Tim's Library

Author’s Note: This is the 10th in a series of 12 articles about the mistakes we’ve made building our foundation since 1997. I’ve decided the last two articles will be a specific timeline of who we’ve connected with and what we learned specifically in our primary growth years – 2007 to the present. I hope you enjoy these articles. Feel free to contact me at any time.

My friend, Tom Rudibaugh, wondered why “passion” wasn’t listed in last month’s article as one of the nine characteristics of great leaders.

Upon reflection, I guess it’s because I’ve watched passion drive as many good leaders to ruin as it has to success.

Passion is an emotion. As such, it must be managed carefully.

Unrestrained or misdirected passion can be more destructive than constructive. A recent example is former Ohio State University football coach, Jim Tressel.

The people I know who have worked directly with Tressel insist that he is a person of high integrity. His career was not only marked by the consistent success of his teams on the field but also by the relative success of his players and coaches as students and human beings.

When he was made aware in 2009 that some players had broken NCAA rules, he did not report these violations. He chose instead to confront his players directly while not passing on the information.

The result of his decision is that he is no longer coaching at OSU and in fact is banned from coaching NCAA football for five years.

Did he take on the issues privately because he felt he could guide the players to a better course without publicly damaging their lives, as he claims? Or did he keep the situation private so that he could gain another national championship?

In either case, he was blinded by his passion. Whether sincerely for his players’ benefit or unethically for the team’s success, Tressel compromised his integrity.

And a leader without integrity is a leader who ultimately fails.

My own passion for the success of this foundation and those we serve has caused me to make many bad decisions over the years. In the early years, we didn’t have enough money to make too many stupid mistakes. We quietly identified and supported a few humble leaders who served the poor well.

But in 2007, when our resources expanded, my passion got ahead of my rational brain.

The years 2008 and 2009 were characterized by enabling many organizations, some with six-figure gifts. I was the bleeding heart who finally could “make a difference.” And yet I found success is no more rapid in foundation work than it was for me in business. And that took 19 hard years. This could take more.

Passion drove me to go too far, too fast in those first years. One such case was accepting an award and kicking off a big campaign for a micro-lender in 2009 only to find within six months that the organization was essentially bankrupt.

So, since 2010, we have planned empirically. That is, we now invest in small increments, piloting each program until we and our partners are on the same page. We filter through a process that leads to big investments only if we succeed in small ways first. The result will be fewer crimes of passion.

Failure – which we all must experience – is a great teacher. 

When I was fifteen, I had a blind passion for rock and roll music. My garage rock band was everything to me. After a massive blunder, my band threw me out. It was my first experience with depression. 

After a few days watching me mope around the house, my Mom, who had no gift for crafts, made a decoupage of the following quote and gave it to me. Forty-five years later, I still keep it close to me as a reminder that – successful or not – I must be careful to pursue my passions thoughtfully.

I sincerely wish you will have the experience of thinking up a new idea, planning it, organizing it, and following it to completion and having it be magnificently successful. I also hope you'll go through the same process and have something "bomb out." 

I wish you could know how it feels "to run" with all your heart and lose - horribly. 

I wish that you could achieve some great good for mankind, but have nobody know about it except you. 

I wish you could find something so worthwhile that you deem it worthy of investing your life. 

I hope you become frustrated and challenged enough to begin to push back the very barriers of your own personal limitations. 

I hope you make a stupid, unethical mistake and get caught red-handed and are big enough to say those magic words "I was wrong." 

I hope you give so much of yourself that some days you wonder if it is worth it all. 

I wish for you a magnificent obsession that will give you a reason for living and purpose and direction in life. 

I wish for you the worst kind of criticism for everything you do, because that makes you fight to achieve beyond what you normally would. 

I wish for you the experience of leadership.  --- Earl Reum 

I wish for you passion that includes acceptance of failure…and the experience of leadership.

Peace,

Tim McCarthy

Editor’s Note: This irreverent “journey through the new Third World” by Lewis is at once vastly entertaining and concerning. Within the past year or so, he visits Iceland, Ireland, Greece, Germany and California to measure the fallout of the financial crisis. Interviews with many key players in these focal point geographies suggest to the reader that the crisis a. looks obvious in retrospect and b. is not nearly over yet. And while I’d already had this fact drilled into my head in MBA school in 2005-2007, he reminds me that the clearest sign of trouble ahead is our government (all levels) un-fundable benefit commitments to public workers and pensioners.

Excerpt: “It’s not just a coincidence that the debts of cities and states spun out of control at the same time as the debts of individual Americans. Alone in a dark room with a pile of money, Americans knew exactly what they wanted to do, from the top of the society to the bottom. They’d been conditioned to grab as much as they could, without thinking about the long-term consequences. Afterward, the people on Wall Street would privately bemoan the low morals of the American people who walked away from their subprime loans, and the American people would express outrage at the Wall Street people who paid themselves a fortune to design the bad loans.”

Editor’s Note: Somehow this article from 16 months ago got lost in my clippings file and yet is still worth publishing. It’s a brief Charlie Rose interview with two academics and two journalists. It’s a great clip in my view of what seems to me to be an American society issue – the bifurcation of incomes.

Excerpt: “America without a middle class is a Third World Country.”

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_45/b4202018126682.htm?chan=rss_topDiscussed_ssi_5

Editor’s Note: The company referenced in the article below “Investing in the Bottom of the Ladder,” by Jody Heymann, demonstrates that for-profit companies can do better by paying and treating their lowest paid employees better. The two companies I’ve been most directly involved in are primarily impacted by their lowest paid workers (WorkPlace Media and Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers). In fact, over 350 of our 400 workers live on the margins. Like Great Little Box, it seems obvious to us that the better your treat your “lowest rung of the ladder” employee, the greater your overall success – financially and societally.

