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Articles in Brief
A quick synopsis of what other publications are
saying about topics related to leadership, employee
involvement, quality, and organizational
performance
Fast Company
www.fastcompany.com
April 2003
You can do Anything—but not
Everything
You know the drill.
It’s Monday morning. You arrive at work
exhausted from a weekend spent entertaining the kids,
paying bills, and running errands. You flick on your
PC—and 70 new e-mails greet you. Your
phone’s voicemail light is already blinking,
and before you can make it stop, another call comes
in. With each ring, with each colleague who drops by
your office uninvited, comes a new demand—for
attention, for a reaction, for a decision, for your
time. By noon, when you take 10 minutes to gulp down
a sandwich at your desk, you already feel overworked,
overcommitted—overwhelmed.
 According to David Allen, one
of the world’s most influential thinkers on
personal productivity, this is the “silent
trauma” of knowledge workers everywhere. We
inhabit a world, he says, in which there are
“no edges to our jobs” and “no
limit to the potential information that can help us
do our jobs better.” What’s more, in a
competitive environment that’s continually
being reshaped by the Web, we’re tempted to
rebalance our work on a monthly, weekly, even hourly
basis. Unchecked, warns Allen, this frantic approach
is a recipe for dissatisfaction and
despair—all-too-common emotions these days for
far too many of us.
Allen argues that the real challenge is not
managing your time but maintaining your focus.
“If you get too wrapped up in all of the stuff
coming at you, you lose your ability to respond
appropriately and effectively. Remember, you’re
the one who creates speed, because you’re the
one who allows stuff to enter your
life.”
Fortune Magazine
www.fortune.com
April 14, 2003
Company Town
It’s an
icon of American life. You know the kind of place:
where the big boss lives in a mansion on the hill,
where half the plant shows up at the bowlarama on
Tuesday nights, where the well-being of the citizenry
is directly related to one firm’s bottom line.
The company town should be gone by now, victim of an
economy that long ago shifted from manufacturing to
service. But a few—Corning, Deere, Wal-Mart,
Maytag, and Smithfield—continue to survive and
thrive well enough to see their companies sit firmly
in the Fortune 500.
HR Magazine
www.shrm.org
April 2003
Forging a Partnership
CEO churn is at
an all-time high. Increasingly, new CEOs enter a
company, fail to deliver, and are sent packing.
Sometimes, if they do produce results, other
companies snatch them up. Either way, the process
starts all over again.
Turnover among chief executives soared 53% between
1995 and 2001, according to the 2002 study “Why
CEOs Fall: The Causes and Consequences of Turnover at
the Top,” conducted by Booz Allen Hamilton of
McLean, VA. The number of CEOs who left their jobs
under pressure more than doubled during that period,
and average CEO tenure plunged more than 23%,
according to the study of 2,500 publicly traded
companies.
 A different
study—“CEO Turnover and Job
Security,” released by Drake Beam Morin (DBM)
in September 2002—estimates that two-thirds of
the world’s companies have changed CEOs at
least once in the last five years.
Denis St-Amour, president of DBM’s Center
for Executive Options in New York, says executives
typically are “gone in three years—not
necessarily because they’re not doing the right
thing, but because they’re not doing it fast
enough.”
CEOs are under enormous pressure to deliver
results quickly. And that, in turn, places pressure
on HR executives to offer proper and timely support.
It is vital for an organization’s
health—and for HR executives’ prospects
of continued employment—to help a new CEO hit
the ground running fast.
For new CEOs, the die is cast within the first six
months or so, and HR leadership in that period can be
decisive, says Dan Ciampa, a former CEO who advises
leaders moving into new positions. “If you look
at people who haven’t made it versus people who
have, the HR person has been better, has played a
more central role in helping the CEO get better in
the first six to 12 months,” says
Ciampa.
“When you don’t have competent HR
people—and I don’t think enough are
competent at what I’m talking
about—they’re going to leave the CEO high
and dry.”
