Talking Story with Say Leadership Coaching

Money isn’t evil

...We can learn from our mistakes (SA Link)

Preface: Welcome to Sunday Koa Kākou. Sunday is the day I answer questions you send to me. If you have a question connected to management and leadership, leave a comment here, or email me. 

From the Say “Alaka‘i” mailbox:

I’m ready to put all my blog reading on hold: I know you try to keep us in the positives versus the negatives, but I get very frustrated when I read articles by you and other business coaches these days, for all I can focus on is making money and keeping it. I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared about being able to make a living than I am right now. The prospects are so terrible and my savings have run out. It all seems completely out of my control. Your advice about better management and leadership practices may be great when there’s money in the bank, but until then, I can’t be bothered with reading about what I cannot work on. That old saying that money is the root of all evil is so true, isn’t it.

This wasn’t exactly a question, but it was a heartfelt frustration that I felt compelled to answer both privately and here on the blog, for I am fully aware that times are tough, and I suspect many people have similar feelings.

Believe me, I share your concern. I will openly admit to all of you that 2009 will be a year I will struggle to keep my own business alive and well too; to do so, I must reinvent it a bit, keeping what works and discarding what doesn’t, replacing those discards with newly promising strategies, and that’s exactly what I’m doing. The Hawaiian value I call on most right now is Ho‘omau, that of persistence and perseverance, seeking to perpetuate the good in my life, and continually reminding myself that adversity can make me stronger, wiser, better. It’s an energy-creating self-talk I cannot allow to falter. Neither can you.

“I don't care how hard this period is. You have to have the combination of believing that you will prevail, that you will get out of this, but also not be the Pollyanna who ignores the brutal facts. You have to say that we will be in this for a long time and we will turn this into a defining event, a big catalyst to make ourselves a much stronger enterprise. Our characters are being forged in a burning, searing crucible.” —Jim Collins, in an interview with Jennifer Reingold

Ho‘ohana: Shift intention to where attention is

I agree that you must focus on the basics of “making a [good] living” (the value of ‘Imi ola, and seeking your best possible life) before you work on things that are the greater pursuits of legacy-focused work that is ‘affordable’ when times are better for you. Matching up your Ho‘ohana (intention with worthwhile work) to wherever your attentions doggedly must remain is usually a wise strategy. If you need more money, you need more money; that’s the fact of life your intentions must be set toward improving in your favor.

However believing that “money is evil” isn’t going to be very harmonious with that intention to make more of it. That’s like trying to make a nightmare come true instead of a dream. You want every one of your pursuits to be a noble effort you believe in. Your need for more money (and our need for money as a society), isn’t going away, so turn money into your dream enabler instead of your nightmare creator. Money by itself is neither evil nor saintly, but you are.

Money is simply currency. Any “evil” that may be associated with it has to do with bad behavior using money in an ill-conceived, uneducated or unfortunate way. When the behavior improves —with philanthropy for example, and with social entrepreneurship, so does the reputation of money as the tool which enables those more admirable behaviors. Then we give money a different name; donations, funding, or venture capital, but it still is money for good versus money for not so good.

What we are all being reminded of right now, both as individuals and as businesses, is that “times are better” when we have a substantial contingency fund that we have ready access to when a storm rages. That may be our first lesson in financial literacy (#2 here: The Top 7 Business Themes on my 2009 Wish List).

Being ‘broke’ is a mistake, not a failure

I think the biggest mistake we make with money is failing to become better educated with using it. The good news is that correcting that mistake is not that difficult. We simply need to redirect our attentions (and intention) with doing so, i.e. with becoming more financially literate.

Money is our basic transactional currency. We all need it, and we all need to be sure we have enough of a contingency fund available (an emergency fund) when circumstances in our world spin out of our control. A contingency fund finances our basic living requirements when everything else goes haywire.

If your savings have run out, you simply made the mistake of not having a contingency fund in addition to your savings (or one which was large enough). And you are not alone: Many of us are getting quite a reality check with which of the two is ultimately more important (contingency or savings) and which must take first priority, and by how much of a margin. We are learning that non-liquid assets do not readily convert into cash flow. We are learning that some conditions we once thought of as ‘fixed’ can be very volatile, and actually are ‘variables.’ We are learning several financial lessons that the present recession has pulled from back burner to front.

