The Seven Deadly Sins of Leadership

Here is a piece about leadership “sins” as categorized by management/leadership guru Drucker.

The Sin of Pride

The Sin of Pride is almost always considered the most serious of the Seven Deadly Sins. Yet it seems so innocuous. My wife calls it “being full of oneself.” I believe feeling proud of what a leader has accomplished or is accomplishing is perfectly acceptable. The problem comes when one feels this pride to the extent that the leader believes himself so special that ordinary rules no longer apply to him. That’s where many leaders go awry.

The Sin of Lust

I once heard a retired leader of a large organization of almost a million members speak about his challenges of leading this organization. “One of the biggest problems,” he said, “was newly promoted senior executives. I may be exaggerating a little,” he continued. “But it seemed almost that as soon as we promoted a man to be a senior executive, he suddenly decided that he was God’s gift to women.”

This individual spoke at a time when almost all senior executives had been male. However, I do not think that one would find much difference with female executives. There is unfortunately a feeling among some leaders that they have “arrived” and are “entitled” to additional sexual gratification as some sort of fringe leadership benefit. In one online survey done by the White Stone Journal, The Deadly Sin of Lust was the most frequent of the Seven Deadly Sins self-reported as “my biggest failing.” So this sin is hardly uncommon. However, it can have very unfortunate consequences. In any workplace it creates jealousies, feelings of favoritism, a lack of trust, damages people and relationships and more.

The Sin of Greed

The Sin of Greed is a sin of excess. It frequently starts with power. Leaders have power, and unfortunately having power has a tendency to lead to corruption if the leader isn’t careful. This may start with the acceptance of small favors and grow into vacations, loans and worse. How do these things happen? A leader sees others with more than he has. Questions may be raised in the leader’s mind as to why others have so much more, yet (in the leader’s mind) are far less deserving. Maybe a small bribe is accepted. It may not even be seen as a bribe, just a favor between friends. If the leader allows himself to be seduced in this way, greed can take over. Unlike the movie, greed is never “good,” even as a motivator, and though Drucker analyzed and approved many motivations, greed was not one.

The Sin of Sloth

The Sin of Sloth has to do with an unwillingness to act. Sometimes this is due to laziness. More often it is an unwillingness to take on work that the leader considers is beneath him. I have many times seen leaders watching critical work that must be completed and for which they were also qualified to do. Yet they stood around “supervising” when they could have given real help to their subordinates and to the mission that they were responsible for accomplishing. In too many cases, good men and women fail because their leader failed to help or take action in other ways. Make no mistake about it, The Sin of Sloth leads to disaster. Leaders must be proactive and they must take action.

The Sin of Wrath

This sin has to do with uncontrolled anger. There is a time for anger in leadership when it serves a definite and useful purpose. As Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson taught us, you can take one minute to make a correction and include the words “I’m angry” and then tell the recipient why. Moreover, anger does have a useful function in that it can mobilize psychological and physical resources to do something about a problem.

However, leaders need to avoid repeated and uncontrolled anger because it can have negative impacts on their leadership. It can destroy morale, does not guarantee a lasting effect in correcting problems, and in effect requires surrendering anger as a tool for the times when expressing it is really useful and appropriate. Moreover when in an angry state, anger causes the leader a loss of self-monitoring capacity and the ability to observe objectively.

Drucker taught leaders to analyze their environment and to determine what actions that have already occurred mean for the future before taking action. Using anger as a single response to all leadership challenges prevents us from doing this analysis. It prevents the leader from making good decisions and may prevent the leader from taking the correct action appropriate to the situation. Actions taken during uncontrolled action are frequently in error and require additional work to undue the consequences of these mistakes later.

The Sin of Envy

With the Sin of Envy, the leader is envious of what is enjoyed by someone else. This may or may not be incorporated with greed. The sin usually leads the leader to make decisions and to take actions that will be to the disadvantage to the object of his envy. So a leader who falls victim to this sin may deny an earned promotion to a qualified subordinate, attempt to destroy another’s reputation or in other ways attempt to make himself feel better by lowering the situation of another. This is obviously harmful to this other individual, hurts the organization and is probably harmful to the leader who perpetrates these actions.

