Archive for CEO
Pew Research Center Study Examines Online Activities in 2010
Posted by: | CommentsA new study Generations Online in 2010 offers a wealth of information about how people across all age groups are participating in online activities like social networking sites, playing games, instant messaging and blogging, which was of most interest to me.
Information Needs Differ
Writing blogs is only up slightly, by 4% since in the last two years, according to a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Only half as many people read blogs as visit social networking sites. But this doesn’t bother me. Why? Because various online activities are filling different information needs. You may visit Facebook to post your vacation photos, or Twitter to follow trends, but you’ll visit a blog for information about a product or service.
Oh, and one other thing, the study doesn’t distinguish between blogs and websites. If you ask someone if they read a blog regularly, they will give a very different answer than if you ask them if they read blogs and websites. Because, dear readers, many blogs are masquerading as websites. You are now on my website, which is actually blog technology. Click on “blog” in the navigation bar and you will find my articles about social media, employee engagement and branding. So I think a lot more people are reading blogs than the Pew research study reports.
We all read studies and then interpret the results so they support our points of view. Be honest, don’t you? That’s why I glommed on to the blogging stats so that I can make the point that a combined 77% of the demographic groups that consumer products companies most want to reach – ages 18 to 45 – are reading blogs.
Blogs as a CEO Platform
As I wrote in my article Blogging as the Centerpiece of a Company’s Social Media Strategy, companies are using blogs as a platform for the CEO to get out the company’s views on a variety of subjects and to disseminate information quickly during a crisis. Blogs can be distributed with the click of a button to dozens of social media sites, including Facebook and Twitter. That’s where the study says a majority of people are congregating online. So, again, it’s information from a blog they’re reading, but studies can’t dig that deep. A study can’t distinguish where the information is coming from.
So take a look at the study and come to your own conclusions that support your points of view!
What Leaders Really Do
Posted by: | CommentsI have my ideas about the subject, having worked for good and bad leaders. I’ll open with what I consider a leader’s primary duty – to communicate his or her vision for the company. Some experts would say this is the second step in being a leader; first comes the vision. But without communications across, up and down organizations, the leader’s vision will never be realized.
John Kotter
John Kotter is perhaps the most articulate and brilliant theorist on what makes for leadership in an organization. He says it better than I can, so I’m going to reference his words of wisdom here. Then, we’ll see how his theories apply to three leaders, or visionaries, of today — Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook, Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, and Reed Hastings, the chief executive and co-founder of Netflix.
Kotter, a retired professor of organizational behavior at Harvard, has written countless books and articles. I still have an article that he wrote in the May/June 1990 issue of the Harvard Business Review entitled “What Leaders Really Do.” I hadn’t read it in a while, but just did, and was blown away by how his vision of a leader could have been written yesterday, even though in 1990 most companies were just dipping their toes into email (my own agency had one computer that could send and receive emails and it usually didn’t work).
No Internet, no Twitter, no Facebook, no internal networks, hardly any electronic connectivity, in other words. Yet leaders today face the same challenges as those back in ancient times (ca. 1990).
The Difference Between Management and Leadership
Kotter clearly delineated the difference between management and leadership, which are both crucial roles in the success of a company. Let me cut to the chase with his definitions:
Leadership is about coping with change
Management is about coping with complexity
To quote from that article, “These different functions – coping with complexity and coping with change – shape the characteristic activities of management and leadership. Each system of action involves deciding what needs to be done, creating networks of people and relationships that can accomplish an agenda, (my bold face) and then trying to ensure those people actually do the job.” Isn’t that what social networking is all about today? Forming networks and communities that share common interests and goals?
Kotter says that leaders seek relationships and linkages that help explain things. Leaders need to be visionaries. Most discussions of vision have a tendency to generate into the mystical, “but people who articulate such visions aren’t magicians but broad-based strategic thinkers who are willing to take risks,” he says.
Visions With Mundane Qualities
Kotter makes the point that many visions and strategies are not brilliantly innovative. Many are mundane, but “what’s crucial about a vision is not its originality but how well it serves the interests of important constituencies – customers, stockholders, employees – and how easily it can be translated into a realistic competitive strategy.”
So that explains why so many people think that Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg are geniuses. They were visionaries who changed the world, when you think about it. Zuckerberg took a simple idea: college students wanting to bond with each other. Getting together in the local hangout wasn’t enough. They wanted a common meeting ground where they could interact 24/7. Zuckerberg saw the possibilities and took the college circuit by storm. He understood how to make the linkages to help people create networks of friends. So in 2004, as a Harvard undergraduate, he launched Facebook in what amounted to a revolution in communication – it all comes back to communication – and his followers grew to be 500 million strong.
Steve Jobs capitalized on a simple idea. Bring the Internet to your cell phone. Not very imaginary. The technology was already there but he had the vision to harness the pieces and figure out how to make it work. He encouraged thousands of people to create iPhone apps that users can download that meet their particular needs. Now his competitors are rushing to catch up with smart phones of their own.