From Work Force to Armed Forces… and
Back
These days, the U.S. military is
increasingly counting on citizen soldiers to fill in
on the home front for active duty troops sent to
potential war zones, and, in many cases, to fight
alongside regular troops in combat situations. While
the military is attempting to remain sensitive to the
needs of members of the National Guard and Reserve,
deployment can be highly stressful—personally
as well as professionally.
Thousands of men and women, as well as their
employers, are feeling that stress. A record number
of reserve troops have been called up since September
11, 2001. By mid-March this year, nearly 200,000
members of the reserves and Guard were on active
duty, and that number was likely to rise with the
U.S. confrontation with Iraq. So even if you and your
employees haven’t yet faced this situation, you
may not be able to escape it.
These vital members of the armed services may have
to leave behind their civilian jobs—not to
mention their families—when they are deployed.
Many of the reservists mobilized since the terrorist
attacks on New York and Washington have been on duty
for more than a year, and these tours could last up
to two years. While many employers are taking steps
to help support these workers, often going beyond
what is mandated by law, others may be struggling
with how to balance the needs of the troops with
those of the business and the workers who remain on
the job.
To illustrate the hardships of being called to
active duty and the special steps that companies can
take to help deployed employees, HR Magazine
interviewed four worker-warriors who were called to
active duty after the September 11 attacks but who
have since returned to their everyday lives and jobs.
Their stories show that continuing pay and benefits
is only one way that concerned companies can ease the
transition from civilian to military life and back
again, and they also show that it doesn’t
necessarily cost a lot to help your patriotic
employees get back in step at work.
Inc. Magazine
www.inc.com
April 2003
Grist: Down With Bossocracy
Though many large companies have rushed to support
the diversity policies at the University of Michigan,
how many American businesses, large or small, really
encourage diversity of thought?
 Three cheers for diversity!
Have you read that dozens of big companies support
the University of Michigan in its landmark
affirmative action case, which the Supreme Court is
currently deliberating? According to Eastman Kodak,
Intel, Coca-Cola, American Airlines, and other
corporate icons, American business benefits from a
diverse work force—ethnically and
intellectually—and they want everyone to know
where they stand.
The author, Adam Hanft, doesn’t plunge or
even wade into the treacherous issue of affirmative
action. He just laments, “As for corporate
businesses on a larger sphere—a macro kind of
diversity—I wish that companies had the guts to
practice the commitment that they so proudly trumpet
to the Supreme Court: the cultivation and
guardianship of divergent, challenging, rainbow-hued
ideas within their own organizations. This is a far
more difficult and systemic challenge than gestural
diversity—a couple of African-Americans,
Latinos, and women in a chummy and cheery
annual-report photo.”
It may be 2003, but the bossocracy still reigns
supreme. And it’s no nano-problem. We are
suffering from a pallid homogeneity of opinion.
Despite all the blather about rule-blasting
ideas—summed up in that vile phrase
“out-of-the-box thinking” —a truly
hot, original idea is pursued relentlessly, if not
viciously, by management death squads.
And, despite all the talk about squished
hierarchies and pushing decision-making down,
enormous and unquantifiable sums of time and
money—billions, no doubt—are wasted in
attempts to anticipate the bossocracy’s whims.
To survive you need to work around its biases. You
need to temper, trim, and tailor your comments,
purging the PowerPoint of offending language likely
to yank the CEO off on a favorite sidebar. We are
obedience-training our management. Like suburban
houses with an invisible fence that stands ready to
jolt a golden retriever ambitious enough to lunge
across the property line, the corporate landscape
ropes off a safe perimeter—and electrocutes the
adventurous.
Don’t think this is a problem that is
limited to big companies, either. Smaller companies,
led by opinionated entrepreneurs, often create some
of the most thought-controlled bossocracies. They
have succeeded by an undying belief in themselves and
their ideas—often by specifically not listening
to the “wisdom” around them—and
they are not about to stop now.
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