Don't Think Too Much

Each month, a woman who owns a little coffee shop allows local artists to hang their works in her business. It's a very busy café, so the artists get a lot of exposure. But every time a new artist is offered the space, he or she bombards the owner with a long list of questions and concerns about the hanging process. Eventually, she has to tell the anxious artist, "Just show up with your pictures and a hammer. We have ladders. If you don't think too much, it will all come together just fine."

"Analysis paralysis" hobbles giant corporations and sole proprietors alike, so I like the café owner's advice to not think too much. Instead, she wants people to think about the right things.  In a way, this fulfills management's primary responsibility to remove obstacles for coworkers. Thinking about the right things reduces distracting anxieties and lets her coworkers - and guest artists - think clearly and, more importantly, take immediate action.

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Categories: Corporate Culture | Creativity | Management Skills | Entrepreneurialism | Leadership

2 comments - Posted by Paul Orfalea at 12:46 PM

The Value of Corporate Myth

Recently, a friend described how companies often rely on a handful of stories to define their culture. He also noted how the tales grow like fishing stories. He cited Kinko's lore about the first shop, which was so small we had to wheel the copier onto the sidewalk to do business. He said every time he heard the story, the shop got a little smaller, and he expected to hear one day that I opened the first Kinko's in a refrigerator box and had to produce my own electricity with a hand-cranked generator.

I had to laugh, because I've heard lots of stories about the company that bear little resemblance to the events I recall.  But if true stories evolved into myth over time, they did so to better communicate the culture's core values. Like any other society, a company retells certain stories to indoctrinate new members in the values of the culture.

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Categories: Corporate Culture | Management Skills | Leadership

3 comments - Posted by Paul Orfalea at 3:52 PM

What's Your Story?

By Dean Zatkowsky

Storytelling shapes human culture; it is arguably the most human activity. If you want to know a people - or a person - learn their stories. In business, government, academia, art and religion, our greatest leaders have typically been our greatest storytellers. They simultaneously preserve a culture while inspiring listeners to discover something new within themselves. Societies - nations or companies or hobby clubs - disintegrate when they lose their stories.

Throughout history, we have cherished the keepers of stories, whether they carried them in buckskin medicine bags, printed them on ornate, gilded pages, or projected them on silver screens.

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Categories: Corporate Culture | Creativity | Education | Management Skills | Leadership

6 comments - Posted by Dean Zatkowsky at 2:01 PM

How to Destroy an Organization, Part 1

"When I was young, I always prized competence over character. But as I've grown old I've come to value character over competence." -Rabbi Abraham Heschel

I've been lucky to work with several managers who express a philosophy similar to Rabbi Heschel's. They hire for attitude and then teach skills, arguing that it's a lot easier to teach someone how to operate a copier than it is to teach someone to be honest, reliable, and friendly. These managers understand the value of character in the workplace. We can endure mistakes, but coworkers of low character become a cancer in the organization.

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Categories: Corporate Culture | Management Skills | Leadership

10 comments - Posted by Paul Orfalea at 9:21 AM

Taking Responsibility

There is a great article called "Cleaning Up Our Own Messes," at Inc. Magazine's website. The moral of the story, that empowerment and accountability must be "welded together," is an important lesson for our children, our coworkers, our students; anyone we want to see grow and develop into an independent, capable, responsible individual.

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Categories: Education | Management Skills | Leadership | Ethics

14 comments - Posted by Paul Orfalea at 7:17 AM

Cavalier Kingpins

By Dean Zatkowsky

We often accuse CEOs like John Thain and Rick Wagoner of arrogance, but it's their selfishness and irresponsibility that really diminishes them as leaders. For my forthcoming book, Kamelot: Kinko's Brief Shining Moment in Business History, I had to coin the term "bossiopath" for executives who not only exhibit sociopathic tendencies, but also present their greed, cruelty and self-obsession as attributes of leadership

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Categories: Corporate Culture | Management Skills | Leadership | Ethics

3 comments - Posted by Dean Zatkowsky at 7:08 AM

The Opposite of Leadership

Discussing populist anger during his interview on The Daily Show, CNN Commentator Jack Cafferty said his thousands of daily emails suggest that the American people "... hate congress, they hate the auto industry, they hate government, they hate Wall Street, but they like this man (President Obama) and his family."

I see this too, and I think it's because the people crave leadership, and unlike those other entities, President Obama is trying to lead. Congress, the auto industry, government agencies, and Wall Street, on the other hand, are engaging in behaviors that look to me like the opposite of leadership.

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Categories: Corporate Culture | Management Skills | Entrepreneurialism | Leadership

16 comments - Posted by Paul Orfalea at 6:22 AM