, being personally present at every property in his business unit over the course of a year just wasn't possible. My observation that you can't travel 450 days in one year was the trigger for him to step back and reassess.

Maybe you're in a similar situation. Here are five questions you can ask yourself to assess your leadership situation and determine what your options are around the highest and best use of your time as a leader.

Question 1: 
What am I trying to do that extends beyond the actual time available to me to personally do it?

Question 2: 
What am I trying to accomplish by doing that?

Question 3: 
Given the role that I'm in, what should I be trying to accomplish instead?

Question 4: 
What resources (people, systems, processes) do I need to acquire or develop to cover whatever still seems worthwhile in my answer to Question 2?

Question 5: 
What opportunities do I have to shift from retail leadership (being personally present or involved in everything) to wholesale leadership (leveraging and involving others to act on the overall plan)?

What are you noticing about limits lately? What are you doing to adjust?  I'd love to hear your thoughts and stories about changes you're making to deal with the limits leaders face.

One thing I've learned in my years as an executive coach is that you can't convince a leader who is heavily focused on results to work on relationship building skills just because it's the "right thing" or a "nice thing" to do.  To motivate the client to change, you have to make a direct connection as to how stronger relationship skills will support the client in getting the results they're looking for. The results oriented leader usually needs evidence of how relationships can help him achieve what he wants to achieve.

So, it was with great interest that I read David Rock's article, "Managing with the Brain in Mind," in the latest issue of Booz and Company's Strategy + Business magazine.  Rock is an executive coach specializing in the connections between neuroscience and leadership. He is the author of Quiet Leadership and the forthcoming book, Your Brain at Work. In his S+B article, Rock opens with the story of recent MRI based research that demonstrates that people who feel rejected or treated unfairly activate the same regions of their brain as people who are taking a literal blow to the head. The brain's responses to relational and physical attacks are quite similar.

Rock quotes a neuroscientist who says the link between social discomfort and physical pain makes sense  "because, to a mammal, being socially connected to caregivers is necessary for survival."  In an economic environment where people are naturally worried about the future, this strikes me as a very important thing for leaders to pay attention to. Rock offers a helpful acronym, SCARF (which stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness), which can help leaders better understand and act on the relationship factors that people naturally need to have addressed.  He outlines a number of ideas in his article about how to act on these needs. Building on Rock's model, I'll offer a few of my own here:
Status:  Perceived differences in status can make people feel threatened and, as a result, their performance can drop. Leaders can counteract this natural tendency by setting up systems and processes to encourage internal collaboration rather than competition. An even simpler approach is to offer praise and recognition for good work at all levels of the organization.

Certainty:  Particularly in uncertain times, leaders cannot over communicate. Be clear in your communications about what you do and don't know.  Keep people engaged and informed along the way.  If you're leading a larger organization, make sure your leadership team keeps ongoing communication with the troops at the top of their list of priorities.

Autonomy:  People feel agitated and threatened when they're micromanaged. Once you've set the goals, give people the space to come up with their own solutions. This is in line with my own prescription for next level leaders to pick up defining what to do and let go of telling how to do it. People will be more productive and learn more as a result.

Relatedness:  People need to know and trust each other to work effectively together. As Rock points out, you can't expect people to work well together without devoting some time and effort to helping them form as a team.  Take the time to help them understand how they relate to each other as people and teammates and not just a group of people working on the same task. There's an old saying that you have to go slow to go fast. Invest the time up front in forming the team and you can shorten or skip the storming stage to get to the norming and performing phases.

Fairness: One of the biggest reasons that people feel a situation is unfair is when they are unaware of what criteria were used to make a decision.  (That seems to be equally true for situations where people either gain or lose something.)  Whenever you can, share the criteria that you and the leadership team have used to make major decisions. Of course, to share the criteria, you have to be clear in your own mind first as to what they are.  If you can't figure out a way to explain the criteria to others, that's a pretty good indication that you're not ready to implement the decision.

Thanks to David Rock for his work and an interesting article. What were your takeaways from his SCARF model?  What tips do you have for dealing with the needs of others around Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness?

One of the things that I think is completely true about leadership is that presence begets presence.  Whatever tone or presence that is set by the leader is the tone or presence that will be adopted by the followers. At least I used to think that. After the outburst of, "You lie!" by Representative Joe Wilson during the President's address to Congress on Wednesday night, I'm not sure who is following who anymore. As many commentators have pointed out, the scene in the House of Representatives the other night sometimes resembled the raucous health care reform town hall meetings of August. Were the catcalls, the sign waving, the heckling and the blatant Blackberrying of Wednesday night's session conscious acts designed to fuel the next round of public outcry or was all of that more of a reflection of the leaders picking up on the presence of their followers?

I'm stumped on that one.  It's tough to figure out which is the chicken and which is the egg.

