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Play Ball!

January 31, 2008

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It is just days to spring training. Touching the World Series trophy only makes the heart grow fonder.

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"Bad News Takes the Elevator"

The Council on Foreign Relations heard from Ajay Banda this afternoon, Executive Chairman of Mastercard. He reminded us that one key to effective operational leadership is to create environments in which employees are relatively unafraid to deliver bad news. "Bad news takes the elevator and good news takes the stairs," he said, underscoring the importance of raising negative issues as soon as possible in order to confront, understand, and resolve them. No doubt speaking from personal experience, Banda said that "people love to feed you good news when you're the boss. You have to make them feel okay delivering bad news and then you have to live up to it." He added an important and understandable exception to his rule, however, indicating that "if you bring me bad news three times and you're the cause of it in each case, then we'll need to have a discussion." He believes in the power of listening with patience and acting with urgency, reminding u

Connecting Odd Dots

Lisbon - It happened one night in Istanbul. My sister and I were attending a performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto #2. I like the piece now, but was then unfamiliar with it. A rush of familiarity came over me during the second movement. I seemed to know the work but was soon bemused as to why. It was not as awkward a revelation as recognizing an aria during a Sydney Opera House performance of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” from a Three Stooges skit. But it reminded me of that moment. It turns out that the singer-songwriter Eric Carmen - let’s leave his politics aside for the moment - based his 1975 hit song “All by Myself” expressly on Rachmaninoff’s second movement. It turns out that Carmen’s 1976 hit “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again” was based on the third movement of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto. Carmen thought the concerto was in the public domain. It had no copyright in the U.S. but the piece was still protected elsewhere in the world. For its part, Rachmaninoff’s esta

Maximizers and Monetizers.

It’s an age-old lament. Regrettably, it hasn’t changed much in recent years. It’s the solemn proclamation by some leaders of publicly traded companies that their most important job – and every employee’s top priority – is to maximize shareholder value. Really? In my days as a senior corporate executive, I often bristled when my CEOs and CFOs publicly invoked this view in ways that seemed to me cliched and unthinking. What did I really hear – and almost everyone else hear – when CEOs and CFOs spoke about maximizing shareholder value? Right or wrong, the cynical take was what they really meant was increasing their personal wealth (and job security) and that of the senior leadership team – including me – board members, and large, wealthy shareholders. Yes, to be fair, many 401(K) shareholders benefit when a company’s stock value rises, but it rarely represents the accumulation of enormous, generational wealth realized by the insiders and their primary influencers. Is this what happened to

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