Kodak died recently after a long illness.  Meanwhile Fujifilm is doing quite well with a nice profit and a market capitalization of about 12.6 billion dollars. And yet, they started from the same place: an almost total dependence on film.  They faced exactly the same situation: the end of the film based camera and thus, the need for film. They both saw this coming. 

How is it that one failed to adapt in any meaningful way while the other transformed itself into a company able to succeed in the new world?

As early as 1979 Larry Matteson, a former Kodak executive, wrote a report detailing the shift from film to digital.  He fairly accurately predicted the shift would be complete by 2010.  In the early 1980s Fujifilm also realized that digital was going to replace film.  Both began to think about what to do and how to change.

So how is it that their current situations are so different?

Unfortunately for Kodak, it had become a complacent monopolist that lost its ability to take big risks and move fast.  It was caught in the mentality of creating perfect products before release rather than rapid development and release of products with ongoing improvement.  Then there is the company town syndrome.  Kodak never heard any criticism in Rochester and developed an insular management unused to divergent thinking, strenuous disagreement, and creative destruction.

Fujifilm meanwhile installed a CEO who took pre-emptive action.  He rapidly attacked the situation and completely overhauled the company.  He went out and purchased a collection of companies which seemed compatible with Fujifilm and were large enough to mean something to a multibillion dollar enterprise.  He went on a high risk path and broke all kinds of rules of Japanese business in his quest to succeed.

If you think about this it’s kind of odd.  If the names weren’t attached you might think that the Kodak story was that of a stereotypical conservative, slow to act Japanese company while the Fujifilm story was right out of Silcon Valley.  In each case the current state of the company is not due to the country of origin but to the style and ability of the leader irrespective of nationality.

Which will you be?     

I’m in Sharjah, one of the United Arab Emirates, as I write this. During the three days I’ve been here I’ve also been in Dubai, another Emirate, passed through the Emirates of Ajman and Fujairah, and left the Emirates for Oman. The experience has jogged my mind for each is different and all hugely different from my previous experience. I find myself thinking new thoughts and considering options that never occurred to me before.

On the interminable 14 hour flight here, lengthened by a 3 hour delay after we boarded, another experience leading to unusual thinking, I read some recent information about the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. It’s now clear that it is much worse than originally disclosed, will linger for decades, and has affected radiation levels around the world.

I juxtapose these two disparate issues because it occurred to me that part of the reason for the terrible response at Fukushima was caused by a lack of significant travel to completely different parts of the world, by those in charge. They lacked the ability to expand their thinking from the concrete and predicable and think the unthinkable…so never even thought about the possibility of such a disaster.

An example of this is that they placed the off site emergency headquarters in case of nuclear disaster 5 kilometers from the plant, and it was not radiation proof. What were they thinking?

As we all have heard, travel broadens the mind. What most have not done is really think about what this means. It’s really not the broadening of the mind that’s important for executives but the broadening of the thinking that this leads to. Travel challenges our pre-conceived ideas and attacks our comfort zone. Travel to places most divergent from our normal reality challenges us the most.

It expands our world and opens up our thinking.

Actually, the last two paragraphs are not always, or perhaps even often, true. While traveling too many rather than allowing new ideas in, work hard to stay within their bubble and float along without being touched and changed. They view but do not see, they are there but do not experience.

If you pop your bubble and allow yourself to be immersed in the experience of the Emirates, or wherever you happen to travel, you will return with new ideas and new ways of attacking old problems. Your thinking will expand and find previous ideas faulty and needing adjustment.

You gain a better ability to think about the unthinkable.

Last week I started off the new year by sharing my thoughts as expressed in the South African proverb “Good Behavior Must Come From The Top.”  I must have struck a chord since I received a number of quite nice responses.  As I read the notes and thought about what I had written it occurred to me that it was a bit too dismissive about the power of words compared to the impact of action.

Not that I don’t think ultimately it’s the behavior that people believe rather than the words but rather that the words so set the tone that surrounds the behavior.  Too often the tone is obfuscation rather than clarity. 

