Show Me the Elephant

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Why is that leaders and the teams they lead often ignore their issues until they have no choice but to take action? This despite the fact that, more often than not, waiting longer limits their universe of available responses.

I work with a practice group in a professional services firm. They have regular meetings of timekeepers and staff. Lately at those meetings there was an elephant in the room – anxiety about how the economy was going to affect them. Rather than talk about what was really on their minds, they discussed administrative matters and client issues.

In a recent discussion with the practice group leader, I asked – “so what are you and your group going to to do to address the downturn?” My client hadn’t really thought about it. Like many, the leader hoped the team could ride it out. I suggested “name it and claim it." It was simple – raise the issue for the group and talk about it. Some questions to ask:

· How busy are we?
· If we keep doing things the way we are now, what will happen?
· What do we need to do differently?

In such discussions, keep nothing off the table. On the cost side, address reductions – staffing, salary and other expenses. On the revenue side, consider new business activities, think about rates and fixed fee alternatives, figure out how to get paid sooner. Address the issues that have to be addressed. Get cveryone to take ownership of the problem. Put the elephant front and center, and deal with it as a group.

What happened? People got to share their anxieties in an appropriate way, own the problem and develop a solution together. They appreciated the opportunity to think out loud with each other.

Does it really matter why we procrastinate on such issues? Fear is probably at the heart of it. But the origin doesn’t necessarily alter the action. What needs to be done is to name it, so we can claim it.

Do you have an elephant in the room that needs to be called out?

To Twitter or Not to Twitter: The Only Top Ten List You’ll Need

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I’ve been twiddling with Twitter for a number of months. Only now I’m ready to get into it with both feet. If you’ve been following me on Twitter at cgreen23 or at trustedadvisors, please make the switch over to my new twitter account, CharlesHGreen.

Now: why should you care?

If you’re not a user, Twitter probably looks narcissistic to you. Why in the world should you want to read what thousands of other people are eating for breakfast? Answer: you shouldn’t, and you don’t have to. Nor does anyone else want to hear that stuff from you either.

The good news is, you can listen, or not, to anyone you want. And you can talk, but others will decide to listen to you, or not. It’s a (very) free market of ideas.

Twitter does a bad job of explaining itself in its invitation for users to state what’s going on. The real power of Twitter as I’ve come to see it is a new form of search, a new vehicle for relationship development, and a new form of promotion. And the last is least.  Or, if you prefer, twitter is the new email.  Or chatroom.  Or texting.  Or social network.  It’s a bit of all that.

Here are my top reasons to Twitter  (in ascending order of importance):

Charlie Green’s Top 10 Reasons to Twitter

10. To find out what all the buzz is about and who’s following Michelle Obama’s twitter account

 9.  To promote your name

 8.  To tap into current events well before the blogs pick it up

 7.  To do an incredibly fast, pointed, search that returns 1 paragraph answers

 6.  To find out perspectives about an issue–don’t forget to try Twitter Search

 5.  To aggregate information that people who like you would be interested in

 4.  To establish your own brand by coming up with a distinctive profile of information you offer up

 3.  To provide your followers with high quality information of use to them

 2.  To find 5-6 thought leaders you admire, and easily follow what they say, and what their followers say

 1.  To make new acquaintances who help you learn, grow, and do business with.

But don’t just listen to me. Here are some other, more experienced, Twitterers on the subject. If you want to decide whether and how to get into this, here’s a pretty good list to help you:

Top Ten List of Others’ Top Ten Reasons to Twitter

  1. Brian Critchfield’s Why Should I Use Twitter?
  2. Chris Brogan (from two years ago) on 5 Ways to Use Twitter for Good
  3. Business Week’s How Companies Use Twitter to Bolster Their Brands
  4. Guy Kawasasaki’s How to Use Twitter as a Twool
  5. Darren Rouse’s 9 Benefits of Twitter for Bloggers
  6. Lee Lefever’s Twittering for 1 Year – a Retrospective
  7. David Lee King’s Why Use Twitter?
  8. Sharon Sarmiento’s The Top 5 Ways Smart People Use Twitter
  9. Chris Brogan again (because he’s the King of Tweet, that’s why) on 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business
  10. Wikipedia on Twitter

And you won’t believe how much faster (most of) this might have been on Twitter.