The Sin of Gluttony

Most think of food or drink with this sin, but for the leader it has a far more ominous connotation. The Sin of Gluttony was the one that most frustrated Drucker. Expensive food or drink is scarce. Therefore excessive consumption can be seen as a sign of status. But gluttony need not apply only to food.

Drucker knew how hard managers had to work to do their jobs as they needed to be done, and he had defended high salaries for top managers early in his career. However skyrocketing executive salaries caused him to drastically alter his opinion. Drucker said and wrote that executive salaries at the top had become clearly excessive and that the ratios of the compensation of American top managers to the lowest paid workers were the highest in the world. Moreover, this difference wasn’t slight, but differed by magnitudes. He said this was morally wrong. The ratio of average CEO compensation in the United States to average pay of a non-management employee in the United States hit a high in 2001 of 525 to 1. Drucker recommended a ratio of no more than 20 to 1.

The Sin of Gluttony was to be avoided for good leadership. Interestingly, Drucker drew a parallel of high executive salaries with the demands of unions for more and more benefits without an increase in productivity. He said we would pay a terrible price for these examples of gluttony and that “it is never pleasant to watch hogs gorge.” As I write these words, we are paying this price.

There are things that a leader must do, and things he must not. The Seven Deadly Sins are those that Drucker maintained that leaders must not do.

Common and important social media fail techniques

The current and foreseeable “big” thing, as seen from an Internet user’s perspective, is the social media. As for anything considered or perceived as fashionable, social media has its own caveats. Testimony to that are (some of  the) social media approaches illustrated below (see the full article here), which guarantee an eventual failure of any sustained endeavor, be it in personal or professional life and career.

Doing nothing ’cause you’re scared of what people will say. People are going to talk, with or without you. Wired)

Pretending to be somebody else. When is it ok to lie to a customer? (mumbrella)

Selling your product all day, everyday. Social Media is about capturing interest, not just sales. (The Next Web)

Failure to respond when asked a reasonable question. It’s a crime to have a presence yet ignore customers. My favourate is @VlineInform

Plagiarising bloggers content. Most bloggers are overtly happy with a mere hat tip. (Journalism.co.uk)

Not personalising your profile. People want to know who you are, what you’re about. (Webinknow)

Blocking access to Social Media in your workplace. For so many reasons Social Media can be an allie or enemy. (Chris Brogan)

Thinking people care about your product. Your product, probably boring. Find an interesting angle. (Emergence Marketing)

Calling your product green when your website isn’t. Many make big claims, few think about their power sucking web presence.

Not understanding how Social Media fits into your marketing mix. Hailed the death of print media… it’s not, it’s a communication tool. (The Oyster Project)

Relying too much on online research. There’s a wealth of info online, it may not all be valid. (Pigs Don’t Fly)

Failing to listen. Social isn’t always about talking, it’s just as much about listening. (Just Another PR)

Not recognizing that you are shooting at the moon…You’re going to fail, lots. Social requires commitment.

Thinking you can’t contribute to a community, just sponsor it. Enthusiasts are already coming together? Why not ask how you can get involved?

Thinking ‘news’ is the only thing that can be talked about online. There’s a plethora of opportunity on the social web. (Search Engine Land)

Saying something, just for the sake of it. There’s no rules to success, just be honest and interesting. (Online Marketing Banter)

Relying on strategic thinking alone. Social media is the worlds largest experiment – recognise you may need to fail to learn.

Using the exact same strategy and content across multiple networks. Love it, you update Facebook & Twitter with every new presser. (Search Engine Guide)

Not measuring / monitoring your activity. Yes it’s possible! (I.e. – Radian6, Buzz Metrics, Dialogix)

Trying to get as many followers as possible. Large unresponsive list = bad, smaller profitable base = good. (digitalOZ)

You treat Social Media as another advertising medium. It’s different. (MediaPost)

The list above is what I consider the most relevant and important failure-leading  approaches espoused frequently by both individuals and businesses while using social media.

Example: have your idea take off while saving money and getting results

You have an idea – everyone has an idea – but so what? Just because you have what you consider a bright, innovative idea, doesn’t make it automatically into a ready-made product, service or any other added value to what already exists. To make sure your idea is worthy, firstly, bounce it off of as many different people – anyone who might give you a valuable input or opinion whether from within or without a relevant domain or field for you – and open your mind to critique (adding new value to your idea) as much as possible.