What I'm not stumped about at all is how disheartening I found the whole display. Leaders need to lead by example. If the example leaders set is that it's OK to act like unruly children, then I think we will, as a society, eventually reap the whirlwind of that behavior. It all makes me wonder, whatever happened to...

respect for the office?   It used to be that the President of the United States was due a certain amount of respect just because he held the office.  It feels like a line was crossed on that this week.  Heck, forget about respect for the office for a moment; how about just simple respect for another human being?

listening?  Remember when you were a little kid and if someone was saying something you didn't like, you'd put your hands over your ears and yell repeatedly, "I can't hear you! I can't hear you! I can't hear you!"?  (I think I might have tried that exactly once before it was made clear to me that that wasn't going to happen again.)  I think we saw a lot of the adult (?) version of that behavior on Wednesday.  What a great example.

giving thoughtful attention?  Tweeting during a Presidential address to a joint session of Congress (especially when you know that the cameras are on you) takes the issue of adult attention deficit disorder to a whole new level.

being hard on the issues and soft on the people?  Have we lost the capacity to have a thoughtful debate or disagreement on substantive issues without resorting to personal attacks?  What does it say about our capacity to solve difficult problems if we have?

honor?   The maintenance of personal honor and dignity might be as simple as asking oneself, "What  would my mom think about this?" before acting. 

For an example of someone who is demonstrating thoughtful leadership and an enormous amount of personal honor, take a look at this feature article from the Sports section of the Washington Post on Navy senior Cameron Marshall.  Marshall is a 26 year old senior who carried the flag as Navy came onto the field for its football game against Ohio State last weekend.  He's a 26 year old senior because he enlisted in the Marines as an 18 year old after 9/11. He came to the Academy as a 21 year old plebe following service in Iraq, Afghanistan and other hot spots. When asked about what it was like to be a combat veteran mixed in with 18 and 19 year olds being exposed to the military for the first time, Marshall said:

"It was a good thing.  When in doubt, you can never go wrong with humility; that's one of the things it taught me. You lend more legitimacy to the things that you've done by remaining humble about them and trying to learn as much as you can, rather than trying to tell everybody everything you know."

"When in doubt, you can never go wrong with humility."  Spoken like a true leader. I hope when Midshipman Marshall has fulfilled his military career that he runs for Congress.  Whatever happened to the leadership role models?  Fortunately, we still have some.

No, I'm not talking about some schlocky movie that didn't make it into theatres this summer.  I'm talking about Brad Garlinghouse, a former Yahoo Senior Vice President who was hired this week to be a key part of the leadership team charged with spinning AOL out of Time Warner over the next year. For fans of memorable business communication, Garlinghouse is best known as the author, in 2006, of a memo to the top executives at Yahoo that came to be known as "the peanut butter manifesto." 

Among other points in the manifesto, Garlinghouse wrote:

"I've heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.I hate peanut butter. We all should"

His memo, which was eventually featured in a front page article in the Wall Street Journal, was a clarion call for Yahoo to get its act together and recapture its leadership position in the Internet space. That hasn't happened yet (and may never happen), but the memo set off a chain of events which led to a change in top leadership and the implementation of many of the strategies that Garlinghouse wrote about.

So, as Garlinghouse joins AOL to help lead what is a combination of a turnaround and a start-up, I thought it was worth taking a look at the peanut butter manifesto to see what we can learn about how leaders can influence their bosses through highly effective communications. Here are a few takeaways:

Be Credible: If you're going to push top leadership for a change, you have to have the credibility for them to take you seriously. Garlinghouse had established his through his past performance and for his clear commitment to and passion for Yahoo. (The guy shaved a Y in the back of his haircut at one point.) He opens his memo by restating his passion and commitment.

Keep It Simple: Garlinghouse writes in clear, conversational language. No 25 cent words and no industry jargon. His sentences are short. He laid out his diagnosis of Yahoo's problems in three short paragraphs with bold face headlines.

Be Visual: What made Garlinghouse's memo memorable was the visual image of peanut butter being spread too thin. Most everyone gets that metaphor because most everyone has had the experience of running out of peanut butter before the bread is covered. Use simple metaphors to make your points.  People will remember what you're saying because you're getting more of their senses engaged.

Make Sense: When Garlinghouse moved to his call to action, he kept it to three simple points with a bit of detail on each:

1.    Focus the vision
2.    Restore accountability and clarity of ownership
3.    Execute a radical organization

When I read his memo for the first time, I immediately got his points and his plan even though my closest experience with Yahoo had been using it for some list serve groups I belong to.  His action plan completely matched up with his diagnosis earlier in the memo.  It hung together and it made sense.

Take the Risk: It would have been easy for Garlinghouse to do what a lot of managers do which is to gripe off line about the "obvious" problems that need to be fixed without ever actually calling the issues out and offering a plan to fix them. Doing that requires taking the risk that top leadership may not appreciate what you have to say. But if you don't say it, who will?  Someone told me once that what doesn't get said, doesn't get heard. If your motivations are for the greater good, take the risk and say it.  You might be the catalyst the organization was waiting for.