Oh, and that twitter address again is CharlesHGreen.

Does Closing Kill Sales?

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Jill Konrath has a great little podcast titled Closing Can Kill Sales, at salesopedia.com.  

Right there, you may be tempted to say, ‘oh come on, that’s old hat.  Nobody does that anymore; it’s totally schlocky and manipulative and in (B2B, consulting, telecom—pick your choice) no one does that anymore.’

Well, just last week I came across a sophisticated B2B software/communications company, and guess what they wanted to know: how to close more sales.

They may not be thinking old-school “assumptive closes, constant closing,” or “you want more fries with that?”  But they are still focused, as a critical operational goal, on how to “close more sales.”  Plus ça change…

Jill is refreshingly direct.  Pure Midwest, corn-fed charm, you betcha; and she’s the real deal in person.  She came up the classic way, selling Xerox copiers.  She cut her teeth on the “ABC” rule—Always Be Closing.  But, like Huck Finn, she always felt badly about not being able to do it.

About closing, she is direct: “I hate it.  It always felt like a violation of the way people normally behave.  It’s about manipulative strategies to get people to say yes, and I just hated it.”

She sold a lot of copiers, though.  “One thing Xerox did teach us was to ask a lot of questions, and I was good at that.  I was really trying to find out the business case, and I didn’t know if it was there or not.  So I kept asking so I could find out, for myself.”

What does Jill say to people about closing?  “I say to them, never close; never be closing.  But always advance the sales process.  They need to know the next step, whatever it is, that’s true.  And eventually, you’ll hear a magic word—they start to say ‘we.’ Then, after a while, it’s ‘how do we buy this?”

There are others—Phil McGee is one, I hope we hear from him—who I think might say that’s exactly what ‘closing’ is supposed to mean—not manipulation, just relentlessly exploring questions. 

But Jill is no dummy either, and she’s quite insistent about ‘never close.’  Why the passion?

I think it’s because the word ‘closing’ is encrusted with nearly a century of subtext of control and manipulation.  It is too baked in for the niceties of alternate definitions to have an effect.

Take my B2B software example.  They don’t want old-school scripted trick lines; they think they’re too sophisticated for that.  But they’re kidding themselves.  Just as much as an old door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman, they’re looking for a way to get a customer to do what they want them to do—namely buy their product.  They just want it done in a hip, 2009, Sales 2.0, CRM, modern kind of way.

Control and manipulation by any other name is still the same.

The real meaning of Jill’s dictum is deeper, I think.  It means, stop, stop stop trying to force your will on others.  Allow yourself to believe that if you really treat customers well and help them to make the best decision, you’ll get your fair share of that opportunity—and way, way more than that in the opportunities that follow.

For most of us, closing does kill sales.  Paradoxically the best way to sell is to Stop Trying to Sell, and Stop Trying to Close.  Just help your customer.     

Sacred Cows, or Goals Gone Wild

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Personally, I love seeing sacred cows sacrificed. Maybe it’s that contrarian thinking helps learning. Maybe skepticism came with studying philosophy and doing strategy consulting.

Maybe I’m just a little bent. Whatever.

Let’s take goal-setting. That’s about as big a sacred cow as you get in business. Googling “goal setting” gets you 5.6 million hits.

Jack Welch praises it. Scottie Hamilton and Michael Phelps get cited as examples of it. Martial artists swear by it. Management by objectives is built around it.

I’m not sure there’s any more common theme in self-help and business success books. It’s just so, like, obvious. Goal-setting may be the secret behind the success of Motherhood and Apple Pie. I’m pretty sure it explains the Boy Scouts.

So–what an unexpected delight to find a balloon-pricking, mellow-harshing, skeptical piece of inquiry in, of all places, Harvard Business School.  (Actually, it’s in the HBS Working Knowledge series, which does a fine job of exploring quirky ideas. They’re just not usually so big as this one).  A little bonus: the smirky title, "Goals Gone Wild: the Systematic Side Effects of Over-prescribing Goals Setting."

