ExecWatchSM High level information If you are having difficulty seeing this mail or images in it, you can view it in your Web browser. Volume 10, Issue 5      In This Issue:   Are you blind to the Truth?   An Innovation Needs Three Parents          Three sins against innovation   Your Office Chair is Killing You        What has four legs and hurts your employees every day?   How Dad’s Yelling Can Spawn [Your] Office Tyrant   From [Your] Blind Spots to Strategic Intelligence   The Physiology of Leadership        A laugh a minute helps you lead   13 Bankers versus One Professor   9 Ways to Make Your Business More Attractive to Investors   How to Communicate in a Crisis   3 Reasons to Fire a Prima Donna If you enjoy this newsletter, read more in our Archive and Explore more Topics and Events Are you blind to the Truth? Learn how to take off your own blinders. Seven strategies for ferreting out critical feedback you’re not getting. When the auto industry titans headed down to Washington on their private jets to ask for federal bailout funds in November 2008, it wasn’t lack of intelligence that led to the faux pas. "How smart do you have to be?" says Richard Tedlow, author of the forthcoming book, Denial: Why Business Leaders Fail to Look Facts in the Face - and what to Do About It, and professor of business management at the Harvard Business School. "I’m sure these people all scored very high on their SATs. It’s not a question of I.Q. It’s a question of being able to see the world from somebody else’s point of view, which is very hard to do when the whole world is conspiring to tell you what you want to hear." Turns out that’s true all over,... Read the article     Back to top An Innovation Needs Three Parents Communication is core to link all of these needs together. Three Sins Against Innovation Keep your "idea monkeys" happy and going in the right direction to get the most out of their expertise. To see a wonderful solution realized to the max, you need one parent for the insight, one for the idea, and one for communication. As you will remember, we are big fans of idea parenting. We believe the people who come up with a clever innovation idea should be the ones to shepherd it through the entire execution process and help introduce it into the marketplace. That way, the insight won’t get diluted along the way and we can make sure that the new product, service, or business model gets all the loving support it needs during development. And we are also big believers in drawing the... Read the article     Back to top Your Office Chair is Killing You New research on an old friend shows how it hurts your back and your health.    What has four legs and hurts your employees every day? Here are a few tip on How to work around your chair. Meet public enemy No. 1 in today’s workplace. If you’re reading this article sitting down-the position we all hold more than any other, for an average of 8.9 hours a day-stop and take stock of how your body feels. Is there an ache in your lower back? A light numbness in your rear and lower thigh? Are you feeling a little down? These symptoms are all normal, and they’re not good. They may well be caused by doing precisely what you’re doing-sitting. New research in the diverse fields of epidemiology, molecular biology, biomechanics, and physiology is converging toward a startling conclusion:... Read the article     Back to top How Dad’s Yelling Can Spawn [Your] Office Tyrant You are a product of your childhood, but you do not need to stay that way... Lars Dalgaard used to act like a jerk at work. As a young manager rising through the ranks years ago at a consumer-products company, he was so brutally blunt with subordinates that a coach pulled him aside and told him to be more considerate, says Mr. Dalgaard, founder and chief executive of SuccessFactors, a San Mateo, Calif.-based software company. He has since realized that an old family pattern was at work, he says. His father was so tough and blunt with him when he was small that he was behaving the same way with others, trying to be "the hero CEO, the Rambo" who ignored people’s feelings. Now that he is conscious of the problem, he says he has changed his ways. He has even instituted a "no-jerks" policy at his company, banning similar behavior by others. We have all worked with at least one office pain in the neck, someone whose... Read the article     Back to top From [Your] Blind Spots to Strategic Intelligence We all have blind spots, but here is how you can expose yours... Nothing breeds success like success, at least according to the old proverb. However, this is not always the case when it comes to business growth. Many organizations, from Polaroid to Sony, have become victims of their own success: they achieved enormous growth by introducing new products - the Polaroid camera, the Sony Walkman - but as the marketplace matured this growth slowed and they were left looking for alternative paths. Few companies can sustain product growth for more than a couple of years. As this slows, many turn instead to acquisitions. This is a risky strategy as 50-65 percent of acquisitions actually destroy value - just look at what happened with AOL and Time Warner. Instead, organizations which want to maintain business growth over longer periods of time need to extend their thinking to include services, solutions or families of products. To get this right, they must start using "strategic intelligence" - a coordinated combination of research,... Read the article     Back to top                   The Physiology of Leadership Maybe you were born with it, but maybe not. You can develop it!    A laugh a minute helps you lead Express your confidence through laughter. Unlocking the brain chemistry of learning new skills. I was excited as soon as I saw the title of Daniel Coyle’s book, The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How (Bantam, 256 pp., $25). In my own first book, Decide to Lead, I put forward the idea that leadership is not a trait you’re born with but a skill you build, through a series of decisions you make as you respond to defining moments in your life. I based Decide to Lead on my research into the lives of some 100 great leaders in history. Coyle goes further, providing a scientific basis for the concept. He built The Talent Code on scientific discoveries involving... Read the article     Back to top 13 Bankers versus One Professor The politics surrounding 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown, by Simon Johnson. The author of a new book on financial reform makes a case for breaking up the nation’s largest banks. "This is about power and control and who decides your future," Simon Johnson warned for at least the second time on Friday. He had just returned to the campus of MIT’s Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, Massachusetts, having been in New York hours earlier to deliver a similar message on The Today Show. Both appearances were part of an intensive launch of his latest book, 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown, co-authored with former McKinsey consultant James Kwak. The "13 bankers" of the book’s title refers to the financial-industry luminaries who were summoned to the White House on March 27, 2009, in a mostly futile effort to enlist their help in solving the very economic crisis they had been so instrumental, in Johnson’s view, in creating. "We’re all in this together," President Obama told the assembled bankers. The statement was more apt than Obama intended, Johnson contends. Wall Street bankers have become... Read the article     Back to top 9 Ways to Make Your Business More Attractive to Investors So you are ready to grow? Know what you are getting into and need to do it right. A private equity investor outlines how an entrepreneur can position his or her business to attract potential backers. The decision to bring outside investors into your company will be one of the most important decisions of your life. Raising money through angel investors, private equity, or venture capital can put you on a path to great expansion and market share. Against that, you must weigh the loss of control you will incur, and the increase in oversight you will most certainly experience. Still, for many companies-particularly those with serious growth ambitions-outside funding is a necessary precondition for success. So how can you prepare your business so that it will be attractive to potentail investors? Here are 9 suggestions:... Read the article     Back to top How to Communicate in a Crisis Basic management plans can improve any crisis, and help you recover from a potential tragedy. A guide to emerging with reputation intact after a crisis threatens your company. Most business owners behave suspiciously like ostriches when it comes to the topic of crisis planning. Either they think nothing bad will ever happen to (or around) their business or they assume that whatever the crisis is, it will be so unexpected that planning won’t do much good. Wrong! Particularly in today’s 24/7 world of communications, where Twitter means that you might find out about a problem FROM your customers or clients, being prepared to address a challenge quickly in a crisis is the key to maintaining trust. And though technology means that the ways you can communicate will continue to change, there are some hard and fast rules about communicating in a crisis that will always hold true... Read the article     Back to top 3 Reasons to Fire a Prima Donna You will always get more from your team than you will from one person who shuts down your team. If you’re a leader who employs a prima donna (one who produces great results but alienates everyone), what should you do? It’s simple. Bite the bullet and fire that person. Here are three reasons why you should:... Read the article     Back to top                   Forward to a Friend: Do you have a friend that would like to receive ExecWatchsm? 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