Career Lessons

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The ‘Stallion’ Dilemma

 

In every company, there are a few very fast rising executive stars with what I like to refer to as the ‘stallion syndrome.’ Why do I call them stallions? Well, they are people who are very impressive in appearance, very strong in performance results and very hard to manage. These stallions stand out from the crowd. They have extraordinary talents in a few critical areas that result in successfully reaching the number goals. They are driven, ambitious, fearless and cocky, and often disregard failures by not taking responsibility. The stallion usually makes or exceeds all of his numbers, drives followers to high levels of performance and innovates amazing concepts and products. Promotions come fast and the stallion moves up in the organization quickly.

But very often, stallions also have huge blind spots to their deficits.

It is almost as if a well-rounded executive must possess twenty different important traits with a passing grade in each area. These characteristics often include:

Integrity
Sensitivity
Emotional maturity
Competency
Quick intelligence
Great instincts
A team first loyalty
Trustworthiness
Ability to articulate clearly
Kindness, etc.

 

On the other hand, there is the stallion, which is extraordinary in three or four of these realms, but can be abysmal in many others. It is almost like God said: “If I give you an exceptional talent, it is a zero-sum character game and for every great trait, there is an offset of weak traits.” History has shown that extraordinary talent often comes with significant quirks.

Because the stallion is stroked for their numerical accomplishments, they are uninterested in working on their weak points. They tend to be extremely difficult to coach, and often are in denial that the weaknesses are important to correct, or worse yet, even […]

By |February 20th, 2017|Career Lessons|0 Comments

The Indelible Christmas

 

This last month I received a request from the National Archives Foundation asking me to write down some experiences from my tour of duty in Vietnam combat. Apparently, this is a national effort to gather the stories before they are lost in a disappearing generation. I have dozens of memoirs from my tour of duty, but here I’ve chosen to recall these two, because they describe how fragile life can be.

I served on the front lines of combat in Viet Nam and, in retrospect; Christmas Eve 1970 was the most formative and life-challenging month of my life. It was the first day of the so-called “Christmas truce.”

U.S. soldiers in field operations hated the Christmas Cease Fire truce that was about to start on December 24th at 10pm and go through New Year’s Day. The Christmas truce concept during war, dating from WWI, was created by Christian countries without considering that it made no sense to the non-Christian enemy we were fighting in 1965-1973. The truce was negotiated that both sides would stop all maneuvers and shooting at each other for six days. The U.S. politicians thought is was a great symbolic idea, but the enemy thought of it as an opportunity with one-sided rules of engagement intentions.

Throughout the Viet Nam war, that “Christmas truce” ended up being a most harrowing week for our troops in the field of combat­, and a chance for the enemy to take advantage of static U.S. field positions. In this war, the Americans owned the day with firepower and the Vietnamese owned the nights with surprise and ambush. Successful night ambushes from the enemy were set up by probes and exploration to understand weak spots in our defenses. That took […]

By |December 16th, 2016|Career Lessons|0 Comments

Characteristics Of Great Business Leaders

 

My consulting role exposes me to some great corporate leaders. When you run across an accomplished and talented corporate leader, their uniqueness from the mass of contemporaries is like red lights flashing. They are different, but have common characteristics to one another. Characteristics of individuals who fit in my ‘real and effective leader’ category include the following:

They have a sense of purpose or vision, and have the ability to articulate it in simple concepts. They can visualize the destination. They are consistently dedicated and focused to accomplish the vision, and can avoid the distraction of divided attention. They are often more into creation than maintenance or incremental improvements. They are open to innovation and new ideas as long as they support the accomplishment of the end vision.
They are energetically driven to accomplish something and show progress. They are impatient. Often their greatest fear is not having enough time. They have the ability to translate their frustration of slow action in others into productive inspiration without being demoralizing. They inject energy into organizations.
They have a value-based and intuitive decision-making style that uses analytics only as a supplement. They realize that getting ever more analytical when it comes to decision-making has diminishing returns against the benefit of getting on with it. They are not afraid of making mistakes because they are confident that they can correct their mistakes later. Their value-based foundation gives them protection against unpredictable decisions that causes disorientation and freezes subordinates in similar situations.
They have the amazing tenacity to overcome obstacles. They don’t quit. They see problems as expected potholes on the journey to successful results. They are not afraid of setbacks as long as a learning curve is embedded […]

By |November 1st, 2016|Career Lessons|0 Comments

Historic Walls Provide A Clue

Don’t Cling To History
Today I seem to be doing more strategy consulting and advisory work for engineering and construction firms, after a three-year hiatus to avoid conflict of interest after leaving corporate management. I am usually called in when things aren’t going great—either revenue is flat or declining and overhead is rising. That formula leads to declining profit and sustainability.

