Monthly Archives: January 2010

The Hurt Locker

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The Hurt Locker more than lived up to its billing as an “intense” film. Black Hawk Down intense. Only the men and women who have served in Iraq (or who live there) can say how real the movie is. Real enough, I suspect.

I’m not sure the film makers had any sort of political statement to make about our presence in Iraq, but I came away thinking there is no way to win such a war. Unless the last suicide bomber blowing up the last Humvee with the last chunk of siMMtec counts as winning. Not sure what it would look like for our side.

The “can’t go home again” theme reminded me of Tommy Lee Jones’ character in Rolling Thunder. I still don’t know what to make of the brief appearances by David Morse, Ralph Fiennes and Guy Pearce.

How flat is your organization?

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This interview with Cristobal Conde, the president and CEO of SunGard, is a good example of why I’ll be willing to pay for the New York Times, when that day comes (couple of weeks?). The Q & A covers several very basic and interesting areas and I encourage you to read the entire piece. Here are a few bits to whet your appetite:

“You have to work on the structure of collaboration. How do people get recognized? How do you establish a meritocracy in a highly dispersed environment?

The answer is to allow employees to develop a name for themselves that is irrespective of their organizational ranking or where they sit in the org chart. And it actually is not a question about monetary incentives. They do it because recognition from their peers is, I think, an extremely strong motivating factor, and something that is broadly unused in modern management.

On leadership:

“I think too many bosses think that their job is to be the leader, and I don’t. By creating an atmosphere of collaboration, the people who are consistently right get a huge following, and their work product is talked about by people they’ve never met. It’s fascinating.

On micromanagement:

“If you start micromanaging people, then the very best ones leave. If the very best people leave, then the people you’ve got left actually require more micromanagement. Eventually, they get chased away, and then you’ve got to invest in a whole apparatus of micromanagement. Pretty soon, you’re running a police state. So micromanagement doesn’t scale because it spirals down, and you end up with below-average employees in terms of motivation and ability.

Instead, the trick is to get truly world-class people working directly for you so you don’t have to spend a lot of time managing them. I think there’s very little value I can add to my direct reports. So I try to spend time with people two and three levels below because I think I can add value to them.

PowerPoint:

“I actively despise how people use PowerPoint as a crutch. I think PowerPoint can be a way to cover up sloppy thinking, which makes it hard to differentiate between good ideas and bad ideas. I would much rather have somebody write something longhand, send it in ahead of the meeting and then assume everybody’s read it, and then you start talking, and let them defend it.

Advice to young people:

“My advice to young people is always, along the way, have a sales job. You could be selling sweaters. You could be selling ice cream on the street. It doesn’t matter. Selling something to somebody who doesn’t want to buy it is a lifelong skill. I can tell when somebody comes in for an interview and they’ve never had any responsibility for sales.”

Print this interview and slide it under the bosses door. Wear gloves and don’t get caught.

One in five radio execs social networking

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How many US radio industry executives (from the 50 largest companiues) are on Facebook or Linkedin? Here’s what the folks at McVay New Media discovered:

“Out of 116 radio executives, running the fifty largest USA radio companies, 14 of them had Facebook accounts and 19 of them had LinkedIn accounts. The most common member of the executive team to have a presence on either website was the Chief Operating Officer.”

While less than scientific –some executives are online under different names– the results raise the question:

“How can we embrace the digital direction of the industry if our leaders are not even participants themselves? Think of it this way. If it were exposed that less than one in five of radio’s C-level executives owned radios, we would significantly doubt their confidence and personal investment in the radio industry.”

“If today’s radio companies are to evolve into the digital media world, wouldn’t it first make sense for radio’s leaders to evolve into the digital media world? Clearly, many leaders in the media industry are still learning the language of digital. Yet, the fastest way to learn a new language is immersion.”

“Tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter can offer any C-level executive a simple and efficient direct forum with employees, shareholders, and customers. In fact, a strong executive could use social networking to improve their company’s image, foster positive communication, and directly confront market feedback.”

Is our (Learfield) industry “headed in a digital direction?” I believe it is. Are our leaders participating themselves? Only a few and in very limited ways. I might rephrase the question:

If only 1-in-5 of our senior managers regularly attended college sporting events, would we “doubt their confidence and personal investment” in collegiate sports marketing?