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2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC
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re: links---certain hyperlinks assume that you are registered as a subscriber
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Finding “Ms.
Right”
Executives act decisively to find the
right person for the right job in the right location. Each of those
decisions: person, role, and place, can lead an executive toward success or
peril. When discontent with past selections distracts an executive,
unintended consequences often arise. When action is delayed, regret usually
follows. So, how does an effective executive select that ideal combination of
the right person in the right job at the best location? In this month’s
issue, we’ve selected some recent stories about these decisions. As you read
about what others have done or are doing, reflect on your own situation. Have
you selected individuals who now seem unsuitable to the tasks at hand? What
should you do about that today? Has your pool of potential candidates
overlooked individuals whose skills you’re not attuned to identify? When you
define job roles, have you put incompatible expectations into the same job?
As you consider tradeoffs, what shortcomings in skills or traits can you live
with? What accommodations will you refuse to make? When you think about the
best locations for your work, how narrow or how broad are your horizons? How
global is your search for talent?
Fifteen new
books are rated in this issue, beginning on page 5. Two books are rated with
one star, five with two stars, seven with three stars, and one with four
stars, representing a typical distribution of ratings. You can also visit our
complete 2004 bookshelf at http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/2004books.html
and see the rating table explained as well as explore links to all 2004 book
reviews. You can also check this same bookshelf to see what other books we’re
reading or considering. If there’s something missing from the bookshelf that
you think we should be considering, let us know at books@hopkinsandcompany.com.
Loving and Leaving
Recent stories about
two different personalities struck us as great examples of the decisions that
executives make for themselves about whether the job they’re expected to do
matches the job they want to do. For their managers, one situation leads to
great success, and the other may lead to peril. The February 10 issue of Fortune (http://www.fortune.com/fortune/subs/print/0,15935,588972,00.html)
presented a long profile of Jay Leno,
who brings in about $100 million in operating earnings each year for NBC, about 15% of its total. NBC
President Bob Wright reflected on Leno’s early struggles in the job, saying, “Talent by
itself is not necessarily reliable. He has talent, and he is willing to work
long hard hours at it.” Leno seems to love his work, and accepts a pay level
at half that of his closest competitor, David Letterman (who takes twelve
weeks vacation a year to Leno’s six). According to Fortune, “He has a prodigious appetite
for work. He earns almost as much money in his spare time as he makes at NBC.
He acts as his own agent. In an industry where stars often demand to be
indulged, he is an affable team player. Above all, he is a relentless
salesman—he will go almost anywhere and do almost anything to win friends and
influence people.” President of NBC
Entertainment Jeff Zucker calls Leno a “perfect team player,” in part
because he “he tapes promos for local stations, schmoozes
with advertisers, and poses for pictures with guests before and after the
show.” As you read this Fortune
profile of Leno, think about how your best workers measure up to Leno’s performance.
Within days of reading about Leno as the right person for that job today, we
read about another successful artist who is no longer considered the right
person for his job. We read in The
Chicago Tribune (2/20/04) (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0402200185feb20,1,3760542.story?coll=chi-news-hed)
that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
will not renew the contract of music director Daniel Barenboim when it expires in
2006. According to Tribune music critic John
von Rhein, “At a time when American orchestras are asking
music directors to be more active partners in raising their community
profiles and finding new audiences, Daniel Barenboim
said Thursday he cannot fulfill those kinds of additional duties and will
step down as music director.” Barenboim told von Rhein that “there have been ongoing conflicts with the
administration and trustees regarding the ‘non-artistic’ side of his
directorship, including questions about his taking a firmer hand in
fundraising, community outreach and maintaining a more regular community
presence.” A resident of
Berlin, who spends about 12 weeks a year in Chicago (more than his
predecessor Sir George Solti did), he said that, “Ideally every city
wants the music director to live in the city and participate in its social
life. This is part of it. My development has gone in a completely opposite
direction. With age, I get less interested and less patient with managerial
and administrative problems. I have neither the energy nor the time to
fulfill those added responsibilities.”
Time will prove whether the trustees of the CSO will find a new director who
will meet all their expectations.
What creates an ideal relationship between your workers and your
organization? What do you do to nurture and grow those elements of success?