Engineering firms are the easiest enterprises to determine what is wrong and the hardest to get to do anything about it. They are stubborn and set in their ways. They are a people business, so business change means getting a mindset change in a diverse and distributed leadership base. At the exposed level of the iceberg, the problem will appear to be poor personnel utilization and low backlog. But that only indicates a more critical, below the surface problem of not having a competitive product and/or the marketing ability to sell it. The firm is just not winning enough work to allow it to hire new people and stay fresh, so they get older. The older the firm, the more energy goes down and expectations decline. The older managers complain that the new generation is not as talented as they are. It can be self-fulfilling prophesy and a resultant downward spiral.

Many of these firms have a long heritage of success that proves to the management that they must have had the ‘right’ model. Awards, plaques and project photos line the walls that beautifully describe the past leadership, the company’s stages of growth and landmark projects. Many older firms also have their age embedded into their business cards and letterheads.

I think all this is fine…if the company is doing well. ‘If it is not broken, don’t fix it.’ […]

By |October 6th, 2016|Career Lessons|0 Comments

Risk Management, The Precursor To Profitability

 

In 2002, after having been a CEO for a couple of years, I faced a looming liquidity crisis. I had several large stockholders who wanted their stock repurchased, total accounts receivables (AR) globally of >110 days (not unusual for significant offshore AR content), and the company was annually losing significant profit on four to six projects out of the firm’s portfolio of hundreds of jobs. I was quickly heading to a point of no return for liquidity that required urgent action. An independent director came to me and said, “Bob, you could make some money to solve your problems if you could just stop those bleeders.’ So simple, but so correct! I knew that was great advice but it required more than just doing that.

I immediately initiated three separate efforts:

A ‘war on the receivables’ to reduce them by 30 days within six months;
Continue to grow the best clients’ revenue as fast as possible; and
Reduce the number of losing projects by one half through better risk management.

 

I did not want to co-mingle, confuse and dilute the efforts, so I created three separate cross-discipline teams to set goals and implementation. I gave each team wide authority to institute policies by studying risk management from larger and more sophisticated firms. Perhaps it was just luck, but in 18 months we had repatriated nearly $200m of AR from our clients, doubled our profit margins (only by reducing the number of large losing projects) and had a demanding and disciplined risk management program in place going forward.

This article is on the topic of risk management.

Risk Management is certainly one of the most mundane topics to write about. If you ask a CEO whether they have a good […]

By |September 1st, 2016|Career Lessons|0 Comments

Look In The Mirror For Your Best Career Advisor

 

These days I occasionally have younger professionals say to me: “Bob, you seem to write from the level of the CEO and often it is not applicable to us. Can you give some advice to people in mid-career?”

OK, here it is: Don’t believe the propaganda of your company’s human resource department relative to their interest in your career development. They are there only to serve the immediate needs of the enterprise, not your career. If the two interests coincide, it is accidental. In good times, they might spend some money on their employees’ development, but in any financially stressful times, they will stop all programs. For example, too many times I have seen great corporate universities opened with enormous effort and cost only to quickly close based on temporary economics. Your career development must be tenaciously selfish, not waiting for better economic times.

That means that the best career advisor or developer is YOU. Don’t delegate or expect it. Take charge of your own career. Plan it and work to make it happen regardless of the stop-and-go interest of your employer.

I do recognize that I have a generational gap issue on what is considered “success” today. My generation was taught that success was striving to be the person in charge, so excuse this article if it does not match your goals. I’ll continue with my lessons learned hoping those who don’t want to be the ultimate leaders of an organization will still find ideas to glean.

In any organization I have been associated with, there is a ladder hierarchy. In service organizations the job roles slowly move from content orientation to business process. For instance, the lowest level of an accounting firm is an accountant (content) while […]

By |August 1st, 2016|Career Lessons|0 Comments