I spent the last few days enjoying a little R&R in Las Vegas, and the flight home today was, dare I say it, actually relaxing. Almost all because of my new Kindle, which I love, as a consumer; as a publisher, I have some concerns. More on that particular quandary in a later post, perhaps.
One surprise for me was how quickly I grew to love reading the NYT on the Kindle. I’ve always been the type who prefers the feel of newsprint, and always hated reading newspapers online. I quickly learned that reading the paper on the Kindle is NOT like reading it online. In fact, logistically it’s a lot easier to read the paper on the Kindle than it is to deal with folding and refolding a big paper in public. And I find I actually read more of the paper on the Kindle — I read most of the articles which I would have otherwise glanced over in print.
For example, if I were perusing the regular paper, I doubt that I would have stopped to read today’s Q&A with Eduardo Castro-Wright, the vice chairman of Wal-Mart Stores. But it crossed my Kindle and I kept reading. While it was a typically superficial sort of interview, there were a couple points I found interesting — and which had very real parallels to association leadership.
For example, his call for simplicity:
“I think that all of us read far too many business books. I’ve worked 30 years now in management roles, and a number of times I’ve seen a new C.E.O. come in, and the first act is typically to get the leadership team to an offsite. And you get a consultant – because you can’t do it without a consultant – and the consultant then helps the team design a vision. And then you’ve got all these words, and several thousand dollars and a couple of days of golf later, you go back to the company to actually try to communicate that vision throughout the organization. So you hire another consultant to do that. It shouldn’t be like that … We have a very clear view of what we do for consumers around the world. And we can describe our complete strategy in 10 words. And that makes it very easy to get everybody energized and aligned.”
And his view of the “strategy” process:
“I think the best source of strategy is your customer and the people who work for you. I’m not saying there’s no room for a vision statement or anything like that. I’m just saying that we tend to spend too much time on that and not enough on the more practical, down-to-earth requirements that drive business.”
And his thoughts on what people don’t learn in business school — which I think is actually an excellent example of what many association staffers, whether they’ve gone to “business school” or not, don’t think about, but should:
“I’ve done this quiz several times when we have gone to talk at business schools. I always ask people, ‘So who’s taking accounting?’ And everybody raises their hand. And, ‘Who’s taking strategy?’ And everybody raises their hand – and you go on with your typical curriculum about the business school. Mostly they are very good at teaching strategy, operations, management, finance, accounting.
“But then I ask, ‘O.K., how many courses have you taken on how you talk with an employee you’re firing?’ Or, ‘How do you talk with the person who comes to your office late at night to tell you that her daughter is sick and she might not be able to come in the following day?’ Or, ‘What do you say when they come in with issues in their marriage that are impacting their job?’
“As managers and leaders of people, those are the kinds of questions that one deals with probably 80 percent of the time. I think that business schools could do more to prepare kids to deal with the often more difficult side of business management and leadership. The balance of courses is probably weighted to the numeric side of business as opposed to the people side of business.”
Interestingly, the NYT also had a feature article on Jim Collins today, and I didn’t find anything he said half as interesting as what the Wal-Mart guy had to say.
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