Leadership belongs to those who lead and who leads better than Rush Limbaugh?
He must be a leader since Clear Channel is paying him a one hundred million dollar sign-on bonus and $38 million a year for eight years.
But it seems to me that the only difference between Limbaugh and radicals of other political and moral persuasions around the world is his paycheck and the focus of his hate, bigotry and fanaticism
Announced just in time for our annual celebration of freedom it’s nice to know that hate, bigotry, and fanaticism are worth more here than in other countries—in the Middle East people spew it for free.
If Mr. Grasso can get his huge retirement and “W” can get elected twice, than Mr Limbaugh obviously deserves $400 mil. I still won’t listen to his clipping service rants. P.T. Barnum had nothing on this character. –Jerry McG, Hartford, Ct.
In the immortal words of P.T. Barnum, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” –Jeff Cox, Tacoma, WA
Apparently there is no ceiling to the price Americans are willing to pay for gas. –Expat, Nova Scotia
CandidProf is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at a state university. He’ll be sharing his thoughts and experience teaching today’s students anonymously every Thursday— anonymously because that’s the only way he can write really candid posts.
Knowing your audience is important for any public speaker. That is particularly true for someone who is teaching. You need to know where your students are coming from.
A few days ago, one of the local high schools brought several bus loads of students to campus for a college day. They wanted us to give presentations to the students on why they should go to college and what sort of things that they could study when they got here. These were summer school students. The students who take summer classes at college are often the better students, the ones who are trying to get ahead.
The summer school students in high school are normally different. A few are working ahead, but most are in summer school because they failed classes and are having to go to summer school in order to advance a grade. These are students who don’t want to be there, and often don’t want to go to school at all. These are what they call “at risk” students.
They are the ones that are unlikely to go to college in the first place, but the school is trying to do the right thing. These are high school freshmen. They still have a chance if they buckle down and study hard for the next few years, but if they continue to not take high school seriously they won’t be ready for college when they finish. Even if they go to college, they are unlikely to finish.
These students are bussed to the college and they are led around to different departments where somebody gives some presentation about their areas. We are given a specified time period. They have me following someone talking about the health sciences. The kids arrive late. The previous presentations have all run over. The person in charge tells us that we’ve got about 1/3 of the time that we were allotted, since they are running late and need to catch the buses.
The person before me gives a standard sort of thing, like probably everyone else had one all day. She has a Powerpoint presentation. She talks about what is offered, what programs of study are available, and what jobs in those fields entail. It is pretty standard; each slide has too much information (lists and such). I know that these can be interesting fields, but the presentation is boring even to me. The kids are falling asleep. She races through her presentation, but it still takes as long as mine was planned to take. There’s no way she could have finished in the allotted time if she’d gone at normal speed.
Then it is my time. (Cont’d Thursday, July 10th)
Is this a good approach to motivating high school students?
By Wes Ball, author of The Alpha Factor – a revolutionary new look at what really creates market dominance and self-sustaining success.
Corporate ADD (see last Tuesday’s posting) may be one of the chief causes of the lack of “leadership training” in corporate America today, other than a simple lack of know-how. Who has time to nurture a subordinate or to model “strategic leadership” in an environment that is all tactical all the time? And, as noted in last Tuesday’s posting, this only gets worse as you go up the corporate ladder.
The danger is that lower-level employees are the only ones with any perceived freedom to experiment or to make truly strategic proposals… at least until they realize that there’s no one upstairs who is listening. That’s when the young ranks of “best and brightest” start looking for another place of employment.
Not all Alpha companies, as I describe them in my book, The Alpha Factor, avoid this problem, but I was lucky enough to work for two where young employees were encouraged to experiment. At one of them, I made a bold comment about how staff at my level were being under-utilized, and the VP of my division challenged me to prove what I could do. That opened up an opportunity for me to initiate a limited, but strategic initiative that created my first big personal success at growing sales.
