Leadership Behaviors That Make A Difference

This month's StartingBloc Institute brought me to the campus of Columbia University Business School. This session's topic was "True Capitalism - Profits with a Purpose". Expect some comments and opinions about Corporate Social Responsibility in the next couple of days. If you have access to an electronic copy of the Econimist article about CSR could you please forward it to me?
I had the opportunity to attend a session and later talk with Mike Cairo, Director of Corporate Social Responsibilitiy Programs, at General Electric. Mike spoke about growing participation of CSR programs at GE. He made many comparisons between Jack Welsh and Jeff Immelt, the different era they led through and the different perspectives they held about the world.
GE has always been a company that prides itself on its ability to develop outstanding managers. To reach this end many initiatives, like the Crotonville Corporate Training Center, have been developed to foster business leadership at GE.
Interestingly, Jeff Immelt, in his 2004 Corporate Officer's Meeting offered six "new" leadership behaviors that are needed to make a difference in today's business climate. I thought they were interesting so please find them below.
Challenge the Process
Inspire a Shared Vision
Enable Others to Act
Model the Way
Use Influence Wisely
Encourage
Now these tenents have always been at the cornerstone of good, responsible, well run, innovative companies. Perhaps Immelt is trying to breathe new life into General Electric's management practices. That's up for debate!

The Next Best Thing to Owning Your Own Stadium

Recently Boston has been a hotbed of sports excellence. With the Patriots sandwiching a Red Sox World Series Title with two Super Bowls of their own, the only stadium in the Boston area to not claim to be the home of a world champion is the FleetCenter. The FleetCenter is the home of the Boston Celtics and the out of commission Boston Bruins.
With the purchase of Fleet Bank by Bank of America, the Bank of America don't seem to be interested in the naming rights of the stadium. Their solution? Sell the naming rights. To whom you ask? Anyone that will pay for them. A boston.com article describes that the FleetCenter will now become "YourCenter" for one day only. You can currently bid on Ebay for the one day naming rights to the FleetCenter!
Unfortunately you don't get to change the name on the building on the outside of the building. However you do get 4 tickets to that night's game/event as well as your name for the center in the lights as patrons enter. The Highest bid for the 2/16/05 naming rights is $6,750.
I have an idea, Bank of America Executives, skip the foolishness of individual naming rights and gift the stadium back to the city as the legendary "Boston Garden". Think about the amount of goodwill you could generate among Bostonians. The Boston Garden reminds Bostonians of the days of Larry Bird and Bobby Orr, what better way to link your company with such great memories!

The Quest For Smallness

There was an interesting article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal entitled, Miniaturization Is Key To Computers' Growth, But Parts Sure Are Tiny (subscription required). This article tries to describe just how important miniaturization is to growth in the computer industry and just how far processing has come in the last two years. Use the following visualization from the article to visualize the rate at which storage and processing capabilities have changed:
It's hard to appreciate how far this miniaturization has come, mostly because the units of measurement involved -- nanometers and the like -- don't have much relevance in our everyday world of yards and miles.
One way to comprehend it may be to imagine a parallel universe in which computer components get larger, not smaller. On this Planet Bizaro, the CPU in your computer, based on the progress since 1972, wouldn't be the size of a matchbook, as it is today, but would cover the area between a football-field goal line and the nearest 12-yard line.
That's nothing compared with what has happened to your disk drive. The very first drive, from the 1950s, had a diameter of 24 inches. Today, the diameter in our alternate world would be more than 2½ miles, crushing much of your hometown.
Disk storage is one of the gold medalists in the race to smallness. That first drive, brought out by IBM, held 2,000 bits of data for every square inch of disk space, or about enough to store the text of a short memo to your boss.
Pretty amazing? No?

A Meeting of the Minds: A Convening of Social Capitalists

This past weekend I had attended the first of several sessions in the StartingBloc Institute for Responsilbe Leadership at the Yale University School of Management. It was an amazing and humbling experience.
Why was it amazing? I had the opportunity to network and talk with some of the brightest most motivated business students in the country. We were all there learning about, discussing and working to find ways to impact the world in a positive way through socially responsible business practices. I loved every minute of the day because I love talking with smart people about business and world issues. If you are an undergraduate and you share my feelings, apply to be a Fellow in next year's program. You won't be disappointed.
I was humbled because of the schools that were represented: MIT, Yale, Stern, Columbia, Wharton. . . Villanova. Now I am not going to try to tell you that Villanova business school is subpar, but by no means is it on the same playing field as those mentioned above.
I have always known students that go to Ivy League and like caliber schools are smart. They wouldn't be there if they weren't. Hell, my girl friend goes to Dartmouth College. But I don't think I ever realized how smart they are. When talking with my girlfriend about her studies (Japanese and Linguistics) I just wrote off not completely understanding what she was talking about as a function of not knowing those two subjects. Place me in a situation where I could talk business and sustainability with some Ivy League students and I could at least keep up, which I did. However I did realize that they talk on a completely different level from that of what I have experienced at Villanova or its peer schools. The command they had of "business speak" is amazing. Also I think that they just simply know more about business in general especially the technical things like finance, economics, etc. Simply put the student in this program are very smart as well as very diverse. Here are the demographics of the NY Institute (which I am a part of):
Average GPA.....................................................3.52
% Underrepresented Minority...............................28%
% Minority..........................................................52%
# of Countries Represented by Fellows..................39
# of Languages Spoken Fluently...........................47
Female Fellows...................................................56%
Well there you have it. My first impressions of the student in the Institute for Responsible Leadership. I am debating on whether to go into some of the topic that we covered, but I don't know if anyone cares. If you would like to hear about the topics, please let me know in the comments.

Desperation Entrepreneurship

Many times the best entrepreneurial ideas are born out of great need. This morning I had an spam email from a college girl that was having trouble putting herself through school. As I am in the same situation I read on. She continued on describing how she would personalize her breasts with my name for $10.00. This "personalization" would simply entail her scrawling a person's name in red magic marker across her chest, her taking a picture, and emailing it to you. Outrageous, simple outrageous.
The best part, she said that it would be a great thing to hang in your cube and look at while at work. I am told it also makes a good screen background. Well I don't know what office building she has ever worked in, but I am sure I would get fired before I got back to my desk with my coffee in the morning.
Like Barry Moltz says, Sometimes you just have to be a little crazy...

A few Super Bowl Observations

I have found myself in an interesting situation for the last week or so. I am a New England Patriots fan deep in the heart of Eagles nation. Hell the Eagle's running back went to my school. I find myself kepping my mouth shut when it comes to talking football with friends down here because of the deep seeded hatred for the other team.
I have come to a few realizations over the past few weeks.
1. Eagles fans are bred young down here. No matter what anyone says Philly loves the Eagles like Bostonians love the Red Sox. Philly will always be a football town.
2. Many fans down here have stated that just getting to the SuperBowl would make them happy after four straight NFC letdowns. Well, guys you got there, just be happy with that because you will lose.
3. Simply put, this is the year of Boston sports. The Sox, the Pats, the undefeated BC Eagles, the Celtics. Sorry Philly, it just isn't in the cards for you this year.
4. When the Patriots roll over the Eagles there will be market of displaced Patriots fans that will be itching to spend money on Patriots SuperBowl gear. Now if I were in the business of selling unlicensed merchandise, then this would be an entrepreneur's dream!
Go Pats!