Obfuscation to hide failure, incompetence, lack of vision, fear, hatred, and the panoply of other less than stellar behaviors.  Clarity on the other hand, leaves you no place to hide.

My thinking about this crystallized when I noticed that airline industry speak for a crash is “hull loss”, clearly an attempt to sanitize and downplay a horrible event.  Wouldn’t you trust someone much more who was willing to just state that “our airplance crashed”?

After all, everyone who hears “hull loss” immediately pictures a fiery crash.  And then immediately thinks how insulting the executive was to treat the public like children lacking comprehension and the strength to hear the truth.

Such speaking allows us to commit horrendous acts and feel no remorse.  Think “collateral damage” for “we killed a bunch of civilians by accident” or “therapeutic misadventure” for when a doctor kills a patient through poor treatment. 

What does this say about you…and your listeners…when you are unable or unwilling to clearly tell the truth about what’s going on or what happened?  No wonder we have such disrespect and disgust at so many in positions of authority or power.

I think there is an even more insidious affect of euphemisms.  It weakens our minds and leads us to become unwilling to hear the truth and so leads to poor thinking and less than the best results.  We become fearful of speaking the truth about uncomfortable things and so are unable to address and thus solve these issues.

All suffer for our fear. We become lessor people than we could be.

Shine the light of facts and truth, address issues squarely.  Bring transparency and clarity to all you do and expect the same from others.  Be the person others look up to and respect for your strength of character and willingness to be open and honest…and for your willingness to accept the consequences.

Be a true leader.

“The first thing is to be honest with yourself.” 

Nelson Mandela

The heading of my musings on leadership this post is a South African proverb.  It’s a good thing to think about on this first business day of the year.

The start of a new year gives you a chance to throw out the old and begin fresh.  All too often we ignore, avoid, or just forget to take advantage of this opportunity.  When this proverb popped into my head as I sat down to write, I immediately started thinking about what I had done last year that showed less than stellar behavior…behavior I hope never to exhibit again.

Unfortunately I thought of a number of such things.

We all have done things like this.  We all remember when we showed in our behavior something at variance with our words.  As near as I can tell, when this variance occurs, the behavior is always worse than what the words express.

Unfortunately what resonates with those who see and hear us is the behavior and not the words.  The words disappear while the behavior sinks deeply into our core.  One instance of poor behavior lingers.  It takes many counter examples of good behavior to change how you are perceived.

On the other hand, one example of poor behavior can wipe out a history of good.  We immediately perceive the bad as the true while the good was merely a coating we used to cover up our true nature.  It is a sad commentary on the way we think, but we do tend to remember the bad and share it with others much more than we remember and share the good.

This has a debilitating effect on your ability to lead for that incident of poor behavior all remember and re-tell lingers, and colors what follows for quite some time.  We have long memories for slights and disconnects between words and actions.

And so, as the new year begins take a few minutes and think about how you’d like to be perceived and what you need to do…and not do…for this to come about.  Notice that I say do and not do rather than say and not say. 

Lead by example. Those who see will understand what you mean whether the words are spoken or not.

But beware, eyes are always watching.  These days all your actions are captured and with the speed of writhing fingers spread across the world.

Leadership has become more complicated, but also more powerful as your actions can be viewed by millions.  This is the good new…but also the bad. As always, culture comes from the top.  Make sure you’re acting to engage and build passion rather than drive away and create distrust.

It’s all in how you act.

It never ceases to amaze me how if you aim your attention at something you suddenly discover that thing in many places.  For example, last post, The Power of Why, I talked about emotion and gut feel as the underlying driver of decisions.  Next thing I know, I’m seeing things about trusting your gut everywhere.

It even turns out the Professor Gerd Gigerenzer, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, claims that intuition…gut feel…makes our decisions not just quicker but better.

Gigerenzer says complex problems often do not need complex solutions.  More analysis leads to paralysis, not solution.  Even worse, more analysis often makes the decision worse rather than better.

All good executives know this.  Over a glass of wine they’ll admit that many of their decisions are based on gut feel and intuition.  Since it’s a bit hard to defend this in public, after the decision is made they often go to great efforts to produce lengthy reports disguising the fact that they’ve already made the decision. 

