Charles Darwin is best know for his Theory of Evolution and his amazing work in that field, but much of that work applies equally well to business—only not in the generally accepted way.

“A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.” (Time to think and dream does not count as waste.)

“In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” (As companies who promoted closed systems learned—to their detriment and eventual extinction.)

“…it is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.” (Which, one can but hope, our fearless corporate leaders will do in the future, since it a prerequisite for the next thought…)

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, not the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.” (Change. Maybe that can include a focus on something other than short-term and ‘maximizing shareholder value’. Wall Street, are you listening?)

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No question, men and women think differently—at work, at home and in every other situation.

And for years the argument has raged as to which approach is better; which thinking clearer; which to follow.

When ignored, the differences are the basis for miscommunication and the resultant misunderstandings, dissatisfaction, frustration and anger.

In rare shows of common sense, some companies focus on understanding the differences, sharing the intelligence across their workforce and creating a stronger corporate culture that takes advantage of both sets of styles and skills. The result is more employee satisfaction, improved productivity, and better retention—all direct contributions to the bottom line.

If you’d like to get a handle on this Leadership and the Sexes: Using Gender Science to Create Success in Business is a good place to start. Authored by Michael Gurian, best-selling The Wonder of Boys, and Barbara Annis, a top consultant on gender issues, the book provide and in depth look at two decades of both scientific research and real-world anecdotal evidence that different isn’t better or worse, or, as Gurian says, “I think what we’ve been able to prove over the last 20 years is that there is not superiority or inferiority.”

Homogeny isn’t good, especially in business. To interact and do commerce with the real world requires not only diversity of thought—gender, racial, ethnic—but respect for and the ability to interact and work together for a common goal.

The major part of Leadership And The Sexes is in the form of five gender tools that walk you through a process to help you understand the differences and effectively deal with them.

1. GenderTool 1 Improving Your Negotiating Skills with Both Genders
2. GenderTool 2 Running a Gender-Balanced Meeting
3. GenderTool 3 Improving Your Communication Skills with Men and Women
4. GenderTool 4 Improving Your Conflict Resolution Skills with Men and Women
5. GenderTool 5 Practicing Gender-Intelligent Mentoring and Coaching in Your Corporation

Written as pure brain science the book would be much drier, but the real-world examples and anecdotes offered save it from that and make for a more relatable read.

The need to acquire gender-intelligence is undisputed, whether for your company or yourself. No matter what you do or how powerful you are gender-intelligence will help you improve.

Finally, to give you an additional inducement to dig into this subject and absorb what it offers, here’s an interview with Michael Gurian.

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I’m a bit ambivalent about Thanksgiving along with many other holidays, such as Mother’s Day. While I understand and even agree with the idea of honoring a certain attitude, it seems hypocritical when it’s done only on that day.

Sadly, many of the people most vocal about a holiday are the same people whose actions during the rest of the year belie their holiday attitudes.

That said, here are my suggestions regarding Thanksgiving.

No matter how bad things are in your corner of the world give thanks that you are alive to read this. As long as you’re breathing you have a shot at changing your circumstances or improving someone else’s. Several years ago I had a terminally ill friend. Her final Thanksgiving act was to sign papers consigning all her useable body parts to an organ donor program; She died just a few days later. Her action infuriated her family, but she had made sure they couldn’t stop her choice.

Which brings us to my second suggestion.

Remember the words of Plato, “Always be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle,” and follow the advice of Anne Herbert, “Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty” daily.

Get in the habit of doing one small, unplanned thing every day—drop a quarter in an about-to-expire meter; pick up a piece of litter; help someone across the street. Just think of the difference if everyone did just one random act every day.

And courtesy of the Internet comes just the right thought to round out this post,

May your stuffing be tasty
May your turkey plump,
May your potatoes and gravy
Have never a lump.
May your yams be delicious
And your pies take the prize,
And may your Thanksgiving dinner
Stay off your thighs!

