When the economy slows, it’s easy to ignore retention factors because management kids itself into believing that replacing people is no big deal.
But slow as it’s happening, the times they are a’chnging.
At least here and there, in companies that really understand the importance of attracting and retaining scarce talent.
“To reduce “female brain drain,” global companies such as Ernst & Young, Goldman Sachs, Booz Allen Hamilton, Hewlett-Packard, Best Buy and dozens of others are increasingly offering a variety of flexible work options.”
Don’t get me wrong. These companies aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their corporate heart or caring social …read more

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Raising kids is about teaching values, among other things, but kids learn by watching more than by listening. “Do as I say, not as I do” just doesn’t fly these days.
Cheating is not only a good example, it’s a global one.
Everyone knows that cheating is wrong, yet in US surveys 64% of high school students say they have cheated, while 84% of undergraduate business students and a whopping 56% of MBA students also admit to cheating. Not only is cheating prevalent, parental action often condones it.
Since many of these same parents are leaders in the workplace, the results of a …read more

Today is Blog Action Day and the topic is Climate Change, so I asked Chris Blackman, who is a strategic consultant specializing finding both private and public funding in the green and clean technology sector, to offer her thoughts on a subject that enrages me every time it comes up—which is more and more often. The subject is the sacrificing of one limited resource for the sake of another.
From Chris…
Would you choose to go hungry and thirsty so that you could have energy?
That choice is the dark side of clean energy.
A ‘clean coal’ power plant uses tens of thousands of …read more

“Leaders tend to be narcissistic, but you don’t have to be a narcissist to be a leader.” –Amy Brunell, assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University’s Newark campus.
“…narcissistic behavior is a “trait predicting charismatic leadership. People who are charismatic and charming… They think they’re entitled to it. They think they’re smarter than other people and they can get away with it.” –W. Keith Campbell, head of the psychology department at the University of Georgia in Athens.
Narcissism isn’t necessarily bad, but it is growing. When psychiatrists deemed it a bonafide personality disorder in the 1980’s it affected 1% of the …read more

Hypocrisy has had a high profile on my blog this summer, especially as it relates to the emerging attitudes of young people.
One of the current hypocrisy poster boys is Senator John Ensign, who really drove home what is acceptable and not acceptable in the prevailing attitudes of those who claim the moral high ground.
The Senator, who roundly condemned then-President Clinton’s sexual peccadillo and subsequent lying to a grand jury, said, “I haven’t done anything legally wrong.” (My emphasis.)
Which mean that if Clinton had admitted screwing around with Monica Lewinsky it would have made it a “distraction” (Ensign’s term for what …read more

I never really paid attention to leadership as an industry until I took over Leadership Turn a couple of years ago. But now I realize that it’s as pronounced and cyclical as the fashion industry.
Jim Stroup at Managing Leadership describes it well.
“Initially the gurus told us that leadership was a superlative individual characteristic reserved to the elite, then a democratically distributed attribute accessible by all… first to vision, then decisiveness, then courage, then team-building skills, then forcefulness, then empathy. It’s about looking inward to one’s core self. No, it’s about communication and connecting with others.”
The list of leadership fashions is …read more

Thursday I wrote about today’s excessive hypocrisy using, among other examples, Senator John Ensign.
Like most bloggers, I post ahead, so that I wasn’t able to include South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford.
Today I want to offer up some quotes from him and tomorrow I’m going to address the subjects brought up by Dan Erwin and Becky Robinson in the comments on Thursday’s post.
“The bottom line, though, is I am sure there will be a lot of legalistic explanations pointing out that the president lied under oath. His [Livingston] situation was not under oath. The bottom line, though, is he still lied. …read more

As you know I am a great believer in the power of words.
Words can hurt or heal; they can lift us up or throw us into the darkest chasm; words can do most anything.
Right now times are tough and too many of the people I hear from are down or depressed and some are close to giving up. And words can help that, too.
When times are tough I’ve found some of my best inspiration from Eleanor Roosevelt. I find her comments to be pithy and filled with common sense; stuff that’s so solid you can grab hold and it will …read more

CEOs have been envied for decades; the pedestal kept getting higher and we all know that the higher the pedestal the further the fall. Things started changing in the eighties and now CEOs as a group are scorned and reviled as symbols of ego and greed who caused most of the problems we’re facing.
Certainly some do qualify for that title, but tarring all CEOs with that brush is plain stupid, as stupid as judging any group based on the actions of a tiny minority—no matter how high profile its is.
Today’s links offer up info on the folks in the corner …read more