It’s all about focus.  Extra information just distracts you from paying attention to the few important aspects of the issue that really matter. You get overwhelmed with extraneous facts that have nothing to do with the real problem and so go off on tangents or wind up paralysed by the fear that you missed something.

In her book on strategic thinking…that’s strategic thinking, not strategic planning…Julia Sloan interviewed CEOs from the world’s leading companies and found that they all depend on private time with their own thoughts to free their gut to guide their most important decisions.  In Learning To Think Strategically she describes this much more eloquently. 

Her book is actually an interesting example of needing to take hundreds of pages to explain and verify that the best decisions generally aren’t really based on huge amounts of research but come from allowing all you know to jumble about freely inside you head until your gut is happy with the result.

Good decisions come from having plenty of diverse experiences that expand your view, keeping clear of assumptions that constrict your options, being careful not to clutter up your brain with too many facts, and then letting your thoughts run free.

Try it next time there’s a fork in the path ahead of you.  Trust your gut.

We all know that when your gut makes a decision it’s usually much better than when your head does.  I’ve listened to many people talk about how they decided to do things. Oten they mention that they thought about it too much and came to a bad decision.  Rarely does someone say I went with my gut response and it was wrong.

Usually it’s the opposite: I didn’t listen to my gut and so made the wrong decision. 

For quite some time I’ve been using this in talks and consulting to guide people towards understanding that emotion is what leads to most decisions and the facts then merely justify what has already been decided.  For some reason this is hard for many to grasp and so they continue to think that facts will attract new customers and keep existing ones.

Apparently they haven’t heard about Apple.

This week a client sent me a link to a short Tedx video by Simon Sinek.  I am embarrassed to admit I never heard of him or his ideas.  Embarrassed because while watching it I realized he has so much more elegantly expressed my thoughts than I have. He calls it The Golden Circle.

Rather than try and re-state what he has so perfectly laid out, I send you to this Simon Sinek Tedx video.  I highly recommend you spend a few minutes watching it for it will change your thinking about how you lead.

I must admit it is difficult for me to send you along to Sinek for somehow it seems to imply inadequacy on my part.  I thought about it for quite awhile as I decided what to write this morning.  Then I realized that I’ve often told the story of how all the exceptional leaders I know will tell you that they really aren’t that good.  They’ve just managed to surround themselves with exceptional people with skills that far exceed their own.

Not that I am such an exceptional leader, but I suppose I must follow my own words.  Find those with exceptional skill and let them shine.  The umbrella of their success will cover you too.

We are overwhelmed.  There is no respite anywhere.  Now even airplanes, the last refuge from continuous connection, are installing internet service.  That old saying “I can’t hear myself think” is the new normal rather than a sometimes occurrence.

I’ve thought about this quite a bit over the years as I’ve notice how people have become less and less able to be alone with their thoughts.  Deep thinking is disappearing as rapidly changing stimulation takes over everywhere.  People even seem unable to sit through a concert or a movie, much less a business meeting without constantly searching their smart phones for something more interesting than what’s going on right where they sit.

We are losing the power of silence and the contemplation it so often brings.  Our minds are being conditioned to think about something in a microsecond burst and then race along to the next thing.  So it was with great anticipation that I noticed an article by Maureen Dowd in the New York Times called “Silence is Golden.” 

She is an extremely clever writer with wide knowledge, laser focus, and a keen sense of humor and irony.  I was expecting the wonderful article I found but what I was not expecting was the movie review it contained.  It seems that Michel Hazanavicius has released a spectacular…silent movie.  “The Artist.”

I thought about sharing some of the thoughts of Dowd and Hazanavicius but ultimately decided that it would be a disservice.  To truly appreciate what we are leaving behind and what this loss means for our future, you really should read the entire work yourself…in a quiet corner devoid of noise and distraction, of course.

Silence is the reason I live in a rural place down a long gravel driveway leading to a very private retreat.  The only sounds are those of nature and the only distractions are those I allow in.  I retreat to hear the silence and all that is hidden inside. 