The paper is summarized here and co-author Max Bazerman is interviewed here:

From the executive summary:

• The harmful side effects of goal setting are far more serious and systematic than prior work has acknowledged.

• Goal setting harms organizations in systematic and predictable ways.

• The use of goal setting can degrade employee performance, shift focus away from important but non-specified goals, harm interpersonal relationships, corrode organizational culture, and motivate risky and unethical behaviors.

• In many situations, the damaging effects of goal setting outweigh its benefits.

But surely, you say, this is a case of excess, of bad apples. Goals are not the problem, people who use goals badly are the problem. (You remember–guns don’t kill people, people kill people).

No, says Bazerman. When the adoption of goals so predictably and systematically produces negative results, it is fair to say it is goals themselves that are the problem. (Are you listening, NRA?)

Well, you might say, if goal-setting is so dangerous, how’d we get to use it so much and so deeply?

Says Bazerman:

It is easy to implement. It is easy to measure. It is easy to document successes. And in laboratory experiments, it has been shown to be extremely successful at improving the measured behavior. [we] simply argue that goals have gone wild in terms of their impact on other unmeasured outcomes. When we factor in the consistent findings that stretch and specific goals both narrow focus on a limited set of behaviors while increasing risk-taking and unethical behavior, their simple implementation can become a vice.

Bazerman and his co-authors are not saying goal-setting is bad per se; they’re not raving nut-jobs. They’re just asking a question that doesn’t get asked nearly often enough.

They have taken a sober, holistic look at one of the most pervasive, unchallenged, unexamined mantras of business—and brought some welcome fresh air to the issue.

Bravo.

Building Trust with Millennials

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Don’t look now, but the “millennials” are coming. Often disparaged as “techaholics” with a high WIIFM factor (what’s in it for me), the millennial, generation Y, echo boomers, or those born sometime after 1976, are changing the shape of the American workforce.

According to a recent NY Times article, the new kids on the block have a sense of entitlement;

Professor Marshall Grossman at the University of Maryland said, “I’ve come to expect complaints whenever I return English papers. Many students come in with the conviction that they’ve worked hard and deserve a higher mark.”

The sentiments are echoed by Sarah Kinn, a junior English major at the University of Vermont: “I feel that if I do all of the readings and attend class regularly that I should be able to achieve a grade of at least a B.”

I have noticed the same phenomenon in the course I teach at Loyola University. A disgruntled student who received a grade commensurate with the final product shifted the blame to me, saying, “Well, I guess it is in the syllabus, so you technically can give me a lower grade.”

How did they get this way? Michele Norris, a Tampa-based consultant, asserts, “If students have a sense of entitlement, it’s not entirely their fault. They are the product of “hovering” parents and an education system that is ‘results oriented’ to prove worthiness. Parents and coaches have rewarded them with trophies just for being on the team”.

According to Norris, millennials do have a great deal of self confidence. “The reality is that this generation is entering the workforce with the ability to multi-task, sort through vast amounts of information (the internet), and navigate the information age.”

John O’Neill, a millennial and senior business student at Loyola University, takes exception to the typical millennial line of thinking. “I am not a proponent of the "effort = quality" train of thought. In many situations, if an assignment can’t be completed on time or up to quality standards, no matter how much work was devoted, it should be considered a failure. “

Like John, not every millennial fits the stereotype. Alex and Brett Harris, authors of Do Hard Things: a Teenage Rebellion against Low Expectations tap into their faith and Biblical principles to combat the idea of adolescence as a “vacation from responsibility.”

With over 16 million hits to their website TheRebelution.com, they are leading the charge in a growing movement of young people who are rebelling against the low expectations of their culture by choosing to "do hard things."

“The world says, ‘You’re young, have fun!’ It tells us to ‘obey your thirst’ and ‘just do it.’ Or it tells us, ‘You’re great! You don’t need to exert yourself.’ But those kinds of mindsets sabotage character and competence,” says Harris.

Meanwhile, millions of millennials are merging into the market. How to integrate them into the workforce?