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone—be sure not to farctate on the farcing today!

PS Enjoy a Thanksgiving special edition of mY generation, Thanks, But No Thanks…giving.

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Click to learn what planning can do for you!

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Sadly, this is Wes’ last post; his heavy schedule and several new projects preclude him from continuing to write for Leadership Turn. Wes sends this message,  “Thank you all for visiting and reading my posts each Tuesday for the past several months.  I hope that you were challenged to think differently about leadership and business management.  My best wishes go to Miki and the entire B5 team.” I want to thank Wes for his insights on creating a leader-of-the-pack company; if they’ve proved useful to you please take a moment and say so. Finally, you can find more of Wes’ insights, as well as contact him, at the Ball Group.

Are you shooting yourself in the foot by giving away more and more in an effort to grow/maintain your business during bad times?

A proven secret to getting more [for you] is offering less [to them].

• When the San Diego Padres moved to their new stadium in 2004, they had one-third fewer seats to sell, yet they sold a million more tickets at 32% higher prices that first year.

• Subway franchisees have learned the best way to boost total sales is to reduce seating.

• Many retailers have discovered that a smaller parking lot increases store traffic.

When you want to boost demand for almost anything, just tell people that availability is limited.  Likewise, if you want more people to take you seriously and aspire to own what you sell, raise your prices.

Since all of the above are proven to work, why is it that as soon as the economy looks a little shaky, otherwise smart business owners and managers start trying to provide more for less?

There is an irrational fear that overtakes even the toughest and savviest business owners as soon as they start to project less demand ahead.

Instead of working on how to increase demand among the 85+% of those customers who still have needs on which they will spend, they focus on the 10-15% of customers who are willing to risk failure and loss rather than spend money and doing that undermines the value of their products/services to all customers.

Businesses start discounting.  They work on giving away more for less.  They make even well-heeled customers believe that their product or service is worth less.

Anyone, who has read my writing for more than a few weeks or who has seen any of the research I have conducted on what creates sustainable success, knows that I get really annoyed with marketers who needlessly give things away.

It harms them.  It harms their competitors.  It harms the category in which they sell.  And it harms the economy.

It also works to prolong economic downturns, because it not only undermines the financial well-being of many companies, but also makes customers believe that prices should stay that low, extending the pain for months longer than necessary.

Take a clue from the Padres.  If you have something worth selling, look for ways to give away less and grow your demand.

As counter-intuitive as it sounds, you will do better and gain more long-term.  You will also help the market in general.

Is your company reacting to the economy by doing more for less or less for more?

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On a post over at Managing Leadership, Wally Bock left a great comment that’s germane to my recent posts and to the notion that the idea of ‘leadership’ has been corrupted by the leadership business and the media.

Wally said, “…people prefer magical thinking to accountability.”

They sure do. That magical thinking is just great for all those who don’t want the responsibility of making their own decisions. It’s wonderful to have a ‘leader’ tell you what to think and how to act. That way, when things get screwed up, it isn’t your fault; it’s the leader’s fault. You get to say, ‘S/he told me to…’ and poof—instant absolution with no strings attached.

Wally went on to say, “There’s a joke about a professor who says that a certain idea is “fine in practice but may not work in theory. We didn’t have a problem identifying who was the leader before we had leadership theory. Nobody worried about whether that Caesar fellow was a true or real or authentic leader. They just followed him.”

Caesar didn’t worry about it, either. He just did [whatever] and assumed that everyone would follow along. And follow they did, at least until he decided to make his leadership official. At that point their response was direct and very final.

We followers need to do something similar to the leadership movement; not necessarily as final, because it does have its uses.

We need to reform its thinking; recognize that leadership skills are for everyone—not just a select few—and stop it from appointing/anointing those selective few as ‘leaders’.

So, new mantra—everybody is a leader; lead yourself first and don’t worry abut the rest.

