8 posts tagged “leadership”

The weeks after the US presidential election have been interesting.
   First, certain Republicans wanted to make Gov. Sarah Palin the fall girl of their campaign. They failed. Bill O’Reilly tore in to her pretty quickly but faced a backlash from Republicans who saw the Governor as a heroine of their cause. Sen. John McCain took an entire week to respond, by which time it was “safe” for him to have done so, when the political meter had swung to Gov. Palin’s favour. We have Joe the Plumber now coming out and saying that he wasn’t that impressed with the Senator, but he was impressed by his running-mate.
   Then, we have a shrewd President-elect who has sought to distance himself from the radical elements, the corruption in the Illinois governor’s office, kept in touch with American people via YouTube, and attempted to go forth with a transparent transition process.
   I am not going to get into politics deeply here. My point is that the behaviour of the two candidates speaks volumes toward the way they brand themselves, their notions of leadership and their motives.
   I do not feel then-Sen. Obama’s campaign was the most transparent. There were questions to be answered, as I have stated on this blog. Vagueness is not a way to earn votes—but history has always shown that a campaign on change after years of one president in office works: Clinton 1992, Blair 1997 and Clark 1999 are good examples.
   I did feel Sen. McCain attempted to be more candid. I was unimpressed, however, by points he flip-flopped on—when first faced with the mortgage crisis, his first words were in fact about letting laissez-faire economics have their way. Within weeks he spoke of nationalizing mortgages.
   So much for the maverick who took a position.
   Now elected, President-elect Obama has done right by his YouTube addresses, understanding that he needs to set a vision as well as a strategy and getting people on the ground early. This is not a cynical exercise in PR. Any leader knows that the most effective way to get an organization moving—and in this case a country—is to get stake-holders in on the act early, rather than impose a strategy on to them. I have said the same in any branding job for our clients.
   Sen. McCain’s failure to defend his running-mate rates down there alongside Al Gore’s failure to endorse Sen. Joe Lieberman, as tradition might have suggested he should have done, going for Gov. Howard Dean instead. Gov. Palin was fine at defending herself ultimately, but not before more damage was done to the Republican Party.
   Whether one agrees with his Cabinet choices, Barack Obama’s moves in his transition have been pretty good, and among the most open I have witnessed since I began watching American presidential campaigns. He is using the playbook of modern communications to ensure that the office of the President will continue to deserve respect. While in some respects he has gone against the ‘Change’ cry of his campaign by rewarding Clinton-era loyalists for the Cabinet positions announced so far, it’s another shrewd move to ensure stability from his party. With enough in place, let’s hope that he can get on with the real serious issues.
   Am I going to give Barack Obama five out of five? No. I still hold some concerns over his ideas. But those who questioned his experience—as those who questioned Gov. Palin’s—might be revising their thoughts today. For the most part, these transitional weeks have been well played by Illinois’ rising star.

[Excerpted; full post here] Today at the Vista Group luncheon, we’ll be discussing the US auto industry’s desire for a government bailout. My view: of course it’ll be great to protect US manufacturing jobs, since the situation is not of the plant workers’ doing. As mentioned in one of my papers, ‘Saving Detroit’, the troubles are self-made: brand mismanagement by the Germans when Chrysler was part of DaimlerChrysler, which I have documented elsewhere; and internal politics within Ford, which is the stuff of legend. GM isn’t totally in the clear but it has done more to attempt to integrate an unwieldy structure (just not quickly enough, with hindsight), coordinate automotive platforms, spread its risk with small cars than its other US rivals, and even engage with consumers via its blog. It’s also taking a useful innovative chance with the Chevrolet Volt, reversing the failures of the EV-1 electric car project.
   I say the US Government could provide some guarantees and certainty for the sake of jobs, but the conditions need to go well beyond salary caps and executive compensations. We are talking serious rebranding (and I mean the vision-, culture- and process-changing definition and not slapping on a new logo) here—something that large US corporations tend to have a problem understanding, executing and absorbing. Or, they get caught up in the rhetoric of branding thanks to the way some of the consultancies work. We’re talking major cultural changes. Read full post here.

Time deconstructs Sen. Obama’s victory:

Over time, it’s become clear that these men view change very differently. McCain sees change as an ordeal, a test of his toughness; Obama sees it as an opportunity, a test of his versatility. McCain sees change as reforming the system; Obama talks about rebuilding it from the ground up. McCain does not e-mail. He became famous by riding a bus. And he brandished at every opportunity the values that never change with circumstances: duty, honor, country first. (See pictures of John McCain’s on the campaign trail.)

