Jason Seiden

Hi, Corporate Leaders. You have a problem. A big problem. It’s called society, and if you don’t think you can or should do anything about it, boy are you in for a rude awakening. Let me break it down for you:

We elect, and then re-elect, a cocaine using, boozing, mediocre-at-best-student as President of the United States. (I’m so glad your taxes went down. I hope it was worth it.)
We have a plagiarist with no real-world experience except as a Senator as our candidate for Vice President. (Well, OK, so much for change.)
We glue ourselves to wannabes for years while letting people with talent struggle. (At least you were able to convert those eyeballs into product purchases.)
We kick kids out of Little League for being too good. (At least your little boy won’t have to know the crushing, devastating pain of—say it ain’t so!—a strike out.)

I don’t know how to say this any other way, folks, but when we prize mediocrity, when we elevate the “values” of “fairness” and “niceness” above “quality” and “character,” we guarantee one thing: failure.

When we can’t win, we can only lose.

And just so that I am totally, completely clear here: if you have voted for Bush, like Biden, have promoted American Idol, or think side with the League against Jericho, then you have had a hand in creating this losing mentality. Further clarity: even if you didn’t do anything to create the losing mentality, if you run a business and have been impacted by it but haven’t done anything to fix it, then you are complicit.

Now, I know you’re not a loser. It’s not how you see yourself, it’s not how I see you. It’s not who we are. But losering is exactly what we’re doing right now—either actively or passively—and we need to do something about it. Three suggestions:

1. Push for more flexible immigration policies, immediately. What’s this got to do with wanting to win? Simple: America needs to reclaim its winning attitude, and—incredibly—as the world’s melting pot, we have the ability to import it. Sooner rather than later, we need to fill our companies with workers who prize success over mediocrity, active choice over laziness, self-sacrifice over “balance.” The fact that we can import dedication, passion, and loyalty is a gift we should never turn our backs on. Get in front of your Congressman—call him/her if you know him/her, write a letter, send an email. We need immigration reform and we need it FAST. We need to get people in this country who have the skills, the desire, and the ethic to get the job done. And if they leave after a few years? Who cares! If we’re not enticing people to stay with better options, better opportunities, better promise, then shame on us, we’re not working hard enough! Reactionaries who pretend that closed borders are the solution to the plight of the American worker, despite noble intentions, cripple our nation’s ability to compete. We need more immigration, not less. If we do everything right but also close our borders, our businesses will not be able to meet their commitments and our economy will shrink as a result.
2. Education reform. Long term, education is the only thing that ensures sustainable success. Ignorance may be bliss, but the cost of it is stratospheric. Worse, the price of ignorance grows higher over time, as ignorance simultaneously begets worsening problems and fewer options for solving them. (Climate change, anyone?) We need to be careful here: ignorance can be dressed up quite eruditely, and often is. So let me be plain: by education, I don’t mean rote memorization of factoids spewed out by unchecked sources, vocational training masquerading as true teaching, or any doctrine that discourages questions (yep, including religious doctrine); by education, I mean the development of the capacity for critical and original thought, the inculcation of a love for learning, and a respect for difference of opinion. Education does not mean preparing for a test or manufacturing a GPA! It means exploring the arts, the sciences, history, and language, and making connections across disciplines. It means wondering, hypothesizing, testing, concluding, and wondering anew. It means researching and applying. It means reading. And, though we seem to have forgotten this, it means struggling to do for ourselves tomorrow that which we cannot do unaided today. So what can you do specifically to reform education? If you have kids, start by teaching them to earn their grades rather than argue for them. If you don’t have kids, find a way to tutor someone in your neighborhood; you’re smarter than you think. Or start a book club. Or just turn off the damn TV for a night. Or stop by the local elementary school and buy a computer for the third grade class.
3. Health policy reform. Holy crap, how has this not happened yet? Is there a company out there that hasn’t been hit hard by the soft costs of employees who are sick or tending for family members who are? My goodness! Kudos to the CDC for moving toward a more preventative model… now let’s get a process in place that lets me know what the hell I’m eating so I can actually act on the CDC’s advice. Can we start by asking the government to re-establish an FDA that’s not beholden to industry for the funding of key studies, and not beholden to a political party for money, either? We’ve got great companies in the food and pharma industries doing great things… maybe we should make sure that their interests, consumers’ interests, and the overseeing body’s interests are aligned, so we can focus on those great things and not the misalignments in the system? I think that sounds like a good idea, what about you?

There are countless issues facing businesses today. Every once in awhile, it helps to step back and put them into a broader context… and when I look at our ability to think strategically, follow direction, handle ambiguity, and do all the things we expect strong employees to do, I keep coming back to the fact that the context in which we live, at the moment, doesn’t allow for these skills to manifest.