Be aware, however, that just because a company is the Alpha of its category doesn’t make it the greatest place to work. Some of the Alphas I discuss in the book have extremely threatening cultures, but they seem to work because they are designed to nurture a specific type of employee that can thrive under that management style.
What are your thoughts on how to nurture future strong strategic leaders?
No matter your position, if you’re one of the go-to people then you need to know about “emotional contagion” and how your moods affect those around you. Although much of the research has focused on emotionally negative or positive bosses, it’s actually leaders, whether bosses or not, who have the most impact.
Yup, now there’s proof for what all of us who’ve been exposed to “glass half empty” people already know—negative emotions, especially in leaders, can bring a group down faster than bad ventilation during flu season.
So if you’re a person of influence you need to stay aware of your own mood. Sure, it’s difficult to be upbeat when you walk out of a meeting with an enraged client, or a design review for a project about to go over budget or a difficult review, but if you don’t, you’ll bring down the rest of your team and that’ll blow off the entire day (or week or even longer).
Overcome your mood using a simple approach that I first learned from a book by Napoleon Hill more years ago than matters. He said, “Think, act, walk and talk like the person you want to become and you’ll become that person,” and “Act enthusiastic and you’ll become enthusiastic.”
Put them together and you have an unbeatable, simple, solution for keeping your own morale and, as a result, the morale of your team, positive and productive.
The approach may seem simplistic, but oft times simple is best. After all, you’re not trying to solve the cause, but to mitigate the effect.
I cleaned out a ton of files today (it was way too hot to go outside) and came across three mildly sexy comments from Richard Branson, Einstein, and Francis Koenig, so I decided to make today sexy comment day.
“You’ll have at least two ways to get lucky on our flights.” –Richard Branson on his airline’s offering casinos and double beds on it six new Airbus A380 planes. (How lucky are you?)
“When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.” –Albert Einstein (Imagine this translated into today’s language.)
“It’s a market untapped by Wall Street… There are 6 billion people on the planet, and most of them participate in adult entertainment.” — Francis Koenig CEO AdultVest (for those of you who don’t know, AdultVest is a $7.9 billion hedge fund that is dedicated to the adult entertainment industry, including buying iPorn.com—no relation to the iPhone. (A lot more stable and profitable than mortgages.)
I frequently disagree with Jack and Suzy Welch in their weekly Business Week column, but in The Connected Leader they offer up good insights as to the effect of the internet on leaders, i.e., bosses, in terms of what it can and can’t do as well as what the leader needs to do.
“The Internet…ushers in a whole new level and scope of employee engagement. Leaders should welcome this development, and most do, but it’s a mistake to treat it lightly. Once employees engage you by speaking out, albeit electronically, they expect to hear back. We would suggest that it can be just as damaging for a leader not to respond to feedback as it is not to ask for it at all.”
Well and good, no arguments. And most leader-bosses are trying to embrace this—even when it scares them silly—because if they don’t they can’t hire. That’s right, engagement is high on the list of employee demands and not just by Millennials and if it isn’t there, well, it’s available somewhere else.
But what I’m cheering is this.
“…one aspect of leadership we believe the Internet won’t change because it can’t. Real leaders touch people… They get in their skin, filling their hearts with inspiration, courage, and hope. They share the pain in times of loss and are there to celebrate the wins.”
It’s called face-to-face and it’s where many leader-bosses are not cutting it. I see too many of them who embrace the orderly world of digital communications as a way to avoid messy, in person interactions—but it doesn’t work.
Current and future technology isn’t the answer—shoe leather is.
That’s right, getting out there and talking face-to-face, knowing your people and giving them the opportunity to know the real you. Not now and then when there’s a special message, but regularly.
As to having the time, you do, because if you don’t your retention will sink like a rock as your turnover soars and you get a street rep that says, ‘give up hope all who join this company’.