    Yet Obama, derided as so ethereal compared with the battle-tested McCain, was the clear-eyed realist in the room; he was a child of change—changed countries and cultures and careers, even his very name: Barry became Barack. You can’t stop change from coming, he argued; you can only usher it in and work out the terms. If you're smart and a little lucky, you can make it your friend.

   They are both right.
   No one can stop change, but an executive should be able to position one best to deal with it.
   However, (s)he should also fall back on time-tested traditions because duty, honour, country first never change as important guiding principles for a national leader.

[Cross-posted] Sometimes I surprise myself on what comes up in blog comments. In a thread about the Iraq war and the short memories of nations over on Vox, I wrote the following. And as I wrote, I believed this to be a possible truth.

To go forth in the future we need to discover our past, a hard thing in an age of short memories as you say. … Leadership might not come from size but from those nations that have steadfastly refused to give in to the prevailing decline in so many places. Switzerland, for all its refusal to join the EU, has managed to maintain one of the greatest gun ownership rates in the world yet not have a single gun-related murder attributable to its own in most years; Singapore, retaining its Confucian philosophies, manages a city-state with limited natural resources.
   Their example needs to be communicated to the world, as well as the positive aspects of certain parts of the US or China—they exist, but they are hidden.
   This is one reason to like blogs because they can cut through the shield of the MSM and government propaganda. I do not think that we have reached any critical mass among netizens, networking citizens together in a form of moral leadership. … [T]here are pockets of good people everywhere as you and I have witnessed, just that we are not necessarily visible.
   But that critical mass can come—and if warfare now is at a terrorist, guerrilla level in so many places, I suspect moral leadership itself will come from a grass-roots base.
   The system needs idealists like us, reminding people of their short memories, and maybe change will be effected not through top–down governmental, propagandist methods or the MSM, but through one-on-few communications from each of us.
   I would rather hope that the next superpower, therefore, is not a nation or even an ideology, but a collective of humankind cutting through the BS and revealing the truth. Who says the ’net cannot be a force for good once more? If it can propagate hate and porn, it can just as easily propagate hope and truth.

   I get reminded of this every now and then by others who feel the same way: Chris, at the Edutainment & Convergence blog, wrote to me privately and inspired me. And when I think back to books like Beyond Branding and Typography & Branding, I think there was a great deal of post-9-11 optimism and the desire to build a better, more understanding world. I find passages of my Typography & Branding inspiring, if an author is allowed to be inspired by his own work, and I can’t have been this cynical back then.
   It’s a good zone to be in and I haven’t felt this hopeful about the potential of the ’net in about a year.
   Last year, I was bemoaning the decline of the blogosphere as it began looking more and more like the darker parts of society, with gossipmongers and rude, anonymous commenters finding their way on to it. Where were, I asked, the globally minded idealists of the 1990s?
   On the other hand, their entry into this world surely puts them closer to the hands of the idealists who can now shape agenda, creating more hopeful sites and messages.
   And maybe channelling or finding the above message from my subconscious helped me put things into perspective more. If indeed the state nation is less relevant and change is better effected by people helping people directly, because technology has now made that possible, then the moral vacuum caused by various changes in society can be filled.
   All it needs are willing participants prepared to get together to make the world a better place, regardless of their political, cultural or religious stripes.
   That’s really why I got into media.
   If we agree on this target, then the rest must follow.

Whether you support the war in Iraq or you don’t—and here in New Zealand we have the luxury to criticize the United States—David Horowitz’s recollection (video found originally on Humbled Infidel’s blog) of why the US went in certainly correlates with my own. It’s why I have always held back attacking President George W. Bush, because faced with what he had in front of him, I cannot honestly say I would not have done the same thing. As Horowitz reveals, neither would Al Gore, who supported Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ speech in 2002.
   The end of this video (cut short) goes into the rationale for war surrounding UN Security Council resolution 1441, which PM Tony Blair managed to sell to Parliament—but which, I always felt, the US was less successful at doing. There are legal arguments there based on the UN Charter but it was always about 1441. 
   This is one of the problems I tend to have with the US Democratic Party, for all my own left-leaning tendencies. Right now, for example, constituents are begging the super-delegates that they should not select who will best beat Sen. John McCain and the Republicans, but who represents their position. The fact this question has even arisen is disturbing: as representatives of the people of course one should represent the citizens. The minute you do not, you do not have a democracy: it is a quest for power among élites ignoring the citizenry, the sort of thing people were getting away from when the US was founded. 
   I am not saying that the GOP wouldn’t look after its own, but given that they have fielded men like Sen. Bob Dole—who from a marketing perspective was a tough sell against President Clinton—it seems that it might be more willing to represent its base than look at seizing power. The 42nd president gifted them the Monica Lewinsky situation, which hurt the Democrats. I would say that they never forgave the GOP or Kenneth Starr who were steadfast in their condemnation and investigation. That power-hungriness from the Democrats is very apparent in the way the Bush administration has been undermined in the last eight years.