Log your lessons learned in precise measurements that will give you the structure for a new personal financial game plan. Then, articulate them more positively, by turning them into the new goals of your intentions. Correct your past mistakes, and make your goals dreamy.

Learn with a good teacher

I encourage you to seek the help you may need with learning the lessons you must now learn. Great teachers and coaches hold you accountable and shorten learning curves. And I am not implying you must hire someone: You aren’t alone in relearning a newly emerging financial literacy for these times; we’re all doing it. Team up with those who have similar learning goals, and seek those willing to teach you and help you learn what they know, as you do the same for them: Collaborate; barter your knowledge.

And yes, if my blog is not the one giving you the most answers right now, read the ones which are: Match up your attentions to your new intention. Get offline for a little while so you can better focus: Redirect your monthly internet payment into your new contingency fund goal, and read the coaching of financial authors available at your library or local bookstore.

Financial Literacy Has Never Been More Timely

Have a meeting coming up and need to fill a hole in the agenda?

Bored with the normal fluff around the water cooler or when escaping to the coffee place down the street?

Thinking about turning the television off tonight in favor of some meaty discussions around the dinner table?

Bring up financial literacy in all its timely, hitting-your-pocket relevance. From Wall Street to fuel prices, from tax relief plans by presidential candidates to your 401k risk assessment, and in thinking about how many readily available greenbacks to have in your mattress over the coming winter, broaching the subject is easy.

I’m hoping you’re talking about it and not just watching from the sidelines, because if there is one bright side to the mess of our U.S. economy right now it is this: There is a ton of learning to be had. To not take advantage of this grand classroom now called Life in the U.S.A. wherever you may live and be in business is a lost opportunity.

Just read this, following an Anderson Cooper tweet-feed in Twitter:

Commentary: Blame boards of directors for financial mess

‘Blame’ is one of those words which grates on me, and in fact, I responded on Twitter,

@andersoncooper "blame" such a futile word. Perhaps "learn from" or even, "seek to be better than" those who have erred so dangerously.

However I largely agree with these assertions by author Nell Minnow:

“Failure this broad and deep takes a village, and regulators, lawyers, compensation consultants, auditors, executives, shareholders, and the press all played a part. But the people who are most responsible for the massive meltdowns of these institutions are the boards of directors.”

“Their sole responsibility is to act as fiduciaries for the shareholders in managing risk. They not only failed to perform this task but indeed, in their approval of outrageous pay plans with perverse incentives, they all but guaranteed the current disaster.”

“I am a capitalist. I love it when executives earn boatloads of money. But it infuriates me when they get it without earning it.”

Tiananmen on Flickr by ciro@tokyo

Let’s take it further:

Why shouldn’t scores more people be taking some small degree of responsibility with this?

It is my belief that a business model of any kind is healthiest when every single person who is a stakeholder in that business understands how that model works, and thus, when it doesn’t work. A business is healthier when red flags are at the ready in everyone’s pocket, and by the time they make it half-mast there is collaborative responsiveness as people work together to get those green flags up instead. Alternatives and solutions begin to take root everywhere as the seeds of new ideas and evolutionary innovation get sown. Business models —even ones that are working just fine, should not be fixed or stagnant; that’s called mediocrity, and resting on your laurels. Both are unacceptable.

In my career, I had learned the hard way that assuming the “guys in the office” or “people who get paid the big bucks” know what they are doing is a very dangerous assumption (Read more at Blind Faith is not part of Unconditional Aloha in an ‘Ohana in Business). They might, but why shouldn’t you know too, whatever your role in an organization?

Why shouldn’t you be more inquisitive, know how all the work that you and others do is connected, and how ultimately it keeps a business thriving in the most profitably healthy way?

There are far too many organizations where people don’t speak up often enough because they feel they cannot intelligently carry their part of the conversation. I HATE seeing that in play in workplace cultures, and it is my stance that managers are the ones responsible for brokering the conversations constantly. Great managers introduce the meaty topics of financial literacy consistently as practice, and they hand out those red flags the want at the ready in everyone’s pocket.

Business takes a whole village, and a highly conversational one. If you are not now having the conversations conducive to continually ramping up the level of financial literacy in your workplace, for goodness sake, start today.