During a recent 60 Minutes interview with Morley Safer, Marian Salzman, an Ad Agency exec who has been tracking Millennials ever since they entered the workforce said, “You do have to speak to them a little bit like a therapist on television might speak to a patient," Salzman says, laughing. "You can’t be harsh. You cannot tell them you’re disappointed in them. You can’t really ask them to live and breathe the company. Because they’re living and breathing themselves and that keeps them very busy."

Faced with new employees who want to roll into work with their iPods and flip flops around noon, but still become a CEO by… Friday, companies are realizing that the era of the buttoned down exec happy to have a job is as dead as the three-Martini lunch.

How can we build trust with these narcissistic praise hounds now taking over the office?

Coach vs. Boss
"It’s the boomers that need to hear the message, that they’re gonna have to start focusing more on coaching rather than bossing. In this generation in particular, you just tell them, ‘You got to do this. You got to do this.’ They truly will walk. And every major law firm, every major company knows, this is the future," says Mary Crane, a millennial coach.

Other-Orientation
In order to be perceived as trustworthy, we must have a high “other” orientation. In the case of millenials, we need to speak their language. Be willing to lose the battles like wardrobe and time clocks, so long as they understand results matter.

Back Patting
They need more accolades. What does it cost to give it to them? Go ahead.

Give Trust to Get Trust
Lastly, to get trust, we must first give trust. Before we can expect them to understand and appreciate where we’re coming from, we must first take the time to make them feel understood.

But that’s just me; I welcome your thoughts!

Groups vs. Individuals: Ruining It for the Rest of Us

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Do groups force conformity among their members?

Or do individuals pull up or drag down the groups of which they are part?

My guess is most of us would say “both.”  As to which is more powerful, my further guess is that most of us would say, “It depends.” 

But here’s an outlier study, courtesy of Will Felps,   assistant professor of management at Rotterdam School of Management (by way of U-T and U-Dub), in turn courtesy of This American Life. 

Felps devised a simple study.  He divided a bunch of college students into teams of four, gave the teams a 45-minute task, and a $100 per-person reward for the winning team.  The catch: 1 in each team was an actor, scripted to behave badly—either The Slacker, The Jerk, or The Depressive Pessimist.

OK, place your bets.  Did the teams co-opt the actors, or were the actors converted to the greater team good?

Ready?

Well, if you believe in the redemptive and influencing power of groups—pay up.  If you believe in the “one bad apple spoils the barrel” philosophy, then collect from your optimistic friends.

Groups with a bad apple performed 30-40% worse than the control groups without one.  And the bad apples didn’t just bring down the average—in at least one case, the whole group descended to the bad behavior of the actor.

Now we know the power of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. 

The interesting question—as always—is, therefore what?

Did the $100 affect things?  Did the ad hoc nature of the teams play a role?  Did the determination of the actors to hew to a consistent anti- role overcome normal tendencies to be socialized?

Or, is it as eecummings said—“sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

These things are usually nuanced, with many cross-ruffing factors at work, but let me say a few words in defense of the power-of-the-individual viewpoint.

The collectivist view, I think, reigns these days.  That is what Felps suggests, and it’s what I see in most business studies.  The role of incentives and behavior is stressed, and the role of things like conscience and personality is de-stressed.

That makes “these days” not unlike the 1950s, the last time we collectively believed in the collective power of the collective.  (Of course, the 50s were rapidly followed by the 60s, if memory serves.  Quite a counter-reformation).

In history, this question gets phrased as the “great man” debate, or “historically significant individuals.”  Did the Union survive because of Abraham Lincoln, or would someone have risen to fulfill Lincoln’s role had he not been there?

Such debates, for the most part, are unanswerable.  But they do get chipped away at as we learn tidbits and refine the theories and the questions more narrowly.

In the meantime, I’m all in favor of the snake theory, hippies, Abe Lincoln, eecummings, and Felps’ faux bad guys.

Why?  They’re just way more interesting.  It’s a simple as that.

Find Felps’ article in a volume of Research in Organizational Behavior,

research by Ashley L. Green

March Carnival of Trust is Up!

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The March Carnival of Trust is up. 

Hosted this month by  Beth Robinson, at her blog Inventing Elephants, Beth brings above all an eclectic perspective to the subject of trust–and it shows in her wide-ranging choice of topics and insightful commentary.