It’s going to be a grind; there are many issues entangled with these two, from wage rates to taxes to countless execution challenges. It’s going to take awhile. Nonetheless, we need to address the core. Now.

I had a terrific conversation yesterday with Tom Riley, a former big company guy who now heads up Business Development for a hungry, fun, and smart online design/strategy shop called Closerlook. Tom’s a sharp guy with keen perspective on corporate life.

One the thing from our talk really stood out: it was a comment Tom made in describing big company decision-making: “I couldn’t get a yes, and I couldn’t get a no.”

That an organization wouldn’t want to take the risk on a revenue-generating opportunity is not a news flash; at a personal level, for the decision makers, the dangers of making a mistake are often far greater than the upside of a win. In one poignant example, Tom told me how he had once been asked to reframe a revenue-generating proposal as a safer-sounding, cost-saving initiative. We laughed about how, when weighing his project against others that “guarantee” cost savings, executives had even asked him if he could “guarantee” his results, too. (Guarantee sales? Wouldn’t that be nice!)

It was the story about how an executive committee refused to kill a proposal for six months, after letting it languish, unapproved, for 16 months, that really got me. Turns out, the problem wasn’t with “approval,” it was with “commitment.” Saying no would have closed doors and could have created political risk—no one wanted to put themselves in a position to be painted as the person to kill the golden goose.

And so it was, a major company let a proposal sit for nearly two years, unapproved, unkilled.

If you read this and find it appalling, unethical, and terrible, relax. It is what it is, and “fixing” the human condition is beyond your scope. Accept it, and move on.
If you read this and don’t understand the inherent problem, THE PROBLEM IS YOU. Just like how the government puts fluoride in our water, corporations put perks into your life, and you never noticed your growing addition, did you? That’s the thing about growing numb: you don’t feel it happening. It’s easy to miss the slide into becoming one of those overfed, puffy-looking teddy bears sitting up in first class, completely indistinguishable from one another, basically serving as human in-baskets who hold ideas for awhile until other people decide to take one and do something with it. Yet there you are, in seat 1A. You, like Tom’s proposal, are neither alive nor fully dead… my guess is that you have a great golf game, a secret fascination for the gizmos in SkyMall that promise to make your life even easier, and almost no idea who your kids are.
If you read this and wonder how to break through this kind of culture, it’s time for a little group therapy, because you don’t. Decision making cultures like this start at the top. They are a function of the people in the highest jobs, and no amount of structural changes, re-organizations, or compensation plan tweaks can change anything unless the people at the top have the willpower to bind themselves to an arbitrary set of outcome and process goals. Short of accountable leadership, nearly every penny of OD spend you make will merely cause the pieces on the same game board to shift around, without changing anything.

Polls shows McCain having erased Obama’s lead now that the Democrat has chosen Senator Biden as his running mate… to me, it seems that people are sensing something. From the perspective of someone who reads people during behavioral interviews, here’s what I’m seeing when I look at Obama:

Issue: Economy
Says: Break from the Reps; fix the issues
Does: Avoids the tough messages on the tough issues (taxes vs. Soc Sec!); in short, panders to a known audience by towing a party line.

Issue: Politics
Says: Change!
Does: Picks a long term, part-of-the-machine Dem as his running mate.

Issue: Social issues
Says: Focus on them and fix them!
Does: Makes teachers’ jobs even more difficult by picking a running mate with a proven charge of plagiarism against him. (Good luck telling students that plagiarism is a capital offense now, Professor!)

Issue: Character
Says: Change—vote for someone who has some!
Does: Obama is a first term Senator running for President. Whatever else he’s got going for him, one thing he is not short of is ambition!

Issue: Energy
Says: Break from the Reps; fix the issues
Does: Avoids the tough message on the tough issues; in short, panders to a known audience by towing a party line. (Wait… I’m having deja vu…)

Issue: Foreign relations
Says: Get tough—invade Pakistan if need be! (BTW, don’t worry… Bush has now already done that)
Does: Increasingly softens stance over time

Look, I’m a leadership guy… is it too much to ask the LEADER OF THE FREE WORLD be someone I can hold out as an example of what to do, rather than someone I use an example from my other list?

Is it too much to ask that my President be “more perfect”, that he (or she!) take the job’s responsibilities seriously, and that he (or she!) not require an entrenched political spin machine for support?

You know who I think would make a good President of the United States? I have a client—I’ll call him Isaac—who would be fantastic. He’s about as sharp as anyone you’d want to meet, he has an incredible aptitude for both strategy and detail, he works like a dog, is dedicated to the success of the organization he represents, believes in his people, giving the good ones opportunity and getting the bad ones into places they can be successful—inside the company or otherwise, he demonstrates an incredible learning orientation, complete with the ability to set his ego aside to take criticism, and he goes and gets outside, expert counsel in areas where he himself is not as strong. He’s a little rough at the edges, but he has learned to gauge when he’s in a funk and works through a few, trusted others when that’s the case so as not to scare off his folks.