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You’re probably too young to have seen Groucho Marx on a TV game show called You Bet Your Life, but maybe you’ve rented some of his movies after hearing about him. If you haven’t, then I hope today’s post motivates to do so.

Marx was a brilliant comedian and offered great commentary on his times; as funny today as he was then.

“Humor is reason gone mad.” (An insight that give us a perfect reason to laugh as much and as often as possible.)

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” (If anything, TV has gone downhill since this comment.)

“Oh, I know it’s a penny here and a penny there, but look at me. I worked myself up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.” (Just think what he could have done with a credit card!)

“Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.” (As has been proved over and over throughout history—and especially during the last eight years.)

“Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.” (Sounds like the honchos on Wall Street.)

Now go rent a Marx Brothers movie and laugh you’re a** off.

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Sunday I offered up some great quotes from Richard Branson and prompted a comment from another Branson lover from Germany.

Now, I can’t read German, but I clicked over to check his blog out anyway and found a terrific video I thought I’d share with you.

It’s a lesson on what’s involved in real leadership and proves that there are a lot worse epithets to be called than ‘goose’.

What do you say. Isn’t now the time to goose your leadership style?

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I’ve come to the conclusion that the road to hell isn’t paved with good intentions; it’s paved with ”leaders with intentions”—good, bad or indifferent.

I figured this out based on media coverage of leaders. After all, have you ever seen a media treatment of a follower?

Media co-opted ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ decades ago and increasingly diluted the meaning until it disappeared.

Along with dilution, the media gave those they termed leaders the same treatment that was previously reserved for extraordinary athletes, celebrities and rock stars.

In doing so they created the monstrous, indestructible, uncontrollable ego found in every leader who bought into their hype; and reflected in compensation packages more fit for royalty than for business people.

And in case you haven’t noticed, you can find many of those massive egos in (surprise, surprise) investment banking, hedge funds, insurance and other sectors of financial services. But you knew that.

In fact, ego-mania has percolated throughout all industries, with little consideration for the size of the organization or its mission.

Further, in throwing the leader term around so loosely the media helped enlarge politicians’ already super-sized egos still more and extended the ego franchise to religious heads.

Not only are those egos super-sized, they also seem to be bulletproof.

How many of these ‘leaders’ have actually taken responsibility for what they’ve caused?

Have you seen them apologizing for their share of bringing down the global economy? Did I miss it? Boy, I hope you Tivoed it for posterity.

But the media’s gone pretty silent on the subject; lauding corporate heads seems to have gone the way of the dodo bird. But dodos aren’t the only extinct bird, the phoenix is, too. And like the phoenix, media leadership hype will rise again just as soon as we all forget—which, unfortunately, we will and that’s a historically proven fact.

By the way, I’m not the only one; Jim Stroup noticed the silence, too, only from a different perspective.

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For a long time now I’ve believed that the L word in all its forms has been abused and corrupted and I’ve haven’t been shy about saying so. Further, I hate words that are defined using variations of themselves. When that happens there is nothing concrete against which to check the meaning of the word or its usage.

I’m also not a lover of people who rant and whine about what’s wrong, but offer no ideas to fix the problem/situation.

So it’s time to start working on solutions.

Perhaps a new acronym would jump-start changing the career slant of ‘leader’.

That way we can offer leadership skills to all, so that they can indeed lead whenever it’s appropriate to the situation—leaders in the instance—instead of anointing a chosen few.

How about POF (person-out-front) to refer to someone at the front of the organization.

Or perhaps it would be better to use upper and lower case for the person in front who may or may not be a Leader, but is a leader.

For example, Richard Fuld is a leader, whereas Lou Gerstner is a Leader.

Of course, that may be worse, since people in those roles already consider themselves ’special’ and might start thinking of the likeness between god and God.

That’s as far as I’ve gotten, but I’m hoping that y’all, AKA, my brilliant readers, will add your ideas and suggestions.

Together we can make a difference.

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