• Your hesitancy means you already know there is a problem and aren’t comfortable with, or not interested in, changing to accommodate the feedback.
• If your people won’t be honest then you have propagated a belief that the messenger will be killed and that belief is typically entrenched in a larger culture of fear.

Either way, the source of the problem is you—not your team or even the general company culture (unless you are CEO), just you. You made it happen and if you want to fix it I suggest you have a long talk with your MAP because that is where the problem lies. The good part is that it’s your MAP and your choice to change it. Your comments—priceless Don’t miss a post, subscribe via RSS or EMAIL Image credit: ZedBee|Zoë Power on flickr

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It was so perfectly aimed, so true and so applicable that I went looking for what else he said.
There’s not a lot, but you’ll love what I did find. Johnson’s comments seem especially pithy and apropos for our world today.

Consider this, “No man was ever endowed with a right without being at the same time saddled with a responsibility.” These days, the higher you go the harder it is to find anyone who has been saddled.

Of course, give it a few years—the economy will recover, the jail sentences will be over, and all those leaders who wouldn’t know a responsibility if it jumped up and bit them will be back taking risks and influencing right and left. This will happen because, as Johnson said, “Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what actually happened, but of what men believe happened.” Or what they choose to remember.

Heroes aren’t really in style these days, so I thought I’d bring the final quote up to date.

“Heroes Leaders are created by popular demand, sometimes out of the scantiest materials.”

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I’m grateful to Kate; it’s good to know my point was made with at least one person.

This is as true for companies as it is for individuals and especially true in the current economic environment.

We can use this economic debacle to change the way we live, do business and innovate; we can stop up-sizing and down-sizing and learn to right-size; we can learn that keeping all our balls in the air isn’t the same as having all the balls existent.

We can start by recognizing that the current mess is substantially of our own making. It started years ago as we turned our personal responsibility over to our leaders, whether political, religious or business. (See Jim Stroup’s excellent post on this subject.)

Along with this abdication of responsibility we chose decades ago to forget/ignore another bit of ancient wisdom, “if it sounds too good to be true it probably is.”

How else to explain the number of Ponzi schemes unraveling, the most recent is 30 years old, not because the good guys caught the bad guys, but as fallout from the recession.

Returning to Kate’s quote, will our reactions to what is going on make or unmake us?

What do you think?

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I am continually amazed and revolted as I watch so-called conservatives of all stripes work to be sure their children are exposed to nothing that conflicts with whatever ideology they are steeping them in.

I say ‘conservatives’ because so-called liberals seem more flexible within their stands. (Please note that I said ‘flexible, not changeable.)

What exactly was in this speech, that some kids weren’t allowed to hear? Here are some excerpts that I found especially uplifting to hear—and if you think I cherry-picked the contents you can read it in its entirety and decide for yourself.

• But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, the best schools in the world — and none of it will make a difference, none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities, unless you show up to those schools, unless you pay attention to those teachers, unless you listen to your parents and grandparents and other adults and put in the hard work it takes to succeed. That’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education.

• You cannot drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to train for it and work for it and learn for it.

• What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. The future of America depends on you. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.

• We need every single one of you to develop your talents and your skills and your intellect so you can help us old folks solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that — if you quit on school — you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.

• But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life — what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home — none of that is an excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude in school. That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. There is no excuse for not trying.

• [After describing specific kids' situations] But they refused to give up. They chose to take responsibility for their lives, for their education, and set goals for themselves. And I expect all of you to do the same.

• I know that sometimes you get that sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work — that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star. Chances are you’re not going to be any of those things. The truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject that you study. You won’t click with every teacher that you have. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right at this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.

• I do that every day. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength because it shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know something, and that then allows you to learn something new.

• So today, I want to ask all of you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a President who comes here in 20 or 50 or 100 years say about what all of you did for this country?

The text of the speech was released early in response to fear-mongering, but some schools still didn’t broadcast it and some parents still prevented their kids from watching.

Why? Because he encouraged them to take responsibility for themselves? Because he said that our country’s future depends on them? Because he was raised by a single mom? Because he told them that success was a function of very hard work?

Or is it the closed-minded attitude of the ideologue represented by 15-year-old Andrew Quick, near Orlando, Fla., who said “he considered the speech to be a potentially disruptive interruption of his school day, so decided not to watch it. “I’m a Republican,” he said, “and I really don’t like Obama all that much.”

I translate that to mean ‘I don’t listen to anyone who doesn’t think as I think and agree with me’, an attitude that doesn’t bode well for our country’s future.

Exactly what in this speech was of such concern to the conservative agenda that their kids should not hear it?

Perhaps the problem is the message that, in the end, they are each responsible for what they become—not their parents or teachers or politicians and certainly not God—just them.

That they will be what they choose to be and whether that choice is active or passive; it’s their choice as thinking individuals—assuming they choose to think and not just blindly follow a given ideology.

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I simply don’t understand what today’s parents are thinking—assuming they are thinking at all.

18 years ago Wanda Holloway tried to hire a hit man to improve her 13 year old daughter’s chances of making the cheer-leading squad.

More recently Lori Drew helped her teenage daughter fake a MySpace page that drove another teen to suicide.

Parents launch efforts to destroy teachers who don’t hand out ‘As’; they scream at referees and umpires when they disagree with a call; they threaten coaches who don’t allow their kids to play enough.