Based on your experience or observation, what advice do you have for leaders trying to influence the top of the house?

What are you doing to celebrate Labor Day? Like so many three day weekends in the U.S., the original point of Labor Day has sort of gotten lost in the shuffle. (President's Day mattress sale anyone?) I spent a little time this morning looking up the history of Labor Day and found this on History.com.

A couple of things strike me about that story. One is how much history we overlook in our focus on the now. We forget where we've come from. The other is that people shouting at health care town halls, however rude their behavior is, is a long way from sending the Army in to break up a strike. A little historical perspective can be helpful in evaluating what's going on today. The cable news culture can make history seem like whatever was caught on video tape a few hours ago. That doesn't exactly encourage thoughtful reflection or dialogue.

But, I digress. Back to the opening question - what are you doing to celebrate Labor Day?  Here are some suggestions:

1. Thank Your Co-Workers:  Before you leave work today, thank some co-workers for what they do.  Tell them what you appreciate about their contribution and why it matters.  They'll appreciate it and you'll feel better having done so.


2. Go to a Parade:  If there's a Labor Day parade in your community, go watch it.  It will reconnect you with our country's history and your own.


3. Unplug:  Spend some time with friends and family having fun.  Go for a walk.  Watch some baseball or football.  Declare Monday an e-mail free zone.   The day after Labor Day represents the start of the sprint to the end of the year.  Take the time to recharge your batteries for the next leg.

Now that the Cash for Clunkers program is over, the results are coming in and it looks like the big winners from the program are Hyundai and Ford with year over year monthly sales increases of 47% and 17% respectively. The number three selling new car during the Clunkers program was the Ford Focus with the Ford Escape showing up in the top 10 as well. The other two American car companies actually showed declines in sales during August with GM down almost 20% from last year and Chrysler sales down 15%.

What's the difference between the three U.S. auto makers? Obviously, there are a lot of factors, but I'd argue the most important is leadership.  As I wrote in this blog back in August of 2007, my money was on Ford CEO Alan Mulally to lead a turnaround at Ford and it looks like that's what he's doing. I spent some time earlier today reading some recent articles about Mulally and watching some video interviews with him to try to determine what he's done right since arriving at Ford from the Boeing Corporation in 2006.  (My sources include articles in Fortune magazine, Business Week, and the U.K. Guardian along with video interviews from Time magazine and the New Yorker

Based on that research, here are five Mulally success factors I've come up with that I think apply to any leader charged with leading a turnaround in their organization.

Preparation:  Before he took the job at Ford, Mulally spent a lot of time with Chairman Bill Ford and every member of the senior management team to learn as much as he could about the culture of the firm and its competitive position.  That time spent up front allowed him to come to the table with a clear sense of what he needed to do from day one.

Clear Plan: Upon his arrival at Ford, Mulally's intent was to focus the company on its core brand, Ford, and to divest other brands they owned such as Volvo and Jaguar. His plan was to invest in the long term future of the core brand and, sensing the recession that eventually came, he established $23 billion in lines of credit within 90 days of taking the CEO job. Those credit lines have enabled Ford to invest in new product development while avoiding the government assistance that GM and Chrysler both had to take.

Clear Point of View: As the video interviews cited here show, Mulally is a very effective communicator.  He speaks in a down to earth tone with a very clear point of view on his business and his plan.    As an example, he says in the New Yorker interview that fuel efficiency, safety, quality and value are going to drive consumer decisions on car purchases.  That's the kind of clear, concise, easily repeatable point of view that an organization can use as a guidepost.

Align the Culture with the Plan: Mulally is pushing for consistency of purpose, transparency and collaboration in the management culture at Ford.  He has put an end to calendar based rotations of executives into new assignments so that they have enough time to prove themselves in the jobs they're in.  He is insisting that managers put their cards on the table in weekly update meetings so that everyone has the opportunity to help solve small problems before they become bigger ones.  For an example of this, listen to the story that he tells in the New Yorker video starting around the 11:00 minute mark.

Focus and Follow Through: Mulally has set up clear systems that keep himself and his team accountable to their plans. Every initiative and it's major tasks are color coded as green for on target, yellow for questionable and red for a problem.  Charts are left on the conference room walls and updated weekly for all to see the changes in status.  In his first meeting using this method back in 2006, all the charts were showing up green. Mulally asked the obvious question, "How can everything be green when we're losing billions of dollars a year?"  The next week one of his managers showed up with red status codes in his report and Mulally literally applauded him in front of the group.  His point was that the only way problems can be solved is if they're identified, tracked and discussed.

Who else would you nominate as a role model for leading a turn around?  What other leadership characteristics do you think are important in a turn around situation?