The Carnival of Trust, hosted on a rotating basis, chooses the Top Ten trust-relevant posts of the preceding month–and provides trenchant, bite-sized commentaries on the posts themselves.  The result is a limited set of highest-quality content.  High content, pre-screened and with intelligent value-adding commentary.

Click through to the Carnival and see what Beth’s eclecticism brings to the subject of trust.  There are strong blog pieces here ranging from social media, to building business trust in China, to an advocate of predictability over trust, to ROI and accountability.  All of which wonderfully demonstrate the breadth of issues touched by trust. 

If you’ve got a blog post you’d like to see in that Top Ten list, feel free to nominate it.  The carnival comes out once a month, on the first Monday of each month. The deadline for submissions (see http://blogcarnival.com/bc/submit_1693.html) is always the prior Thursday.

Thanks again to Beth for hosting; drop on by for some tasty reading. 

The Ethical and Regulatory Morass of the Stanford Scandal

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I didn’t start out looking for trouble.

But like the camera shots in a Sergio Leone western, every time the camera pulls back for perspective in the Stanford Investment Bank story, the plot changes.

But let’s begin at the beginning. You of course know Madoff–the man with the minus touch.

Now we have "Sir" Allen Stanford–let’s call him mini-Madoff. He’s head of the Stanford International Bank (SIB), now accused by the SEC of bilking about $1.8 billion through, what else, a Ponzi scheme. Based in Antigua, operated out of Mississippi and Texas, a very private management team.

SIB had an outside lawyer from the prestigious firm Proskauer, Rose. His name is Thomas Sjoblum. On February 10, in the SEC offices in Fort Worth, Texas, Mr. Sjoblum accompanied his client, SIB’s Chief Investment Officer Laura Pendergest-Holt, to a 4-hour deposition by her.

The next day, Mr. Sjoblum told the SIB folks he was resigning from the case.

Musta been one helluva testimony Ms. Pendergest-Holt gave, eh? So it would sound.

In a blackberry email to an SEC lawyer two days later, Sjoblum clarified:

"I disaffirm all prior oral and written representations made by me and my associates … to the SEC staff regarding Stanford Financial Group and its affiliates.”

For me, it all started with that funny word–“disaffirm.” In a blogpost on February 20 I said “disaffirm” was a tortured linguistic construct aimed at putting distance between telling the truth and technically not lying.

But then the real fun started. Pull the camera back a few feet.

I then separately heard from two lawyers for whom I have very high regard, suggesting I had been too hard on Sjoblom. They suggested Sjoblom was a whistle blower whose actions were principled, difficult and courageous.

They were not alone. The blog AmLaw Daily had written the day before:

…Sjoblom…sniffed out the fraud, withdrew his representation, and told federal investigators he essentially took back everything he had told to them in recent weeks…

Am Law Daily contacted a number of legal ethics experts to discuss Sjoblom’s decision to come clean about a client’s alleged frauds–especially given the possibility that in doing so, he disclosed confidential client information to the government…

Experts said Sjoblom did precisely the right thing–and, more importantly, that the federal Sarbanes-Oxley Act likely made his decision much easier than it otherwise might have been.

"He [Sjoblom] did the right thing here," says Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics expert at New York University School of Law.

I started looking for crow to eat. Until, that is, I read the Memphis Daily News account of what actually happened at that February 10 SEC deposition.

By the SEC’s own notes, Sjoblom came out swinging—asking if the SEC had yet referred the case to Justice, arguing that the SEC didn’t have geographic jurisdiction, arguing that the (allegedly) bogus CDs Stanford sold were not “securities” under the relevant legal definition.

Huh?

Suddenly the aspiring Hollywood screenwriter in my head switched stereotypes: this was not the plot for the courageous whistle blower movie. This was the script for the B "mob lawyer" movie. Could he really have had a Saul on the road to Damascus conversion in one afternoon?

So–what happened in that room? Did Ms. Pendergest-Holt really drop a bombshell that blindsided Sjoblom? Or did Sjoblom do a Claude Raines (“I am shocked, shocked! to discover my client has lied to me for years about billions of dollars!”)? Incidentally, Ms. Pendergest-Holt was arrested by the FBI a few days later.