Once you start considering (a hitherto unconsidered) factors stemming from breaking initial presuppositions, stereotypes, narcissistic flavors and just plain and simple information about market, competition, trends that somehow slipped through your fingers, you will start clearly seeing, visualizing what you are after.

Next, execution.

But, wait a minute. Even in execution there are ways and ways. The latter is what you must consider if you financial situation is still  (or will shortly become) somewhat shaky.

In this era of mushrooming Internet technologies – especially web 2.0-related/devised – doing business online or putting an online business presence is becoming easier by day. Traditional means of creating, building and sustaining a business are either becoming obsolete or reinventing themselves. There luminaries like Umair Haque who has awesomely created Awesomeness Manifesto and much more.

And of course, with the current economic situation, we are all looking how to do it a 21st-century-style-innovative and to save money while doing it.

Let’s take an illustrative example. In 2004, Heather Allard “started 2 Virtues Inc. to bring my inventions, Swaddleaze and Blankeaze to market.”

She spent in excess of $54K (even without product manufacturing).

If I started 2 Virtues now in 2009, I’d do things so differently.  I could start a business for under $1000 by doing these 5 things:

1. Skip the Website
2. Hire a Freelancer
3. DIY
4. Become a Social Butterfly
5. Free Stuff

If you read carefully the entire article (containing many nice tips, free tools and additional links) you will see how Heather – if she started in 2009 with all her current knowledge and experience – would have been able to economize on practically every aspect of her business initiative, thanks mostly to the Internet and free online tools, methodologies and techniques.

Instead of $54K, you can spend <$1K. What do you think about that?

3 startups +1 and 3 lessons +1

The Entrepreneur magazine has asked three successful entrepreneurs to describe a scenario of doing things all over again if they had a chance. Below is their response.

Entrepreneur

Sunny Bonnell, 33, co-founder of Motto Agency, a brand and design firm in Myrtle Beach, S.C. Founded in 2003, the company’s year-end sales are projected to reach about $1 million.

Lesson Learned

“As a woman business owner, I would have reached out to organizations like Count Me In for Women’s Economic Independence a lot sooner than I did. They have helped me build our networks on a national level (i.e., establish partnerships with FedEx, OPEN from American Express and Dell) and given us access to mentorship, marketing opportunities and business resources.”

Entrepreneur

Anthony Mongeluzo, 28, founder of The Pro Computer Service LLC, an IT services company in Medford, N.J. He founded the company in 2002 and now has annual revenue in excess of $2 million.

Lesson Learned

“I would have treated my company like a real business and not looked upon it as a stepchild. I would have given it the same full effort every day and not wasted my energy from 9 to 5 with my employer grasping for a moment or two to sneak in a quick call to one of my clients.”

Entrepreneur

Kris Putnam-Walkerly, 40, founder of Putnam Community Investment Consulting Inc., a Cleveland-based philanthropy consulting firm for foundations and nonprofits. She founded the company in 1999 and projects 2009 revenue to approach $1 million.

Lesson Learned

“I should have conducted more regular financial analysis of the business early on to help me understand which types of services and clients were most profitable and to allow me to make more informed decisions as I grew.”

Personally, I am also still struggling with my own startup, Elegua, to have it gain sufficient traction, especially considering that I and my partner are on a bootstrapping mode till now. And we both fall into the “lesson learned” of the second entrepreneur,  Anthony Mongeluzo, above. My previous initiative, OpenCoffee Club Cairo, is also sort of put on hold, as the inaugural meetup didn’t attract a threshold number of local entrepreneurs, startup enthusiasts, VCs, techies and individuals interested. This reminds me as well to give it another push, as I also got a recent feedback to renew my effort. Hence:

Lesson Learned

Persevere, persevere, persevere. Perseverance, especially in cultures/societies with corresponding 0-market knowledge of or unadapted mentality to the ideas of the business initiative in question, it is vital to persevere and however steep a climb it might seem, there is always a societal learning curve, which, once the tipping point is achieved, will become self-sustainable.

Given its complete novelty and unawareness in the MENA region and in Egypt, I think I will give it another try.

What are your experiences and lessons learned?

P.S. I know it has been a long time since my last post. My own side projects and my work prevented my “blogging creative juices” from running. I will try to be more systematic henceforth.