Many of us have always thought that if your employees are happy, everything goes better all day.  You might have noticed that we even incorporated this into the Benari motto: Pay Attention · Add Value · Have Fun. 

According to recent research by Dr Nancy Rothbard of my very own Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and her colleague Dr Steffanie Wilk of Fisher College of Business, Ohio State University, it’s true.  It seems that employees who start off happy provide better service and are significantly more productive.

Employees who show up miserable take more small breaks which leads to them being about 10% less productive, and then there’s the way they deal with customers and other employees.  Apparently all those little things that some companies do that are often laughed at as silly turn out to boost results significantly at a small cost.

It makes sense to give your people a few minutes to positively transition to work when they arrive.  Those free donuts and coffee and a bit of chit chat might be what leads to a profitable day rather than some red ink. 

This causes me to reflect upon how we reward managers. Perhaps there should be a year end bonus for the manager with the happiest and most smiley crew.  I’ve know for a long time that if people love what they do and who they work with they can’t wait to come to work.  They develop an excitement and passion that infects the entire organization…and those it touches.

They are a happy crew and happy people tend to smile…a lot. 

As we’ve all observed, smiles are contagious.  Unfortunately not smiling can also be contagious.

In the world of EOS we teach leadership teams to always spend the first five minutes of any meeting sharing good news.  You might try this yourself and notice the difference it makes.

By the way, about my comment “my own Wharton School”, I happen to be Professional Faculty and Region Manager Africa for the Wharton Global Consulting Practicum which is part of the graduate school.  I mention this since I’m always interested in hearing about things Africa, particularly marketing project opportunities.

You might have heard about the child abuse allegations swirling around the football coaching staff of Penn State.  As someone who is from Pennsylvania, lives in Pennsylvania, and has hoards of friends and acquaintances who positively glow when they talk about Penn State…not to mention a client who has a life size cardboard cutout of Joe Paterno standing in his office, I have been thinking about this quite a bit as I follow the ongoing revelations.

As I’ve learned how long this has been going on and how many people are implicated in the coverup, I’ve become more and more depressed about what it says about the Penn State culture of protecting football at all costs…even at the cost of allowing an accused pedofile to continue onward and potentially find new victims.

I feel sadness that a great university could have so lost it’s way as a beacon of teaching right from wrong…have forgotten that part of education is creating future citizens with outstanding values that we expect our country to exemplify.

But mostly I feel great anger that those in authority had absolutely no compassion or concern for those molested, both past and future.  They were as the flotsam and jetsam swirling around the ship, beneath thought.

I had decided not to write anything about it for what could I add and what would it bring to a blog mostly talking about leadership and management?  Then I happened to read the November 23 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer by Frank Fitzpatrick, “Did PSU players get special treatment?”

It is a straightforward recitation of various meetings related to the football team that went on since 2002 when team member Anwar Phillips was accused of sexually assaulting a female student.  It paints a picture of a culture perverted to at all cost protect football or maybe the money brought in by football.

And it shows what happens when an entire organization has so lost its way and thinks itself above all rules and regulations, and the law.

The title of this post, it’s part of a quote from Graham Spanier, university president at the time, talking to Vicky Triponey who at the time was a Vice President and headed the university disciplinary arm, judicial affairs.  The entire quote is “Vicky, the coach is right. We can’t expect the players to tell the truth.”

The coach mentioned is Paterno.

Think about the revered football coach and the president of the university agreeing that it was too much to expect football players to tell the truth.

As you all know so well, culture starts at the top.

Who knows where this will end.  All because those at the top lost their way.

The motto of Penn State athletics? 

Success with Honor

Sometimes you just have nothing to say.  Nothing to add to the ongoing dialogue, no facts that help with the decision under discussion, no new ideas to move things forward.  No ideas at all. 

Rarely am I at a loss for something to add but I find myself with nothing at all to share that strikes me as the least bit useful for advancing the cause of building great managers and the companies they lead. 

The temptation is strong to jump in anyway.  But I shall resist.

Silence is often the best thing to share.