Vinod Khosla, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems and now a venture capitalist, considers himself a pragmentalist (pragmatic environmentalist) and his investments reflect that attitude.

“And I’m a firm believer, technology is the real solution. The world will not go backwards. Human beings aren’t made that way. And so you have to come up with different solutions.”

All well and good, but he goes on to say that leaders need to hold opinions based on their own belief system and that if you believe strongly enough you can lead confidently.

The examples he mentions are Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison and therein lies the problem.

It’s a common attitude, cite one of the “good guys” to illustrate so-called leadership qualities and ignore all the bad examples of the same action.

Ellison and Jobs are known for forging ahead based on their own opinion and convictions and damn the torpedoes and analysts. Fortunately, they’ve both been right far more often (not always) than wrong and so are held up as examples of the need to hold to passionately to one’s beliefs.

But what about all the leaders who follow their own belief system and blow up their companies when they damn the torpedoes?

Robert Nardelli at Home Depot; Richard Fuld at Lehman and the rest of the Wall Street CEOs who passionately believed in derivatives and minimized the risk; John Thain at Merrill Lynch; Al Dunlap at Sunbeam; the list is endless and timeless.

Khosla is interesting and obviously successful following his own advice, but I suggest that you look for more than confidence based on a personal belief system when choosing someone to follow.

What do you think?

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Did you know that six out of ten of the boys who could help build our future drop out of school and end up in jail?

That’s a full 60% and that is one scary number.

These boys are just like your sons—only without the same opportunities.

These boys are black.

The M3 Foundation is changing that one small step at a time.

M3 was started three years ago by KG Charles-Harris, CEO of Emanio, who I met first as a client and now count as a good friend.

The following is from this year’s M3 year-end report.

“M3 has had tremendous success during the past 3 years. We started with 10 underperforming boys at King Middle School in Berkeley in 2006 and expanded to all three middle schools in Berkeley with more than 30 students in the program during the past school year.

The boys achieved an average GPA of 3.0 during the past school year, some starting as low as 0.6 GPA. The average GPA was raised from 2.7 to 3.0 during the last semester.

All our boys are from low-income families, many with single parent or guardian backgrounds. Since 54 percent of black boys drop out of school on a national level, and 73 percent in the San Francisco Bay Area, these results are a tremendous boost. We expect to improve these further during the coming year.”

Take a good look at the numbers. That’s the kind of improvement that No Child Left Behind was supposed to achieve—but didn’t.

M3 accomplished it by working directly with the boys, not by teaching them to take tests or drumming rote memorization into their heads, but by showing them the value of education and providing the attention needed to appeal to their pride.

Instead of being told they could not they were told that they could.

Not just told, but supported and encouraged.

And they succeeded.

Finally, M3 packs a lot more bang for the buck than most programs do—check it out.

Come back next week for an interview with KG Charles-Harris.

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Image credit: M3 Foundation

Remember the really bad culture? Here’s a picture of what happened.

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You may be a tweeting guru, but can you sum up your life, career or tell a story in just six (real) words?

When challenged to tell a story in six words, Ernest Hemingway came up with “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”

Starting in 2006, Smith Magazine challenged readers to write their memoirs in six words and the effort is still going strong. Here are three examples from the Smith site,

Ecstatic, elastic, eccentric, electric, ever-changing existence!

Dreams diverted; life proceeds. Embracing detours.

Lesser people would’ve given up already.

I wrote Birth, death, fun and happiness in-between because that’s always what I wanted and got from life—including obstacles and detours.

The great advantage six words have is to force clarity of thought upon the subject.

It’s easy to set up a place on your intranet for people to post their six-word thoughts—not once, but many times.

You can use it to explore your group and company culture, clarify projects and goals and for individual team members.

• Invite everybody to post their six word description of the culture.

• A biographical section gives people a place to document their growth professionally and personally along with specific struggles and triumphs.

• Boil down the essence of each project to six words. You may be surprised at how different the descriptions are reflecting the different visions of the project team—six words helps to get everybody on the same page.

• Provide a truly anonymous section for complaints. The six word limit forces clarity on descriptions of problems and can often give you a heads up before the molehill becomes a mountain.

Please take a moment to add your six word memoir, thought or description of Leadership Turn here!

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Have you ever thought about what leadership sounds like?

Real leadership makes no noise.

Real leadership goes quietly about its tasks.

Real leadership doesn’t announce itself or blather on about what it plans to do in the future.

Real leadership isn’t a pied piper that mesmerizes you to follow along on its journey.