How Not to Manage Innovation (Umair Haque)

Umair Haque is one of luminaries who deserves to be read and reread by all those who care for or envision a better, less consumerist and money-bogged future.

In the article below he shows his take how venture capitalists are stiffening innovation by focusing on numbers, short term goals, quick profits, etc. Read this englightening piece and look around for many examples. Below are his strategies (based on Jeremy Liew’s analysis) of Apple’s iPhone AppsStore outlining how not to manage innovation.

Focus on short-run numbers

When venture investors or middle managers act like, well, middle managers, innovation is likely to wither.

Apply surface economics

When venture investors or managers don’t look deeply at the economics of the markets and industries they are investing and competing in, the result is a hodge-podge, often unsuccessful innovation portfolio — one where potentially successful innovations are under-invested in, and almost certainly unsuccessful innovations are over-invested in.

Be strategy-blind

When venture investors or managers alike act like purely financial backers — instead of partners who acknowledge and encourage a durable, shared strategic interest — the disruptive potential of innovation is sapped.

Fail to see the right context

When investors or managers fail to place innovation in the right context, value is difficult to assess. Context is what makes numbers meaningful: it adds validity, reliability and accuracy to financial logic that is otherwise bereft of it.

Never have an ideal

The mistake isn’t particular to venture guys. It is what happens when we misapply the mechanics of finance to the art of innovation. The fallacy of inferring economic meaning from financial numbers is what’s bankrupting Sony, what eviscerated Detroit, and what, ultimately blew up the investment banks.

The full article is here.

Why Smart People, Executives and Companies Do Dumb Things

I am a big fan of Guy Kawasaki (and his blog), having recently purchased and consumed his last book “Reality Check.” One of the chapters of the book, and the corresponding post on his blog, he refers to a book called “Why Smart People Do Dumb Things” pointing out four reasons why smart, intelligent, powerful, and rich people end up in disastrous situations.

Hubris. Pride to the point that you no longer feel shame, no longer believe that you are subject to public opinion, and no longer need to fear “the gods.” Examples: Gary Hart’s involvement with Donna  Rice that ended his run for the presidency and the Dennis Kozlowski’s (Tyco) $2 million toga party.

Arrogance. From the Latin word arrogare: “to claim for oneself.” Arrogant people believe they have  claim to anything and everything they want–they are “entitled” to it. King David, for example, felt  entitled to the wife (Bathsheba) of one of his soldiers. Modern day King Davids feel entitled to corporate jets and an entourage to tell them that their keynote speech rocked.

Narcissism. Self absorption to the point that you are blind to reality. The world only exists to provide you gratification. Examples: Richard Nixon and Watergate; the Clintons and Whitewater—really just about every politician and CEO who falls from grace.

Unconscious need to fail. If you think failing is hard, try winning. The questions that go through people’s minds when they they are on the doorstep of success are: Do I really deserve to win? Do I want the pressure of constantly having to win in the future? Can I really handle success? Perhaps this explains why professional athletes still take performance enchancement drugs even after watching their colleagues get busted.

The authors of the book prescribe a six-dimensional set of remedies:

1. Accept yourself
2. Accept others
3. Keep your sense of humor
4. Accept simple pleasures
5. Enjoy the present
6. Welcome work

The same book goes on mentioning why smart companies do dumb things. Here the list is more sophisticated.

• Consensus
• Conviction
• CEOs
• Experts
• Good news
• Lofty ends

Guy adds another three additional factors that make smart companies do dumb things.

• Budgets
• Greed
• Arrogance

From my limited experience, I would also add (to make few implications more explicit):

• Lose of focus/vision
• Lose of touch with reality
• Willingness, inability and perseverence to overstretch

Finally, an excellent book (that took six years to complete) by Syney Finkelsteen, “Why Smart Executives Fail,” draws on an unprecedented research of the corporate history and showcases some of most flagrant examples of brilliant and smart executives who caused their companies to fail.  He lists seven habits of spectacularly unsuccessful executives

1. They see themselves and their companies as dominating their environments.
2. They identify so completely with the company that there is no boundary between their personal interests and their corporation’s interest.
3. They think they have all the answers.
4. They ruthlessly eliminate anyone who is not 100 percent behind them.
5. They are consummate company spokespersons obsessed with the company image.
6. They underestimate major obstacles.
7. They stubbornly rely on what worked for them in the past.

