A Birthday Blog and a Healthy Exercise

I’m celebrating 39 years today and feel compelled to deliver many thanks and recognitions.

Age 1: My mom’s OBGYN – Dr. Patrick! Yes, on Saint Patrick’s Day
Age 2: My dog Jet. Coolest and biggest German Shepherd
Age 3: My Big Wheel
Age 4: Dad’s motorcycle
Age 5: My best friend, Billy
Age 6: Toughskin Jeans
Age 7: Monica Anderson – Wow!
Age 8: Soccer in Europe
Age 9: My faith in Christ – By the way, St. Patrick used the shamrock to represent the Holy Trinity
Age 10: Nothing – I lived in Montgomery, Alabama
Age 11: Moving from Montgomery, Alabama to Washington D.C.
Age 12: First football season – Springfield Steelers
Age 13: My totally rad skateboard and half-pipe
Age 14: My first paying job – Delivering the Washington Post
Age 15: O’Fallon Township High School football – Undefeated
Age 16: My candy apple red Firebird – rusted through
Age 17: Homecoming King for North Pulaski High
Age 18: University of Arkansas’ Acceptance Letter – Phew!
Age 19: Lifelong friends – Kappa Sigma
Age 20: Survived Air Force boot camp and survival school
Age 21: College graduation
Age 22: First real career-oriented job – J.B. Hunt
Age 23: My first date with Melinda Caudle (WOW!)
Age 24: My Marriage to Melinda Caudle (Mel)
Age 25: My first business – ThompsonEarnhart
Age 26: Season tickets to Razorback Football – Thanks Dale
Age 27: The Fayetteville Square in the Spring
Age 28: My son, Blake (May 98 – June 98)
Age 29: My daughter, Alex
Age 30: My second business – ThompsonMurray
Age 31: Annual Seaside vacations with best friends
Age 32: My aerobatic airplane – the Extra 300
Age 33: Radical Sabbatical – almost a year off
Age 34: My third business – SVI
Age 35: My son, Jax
Age 36: SVI’s early leadership team – Autumn, Jason, Tim
Age 37: Learning to sail
Age 38: First publisher – McGraw-Hill
Age 39: Great start – 72 degrees, drinks on the patio with friends

Life is rich. Onward!

Tags: champions, leader, Leadership, organizational, thankful, thanks

Reach Out When Others Won’t

I was in a meeting yesterday when one of the participants proudly stated that he only invests in relationships that are mutually beneficial. And why not? After all, why should he invest in a relationship when he gets very little, if anything in return? These types of relationships are considered to be direct reciprocity relationships.

I knew I disagreed with this person’s relational mentality, but I just didn’t know why. I knew that I had benefited from benevolent relationships (still do) and that I’m so appreciative of those people who invested in me when I had nothing to give. These types of relationships are considered to be indirect reciprocity relationships.

Direct reciprocity means I support you, you support me, and together we’re better and stronger. It’s a barter system and relies on repeat encounters of mutual cooperation and mutual benefit. We see direct reciprocity relationships in formal or informal strategic partnerships, in peer-to-peer accountability groups, and in open brainstorming efforts.

Indirect reciprocity, on the other hand, occurs where mutual and equal contribution and benefit don’t necessarily exist. The cooperation favors one side more than the other, such as in mentor/mentee relationships or in relationships developed for charity. Repeat encounters aren’t necessary for indirect reciprocity, either. For example, helping a stranger change a flat tire or a simple gesture of “after you, sir” is indirect reciprocity.

So how do champions rank relationally? Do they focus more on mutually beneficial relationships or do they tend to take on the bulk of the relational investment? After perusing SVI’s database of information, here’s what I found:

Champions actively seek to support and enable close to 40 percent more people throughout their network than others

• They are significantly more focused on others.
• They are significantly more energizing to others.
• They are significantly more encouraging to others.
• They are significantly more enabling to others.
• They provide significantly more support and advice to others.
• They are significantly better problem solvers for others.

Obviously the relationships of a champion are not balanced equally regarding value.

If you’re a champion, you’re called to reach out when others won’t. As a champion, you’re compelled to lend a hand when others walk away. When someone cries for help, a champion will listen and take action if she can.

These are needy times. Champions are attuned to the needs of others and they lend support regardless of the value they get in return.

Tags: book, champion, organizational

The Breakfast Club

Remember that brilliant 80’s movie with Molly Ringwald and Judd Nelson, The Breakfast Club? It featured a few ragamuffin teens who were dealing with some significant life issues. What I enjoyed about the movie is seeing how these teens grew in love and respect for each other through their vulnerability. Their vulnerability empowered them as individuals and brought them together as a close-knit group.

I recently found myself in my own breakfast club. My small group of students at John Brown University this past semester all seemed to have had an amazing and/or tragic past. Their stories were completely moving and inspiring. Some of these students should never have been able to recover from such severe family loss or career setbacks. I’ve heard many stories, but theirs may have set the bar.

I learned three valuable principles from these students that I thought I’d share with you.

1. Firm convictions keep them grounded and they remain faithful to their beliefs.
2. They stick to their fundamentals in life. They know their core values and they live them.
3. They never, never, never give up—always pursuing their dreams regardless of their circumstances.

These principles aren’t revolutionary, but they continue to reinforce the path to a successful recovery or rebound. And as we know from Bennis and Thomas’s book, Geeks & Geezers, the most extraordinary leaders, or champions, have overcome crucible experiences.

Thank you to Abbie, Charles, Chesney, Curtis, and Mike. You all are a tremendous blessing in my life and I’m thankful for our time together. We are The Breakfast Club.