Let’s pull the camera way back.

Attorney Sjoblom is an ex-assistant chief litigation counsel in the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. On February 10 he aggressively explores defenses for SIB just before Pendergest-Holt comes on and says things that get her arrested. The next day he resigns.

The obvious question becomes, ‘What did Sjoblom know, and when did he know it?’ Of course I don’t know, but let’s consider what Sjoblom might have known:

  1. In 2003, a whistle blower case against Stanford was brought in front of the NASD (FINRA’s predecessor).
  2. In fact, according to Henry Blodget, "at least five former Stanford employees told the SEC they thought Stanford was running a Ponzi scheme, from 2003 on."
  3. A January 2008 lawsuit was filed against Stanford alleging endemic lack of compliance.
  4. A Venezuelan analyst wrote a report called Duck Tales in January 2009 which did for Stanford what Markopolis did for Madoff–blew the conceptual lid off.
  5. But the nail in the "shocked, shocked!" coffin is in the FBI arrest claim for Stanford’s Pendergest-Holt:

..the complaint alleges there were stormy preparation sessions for Pendergest-Holt in January and February “during which the bank’s shaky asset base became apparent to a wider circle of officials and to the lawyer — ‘Attorney A’ — who later quit.”

Um, who might ‘Attorney A’ be? Whoever it was, he knew something was up back in January.

So–just when did Sjoblom "sniff out the fraud?" The day after he heard testimony in Dallas? Or way before?

If he knew anything in advance–then why the aggressive denial-of-jurisdiction rant at the outset of the hearing? How much charade does a lawyer have to go through before he can speak some truth? I know legal ethics is much concerned with maintaining client confidences. But how much pretzel-twisting is required to serve that particular god?

The legal experts said Sjoblom did “exactly the right thing.” They also say that Sarbanes-Oxley made it far easier for lawyers to reveal confidences in certain situations. Let’s assume both statements are true. How horrible it must have been pre-Sarbanes–how many would-be whistle-blowing lawyers went to the grave mute?

How much in-your-face evidence of massive fraud does it take before a lawyer can say "my client is a crook and a liar" in a legally acceptable manner?

May I suggest the right answer should be–"less than this."

If this was a praiseworthy, ethical act consistent with the highest standards of the law, then something is very wrong–either with a lawyer, with legal ethics, or with the law itself. The law owes society more than citing last-minute tortured "disaffirmations" in the face of egregious criminal wrongdoing as examples of ethical behavior.

Note: It’s possible that Professor Gillers was not aware of all this background when he called Sjoblom’s actions "exactly the right thing." For all I know, given the background, he might even agree with me. I’d welcome his perspective here, and I’d welcome any correction from anyone about matters of law or fact.

Fixing Executive Compensation: Social Engineering, or Ethics?

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A little over two years ago I wrote a post called The Next Big Trust Scandal—suggesting it would be Executive Compensation.

I may have gotten that one right. Think of the fuss lately about corporate junkets (most recently, Northern Trust) , CEOs on private jets, etc. And of course, Obama’s proposal to cap executive compensation.

Which brings us to yesterday’s Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page, where two respected academics (Judith Samuelson, Lynn Stout) write “Are Executives Paid Too Much?”

They get a few things quite right—and one big thing quite wrong.

They suggest an epidemic of short-termism is responsible not only for compensation excesses, but for value destruction in the economy as a whole. In this they are surely right—or, to be accurate, I completely agree with them.

They also offer a simple, practical and powerful suggestion:

“Top executives who receive equity-based compensation should be prohibited from using derivatives and other hedging techniques to offload the risk that goes along with equity compensation, and instead be required to continue holding a significant portion of their equity for a period beyond their tenure.”

Well done.  But now for that Other Thing. The heart of their problem statement is:

“Our economy didn’t get into this mess because executives were paid too much. Rather, they were paid too much for doing the wrong things…. The system was perfectly designed to produce the results we have now. To get different results, we need a different system.”

No. The problem extends well beyond “the system,” and it won’t get fixed at the same level it was caused.