Why do intelligent and smart people fail?

What is the difference between smart and intelligent people?. Intelligence has more to do with our genetics and inborn abilities whereas smartness is generally a skill which can be built on top of intelligence. Or, put it more succinctly:

If we imagine intelligence as the capacity of our brain, smartness would be the art of filling it. In other words, maybe your room ( intelligence) isn’t really big but you are very good in filling it and using it most effectively ( smartness).

However smart and intelligent a person might be, he/she is still prone to fail.

According to In Search of Human Mind (by Robert Sternberg), intelligent people fail because of one or few of the reasons below:

1. Lack of motivation
2. Lack of impulse control
3. Lack of perseverance
4. Using wrong abilities
5. Inability to translate thought into action
6. Lack of product orientation
7. Inability to complete tasks
8. Failure to initiate
9. Fear of failure
10. Procrastination
11. Misattribution of blame
12. Excessive self-pity
13. Excessive dependency
14. Wallowing in personal difficulties
15. Distraction and lack of concentration
16. Spreading oneself too thin or too thick
17. Inability to delay gratification
18. Inability to see the forest for the trees
19. Lack of balance between critical, analytical thinking and creative, synthetic thinking
20. Too little or too much self-confidence

Smart people have a different set of potential reasons directly or indirectly overlapping with the reasons of failure for intelligent:

1. Their goals are lot bigger
2. What makes them smart makes them ineffective competitors
3. They falsely mistake most people as being more like them than they are
4. Thinking by itself is not a success
5. They require different kinds of stimulation

What other reasons can you think of that make intelligent and smart people fail?

Detroit’s 6 Mistakes and How Not to Make Them

First Wall Street and now it seems GM and Chrysler came begging at the governments doors for additional $20+ billion dollars. What do they offer in exchange for this money? They want to give buyouts and early retirements packagesin their effort of cost cutting and layoffs. This means essentially that the two companies aim at reviving themselves the old, traditional way adding perhaps an edge of efficiency, leanness and flair of cautiousness in these new realities or do they offer a radical shift, a ideological quantum leap enabling reconstruction of an automotive industry that befits well the expectations, technological progress and strategic vision inherent in the 21st century?

GM and Chrysler so far seem to have chosen what is best characterised by Albert Einstein’s saying, “You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.”

Below is an illuminating piece on what (six) mistakes were made by Detroit industries during the 20th century from Umair Haque, one of visionary thinkers on this aspect. These errors, while allegedly bringing automobile industry to their knees in the 21st century, were largely paralleled, ideologically, by other mainstream industries of the 20th century.

1. Old rule: Choose evil. Industrial era business is unrepentantly and almost sociopathically evil: shifting costs onto others, while striving to internalize benefits. Detroit chose lobbying, marketing wars, and low-cost hardball – to always and everywhere try to socialize costs and privatize benefits. Never was this truer than Detroit’s lobbying against public transport throughout the 20^th century. Why does public transport in the States suck? Because Detroit’s lobbying machine doesn’t.

New rule? Choose good. In the 21^st century, every moral imperative is also a strategic imperative:doing good – for customers, employees, suppliers, or society – is a radical strategic choice that unlocks new pathways to innovation and growth. The opportunity cost of defending evil for Detroit was never learning how to choose good – and that’s a crucial mistake other auto players didn’t make. Tata chose to make a car that was accessible to the world’s poor. Porsche and BMW chose to invest in talent, people, and imagination. Honda and Toyota chose to invest in renewables and partnerships with the public sector. All opened new avenues to growth for an industry at the brink of extinction.

2. Old rule: Selfishness is self-interest.What’s strategic is supposed to be what’s in the firm’s self-interest. But how do we define self-interest? Consider for a second the fact that as recently as this year, Detroit’s lobbyists were hard at work, opposing stricter fuel efficiency standards. That’s 20^thcentury self-interest at its finest – not authentic interest for one’s own long-run outcomes, but simply a childlike selfishness, both myopic and narrow, where cutting off the nose to spite the face is as rational as mutual nuclear annihilation.