Why won’t he ever be president? Because his faults make him unelectable: he’s not telegenic (he’s more interested in doing the job than in getting it), he lacks the kind of charisma that the spotlight requires, and he hasn’t built the right network to get himself noticed by people in power.

Which is too bad, because I’m really struggling with the upcoming election. Sometimes, like today, I wish I weren’t in the leadership business… I wonder if this whole thing would be easier if I just had my pet issue, could love/hate the candidates based on their position relative to my one issue, and then go about my business as usual.

3 comments made yesterday were caught by my spam filter and, despite my attempt to de-spam them, have disappeared into spamland with 13 other messages about auto insurance. One was a well written critique of my recent post about CNN and the Founding Fathers, and 2 were very nice messages about the blog in general. The critique took me to task a bit for laying off during the post, saying basically that I wasn’t up to my usual standards of brutal honesty. In a nutshell, the reader caught onto the fact that I was ducking any religious or political stance and sort of wondered how that could be, given the subject. The reader did afford me one saving grace, namely my call for education reform as the answer to what ails us.

I hear you, and I agree. The post was lazy. For anyone who wonders where I stand on the political and religious issues of the day, please allow me to refer you to this post and this one from a year ago… near as I can tell, not much has changed.

And as for my true feelings about CNN’s poll, frankly, I don’t think it matters. We are a nation of issue voters, and trying to anticipate the outcome of an election based on how American’s feel about some larger trend misses the point. At the ballot box, we tend to vote according to our feelings on one or more of the following:

1. Who will keep the cost of living down (for many this means wages; for some this means pro-business policies; for everyone this means lower taxes)
2. Who will nominate Supreme Court Justices we like
3. Who makes the more credible promise that our children might get hurt (this is where education loses: in the short run, police and prisons seem to provide more security, even though education provides the greatest long-term security for everyone)
4. Who looks and sounds more Presidential

Only if our primary issue is stacking the Supreme Court do issues like religion matter; everywhere else, such issues are a smoke screen… i.e., religious groups will want more political power if it means more government contracts, but then they’ll want less when they start receiving the scrutiny and audits that come with those contracts. And honestly, I don’t think most American’s are sharp enough to understand the importance of America’s independent judiciary; I think most people see the courts as one more thing that politicians bicker about that doesn’t impact them in any meaningful way. (Sorry folks, I may be an optimist, but I’m also a realist.)

The nice comments, by the way, alerted me to the fact that a few more people are now picking up my RSS feed, which is fantastic. Welcome aboard!

I have no way of recalling those comments… but now you know what got said, albeit in digest form. If anyone can suggest an alternative to ASKIMET I’m all ears, and if you wrote the posts I’m talking about and still have a copy, fire it over and I’ll get it up to the site.

CNN reports tonight on a survey done related to people’s opinions about the separation of church and state. A survey. 219 years after the ratification of the Constitution. In the midst of a “War on Terror” that’s being fought against theocracies. And it’s close: we’re still split almost 50/50 on whether the church should have a political voice.

How is it possible that we are bombarded daily with news about how foreign governments in the Middle East and in Asia (think Pakistan) struggle to control legitimized religious factions, yet we are barely holding them at bay in our own country?

Don’t answer that, it’s rhetorical; the answer is that people have a darn good knack at believing—strenuously—whatever happens to be in their personal best interest, regardless of what’s best for “people overall.”

I hear people complain all day about corporate politics, but I gotta tell ya, what I see in business ain’t nuthin’ compared to the political land grab we tolerate in our governing body day in and day out. If you’re having trouble dealing with ambiguity, it’s likely because you’re still a bit too idealistic in your belief that people will do what they “should” do, as opposed to “what’s good for them.”

The human condition simply isn’t magnanimous.

John Adams had it right when he included a line in the Massachusetts constitution about government’s responsibility to educate the people. Because until education—real education, the kind administered by super-qualified, highly-motivated, and appropriately compensated teachers, as opposed to the fakey kind education that is supposedly measured by a series of standardized tests—becomes a priority, we are destined to struggle with issues we have no business debating in the first place; the only answer to our inherently self-interested ways is to be versed in history. History gives us a chance to do what the Whopper does in War Games: play through all the scenarios for ourselves so we can see the true consequences of our actions… when we try to project into the future, our self-interest blinds us and skews our perspective. Only by looking backward do we seem to learn how to expand our perspective.

Want a better life? Read a book.

Want a better world? Read a book about history.