   I say if one opposes the war, then there are ways to do it without resorting to revisionism. I might not agree with our PM, Helen Clark, on her courses of action, but at least she took a position based on the facts before her and said ‘No’ to going in to Iraq. She has never gone and revised history, and simply held firm on her principles. She has good support for it because most New Zealanders opposed the war and carried out her job (on that occasion) as a servant and representative of the people.
   The consequences of Resolution 1441 were always clear but the means of acting upon them were less so because of the way the UN Charter is written, and that ambiguity effectively gave some countries a chance of opting out. Our PM took it, as did the leaders of many other nations. It is respectful, even if she later made a gaffe about how she did not think a Gore presidency would have gone to war. (As Horowitz reminds us, that is probably an incorrect position.) They believed that an extra resolution was needed before war; the US, UK, Australia and others did not.
   The Democratic Party and the anti-war movement probably think that this is all too tough to sell to the public, so they engage in other tactics, shaming US troops or the administration and pressuring those who have short memories to join their cause. I am not saying that what they have uncovered is all untrue—of course I accept there are dodgy dealings surrounding the war and I even accept some misconduct—but they’d earn my respect if they didn’t flip-flop or cover up the truth. Sen. Clinton, who voted for the war, who voted for the increase in expenditure alongside Sen. John Kerry, is one of those very high-profile politicians who has changed depending on the trade winds of public opinion.
   Of course a senator or a future president must be representative but she must also stand on truth. ‘I was wrong to have supported the war because …’ would have been a good start. ‘Now the American people are telling me that it is time to withdraw our troops.
   ‘My support was founded on the belief that resolution 1441 was inviolable. It was not, and we have carried out the due punishment needed on Saddam Hussein’s régime.’
   There are millions of ways to spin it, especially ways to do it without demoralizing the young men and women serving in Iraq—and I am not even a politician.
   This would also mean she’d have to go against her husband’s attacks on Kosovo, which also did not have that additional Security Council resolution but was a preemptive strike by the US. George W. Bush is not alone, just that the media give him more grief over it.
   But a mea culpa is not flip-flopping and it is not pandering. It is being honest, something the Beltway sees very rarely.
   What concerns me, however, is that the road to war is a serious matter. It should not be so easily bent because the decision should be founded on principle—and if those principles existed after resolution 1441 was broken then they exist today. Congress voted for the war, with bipartisan support. There needs to be a far bigger shift for any US representative to say no to the war now—so what is it?
   A poor entry strategy, a poor exit strategy, the belief that the US’s only task was to oust Saddam Hussein, the belief that the parameters of the original declaration of war have been fulfilled—what? Certainly Sen. Clinton needs to tell us.
   She has said that she would not have voted for the war if she knew there were no WMDs. But as Horowitz points out, the existence of WMDs was not the basis for war. Did Sen. Clinton “misspeak” again?
   There is a popular notion that that was what resolution 1441 was all about and we all remember Sec. Powell’s Powerpoint presentations to the UN.
   But unless Sen. Clinton has misremembered this incident as well, resolution 1441 on November 8, 2002 was about Iraq’s non-compliance with conditions laid down by the international community over disarmament, which included WMDs, but they were not the core issue.
   When Iraq lied about what it did with its WMDs, which the international community confirmed it had as late as 1998, the US took a hard line.
   Iraq itself never offered an explanation on the discrepancy between its claims and tests by the inspectors.
   That was one legal justification for the US and the UK, and, skipping over a few issues, the war began.
   I sure wish the US politicians would just tell the truth about the vote at that time because they should have a better understanding of it, having been there—rather than let people like me catch them out.
   This is another reason to not dislike Bush: he said he would stay the course, so he did. The majority of Americans voted for him in 2004 (regardless of whether one is counting the electoral college or the popular vote) and knew this full well. And while I think some of his spending has sent that US deficit soaring, he has stayed firm on his belief in his tax cuts. He seems content because he thinks he is protecting the Constitution and that he needs to continue his strategy. Maybe that is the Bush world-view. (He saw how his Dad got burned on the ‘No new taxes’ and learned from it. He saw how his Dad lost the support of the right wing of the GOP and learned from it. And he saw how he was criticized for being too smart when he ran for Congress—which is where the folksy public image comes from. Welcome to Bushland.)
   Had the war successfully concluded people would praise him on his steadfastness.
   For if a leader bends based on the trade winds, then will she bend based on pressure from other sovereign nations? If Saudi Arabia put pressure to bear on the US, would Sen. Clinton cave in? If a communist nation put pressure on Sen. Obama, would he? Or, for that matter, how far will Sen. McCain bend to foreign pressure? 
   We cannot turn back the clock now and see how the message could have been better communicated to the US. We should know, from the Horowitz video, why the US went in and understand who is now lying to the American public: that is important. For all his failings in everything from the Patriot Act (which I am no fan of, and it has restricted the movement of people who could benefit the US) to the Alberto González judicial appointments, I do not think it was President Bush. I have never called him a bare-faced liar.
   The next presidential election is a chance to address those failings. The economy can be fixed but what is in dire need of repair are the values to which not only Americans want moral leadership, but most of us in the western world. Get the values right, get the truth right, and the rest will follow.
   At the end of the day I care not if the president is a Democrat or a Republican, and I have no say in it anyway, as long as our common values are restored and preserved, and the leader is truthful. And that the decision for staying the course or withdrawing is also founded on truth.