We cannot let business off the hook by claiming the rat maze was incorrectly designed, the cheese was of the wrong variety, or was hidden in the wrong corners. The solution does not lie (solely, or even mainly) in tweaking financial incentives, even in shifting timeframes.

The solution to egregious excesses—and to a lot more—simply must include a healthy dose of personal accountability for doing the right thing. A conscience. An inkling that society has expectations, and the power to demand that they be met. For lack of a better term, ethics.

Samuelson/Stout’s three solutions—metrics, communications and compensation structures—don’t include a simple social demand to behave decently.

What has to happen, I think, is not behavioral engineering, but shock therapy.

I am not being naïve here. In fact, I think they may be. The verbs in their recommendations are “we need new ways to measure,” “must change the ways they reward,” “need to ensure.”

The academics and the exec comp consultants are not going to force change. In fact, by treating the issue as a strictly technical one, solvable by just tweaking metrics and rules, they are actively complicit in the continued non-ethical framing of the problem.

Force is what’s needed. CEOs and Boards don’t do things because an academic says they should. Radical politicians have it right when they say, “power comes only to those who take it.”

My suggestion is for a lot of people to get really ticked off. The authors may deride Obama’s solution, but a president proposing policy exerts a lot of pressure. Columnists, bloggers, authors, short-sellers, reformers—get angry. Shareholder activists, get active. Demand accountability and decency.

As Alfie Kohn says, “monetary incentives work. They incent people to get more monetary incentives.” If we believe the only reason corporate people behave the way they do is to maximize their own personal bank accounts, then we will get nothing but more rats, moving in slightly different directions, more and more firmly grounded in nothing beyond their rat-ness.

Ironically, author Lynn Stout may understand this well, having recently written a paper called Taking Conscience Seriously. It looks good. One hopes she will allow her thoughts on conscience to more deeply infect her writings on altering corporate compensation.

 

 

Sucks To Be You

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Ever feel like being sincere–but want to hedge your bets?  To sincerely empathize with another–but not lose your hipness?

Then it’s hard to beat, “It sucks to be you.”

The phrase has been around at least a decade; it was the title of a 1999 hit record by Prozzak, and a song in the play Avenue Q.

Which is more popular: self-pity, or sarcasm?  Here are googling results for:

    “Sucks to be me”    111,000
    “Sucks to be you”    215,000

Sounds like sarcasm wins.

I was reminded of this phrase a few days by a scene in the TV show Scrubs, wherein a new intern used it in lieu of a more traditional bedside manner.  (Another Scrubs moment: Turk tries it on Carla, with not so funny results).

Here are some snarky definitions from the Urban Dictionary: 

When something bad happened to another person, it sucks to be that person.  “Your daddy is in jail for getting you pregnant. Sucks to be you.”

A phrase which expresses mild sympathy for the plight of another, while implying greater relief that those circumstances have befallen someone other than the speaker.

An expression of acknowledgement of hardship. Depending on context, can be sympathetic or taunting.

“You: My car broke down, and I have to get to the other side of the state tonight!
“Me: Damn, dude. Sucks to be you.

“Her: I totally blew my interview, and now you’re going to get the job for sure.
“Him: Ha ha! Sucks to be you!

I’m fascinated by this phrase, and I’m not entirely sure why. 

•    On the purely aesthetic side, it is an artfully efficient expression of ambivalence—in only four words, it confuses the listener as to the speaker’s intentions.

•    Like much slang, it can change meaning depending on intonation alone.

•    Like doublespeak, it can hide motives, while appearing clear.

In other words, it’s the ideal phrase for those seeking to remain ambiguous.

I have no idea whether the phrase has gotten more, or less, popular in recent years, but I suspect it’s a phrase for the times–when the times are slippery, hip, frivolous, and when sincerity is slightly out of vogue.  Like, a few years ago.

If that’s true, then I suspect the phrase is in for a decline.  The times right now are darker, less celebrating of witty repartee. In such times, snarky humor just isn’t as funny.  

We are inclined to be more frustrated, seeing that our fates more are tied to those of others. If it sucks to be you, it probably sucks to be me too. It behooves us all in such times to relearn trust in each other.