This week we’re supposed to write about “your business epiphany - what one moment influenced your career or business more than any other?”
Epiphanies are funny things. What we think is an epiphany (AKA, an ah-ha!! moment) when it happens may become more mundane in 20/20 hindsight, whereas a passing thought becomes monumental wisdom in that same hindsight.
What epiphanies I can identify fall in the second category.
Here is the one that’s had the greatest impact on me, because it stopped my laying all those coulda/shoulda/woulda trips on myself.
Don’t judge who you were and what you did in the past based on who you are and what you know now.
It wasn’t until I had to explain it to someone else that I was forced to think through exactly what I meant. Here is how I explained it then and have continued to explain it to clients and others ever since.
Each of us is composed of multiple, past “me’s,” each a different, stand-alone version from the current one.
When you look at past actions (Why did I…) you need to first ask yourself if you made the best decision/action possible based on the information you had at the time in conjunction with the person you were at that time.
If, in fact, you did, then the you you-are-now has no right to judge, i.e., beat up on, the previous you for that decision/action.
This doesn’t mean that you need to condone everything—today’s you may decide that in the future you should move in a different direction, do more research or whatever—but it does preclude you from taking your former self to task.
I hope you’ll consider saving yourself a lot of grief by integrating this idea into your own life.
CandidProf is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at a state university. He’ll be sharing his thoughts and experience teaching today’s students anonymously every Thursday— anonymously because that’s the only way he can write really candid posts.
An uncaring and ineffective professor does not even take into account the possibility that students are not properly prepared for their class. The students who are ill prepared will not have a chance.
So, you have to learn where your students are. What do they know? What do they not know? If a large number of them don’t know the shape of the Earth, then be sure to cover that. If they don’t understand a certain type of differential equation, cover that in class. But, a good leader also recognizes when success is not possible.
Occasionally I have a student who has no chance of succeeding in the class. That is tough for me, because I want everyone to succeed. But, I have students who sign up for calculus based physics even though they do not even have a good grasp of algebra and have never had calculus.
I have students who take the second semester class after taking the first semester class somewhere “easier” where they did not cover as much material as we do in our first semester class. Unfortunately, the second semester class builds on the concepts covered (or supposed to be covered) in the first semester.
There is only so much that I can do. Physics is intense enough. I cannot teach algebra, trigonometry, and calculus AND physics. If students are missing some things, then I can help them and explain those few things. But, I cannot teach them an entire course’s worth of material in a few minutes when they come by my office.
Eventually, you have to realize that some of them need to stop, drop the course, and go back and take the other classes that they need in order to succeed in your course.
It is very difficult having to tell a student that he or she is completely unprepared for the level of your class and needs to go back and learn the basic things needed before signing up for the class again. You know that many of them will just quit rather than doing that. But, you also know that they won’t succeed if they stick with it. That is something that a good professor will occasionally have to do, though.
But it seems to me that the only difference between Limbaugh and radicals of other political and moral persuasions around the world is his paycheck and the focus of his hate, bigotry and fanaticism
No matter your position, if you’re one of the go-to people then you need to know about “
and productive.
I cleaned out a ton of files today (it was way too hot to go outside) and came across three mildly sexy comments from Richard Branson, Einstein, and Francis Koenig, so I decided to make today sexy comment day.
“The Internet…ushers in a whole new level and scope of employee engagement. Leaders should welcome this development, and most do, but it’s a mistake to treat it lightly. Once employees engage you by speaking out, albeit electronically, they expect to hear back. We would suggest that it can be just as damaging for a leader not to respond to feedback as it is not to ask for it at all.”
This week we’re supposed to write about “your business epiphany - what one moment influenced your career or business more than any other?”
So, you have to learn where your students are. What do they know? What do they not know? If a large number of them don’t know the shape of the Earth, then be sure to cover that. If they don’t understand a certain type of differential equation, cover that in class. But, a good leader also recognizes when success is not possible.
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