Transforming a Business With Snail Mail
- Image via CrunchBase
Reed Hastings, the chief executive and co-founder of Netflix had a simple idea to offer a subscription service for customers to rent movies by mail. Hardly an earth-shattering idea, but nobody else was doing it. As my former agency’s creative director used to say, “there are no big ideas, or small ideas, only powerful ideas.” The service took off – remember Kotter saying not originality but serving consumer interests was key — and now Netflix has moved beyond snail mail to become the biggest source of streaming web traffic in North America during peak evening hours, according to an article in the New York Times “Netflix’s Move into the Web Stirs Rivalries.”
Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor, was quoted in the article, “Netflix used an open-source network, the U.S. Postal Service, to launch an alternate distribution business without asking anyone for permission…now they are using another open-source network, the Internet, to transform the business.”
Here’s the thing – nothing has really changed in the definition of leadership in the past 20, or 30 or more years. Ideas about how to make something bigger, stronger, better, faster so it serves your community is still the currency of leadership.
So, are you a leader or a manager? Most people think it’s cooler to be known as a leader, but it’s the managers who turn the leader’s vision into a profitable product or service.
For an excerpt of the HBR article by John Kotter go this link What Leaders Really Do.
This post originally appeared on the website of Bea Fields Companies, Inc. — Leadership Coaching and Training for High Growth Companies
Feeling Safe: A Good Boss Watches Your Back
Posted by: | CommentsA couple of recent studies confirm that one of our most primal needs is safety. We want to feel safe – at home, in our city’s streets and especially at the office. Reuters came out with a report today that ranked cities on how safe they are for children. I’m proud to say that my hometown, New York City, ranked first along with Louisville.
Feeling safe -- he's got their backs
Another study by McKinsey this past summer discussed the importance of a boss making his employees feel psychologically safe by watching their backs. This intrigued me because feeling safe isn’t usually found on the wish list of employees. A good salary, a secure job (maybe that does equate with safety), meaningful work and a sense of community usually rank high.
So why is it important for a boss to “watch your back” and provide psychological safety? According to the McKinsey study, “Why good bosses tune in to their people, “Good bosses spark imagination and encourage learning by creating a safety zone where people can talk about half-baked ideas, test them, and even make big mistakes without fear of ridicule, punishment, or ostracism.”
An Absence of Safety Can be Deadly
An absence of psychological safety, in concert with fear of the boss, can be dangerous or downright deadly….one study showed that when pilots faked mild incapacitation toward the end of a rough and rainy simulated flight, their copilots failed to take the controls 25 percent of the time—resulting in simulated crashes.
To lock in your team’s loyalty, boldly defend their backs, says the study’s author Stanford management professor Bob Sutton.
Fear Stifles Creativity and Productivity
Who wants to take a chance and suggest a new way of doing something and risk the wrath of the boss? Says Sutton, “The best bosses invent, borrow, and implement ways to reduce the mental and emotional load heaped on their followers — followers who enjoy such protection have the freedom to take risks and try new things.”
Fear can be a motivator – of the wrong kind of behavior. A fearful employee keeps his head down, does what he’s told and expected to do but rarely ventures out on the edge of the board. I once worked for a CEO who screamed and tossed ashtrays. He even resented the clack of his secretary’s fingers on the keyboard. Do you think anyone voluntarily went to his office with a new idea? Not on your life.
Blogging as the Centerpiece of a Company’s Social Media Strategy
Posted by: | CommentsI’ve been blogging about twice a week for well over a year now. I gave my first update last summer about why I blog. Write Speak Sell would become the focal point of my thoughts about communicating ideas, which is at the heart of what I have done professionally for over 30 years. It’s liberating to say what you really think and believe, while always being authentic.
A blog is the centerpiece of a company's social media strategy
Since then I’ve also come to believe that a blog is the centerpiece a company’s social media strategy, both internally and externally. The CEO is where it all starts. Wise leaders are using social media because that’s where their employees and customers are.
The CEO needs to be talking directly to the company’s stakeholders regularly with quick takes on new developments. A blog is the perfect vehicle because the nature of a blog is to be informal and for it to express the personality and communicate the authentic convictions of the writer.
A blog liberates the CEO from his ivory tower and into conversations with employees and customers in the social media communities they populate. This is a big culture change for most companies.
With a keystroke, the CEO can distribute her blog to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media sites where people are getting their information now days. She can be out there first with the news, before the rumors and misinformation start flying around the Internet. There isn’t time for a press release vetted by a dozen lawyers before it’s distributed. Everything is transparent now.
Employee Engagement
The CEO can profoundly influence the company’s future success when employees to buy into his vision. But employees can’t march in step with a CEO who doesn’t engage them in a two-way conversation about his goals for them and the company. If he does that, they can become the company’s most important brand advocates and commit to providing superior customer service.
Once again, I cite Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh as the pioneer. In his blog last year he wrote a piece, “Your Culture” In it he said, “It’s a very different world today. With the Internet connecting everyone together, companies are becoming more and more transparent whether they like it or not. An unhappy customer or a disgruntled employee can blog about bad experience with a company, and the story can spread like wildfire by email or with tools like Twitter. The good news is that the reverse is true as well. A great experience with a company can be read by millions of people almost instantaneously as well.”
Good advice and a good example to follow.