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Take 5 with this Related Reading:

1. There’s Mellow Mālama Maintenance in Math (at MWA Coaching)
2. The Role of the Manager in Managing with Aloha: The case for a better way to work. (at MWA Coaching)
3. Book Review: The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (here on Talking Story)
4. For the BEST 15 minutes in the workday, Huddle. Reinvent the concept of meeting.  (here on Talking Story)
5. Is Forever a good business strategy? (here on Talking Story)

Category page: Financial Literacy index.

Talk story with the Ho‘ohana Community:

1. Reflections on a Sinking Economy by Brad Shorr
2. How to Survive When Your Company's Ship Sinks  by Anita Bruzzese
3. Faith And The Bankrupt Leader by Chris Bailey

Is Forever a good business strategy?

It is incredible to me that I have paid a different rate for mailing my Christmas cards in each of the past 3 years; 37¢ in 2005, 39¢ in 2006, 41¢ in 2007, and now it will be 42¢ in 2008.

The year I graduated from high school, it cost me 8¢ to mail out the thank you cards for the leis and gifts I had received. That's an increase of 525%

Now, there is the Forever stamp.

[The History of Postage Rates in the U.S.]

WASHINGTON, D.C. — You've heard about it. You've read about it. Now see it for the first time. It's the Postal Service's newest consumer innovation — the Forever stamp. The stamp was previewed today at the National Postal Forum, the premier trade show for advertising, marketing and mailing executives. Featuring the Liberty Bell image and the word "forever," the stamp will be good for mailing one-ounce First-Class letters anytime in the future — regardless of price changes. The Forever stamp goes on sale April 12 at 41 cents. Customers can begin using the stamp when postage changes May 14.

"Who said nothing lasts forever?" remarked Postmaster General and Chief Executive Officer John E. Potter in unveiling the image here at the National Postal Forum. "The Forever stamp is a consumer innovation guaranteed to deliver unprecedented convenience and value to our customers. It's good forever."

Prices change again on May 14th:

Once prices change May 14, the Forever stamp will remain on sale at the 41-cent First-Class one-ounce letter price until the next price change. The Forever stamp will then be available at the new price.

What do you think about banking your money this way with the United States Postal Service? Notice that even if you buy them now, you can't use them until the price goes up on May 14th.

Is Forever a good business strategy?

Does it make sense to you as a customer?

What does this have to do with Talking Story?

When you have adopted the MWA 'Ohana in Business philosophy, you treat everyone associated with your company as business partners. Moves like this outside your company are a terrific way to begin conversations on financial literacy in business within your company. They are current topics and they affect virtually everyone, thus they are great conversation starters.

The more you can help people understand business strategy in general, and as similar or different from your own, the more you will deepen their understanding of — and further learning curiosity with — your own business plan and business model. The more curiosity people have, the more you will stimulate their ideas and their initiative — and let them know you welcome them.

Financial literacy then becomes less intimidating, and conversely, less condescending when it is part of the conversation every time financial news breaks.

So what do you think? Shall we start the conversation here?

Is Forever a good business strategy?

Does it make sense to you as a customer?

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From the Talking Story archives: What does ‘financial literacy’ mean to you?

Some other Let’s Talk Story postings you can choose from!

• Being a “Leader” is what managers do too
• When you have a hard time Choosing, do you know Why?
• Talk Story about Stopping: 5 Reasons to Kill Auto-Pilot
• Talk Story about your Values with Pictures

Why “management” has a bad rep

This is a true story; so true it hurts when you’re a management coach like me.

I stopped at the post office to buy Christmas stamps this morning, asking for eleven of their books of 20 stamps. I bought two different designs, and watched as the woman helping me fanned them out to scan them into her register one by one. Beep...beep...beep... eleven times.

I said to her, “too bad your system won’t allow you to just put in the quantity and scan them once” to which she replied, “oh it will, but we do it this way now because management says we need to show that we spend more time with our customers. We don’t want our hours cut back during the holidays.”

Huh?

She had an expression on her face of being so pleased with herself, not for a moment realizing she was freely admitting to me that her delay tactic was the best thing she could come up with. More service, actual service, was not her first choice, or apparently much of an option she’d thought about at all. Nor was she concerned with the line growing longer behind me. I was dumbfounded and didn’t know what to say.