New rule? Purpose is self-interest. The 21^stcentury demands a more enlightened self-interest: one factoring in a longer timescale, fuller contingencies, and an honest and broad consideration of hidden and unintended consequences to people, society and the environment. When we understand all that, have begun to develop a purpose – a way in which we will change the world radically for the better. By confusing selfishness with self-interest, Detroit vaporized it’s own purpose – and will stay trapped in a wilderness of economic meaninglessess until it rediscovers it.

3. Old rule: Maximize destructiveness. The goal of orthodox strategy is to destroy the ability of others’ to imitate or commoditize you. And Detroit was a master of the art of destructive strategy: patenting, trademarking, and litigating; playing hardball to control distribution channels, defending brands with disproportionately steep marketing investment, and building entire new marques to gain share in key markets and segments. The point of all these tired, stale 20^th century strategic moves was the same: strategy as an exercise in exclusion, isolation, and barrier-building.

New rule? Get constructive. True 21^st century businesses can be judged in the blink of an eye: how intensely do they put the “co” in constructive? Can they let demand spark and fuel co-creation, can they co-produce from a pool of shared resources, are they capable of letting value activities be co-managed, are they tuned to cooperate? Detroit can’t get constructive because it’s spent the better part of a century playing the games of destructive strategy.

4. Old rule: Seek differentiation. When is a Jaguar really just a Ford? When it’s an S-Type. Under Alfred Sloan, GM famously organized itself divisionally – Pontiac, Buick, Cadillac… – for the sole purpose of differentiation. But industrial era differentiation is too often just skin-deep: the same lemons with slightly different marketing, distribution, and branding. So why pay a steep premium for a Buick if it’s just a Chevy with slightly nicer trim? Detroit discovered the hard way that in the 21^st century, the concept of differentiation is increasingly stale.

New rule? Seek difference. Ultimately, the problem is simple: differentiation is about perception. Difference is about reality. People in the 21^stcentury aren’t the zombified, braindead consumers of the 20^th century. And so the 21^st century demands not mere differentiation – a bean counters’ eye view of the world if ever there was one – but true difference. True difference is built by making different choices from the ground up – different in the very essence of the value activities that make the wheels of production and consumption spin. Porsche and BMW strove for difference – not mere differentiation – and it is that choice that is at the heart of their global leadership of the automotive sector.

5. Old rule: Seek agility. Strategy is in many ways simply the avoidance of crisis – the evasion of threat, weakness, and vulnerability. The goal of strategy as the avoidance of crisis is simple: agility. Industrial-era corporations seek agility, in other words, by insulating themselves from real-world economic pressures – that’s what Detroit did bar none, by always seeking to game the system: lobbying, marketing, and wheeling-and-dealing it’s way straight into oblivion.

New rule? Seek crisis. By insulating themselves from real-world economic pressures, boardrooms also dilute and sap incentives for innovation and renewal. Detroit wasn’t innovating because the opportunity cost of strategy as gamesmanship was, ultimately, foregoing innovation itself. In the 21^stcentury, gamesmanship – and its attendant dilution of incentives – is a sure path to near terminal strategy decay. Forget Detroit – just ask big music, big pharma, or big food.

6. Old rule: Advantage happens against. Orthodox econ holds that it is through the pursuit of competitive advantage that corporations create the most value most quickly and reliably. And that’s a mistake Detroit made to the hilt. It sought a nakedly competitive advantage – against suppliers, dealers, consumers, and society alike. The result is an industry crippled by structurally antagonistic relationships with labour, buyers, suppliers, consumers, and society alike.

New rule? Advantage happens for. Competitive advantage against bears a striking resemblance to simply bullying. Bullying is easy: just as in the sandbox, any boardroom with market power can jack up margins by forcing others – buyers, suppliers, consumers, society – to bear costs. But if every corporation across the economy is playing that game, the economy’s just a game of musical chairs.

Commonalities between markets and (usually failing) politics

The logic of the market is predicated on the pervasive and obvious inequality of humans. No two people have the same scales of values, talents, or ambitions. It is this radical inequality, and the freedom to choose our own lot in life, that makes markets – division of labor, production and distribution of goods and services – possible. Our differences are reflected in our outcomes and results which are converted into market commodities/products/services. The latter we exchange for what we need/want but do not have.