On one hand they enable their kids to avoid all responsibility and on the other castigate them for not living up to whatever parental dreams they are trying to realize.

I know that it’s not all parents; and this isn’t a new rant, but it’s one to which I keep coming back.

And it came back with a vengeance, in fact you might say my outrage cup runneth over, when I read that Senator John Ensign’s parents paid off his mistress.

“The wealthy parents of Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) gave $96,000 last year to the staffer who was then his mistress and to her family, his attorney said yesterday.

The gifts to Cynthia L. Hampton and her family were given “out of concern for the well-being of longtime family friends during a difficult time,” according to the lawyer, Paul Coggins.”par

Ensign’s parents aren’t Gen-Xers and probably not Boomers, so this problem isn’t new.

You read stories about helicopter parents all the time, but when does it end?

How can anyone expect a person to make good choices when their mistakes (and worse) are ‘handled’ for them by their parents?

What do you think about Ensign’s parents’ actions? Obviously, pay-offs aren’t in the same class as murder; are they better or equal with bullying?

I don’t have any answers, but we’d better find some—and fast!

An open discussion is a place to start so let’s hear your thoughts.

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Yes, storytelling is an extremely powerful tool, but I see two problems inherent in these discussions.

The first is that the political, religious and business leaders used to illustrate storytelling’s influence are always positive examples and, obviously, plenty of those on the dark side have used it too.

Secondly, there is rarely any information on how listeners can shield themselves from the enthralling effect of the story in order to evaluate the actual ideas being presented.

I remember a friend telling me that he was mesmerized after hearing Bobby Kennedy, who he opposed, use stories to describe a situation and what he would do to change it. The effect wore off, but he found it a frightening experience.

Combine these two and you have a recipe for disaster—Hitler was an expert storyteller from the dark side, which is why he still has adherents.

Business leaders tell stories, called visions, constantly.

But as adults, involved in adult pursuits, we have a responsibility not to suspend our common and critical senses and swallow the story whole.

Here is how you stay balanced.

Enjoy the story, but remind yourself that it is a story and that once the telling is done then the content needs to be dissected and evaluated by the left side of your brain as opposed to embraced in toto by the right.

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Meet Robert L. Joss, Business School Dean at Stanford University.

On his first day he saw his position as Dean was in the bottom position of the unofficial org chart and a legend underneath that said, “And everything runs downhill.”

Over nearly an hour, Joss discusses Leadership Is Responsibility, Not Power.

It’s well worth your time. And if you want great take-away quotes, click here.

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Is there really a lending problem?  I know several people who doubt it.

One is a local car dealer.  He was almost dazed as he related a story to me about selling a used car to a woman who had a bankruptcy five years ago.  He sold her a nice car for $27,000.  She did not have the first payment she needed to make the deal.  Three banks (Bank of America, Citizens Bank, and one other I can’t recall) all offered her a loan for $32,000.  That’s on a car that would only give her $22,000 on trade-in, if she sold it back one week after consummating the deal.

I also know another young couple who just purchased a $19,000 van.  They had no problem getting a loan despite the fact that they have very low income.  The rate was 18.5% – about three times what should be available.  When an older and wiser friend challenged them that they could not afford the payments needed, they said, “Well, they must know what they are doing.  They offered the loan to us.”  The friend helped them sell the car, pay off the debt they still owed on the van, and get them into something they could afford.

So what’s wrong with these scenarios?

In the first case, at least one of those banks is in the midst of getting a getting an infusion of taxpayer cash from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, because they lost so much money on poor-quality loans.  In the second case, the justification for making a really bad decision was that the blame was really on someone else.  Worse yet, someone helped them get out from under the burden, but it is obvious from talking to them that they really don’t understand what was wrong with their decision.

We’ve just gone through the scariest financial event in my lifetime, but we aren’t through the consequences of banks, mortgage companies, investment companies, investors, consumers, and the U.S. government all thinking they can get away with making really stupid financial decisions because the blame can be cast upon someone else.  It’s like watching three year olds pointing fingers at each other and expecting mom to “buy” it.

What is it going to take for us to finally understand that it doesn’t work to either expect someone else to make things right for us when things go bad or to do things that enable those persons making bad decisions to go on making bad decisions?

Isn’t it time that we let people take responsibility for their decisions?

If people want to have the freedom to make decisions for themselves, shouldn’t they also be required to take the consequences of those decisions?

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But as a wise man said, you can learn from everyone.

When I was growing up I had an aunt with whom I didn’t see eye to eye, to say the least. Yet, it was because of this aunt that I learned something that became a cornerstone of my MAP.

My aunt had a glass topped dressing table and, like many women of that era, she would place inspirational clippings and notes under the glass. That’s where I first saw

Profit from the mistakes of others—you don’t have time to make them all yourself.

As much sense as it makes, even back then, it’s been one of the hardest for me to follow. I seem to profit well from small and medium mistakes, but have an unhappy tendency to make the really large ones myself.

The same can be said for many of our business, financial and political ‘leaders’.

This isn’t the first economic crisis brought about in the name of profit and maximizing shareholder investment, just the worst in a long time.

As I read the news a line from the sixties hit “Where have all the flowers gone…” keeps repeating in my mind—“when will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?”

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