No wonder the postage rates keep going up... and they are 41 cents; new image not in the budget either?

For a better way check out: Mea Ho‘okipa Live Their Aloha Every Day; a forum with the Ho‘ohana Community on hospitality and service.

From Corporate Life to Self-Employment

Knowing of my long history in corporate life, people will ask me if I’d ever go back to it should I be offered the corporate dream job again. The question will come up when I say that I came very close to having THE corporate dream job more than once in my career. I knew when I was in those situations, and I truly did enjoy them; I had learned a lot being Mz. Corporate Manager.

While I have no regrets, the quick answer is no.
I’ll never go back.

Today I realize that even THE corporate dream job has a long, long way to go before it can get close to the benefits I now enjoy being self-employed. Here’s why;

1. Working for myself means I work for my own reasons, defining my work completely in terms of what I consider my ho‘ohana to be. Life is too precious to do anything else.

2. I now understand what my ideas can potentially be worth. There is no question that whatever I write, whatever I create and produce is totally my intellectual property. Thus, I’ll always have it as an asset I can market.

3. In my particular situation I have no establishment or office hours; I work where my customer works, or with their brains (i.e. on the phone and virtually works just fine).

4. Because of number 3. I don’t really have the walk-in effect; I get to choose my customers after interviewing and “qualifying” them. I choose to work with people who are coachable yet who are smarter than me in some way (hence I’ll learn from them too), and who I will enjoy working with. To be perfectly blunt, I don’t work with unpleasant people.

5. Now that I’ve had this 4-year taste of it, I’ll never give up the freedom I now have to tweak my work schedule however I need to (and want to). My time belongs to me. The ironic thing is that I work more hours; the exceptionally cool thing is that it no longer feels like work.

6. The incentives are different. You are never as financially literate working for someone else as you are when you are self-employed, and that kind of intellectual currency is increasingly valuable in today’s world.

7. Similar to number 6, being self-employed equates to being self-sufficient. At first you think it’s more risky to work for profit versus paycheck, but you soon find out that counting on a paycheck is the riskiest thing you can do.

8. This one speaks to knowing myself; I thrive on being totally in charge. I got pretty far up the corporate ladder, yet like most “top” executives I ultimately answered to someone; a boss, an owner, a stakeholder. Today I answer to me.

9. I get more done. I have never before had the amount of self-discipline I have today, because I hold myself more accountable than any of my employers ever could. If I slack off, procrastinate, or try to justify anything I only fool myself. Again, today I answer to me.

Self-employment may not be for everyone, but it definitely has become MY only option. It honestly makes me feel smarter.

So why should you care about all of this? Because I’m hoping you’ll think about joining me sooner versus later. To me, smarter and happier people are not my competition; they add the qualities of enthusiasm and optimism to my world.

It’s not that I feel working for an employer is a bad thing. On the contrary, I think you should milk all the knowledge and benefits you can get out of it while you do it. However I do believe that the day will come that you’ll need a “second act” to life’s play because there is this inevitable thing which happens to all of us; it’s called aging. Age creeps up to deal us this cruel card called, not as employable as younger candidates.

UNLESS, you have something to offer that those younger candidates don’t: Intellectual property that buyers can only get from you. Go back to my list and read number 2. again as the single reason. The other ones are the icing on the cake.

For me, Managing with Aloha is my current number 2. Because of number 4. I know that there will be other things like Managing with Aloha in my future.

What is the intellectual property you are working on, banking it for your future?

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Related posts from the archives:

• What does Financial Literacy mean to you?
• An index on entrepreneurship: The Start-up Garden

On the Kūlia i ka nu‘u warpath: the Compensation Enemy

I have a wonderful client who I love working with.

This client has embraced Managing with Aloha with as big a bear hug as anyone can give it. Right now, Kūlia i ka nu‘u could be their middle name, for indeed, it has become a battle cry in their company. They currently joke with me that they are striving to be my poster children for MWA, so much so that when I visited them last week I walked into a room of leaders waiting for me with warpaint striped on their cheeks!

Yet recently I had a telephone conversation with one of them who was very discouraged, explaining to me that,

“It just doesn’t seem right to get people all charged up and excited about all the right things, asking them to Kūlia and strive, reaching higher and higher for excellence, when we just don’t pay them as well as they’d be paid if they left us to go work somewhere else.”