When the interests of your organization and a key player diverge, what
happens? How clearly are expectations, especially changing ones, communicated
and understood among all parties? To what extent do the “extras”, like Leno’s willingness to do more things for NBC, influence
your assessment of those who work for you? To what extent does
expanding job expectations limit the talent pool? In Barenboim’s case, he wants to spend more time on music
and less on administration. If you were his boss, would you accommodate that,
or look for someone to meet all your expectations? Are you likely to find
someone to meet all your needs?
Desire
We remain intrigued
and confused by the under-representation of women in the ranks of CEOs. Two
recent articles increased our confusion. The cover story of the February 2004
issue of Fast Company, (http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/79/women.html)
titled “Where Are the Women?” explored the topic. Here’s the core of how the question
was answered: “In
part, the answer probably still lies in lingering bias in the system. Most
women interviewed for this story say that overt discrimination is rare;
still, the executive suites of most major corporations remain largely boys'
clubs. Catalyst, the women's business group, blames the gap on the fact that
women often choose staff jobs, such as marketing and human resources, while
senior executives are disproportionately plucked from the ranks of those with
line jobs, where a manager can have critical profit-and-loss responsibility.
Others fault the workplace itself, saying
corporations don't do enough to accommodate women's often more-significant
family responsibilities. All those things are true. But there may be a
simpler--and in many ways more disturbing--reason that women remain so
underrepresented in the corner office: For the most part, men just compete
harder than women. They put in more hours. They're more willing to relocate.
They're more comfortable putting work ahead of personal commitments. And they
just want the top job more. Let's be clear: Many, many individual women work
at least as hard as men. Many even harder. But in the aggregate, statistics
show, they work less, and as long as that remains true, it means women's
chances of reaching parity in the corner office will remain remote. Those top
jobs have become all-consuming: In today's markets, being CEO is a global,
24-hour-a-day job. You have to, as Barnes says, give it your life. Since
women tend to experience work-life conflicts more viscerally than their male
peers, they're less likely to be willing to do that. And at the upper reaches
of corporate hierarchy, where the pyramid narrows sharply and the game
becomes winner-take-all, a moment's hesitation--one important stint in the
Beijing office that a woman doesn't take because of a sick child or an
unhappy husband--means the odds get a little worse for her and a little
better for the guy down the hall.” Carol
Hymowitz’ In
the Lead column in The Wall Street
Journal (2/3) (http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107575975625718372,00.html)
added one more reason: “When it comes to landing a corner office or executive
title, what counts a lot more than conscientiousness is daring, assertiveness
and the ability to promote oneself -- all qualities men more typically
demonstrate.” She goes on to say, “To make changes, women need mentors and to
be careful to seek a workplace culture that recognizes and rewards their
talents.” For now, not enough workplaces seem to do that. Potential for
sexual harassment may inhibit some women from taking on assignments with
travel. According to Kimberly
Schneider of Illinois State
University, “Although
women today may have more support and legal recourse for filing sexual
harassment complaints than 30 years ago, they don't speak up as often as one
might expect because of a fear of losing their job and other negative
consequences. One thing we've learned is that retaliation happens a lot, and
women are not reporting or confronting harassers partly due to their concerns
or fears of retaliation …How seriously a person feels they would be taken is
a good predictor of whether or not an incident will be reported; the majority
of victims don’t report sexual harassment.” (Chicago
Tribune, 2/25/04).
How effective
are you at attracting and retaining talented women in your organization? If
you have employees, men or women, who demur in promoting themselves and their
skills, how do you help them recognize and acknowledge their value to your
organization? How do you assess the mentoring of women in your workplace, and
the extent to which your organization’s culture recognizes and rewards the
talents of women? Is there fear of retaliation?
Free Agent Planet
Globalization and
worldwide outsourcing are topics that can entwine organizations in political
controversies and in labor strife. Daniel
Pink (author of Free
Agent Nation, recommended here in July 2001)
offers a great presentation of outsourcing in the cover article of the
February 2004 issue of Wired (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.02/)
titled, “The New Face of the Silicon Age: How India Became the Capital of the
Computing Revolution.” Pink chronicles the changes that have led to the
transfer of programming jobs from the United
States to India, and the impact of those changes on workers in both
places. According to Pink, “A century ago, 40 percent of Americans
worked on farms. Today, the farm sector employs about 3 percent of our
workforce. But our agriculture economy still outproduces
all but two countries. Fifty years ago, most of the US labor
force worked in factories. Today, only about 14 percent is in manufacturing.