Excerpt: “The companies we studied had in fact increased their profitability by investing in their employees at the bottom of the ladder.”

Editor’s note: This is perhaps my favorite quote ever, a sign posted behind the desk of my friend, placed so no one can see it but him.

Editor’s note: This is just a great throw-back song for me. A lot of memories come to me from this hitchhiker’s ballad of missing their mate, some of the best from singing it with my family. But there is also a point in the refrain, noted below in my favorite lyric.

Favorite lyric: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose; nothing ain’t worth nothing but it’s free.”

This is the 9^th in a series of 12 articles about mistakes I’ve made and lessons I’ve learned building a non-profit foundation since 1997.

Leadership is the most written about subject in business.  I’ve read twenty or more books on it, attended dozens of classes and seminars and read hundreds of articles.

And it’s still not easy for me to put a finger on leadership.

Of all the books, I still recommend “On Becoming a Leader,” by Warren Bennis, written more than twenty years ago.  For classes, I score Collins “Level 5 Leadership” above all others.  And you can find several of my favorite leadership articles in the library on this website.

Lately, I’ve been trying to add my own empirical data to the learning.  Who has led me?  What characteristics did they demonstrate?  What made me want to invest my time and resources in their organizations?

I still think of myself as 40, not 60, so it still surprises me when I realize I have a lot of data to work from:

·         Our foundation has invested in over 100 organizations so far

·         Our non-profit and for-profit lending companies have served over 30 small and large organizations

·         For 17 years I’ve met for a full day each month with 15 other CEO/owners in a peer group called Vistage (formerly TEC).

My summary view is that every business and non-profit can easily trace its success or failure in some manner to leadership.  Effective organizations are people-motivated and aligned by a good leader.

So below, I’ll list the characteristics I’ve most consistently seen in the successful entrepreneurs, CEOs and non-profit organization leaders who I’ve worked with.

1.      Acquisitive…..good leaders I’ve worked with crave learning and strive to acquire more knowledge.   The most effective acquisitive leaders get most of their learning from others who have faced similar situations and issues.  So, great leaders are not necessarily inventors, yet always they are builders of knowledge.

2.      Risk managers…..not risk takers.  The best leaders measure risk and reward dispassionately.  They calculate the “best case-worst case” before acting.  Prominent in their calculation is each decision’s effect on the people they lead.

3.      Realistic……..a consistent leadership vacuum is the avoidance of reality.  All of us face one or more overwhelming issues.  Poor leaders avoid seemingly insurmountable issues.  Good leaders accept them, face them down and try to pull that issue apart piece by piece.  Whether successful in overcoming them or not, these folks are more fun to follow.

4.      Planners…….my first question of anyone we might work with is: “Do you have a written plan?”  The second question is “May I see it and critique it?”  Poor leaders answer “no” to one of these questions.  Good leaders have a clear, written plan.  Great leaders have an open plan, welcoming all who are willing to help make the plan better.  NOTE: Many poor leaders hide behind a voluminous “strategic plan,” knowing that if they can’t fully understand it, no one else will either.  J

5.      Customer focused………..the most consistent quality of a poor leader is one who focuses internally.  “Dilbert” and TV’s “Office” demonstrate my point – strategy makes little sense.  Any organization that focuses, even benevolently, from the inside out do worse than ones who build from outside, in.  All success – profit and non – begins with a customer.  

6.      Numbers driven……the most effective non-profit leaders know that they cannot create, maintain or grow their mission without making the numbers work.  I majored in political science so by definition I hate numbers.  But I’ve learned the hard way that both my social venture and business interests can only be served effectively if I first measure decisions mathematically.

7.      Humble…..the surprise of Collins’ Level 5 leadership theory.  Humble people make the best leaders because we find them easy to follow.  Humble leaders don’t care who gets the credit (in fact they know success has many parents) and so they find it easy to encourage others.  Therein lies their power.

8.      Resourceful………….whether working with plentiful resource or none, great leaders know how to leverage whatever they have.  When it’s a lot, they use what they have wisely.  When little is available, they get resourceful.  The great start-ups I’ve worked with take the approach of “who can we borrow resources from?”

9.      Authentic………..I save this for last because it’s the final litmus test of great leadership, in my view.  It’s been said that “people with great strengths have great weaknesses.”  Authentic leaders recognize their weaknesses as well as their strengths.  They allow people to see both and can openly discuss them.  Who follows a phony?  Other phonies. 

Is there one leader I work with who encompasses all these qualities?  Yes, actually there is more than one.  Maybe I’ll feature them in later articles.  These articles would lend reality for my points by citing real leaders I know and follow.

“Do-gooders” fool themselves just like all business people do.  And those willing to fool themselves and others, consciously or unconsciously, waste time and money.    

How do I know?

I’ve done it – repeatedly.

It was only after I got a headache that I stopped beating my head against the wall of non-leadership.

Peace. 

Tim McCarthy

http://www.capitalidea.org/downloads/pdfs/CI_one_page.pdf

Editor’s note: The attached overview of a cool non-profit in Austin, TX, intrigues me for two reasons – 1. It’s a great mission we’re working on too and 2. It’s one of the best simple overviews I’ve ever seen of a social mission.    

Editor’s note:  Thanks to my good friend and article-watcher, Ron Dimattia, for passing this onto me.  I’ve never been a big Clinton fan and yet his point of “charity” alone no longer making sense is one I subscribe to wholeheartedly.  And the article is well-written and to the point.  

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/544c317a-42a2-11e1-93ea-00144feab49a.html#axzz1lAhNPWnC