Making it Personal Will Demand Sacrifice

A contributor to this blog, Bryan, reminded me today of something I know well, but don’t think about often enough. If I love something so much that it becomes a personal mission of mine, it will demand personal sacrifice.

Bryan left a lucrative career for the mission field. I left easy money for a “wrestle to the mat” in people development. My brother’s wife, Jayme sacrificed life balance (impossible) for her music career.

Seth Godin has an interesting read on how difficult it is to make great money doing something you love. I hope that’s not true. But this is for sure – doing what you love will demand greater sacrifice than playing it safe.

Tags: balance, career, champions, Godin, Leadership, life, mission, organizational, Sacrifice, Seth

The Enterprise of the Future

I must commend IBM on a couple of recent studies it published on the enterprise of the future and the DNA of Human Capital. This blog entry is specific to the report titled, the Enterprise of the Future.

IBM conducts a biannual study on what is on the horizon for organizations all over the world. In this recent study over 1,000 CEO’s worldwide were interviewed to better understand where they are taking their companies, what their challenges are and where they see the greatest opportunities. There was significant alignment amongst these CEO’s as to what the enterprise of the future looked like.

I’m pleased to say, the message is one of optimism. I’m proud of the message many of our business leaders are communicating and I feel these messages are spot on to progress through the challenges our world is facing.

According to this study, new individual success competencies are being formed – some of them are debunking several leadership heroes of the past. Our research is uncovering some of the same needs that are more in demand today than they were 10 years ago (leadership charisma, collaboration, disruptive business models).

Also, this study presents three things that have consistently been included in the top priorities for CEO’s across the globe over the past three years: People Skills, Socioeconomic Factors, & Environmental Issues. Organizational Champions is where all three of these drivers merge.

The study presents the Enterprise of the Future as being:

1. Hungry for change – The enterprise of the future doesn’t just respond to change, but rather shapes and leads change. These companies are very agile.
2. Innovative beyond customer imagination – The enterprise of the future allows innovation to happen throughout the entire supply chain. Internal experts collaborate and partner with external experts and customers to drive innovation, deliver sustainable results and create speed. These companies are fast.
3. Globally integrated – All of the knowledge is not owned by the enterprise of the future, but these companies are really, really good at finding and engaging experts around the world wherever they might be to help sustain the most competitive business models. These companies are connected.
4. Disruptive by nature – The enterprise of the future doesn’t just change and adapt. It makes bold moves, reinventing itself often. And not just itself, but the enterprise of the future helps reinvent their entire industry. – These companies change the game.
5. Genuine, not just generous – The enterprise of the future goes beyond philanthropy and compliance. It is genuinely interested in doing good AND being successful. The enterprise of the future knows how to build engaging and high performing cultures through their genuine concern and sense of mission. These companies are authentically good.

IBM’s CEO, Samuel Palmisano concludes his introductory letter for the study with this comment, “Those of you who are making the boldest plays – pursuing the most global, collaborative and disruptive business model innovation – are outperforming your peers.”

At SVI, we call these bold players, Organizational Champions. They are mavericks. Today, our world needs mavericks championing our organizations and communities.

Great job IBM in capturing these insights. They are very valuable.

When Did PayPal (and Facebook) Become Evil?

I have heard two stories lately that have really made me start to reconsider a company that I used to have very positive thoughts towards. On a recent Security Now podcast with Leo LaPorte and Steve Gibson Steve spent the better part of the show talking about an alarming trend. Paypal, on some of the links on its page, routes users through an ad service called Double Click and then back to its site without the user knowing it. You need to listen to the podcast for a full explanation as to why this is very, very disturbing, but the short version is, it allows for Double Click to place third-party cookies on your system. This is a problem because it allows a third-party, a website that you aren’t expressly visiting to track you as you move from site to site. PayPal is allowing this in a transparent way that doesn’t alert you as the user of the site that it is happening. This is quite disturbing and as of yet, PayPal hasn’t given any explanation as to why they are doing it. Evil.

Next, I just read on Seth Godin’s Blog about his recent experience with PayPal where they sent him on a galactic goose chase when they inadvertently flagged his account for suspicious activity. Seth wanted to rectify the situation because the recent activity was all on the up-and-up but couldn’t when he found it impossible to get a hold of someone with the power to fix the problem.

PayPal used to be a glowing example of a trustworthy site that endeared itself to its users. Now, there is story after story of PayPal plunging down a black hole of bad service and mistreatment of its customers. Bad show PayPal, it is time to shape up, or another service will come around and turn your world upside down. In this post-industrial world where service is your only point of differentiation, you are jeopardizing your future for some short-term gains.

Another good company gone bad story is brewing over at Facebook. Recently Facebook released its new plan for monetizing its growing market share in the social-networking world. Supposedly, their new service was an opt-in ad service where your purchasing habits were automatically put into your activity stream. In other words, when you bought something online, Facebook would tell your friends about it if you said it was ok. That is all fine and good if indeed it was an opt-in service, but according to today’s Buzz Out Loud Podcast, it has come to light that the service was opt-out by default. That meant that Facebook and its partners tracked your online purchasing habits without your express permission. This is a huge mistake.

Facebook is in an industry where they could be supplanted very easily if its users became disenchanted. There are a number of other social-networking sites out there that are simply waiting for the next grand exodus to happen. If you don’t believe that it could happen, its happened before. Friendster was the first uber-popular social-networking site. It was supplanted by Myspace who was in turn supplanted by Facebook.

Facebook is the current Web 2.0 darling, but if the winds change they could very well be tomorrows Myspace. I expected more. Hmmm, maybe that was a mistake.

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UPDATE:

Not 12 hours after this story was posted to this blog did this apology come from Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook.  Good on ya for doing the right thing!

We are still waiting to hear from PayPal.