I agree, it’s not right.

The managers in this company are in a tough spot to be in. This is a company in turmoil because they feel they know what to do, they feel they know how to get from good to great, and they love the people they work with, yet they are struggling with retention. Unfilled vacancies are adding to the workload of those who valiantly carry the torch, and even though they know that managing with aloha is the right thing to do, it gets tougher and tougher to rally behind and pull off.

In this particular case, I have not pulled back from giving them the Kūlia i ka nu‘u message; we have redirected it to solving their issue with a poor compensation structure within the company. It’s a biggie, and it will take all the creativity and determination we can muster.

However that IS what Kūlia i ka nu‘u takes. Striving for excellence demands bucket loads of creativity and determination. In cases like this one, it also demands the bravery (there’s that word again) to simply not accept a wrong: Their compensation structure is very clearly broken.

When you manage with aloha, having a business model with imbalance in what you can afford to pay the people who work for you is not acceptable. Period.

If you cannot make the numbers work, you cannot make the business work in the best possible way, taking it from okay to good, and from good to great.

Managing with Aloha demands business models with aloha.

Take care of your people first and foremost: If you don’t, you cannot expect them to take care of your customers and the health of your business, and still sleep well at night feeling good about it.

“Catch a Rising Star”—yours

This morning, George Ambler, author of The Practice of Leadership (and someone in our Ho‘ohana Community you really should bookmark online) sent me into a management and leadership thinking frenzy with his pointer to an exceptional article written for Fortune magazine — you MUST read it, because I want you to get as fired up as I am right now.

Initially, George baited me with this question of his own:

Are you having powerful leadership experiences?

“Leadership experiences and one of the most important tools for leadership development. Are you consciously seeking out leadership experiences? Leadership experiences, are those that take you out your comfort zone, out of your everyday routine and cause you to embrace some risk. If you honestly evaluate your "leadership career", do you have ten years of leadership experience.......or do you have a one year leadership experience repeated ten times?”

In my opinion, everyone with a calling for great management can be a leader, and that includes you (or you probably wouldn’t be reading Talking Story to begin with).

My company is called Say Leadership Coaching, however my book, and the heart and soul of my business, is called Managing with Aloha. I say I’m a management coach. Why?

I am pretty bullish in my insistence that an emerging leader, that is, the kind of leader I want to see succeed, must understand what great management is.

Even if he or she can’t do it themselves, they have to recognize it so they can hire it, and empower it.

When they lead other managers they must insist upon only great management — they must demand it.

It is my strong, and yes stubborn, unwavering belief that the best leaders have the most management-empathy, and they understand their managers are the glue that holds everything in a business together.

Coaching great managers to be great leaders is easy.

Coaching poor managers to be great leaders is impossible.

Related to this, so insightfully by John Keane here, is that great managers thrive in, and continue to drive human-healthy processes and systems in an organizational culture. This kind of organizational culture is the second thing that the kind of leaders we need today must demand.

And no, demand is not too strong a word. This is too important.

Here is your assignment from this management>then>leadership coach, and if you want to be a great leader today, ignore it at your own peril:

Read George’s highlights here: What’s the State of your Leadership Practice? by George Ambler, author of The Practice of Leadership

Then, high-tail it here for the article George refers to: Catch a Rising Star by Geoffrey Colvin for Fortune via money.cnn.com

Then, let’s talk story. Let me hear from you. This Ho‘ohana Community of ours represents a wealth of knowledge; don’t just hold it in. Make your thoughts known.

For another clue to how critical I think it is we understand the implications of Colvin’s insights, take a look at all the categories below I’ve added this post to. I have also done a post this morning for the Blog Synergy on this subject, for I am hoping to stimulate more ideas on how we as thinking, blog-reading teams of passionate people can work on our practice of leadership, right here, right now.

I’ll be writing more on this for the MWA Jumpstart coaching program later: both George’s post and Colvin’s article deserve serious study.

How I love the work we do!

technorati tags: Alaka‘i, Leadership. for the Talking Story category links, click the ones in this post’s footer.

Learning to like the “B” Word

Oh how well I remember the drill, and how glad I am that I don’t have to do it any more.

