August 26, 2009 by bgetch.

A large part of “Brand Obama” was the successful presentation of a person who was smart, serious but could also enjoy simple things like Easter Egg rolls, filling out an NCAA basketball bracket, eating hamburgers at “5 Guys”, even having a beer to diffuse a situation. However, this excerpt from a column by Foud Ajami in the Wall Street Journal which is gaining traction speaks of a “joyless” Barack Obama. Carter and Nixon — early on — presented themselves as fun and optimistic but then malaise and darker angels came on.

The failure of the Carter years was, in Reagan’s view, the failure of the man at the helm and the policies he had pursued at home and abroad. At no time had Ronald Reagan believed that the American covenant had failed, that America should apologize for itself in the world beyond its shores. There was no narcissism in Reagan. It was stirring that the man who headed into the sunset of his life would bid his country farewell by reminding it that its best days were yet to come.

In contrast, there is joylessness in Mr. Obama. He is a scold, the “Yes we can!” mantra is shallow, and at any rate, it is about the coming to power of a man, and a political class, invested in its own sense of smarts and wisdom, and its right to alter the social contract of the land. In this view, the country had lost its way and the new leader and the political class arrayed around him will bring it back to the right path.

Thus the moment of crisis would become an opportunity to push through a political economy of redistribution and a foreign policy of American penance. The independent voters were the first to break ranks. They hadn’t underwritten this fundamental change in the American polity when they cast their votes for Mr. Obama.

American democracy has never been democracy by plebiscite, a process by which a leader is anointed, then the populace steps out of the way, and the anointed one puts his political program in place. In the American tradition, the “mandate of heaven” is gained and lost every day and people talk back to their leaders. They are not held in thrall by them. The leaders are not infallible or a breed apart. That way is the Third World way, the way it plays out in Arab and Latin American politics.

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July 30, 2009 by bgetch.

By Pallavi Gogoi, USA TODAY
NEW YORK — Five years ago, Jamie Dimon and his three daughters picked up an RV in Wyoming and drove through Yellowstone, Idaho, Nevada and Yosemite, and finally into the Beverly Wilshire hotel in Los Angeles, where his wife was meeting them. Arriving at the wheel of an RV, unshaven and in shorts, he was waved to a stop by the guard, who told him he couldn’t park there.

“I got off and said, ‘You do valet parking here, don’t you?’ ” says a grinning Dimon, gleefully recounting the exasperated look on the face of the hotel guard. Little did the guard realize, but that scruffy hotel guest at the wheel of the RV would a few months later strike a deal to merge Bank One with JPMorgan Chase (JPM), a step on his way to being CEO of one of the oldest blue-chip financial institutions in New York. Read the rest of this entry »

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July 21, 2009 by bgetch.

HBR article on getting down to basics of what you believe from former Goldman Sachs CEO

It’s surprising how often business leaders fail to ask themselves: How frequently do I communicate a vision and priorities for my business? Would my employees, if asked, be able to articulate the vision and priorities? Many leaders have, on paper, a wealth of leadership talents: interpersonal, strategic, and analytic skills; a knack for team building; and certainly the ability to develop a vision. Unfortunately, in the press of day-to-day activities, they often don’t adequately communicate the vision to the organization, and in particular, they don’t convey it in a way that helps their people understand what they are supposed to be doing to drive the business. It is very difficult to lead people if they don’t have a firm grasp of where they’re heading and what’s expected of them.
This was the problem at a large Fortune 200 company that had decided to invest in its 1,000 top managers by having them attend an intensive, two-day management-training program, 100 at a time. Before each session, the participants went through a 360-degree nonevaluative review in which critical elements of their individual performance were ranked by ten of their subordinates. The company’s senior management looked at the results, focusing on the top five and bottom five traits for each group. Despite this being an extremely well-managed firm, the ability to articulate a vision ranked in the bottom five for almost every group. Managers at that company did articulate a vision, but the feedback from their subordinates strongly indicated that they were not communicating it frequently or clearly enough to meet their people’s tremendous hunger for guidance.
Employees want to know where the business is going and what they need to focus on. As the world changes, they want to know how the business vision and priorities might change along with it. While managers are taught to actively communicate, many either unintentionally undercommunicate or fail to articulate specific priorities that would give meaning to their vision. However often you think you discuss vision and strategy, you may not be doing it frequently enough or in sufficient detail to suit the needs of your people. Look at the CEO of an emerging biotechnology company, who was quite frustrated with what he saw as a lack of alignment within his top management team. He strongly believed that the company needed to do a substantial equity financing within the next 18 months, but his senior managers wanted to wait a few years until two or three of the company’s key drugs were further along in the FDA approval process. They preferred to tell their story to investors when the company was closer to generating revenue. When I asked him about the vision for the company, the CEO sheepishly realized that he had never actually written down a vision statement. He had a well-articulated tactical plan relating to each of the company’s specific product efforts but no fully formed vision that would give further context to these efforts. He decided to organize an off-site meeting for his senior management team to discuss and specifically articulate a vision for the company.

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July 9, 2009 by bgetch.