But we've still got the largest manufacturing economy in the world - worth
about $1.9 trillion in 2002. We've seen this movie before - and it's always
had a happy ending. The only difference this time is that the protagonists
are forging pixels instead of steel. And accountants, financial analysts, and
other number crunchers, prepare for your close-up. Your jobs are next. After
all, to export sneakers or sweatshirts, companies need an intercontinental
supply chain. To export software or spreadsheets, somebody just needs to hit
Return.
What makes this latest upheaval so disorienting for Americans is its speed. Agriculture jobs provided decent livelihoods for at
least 80 years before the rules changed and working in the factory became the
norm. Those industrial jobs endured for some 40 years before the twin
pressures of cheap competition overseas and labor-saving automation at home
rewrote the rules again. IT jobs - the kind of high-skill knowledge work that
was supposed to be our future - are facing the same sort of realignment after
only 20 years or so. The upheaval is occurring not across generations, but
within individual careers. The rules are being rewritten while people are
still playing the game. And that seems unjust.” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman followed Pink to India and carried the change
cycle one step further in a recent (2/26/04)
column (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/26/opinion/26FRIE.html?th):
to write the screenplay for an animated version of the life of Krishna, an
Indian film studio “wanted the best storyteller it could find and outsourced
the project to an Emmy Award-winning U.S. animation writer, Jeffrey Scott —
for an Indian epic!” For those of us who hate change, it’s coming faster than
ever.
Are you finding the right
people to do the right job in the right places for your organization? What
barriers exist to transferring work from one part of the world to another for
your organization? How well do you assess the skills available around the
planet? How well are you preparing your current workforce for the changes
they need to make to meet the needs of your organization in the future, and
to have their skills become needed in the future?
Follow-up
Here are selected
updates on stories covered in prior issues of Executive Times:
Ø
We’ve
picked on Coca-Cola’s executive foibles in the August 1999,
December
1999, April
2000 December 2000,
and April
2001 issues of Executive Times,
so it’s about time to note the company again. We last noted that Coke CEO Doug
Daft had already reorganized, so he was running out of options. On
February 19, the company announced
Daft’s retirement at age 60, and speculation began
about his replacement, with much attention given to 51-year-old Steven J. Heyer,
Coke President and Daft’s heir apparent. According
to The Wall Street Journal,
(2/24/04) (http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107758238892137201,00.html)
Heyer is in the running, but the Board will conduct
an external search (briskly). Will they attract outside talent? Will Heyer get the job? Will the Board select former executive
Don Keough who’s recently rejoined the Board at age
77? Somehow or another, we expect more drama in Atlanta. Stay tuned.
Ø
The
cover story of the February 2000
issue of Executive Times,
was titled “Waging Talent Wars”, and back in that distant past, employers
were competing against one another for workers. Now, workers are trying to
differentiate themselves from one another in a weaker job market. Be prepared
for the latest development in the battle, which we read about in The New York Times on February 1 (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/01/jobs/01jmar.html?pagewanted=all).
Some job seekers are now using video resumes. “Video résumés are starting to
emerge as a new weapon for job hunters. The videos range from 20-second
presentations of a job applicant candidate directly addressing the camera to
four-minute mini-movies replete with graphics and photo montages. Some job
seekers spend pennies to make simple home videos; a higher-quality video can
cost several thousand dollars.”
Legacy
A Sense of Place
We often notice some
places that welcome our attention. Something catches our eye. We slow down
and pay attention. Sometimes, that attention has come as a result of the work
of an expert landscape architect. Thanks to the leadership over the long
career of one such artist, thousands of cityscapes have been transformed,
helping to bring people together. Throughout 20th century America, Daniel Urban Kiley
carried on the type of work that Frederick Law Olmstead did in the 19th
century. Chances are greater that you’ve heard of Olmstead, but not of Kiley. At Fountain
Place in Dallas, Kiley combined bald Cyprus trees, fountains and
cascades of water to creating an urban setting that draws pedestrians. If
you’ve noted how “right” it seems as you approach the Kennedy Library, or the
East Wing of the National Gallery of Art, or the Oakland Museum, that’s
thanks to Kiley, who died at home in rural Vermont
in late February at age 91. Next time we’re in the south garden of the Art
Institute of Chicago, we’ll smile and think of Kiley
and his memorable legacy on the places where we live and work.