Well, I should rephrase that, for I still do it, just not in a mega large company anymore following someone else’s rules.

It’s a much more meaningful process when you do it with your own money, and because you actually want to. I’ve gotten to be somewhat of a rebel over the years, and I like to do it by my own no rules approach, always stretching, always searching, always experimenting, always testing in a way that the metrics of it get to be more fun, more meaningful.

What am I talking about? The “B” word. Click over to my article on www.Lifehack.org today and find out … betcha anything you say, “oh, that B word.” 

Here’s a hint before you click … look at what category I put this post in. Todd is the one that got me started on this back on Monday.

What does ‘financial literacy’ mean to you?

In our talk story Friday, Tom Ehrenfeld mentioned how something really bothers him:

“…the creation of a new class of people who are in permanent debt. Between the relaxation of standards for credit card companies (which now charge usurious rates and an ever-escalating array of fees and penalties), the changes in bankruptcy laws, and the conversion of the debt counseling field from one of small local charitable agencies to virtual storefronts for for-profit hucksters, it’s bad. There are already alarming discrepancies in this country in the allocation of wealth, and the credit epidemic is eviscerating what’s left of the middle class. Obviously I believe in free markets and in enterprise, but not to the extent to which we’re producing debt peons.”

Well Tom is certainly not alone in his concern. This morning, I saw this headline in our Honolulu Advertiser, pulled from the Associated Press:

Experts see crisis in growing U.S. Debt
By journalist Robert Tanner

You owe $145,000. And the bill is rising every day.

That’s how much it would cost every American man, woman and child to pay the tab for the long-term promises the U.S. government has made to creditors, retirees, veterans and the poor.

And it’s not even taking into account credit card bills, mortgages — all the debt we’ve racked up personally. Savings? The average American puts away barely $1 of every $100 earned.

Our profligate ways at home are mirrored in Washington and in the global marketplace, where as a society we spend $1.9 billion more a day on imported clothes and cars and gadgets than the entire rest of the world spends on its goods and services.

Will your kids be able to deal with their money?

These articles were very distressing to me in my morning newspaper reads:

Star Bulletin: Education Dilemma.
PBN: Economic literacy: students know as little as their parents.

“Does money hold its value well in times of inflation? No, but 36 percent of Hawaii students answered “yes,” and 22 percent said they didn’t know, according to a survey by the University of Hawaii Department of Economics.

As reported to the attendees of the 2004 Hawaii Economic and Financial Literacy Conference in Waikiki yesterday:

521 students (at 19 public high schools from all seven school districts across Hawaii) were given 20 multiple-choice financial questions. The average student got 11 of the 20 questions right. The group score was 54 percent.”

Yikes!

A few years ago I picked up Robert Kiyosaki’s book Rich Dad Poor Dad at an airport newsstand, and it made a huge impact on me. Kiyosaki is not a fan of the financial education given—or not given—in our schools. Reading his book, I thought about the two teenagers I had at home, and I vowed that I would begin their financial education myself.

We started with simple things: I got them each their own checking account with a cash card to use while shopping, and opened savings accounts in which any future cash gifts would go. I made the first modest deposit in each account: I would double it when they each finished reading Rich Dad Poor Dad for themselves. (Not sure how bribery rates in good parenting, but in this case it did the trick.) That Christmas, one of their gifts was their own brokerage account in the USAA First Start Program: through-out the year we’d make small monthly deposits to UTMA Mutual Funds on their behalf. We’d match their own voluntary contributions. Quarterly we’d talk about their statements, and in teaching them I had to get more intelligent about it myself.

This past year, we took a huge step with my daughter’s financial education: she went through the entire real estate purchase process with me for an O‘ahu condominium, looking up her own credit history we thankfully had established those years prior, evaluating the mortgage options we had available, and earning the right to put her name alongside mine on the deed. She has a monthly budget designed to pay herself (her equity) first, as she juggles college with a job and her living expenses.

I’m sharing my story with you to encourage you: the best and easiest way to prepare your kids is to let them in on your life. Create a family budget and explain it, stick to it and evaluate it on a regular basis. Refinancing? Starting a Christmas savings plan? Planning a 401k rollover when you change jobs? Talk about these things at the dinner table.

Don’t wait for the schools to do the job you can do best.