Real leadership happens every day all around you; it’s done by your colleagues, those you pass on the street and the people in your home.

So the next time you hear leadership be suspicious, be very suspicious.

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Power is interesting—an almost tangible phenomenon.

People crave power relative to their image of themselves. What seems like a small amount to you may be enormous to another.

According to Margaret Thatcher, “Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.”

Alice Walker warns that “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

Of course, a lot of people have just quit thinking, so they don’t have to worry about their power.

Francis Bacon tells us that “Knowledge is power,” but doesn’t mention that knowledge requires more than book-leaning and texting.

Napoleon said “Power is my mistress. I have worked too hard at her conquest to allow anyone to take her away from me.” Wow, he would make a great hedge fund manager, don’t you think?

Abraham Lincoln warns that “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

Sadly, most have failed the test.

As usual, the best wisdom about power is old.

In the mid 1600s Blaise Pascal said, “Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just,” but it will be a cold day in hell when that happens.

But It was Lao Tzu who best summed up power 2500 years ago when he said, “He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has mastered himself is mightier still.”

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CEOs move markets. A look, a gesture, a word.

And what the experts recommend for them will work for you.

Forbes has an article how to control CEO rage, but the best part is the accompanying slideshow highlighting the anger of a few of the most famous and infamous—those who lied, cheated and stole their way into history.

The Washington Post calls it the “Silent Language of Leadership,” but ignore the ‘leadership’. What is described is the silent language of influencing people, whether you are a CEO, Bernie Madoff or parents struggling to get through to your teenager.

Sometimes the boss decides it’s time to leave, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it—Sarah Palin did it the wrong way. See how it should be done; this is good information no matter what level you’re on.

Finally, how much disclosure should be required of the CEO of a publicly traded company? It’s a hot topic since Steve Jobs surgery was announced as a done deal.

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Monday Steve Roesler wrote a terrific post briefly recapping a Peter Drucker article in the Harvard Business Review called “Managing Oneself” (Steve included a link to the full article).

A part of that article is The Act of Noticing and it really resonated with me.

“While everyone is blogging, Twittering or tweeting, linking in, booking their faces, and coming up with other digital ways to “connect”, it would be good to ask: “Am I too busy to notice?”

I bookmarked an article last week that included solid research about the bulk of the population preferring to buy goods and services through face-to-face contact. Now I can’t find it because I was so darned connected online I didn’t actually pay attention to the title or where I filed it.

This leads into the video below. I was reminded of Emotional Intelligence pioneer Daniel Goleman’s TED talk a couple of years ago. If you want to know the connectedness between emotions, business, and “noticing”, this will be time very well spent. Close your door. Now. Tell you’re boss you are doing professional development. You are.”

I recently wrote that “No one is expecting you to solve the problems, but you can reach out and touch just one life. If everyone over 21 did that we would be well on the way to change.”

All I can add is that we better start noticing before all the lights are turned off for good.

Now go see your friends and tell them; have a ‘noticing’ contest together with a ‘doing’ contest.

Before you can practice random acts of kindness you need to notice.

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Image credit: TED

The road to hypocrisy is pave with ideologies.

This is especially obvious in the confirmation comments around Judge Sotomayor.

According to Republicans she would bring bias to the Court, but we already have that in the current Court.

The difference is that the current bias is in tune with Conservative Republicans, whereas Sotomayor’s MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) isn’t.

So the “we want to avoid bias on the Court” is more correctly stated as “we want to avoid bias on the Court unless it agrees with ours.”

Beliefs are based on and fed by passion, whether it’s religious or ecological; animal lover or tree hugger, the list goes on and on.

Tony Robbins is fond of asking, “Does your passion burn brightly enough others can see it, can feel it?”

Passion is a recurring theme today, whether leading, motivating or innovating; it’s important to entrepreneurs as well as those in all sizes of mature companies; to parents, politicians, non-profits and causes.

But did you ever stop to think that passion unchecked yields freely to fanaticism?

• In business, fanaticism leads directly to ‘not invented here’ syndrome.

• In schools, fanaticism leades to lying and cheating.

• In life, fanaticism paves the road to a closed mind, one that is evidenced by fear, hate, bigotry and hypocrisy.

Phil at Slacker Manager offered a great quote, “The mind is like a parachute and works best when it’s open.”

How true. And how sad that passion can deflate the parachute and close a mind.

Passion is positive in many situations, but unbridled passion is the hallmark of the ideologue just as an unconscious bigot is someone willing to joke about “them,” but can’t take a joke about “us.”

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lady☆εvα on flickr

This stress is chronic, but this is a sign of our times.

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