Anita Roddick was an inspirational lady. Here are some quotations from her last interview in The Daily Telegraph.

On the US wealth divide
It’s a society that is absolutely separate, it’s a gated community living next door to a society that is impoverished, a gated community living next to ghetto—you see that all the time and it will happen here—the two poles of our society.
   Everything is here for the wealthy. You can hide your money away in tax havens, you can find ways of making more money.

The global credit crunch in the US
It's like that fresh flesh: I want it now, you know I can’t work for it, I can’t be an apprentice, I can’t look up to it. And people are living longer. The elderly don’t want kids in their home. Everybody’s staying at home and there’s not a work ethic that I’m seeing. There’s got to be more creative ways of finding jobs and getting skilled or finding jobs that are worthwhile and you don't have to be skilled for.

B-school
This notion that to be in business you've got to go to a business school: it’s crap. Because business schools only shape you to be a very efficient person working in a very traditional system—but the most exciting things are what’s being done untraditionally.

L’Oréal and the Body Shop
I’m thrilled with it, absolutely bloody thrilled with it. I think they’re going to do amazing things. I think they’ll be able to—with the research companies that they’ve bought—not the product companies—of completely eliminating animal testing in the future. It will not be part of the industry. Because they're doing cell culture testing—they’re making their own cells and their own skin. Every ingredient, every food product will be tested.
   For me it’s been a wonderful gift because a company that is a strong understanding brand bought it. The alternative was that a group of financiers would come in and asset strip it—they wouldn't give a toss for anything.

Outsourcing
We’re not a manufacturing country anymore. But I think you get people to understand the story behind what they buy—to make that one jump and say what's the real cost of something, if everybody got another 25pc for the garment they made then you wouldn’t get this big social dilemma.
   I remember going to a sweatshop area in Nicaragua, and it was quite a modern factory but there was no place to eat or have half an hour off. And the women were walking some 3 miles to work every day. And I walked back with them, and they were living in cardboard huts. One woman said to me, whatever you do tell them all that we want to do is move from slavery to poverty. They were forced to take contraceptive pills, they were thrown out if they had a grey hair and this is nothing compared to what goes on in Bangladesh.

The futility of “marketing”
We never had a marketing department for 20 odd years. Every year we were getting awards for our marketing, and we didn’t know what it was. The minute we brought in marketing as a traditional thinking—cover your trucks with messages, environment human rights etc, went out the door.
   We had an enormous amount of humour. I remember on Mother’s Day we had a message saying ‘God couldn't be everywhere so he created mothers’. We were doing really quirky things that got people engaged.