Latest Books
Read and Reviewed:
(Note: readers of the web version of Executive Times
can click on the book covers to order copies directly from amazon.com. When you order through these links, Hopkins
& Company receives a small payment from amazon.com. Click on the title to read the review or
visit our 2004 bookshelf at http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/2004books.html).
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Title (Link to
Review)
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Author
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Rating
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Review Summary
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Purchase
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Oracle
Night
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Auster, Paul
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••
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Recovery.
Two writers use each other to overcome writing blocks and move from illness
to living life fully. An unusual visit to Brooklyn
in the form of a literary novel.
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Double
Vision
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Barker,
Pat
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••••
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Plain Sight.
The novelist and the sculptor protagonist lead readers to seeing what’s
important in life. Introspection leads to questioning beliefs and recovery
opens the possibility of seeing new relationships transform lives.
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The
Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead
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Callahan,
David
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•••
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Outrage.
While cheating isn’t new, Callahan presents a compelling story of how and
why it is increasing in America
as more people choose to sacrifice integrity before economic security.
Depressing at times to read, plenty of examples make it hard to disagree
with premises.
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An
End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror
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Frum, David and Richard Perle
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•••
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A Manual
for Victory. Former Bush speechwriter and former DOD policymaker present
what they call a “manual for victory” in the war on terror. Bush supporters
will cheer on most pages, while opponents will find ammunition, creating an
interesting book for readers of all political sympathies.
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The Boys'
Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe 1944-1945
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Fussell, Paul
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••
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Raw.
Unsentimental, raw, unvarnished view of the horror of war by talented
historian who was one of the young infantrymen on the field of Europe at the end of the second World War. Haunting,
true stories.
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Bushwhacked:
Life in George W. Bush’s America
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Ivins, Molly and Lou Dubose
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•••
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Eloquent.
Journalist authors know how to turn a phrase, and present facts and stories
with venom and wit, leaving little room for those willing to gloss over the
details. Bush-bashers will find plenty to enjoy, and Bush supporters won’t
pay attention to this book.
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The
Murder Room
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James,
P.D.
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••
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Prolonged.
For some readers the drawn out plot momentum prolongs the pleasure of
discovering clues, while others will be infuriated by the sluggish pace.
Still waiting for the next Agatha Christie.
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Absolute
Friends
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Le
Carre, John
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•
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Lukewarm.
Even rabid fans of LeCarre will conclude latest
novel not in the upper half of his repertoire. Author’s animosity of U.S.
and British foreign policies influences too many pages without making the
novel better.
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Mr.
Paradise
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Leonard,
Elmore
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•••
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Satisfaction.
Great dialogue, memorable characters, and a wacky enough plot, set in Detroit, and delivered
with picture-perfect clarity and brevity. Both quirky and realistic,
surprising readers with lines to laugh at.
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Rumpole and the Primrose Path
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Mortimer,
John Clifford
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•••
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He’s
Back. Beloved barrister Horace Rumpole has
recovered from illness, leaves the Primrose Path nursing
home and returns to chambers in triumph in new collection of six short
stories.
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The
Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less
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Schwartz,
Barry
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•••
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Satisficer. With more choices
in our lives, why are we less satisfied than we’d like to be? Too many
choices has become a new problem to address, and this book presents what’s
created the paradox, and offers ideas on how to respond.
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Your
Marketing Sucks
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Stevens,
Mark
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••
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Extreme.
Author demands each marketing dollar be spent to bring in money, something few
companies do well, or even at all. Good examples from passionate author who
will irritate many marketing executives and please many general managers.
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The
Making of Toro: Bullfights, Broken Hearts, and One Author’s Quest for the
Acclaim He Deserves
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Sundeen, Mark
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••
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Ole. Those
with a certain sense of humor will enjoy this novel, particularly those who
don’t take themselves too seriously. Fewer than ten copies are likely to be
sold within Washington,
D.C.
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The
Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of
Paul O’Neill
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Suskind, Ron
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•••
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Competence.
Forget what you’ve heard about this book. O’Neill was a competent Secretary
of the Treasury, and Suskind is a good
journalist. An informative presentation on the process of vetting issues
within the Bush administration.
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Autumn
of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys
Who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media
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Wolff,
Michael
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•
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Vacuous.
Participant-observer’s account of players and action in big media by author
of New York Magazine column, This
Media Life. Read only if your interest in media companies and characters is
high, or if your curiosity about mega-mergers hasn’t been sated.
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