In (most of modern) politics the ideological parallel is easily imitated. For example, system of voting is designed to replicate the market’s participatory features. In fact, it is a perverse distortion of the market system. In markets, you get the goods you pay for. If you don’t and there’s been a violation of contract, you have legal recourse. In voting, people are not actually purchasing anything but the politician’s word/promises, which is legally un-claimable. Furthermore, a politician has every incentive to lie, manipulate, or twist to produce the desired result.

“Politicians shake our hand before elections and our trust thereafter.”

Politics does not consider individuals. We are merely a tiny speck on the vast blob called “nation,” and what this blob “thinks” is only relevant insofar as it accords with a political agenda advantageous to the country and its friends. During elections – our one opportunity to feel ourselves important and involved in our country’s politics – we are asked to cast ballots for people we do not know (or know what they want us to know) because they make promises they are under no obligation to keep – or keep them if it advances their agenda, enlarges their purse or contributes towards another election term for them. What’s even worse, the voting gesture is pointless on the margin. The chances that any one vote will actually have an impact are so infinitesimally small as to be meaningless.

In markets, success means entrepreneurial talent or business acumen which translates into the ability to anticipate, create and serve the needs of the market. In politics, success means the ability to twist and manipulate public opinion so that enough fools (so regarded by politicians) reaffirm the politician’s power and ambitions. It takes special talents to do this, which are not cultivated in good families – read Machiavelli. In markets, most successful usually deserve the credit due to merit, hard work and shrewd vision. In politics, the most successful usually excel in art of acting,  (in best of cases) rhetoric  -  in recent years, we hardly have seen any – narrow-mindedness and self-aggrandizement.

A politician, according to Ambrose Bierce’s dictionary, is “an eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When he wriggles he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive.”

What about likes of Patrick Henry and George Mason? They wanted to separate (the American) society and government to protect the people from being manipulated by cunning political forces.  Albert Jay Nock was right to characterize a country, democratic or otherwise, as a parasite on society, whereas markets (especially those where innovation and entrepreneurship are common) and economic production represent lifeblood of (free/healthy) societies.

Politics and markets affect each other. When politics has an upper hand, life of common people gets worse. When markets have an upper hand, life of people gets worse as well.

Judge for yourself.

Does your behavior damage trust?

In normal times as well as hard times, trust is the foundation of any collective human endeavor, be it in business, in politics or in any other social or group activity. “Does your behavior damage trust?” is a key question and following are 25 behavioral patterns that contribute to creating mistrust within your team/group.

1. You fail to keep your promises, agreements and commitments.
2. You serve your self first and others only when it is convenient.
3. You micromanage and resist delegating.
4. You demonstrate an inconsistency between what you say and how you behave.
5. You fail to share critical information with your colleagues.
6. You choose to not tell the truth.
7. You resort to blaming and scapegoating others rather than own your mistakes.
8. You judge, and criticize rather than offer constructive feedback.
9. You betray confidences, gossip and talk about others behind their backs.
10. You choose to not allow others to contribute or make decisions.
11. You downplay others’ talents, knowledge and skills.
12. You refuse to support others with their professional development.
13. You resist creating shared values, expectations and intentions in favor of your own agenda; you refuse to compromise and foster win-lose arguments.
14. You refuse to be held accountable by your colleagues.
15. You resist discussing your personal life, allowing your vulnerability, disclosing your weaknesses and admitting your relationship challenges.
16. You rationalize sarcasm, put-down humor and off-putting remarks as “good for the group”.
17. You fail to admit you need support and don’t ask colleagues for help.
18. You take others’ suggestions and critiques as personal attacks.
19. You fail to speak up in team meetings and avoid contributing constructively.
20. You refuse to consider the idea of constructive conflict and avoid conflict at all costs.
21. You consistently hijack team meetings and move them off topic.
22. You refuse to follow through on decisions agreed upon at team meetings.
23. You secretly engage in back-door negotiations with other team members to create your own alliances.
24. You refuse to give others the benefit of the doubt and prefer to judge them without asking them to explain their position or actions.
25. You refuse to apologize for mistakes, misunderstandings and inappropriate behavior and dig your heels in to defend yourself and protect your reputation.

This list is especially relevant for leaders and those appointed to leadership positions for trust is the foundation of successful leadership.