   There’s more on Dame Anita Roddick, DBE today in Lucire, along with a related op-ed from yours truly about her leadership.

I know Gov Schwarzenegger divides opinions, but I was interested to read this in the Mercury today:

Schwarzenegger recently proposed distilling the state GOP platform—the party's statement of core values—into as little as a single page focusing on lowering taxes, limiting the size of government and building a strong national defense. That proposal, in a letter to party members, made no mention of abortion, gay marriage or other social issues that often divide party members.

   Taking politics aside, a one-page summary of the brand’s core values makes sense. In fact, a one-sentence summary makes even better sense. How else can a disparate group of people be united under a banner?
   Starting with what an organization agrees on and building from there is one of the wisest things that a CEO seeking to transform it can do.
   Reading through the Mercury report, it seems that this routine matter is too darn hard for those in the political process. The leader says one thing, the people beneath him take ten times longer than any corporation, probably due to selfishness and an absence of generosity.
   What those stalling such processes, and they are rather minor in the grand scheme of things, fail to realize is that news of divisiveness makes the GOP even harder to fathom as a party with any direction.
   And since the liberal media are widespread, similar divisions in the Democrats—and I am sure they exist, perhaps more so—won’t be exposed as they champion Clinton and Obama. Even conservative media following the dollar might want sufficient scandal for sensationalism’s sake.

New Zealand is a year behind on Life on Mars, and I note from a TV One ad just now that Derren Brown’s Séance will air next week. I know we are necessarily behind the UK on British programmes, but I don’t remember us being this far behind since the 1970s. A three-year-old show? What is happening? Now with Cold Case, Without a Trace and other American shows on One, is this the end of the British influence on our networks?
   And people wonder why TVNZ as a whole is doing so poorly. It’s simply not delivering what people want. I can say that with some more authority, having been an insider.
   Incidentally, having left Good Morning, my theory has been proven right: my profile is up. The results are in: May saw eight press mentions across the company—up on 2006, but down on some months in 2003–5 where we were seeing something written about us at least daily. (The idea that appearing on TV regularly enhances your profile is, I can now say, bollocks.) It is reaching the levels (measured in column inches and mentions) it was at before I began on the show; indeed, we seem to be returning, as a company, to pre-2004 levels, before we made some bad hiring decisions. I do seem to have rid myself of the negative influences in my life—and Good Morning, and whatever sickness TVNZ has, were the last.
   I love being proved right—it was a good lesson, reminding myself to stick to my guns, remembering that sort of magic that helped us get an international clientèle to begin with, and exposing me to seeing a bad organization that wasn’t paying me to fix it. It’s not every day I have that opportunity: while I have seen ill organizations, I am usually called in after they have realized they need help. TVNZ has not got there yet and, in recent memory, is the only first-hand example I have of an organization I got to see over a period that wants to stay in its funk. It had more often been a management-textbook theory.
   As to my personal profile, I believe the slip in press mentions was due to an energy mismatch here at work in 2005–6 and the fact that appearing on Good Morning took me away from building my media appearances doing the things that mattered to me as a CEO. From a personal-brand standpoint, it was not authentic, to coin a phrase from Johnnie Moore. Not that that was the intent: I had been promised by the network that I could promote Lucire, most of all, through the show. That promise, as those of you who listened to my voice post last month, was not kept.
   Furthermore, I cannot see, with hindsight, how the ‘You’ve Got Male’ segment was a dignified forum for a company leader. I say this with respect to men like Paul Sinclair, with whom I regularly stay in contact.
   When I think of interviews I have had with CNN or the BBC, the show went against the image I had built up as a businessman.
   As each week passes, I feel more comfortable with my decision to leave Good Morning, and the positive consequences are coming up more frequently.
   My main regrets are endorsing the show to friends, getting caught up in it. I should have recommended that Laural and Sharaine Barrett not appear, though it was a good excuse to catch up in Wellington. Jennifer Hamilton of Avidiva reports no increase in profile, bookings or ‘Oh, I saw you on …’ since appearing on Good Morning.
   You may see me on C4 in mid-July (to be confirmed), and there may be some news that could net some television attention in late June–early July. The key is to not get sucked in to negative organizations or be around negative people as part of my routine—and if I have to appear on a TVNZ network, then it must be totally in line with my real job and personal mission.