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The 7/8 CEO
Related to country: United States
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

When I first meet with a CEO to begin work with her or him as coach, I make it clear that the emphasis of my work is on behavior. Let’s understand that I’m fully cognizant this is a very talented and accomplished person who’s my new partner in a wonderful undertaking. To be in this position as CEO they already are in the 99th percentile of the executive population.

But I still see them as people whose final topping out on claiming their singularity, in other words, their true value proposition to the world, is work they have yet to do. I look at a CEO and say, “You’re a 7/8th man and we’re here for you to claim that final 8th. I doubt even you know what a phenomenal impact it will have on this company when you fully own yourself and go that final distance.”

If this idea resonates for you and you wonder how you might put the pieces together in the human puzzle and claim your final 8th, whether you have your eye on the top job in a corporation or are curriculum director of a large urban high school, I have some ideas to share with you.

A couple of weeks ago I addressed the University of Chicago Booth School of Business Entrepreneurial Roundtable and covered this topic. A link to the video of that presentation appears below. Of course, I’d be delighted if you find it useful.

http://yourinnerceo.blogspot.com

All the best,

Allan

November 7, 2008 | 3:46 PM Comments  0 comments
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So, You're Thinking About A WIKI?
Related to country: United States
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

So, you’re thinking about a WIKI?

Have you wondered about a WIKI? I mean, about getting into it, making it really sing for you? Just what is it? What’s the return on the effort to learn what makes it go? What accounts for its increasing buzz? You know it’s meant to be a tool for collaboration, but does it truly work? Is it what it’s cracked up to be? Most important, you ask, is it for us? For me?

If you have such questions and more on how a WIKI might help your organization—virtual or on the ground—make a giant leap in idea generation and application, I have good news for you. Lots of good news, in fact, packed into the 167 pages between the covers of a new book titled Wikipatterns by Stewart Mader.

Mader is a social software maven who, in 2006, wrote the first book that focuses specifically on the application of the WIKI in education, and actively demonstrates the tool in action. He’s the founder and administrator of two groups on Facebook: (1) Using Wiki in Education and (2) Wikipatterns.

How do you get a WIKI started? What will draw people to it? How do you spare them from fear of putting their thoughts down for all to see? How do you minimize their angst over editing others’ comments and thereby offending them? How do you get over someone else editing your own comments? How much is vandalism a spoiler to great group effort? Is this tool for small scale enterprises only, or just the opposite? How long does it take to get started? What’s its life-span? Who moderates it?


Mader answers all these questions and many more that tell you what you don’t know that you don’t know. He does this with a competence, flow and range of experience that shows how others have cleared these hurdles. Ten mercifully brief case studies give ample evidence of how the WIKI pulls people into a knowledge-and-solution camp that runs rings around email for speed, effectiveness, cohesion and intellectual rigor.


His chapter, “11 Steps to a Successful WIKI Pilot” is, for me, the brilliant sparkler among many glowing stones. I mean, after all, this is how a successful venture gets started, and we’re using this chapter as a model for building a WIKI workbook for our virtual site on Facebook, “Your Inner CEO/The Book for Business.”


In the end, Mader makes clear that the opportunity that the WIKI provides is its inherent flexibility for you to shape it completely to meet the needs of your organization, no matter how unique it is.


Don’t even think about undertaking a WIKI without absorbing the good vibes, savvy and energy of this guide.


All the best,


Allan

January 10, 2008 | 8:01 AM Comments  0 comments
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New Group: Your Inner CEO/The Book for Balance in Business
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

NEW GROUP: YOUR INNER CEO/THE BOOK FOR BALANCE IN BUSINESS

1. The title of this blog is the first of three matters I’d like to bring to your attention. So let me get right to it. “Your Inner CEO/The Book for Balance in Business” is the name of a new group I’m starting on TIG. When you visit the group’s webpage (http://groups.takingitglobal.org/YourInnerCEO) you’ll see this description:

This group aims to help its members discover their singularity. This is one of the most neglected tasks on the planet, yet when courageous explorers experience this clarity, they place themselves in the enviable position of offering their true value proposition to the world in three key areas: work, love and community. The guidebook for our new group this self-discovery is YOUR INNER CEO: UNLEASH THE EXECUTIVE WITHIN. This is a book I’ve written that is based on the social psychology of the brilliant Vienna Psychiatrist, Alfred Adler. Adler, along with Freud and Jung, are the three pillars of modern psychology. This book is the starting point of our discussions and explorations, and our inquiries will no doubt take us in many stimulating directions concerning the life of our businesses (profit or non-profit) and the business of our lives.

Most TIG groups are not-for-profit organizations committed to a particular social cause and action. YOUR INNER CEO is committed to the leadership development of the people engaged in these causes. Please visit the webpage, and if what we’re about appeals to you, please sign up and invite your like-minded TIG friends to do the same.

2. Our new group also has a website: http://www.yourinnerceo.com. You can go there right now to download, free-of-charge, Chapter 5 of our guidebook. The title of this chapter is “Boards.” I want you to have this chapter available to you immediately because it offers the book’s main lessons on collaboration. Anyone who serves on a committee or wants to learn how outstanding governing boards function, will benefit from reading this chapter. When you read it, you’ll also be in a position to know whether or not you want to buy the book and join our new study, learning and discussion group.

3. So, today, we launch our WIKI Discussion Group, which will support the efforts in our study group here on TIG. Our TIG group is limited to TIG members, but the WIKI discussion will be open to anyone in the world who wants to engage in the open-source, peer-production process of creating a workbook as a companion piece to our guidebook, YOUR INNER CEO. You can see how our TIG group and WIKI discussion can complement each other and deepen our understanding of how all of us can offer our true value proposition to the world.

Come join us! Go to our website http://www.yourinnerceo.com and click on the tab "Join our wiki discussion." That's it.

The two links below show how our guidebook has been received. The first contains all the Amazon/Borders reviews. The second is from Tom Pick, one of America’s most respected B2B bloggers.

http://www.amazon.com/review/product/1564149552/ref=cm_cr_pr_link_1

http://webmarketcentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/book-review-your-inner-ceo-unleash.html

December 18, 2007 | 3:11 PM Comments  0 comments
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THERE'S NOT ONE GOOD REASON FOR STARBUCKS' SUCCESS!
Related to country: United States

THERE'S NOT ONE GOOD REASON FOR STARBUCKS' SUCCESS!

“You gotta be kidding,” you say . . . but I’m not. There are THREE good reasons, and ONE sensational reason Starbucks stands apart not only from other beverage and food operations, but other retailers as well.

Just why is it, for example, that by the end of today there will be more than 62,000 members of Facebook who habitually and enthusiastically choose to enjoy the Starbucks experience? There are almost 1200 people here on Gather who do the same and also conduct a book study group based on their in-common membership in their Starbucks sub-group. MySpace has more than 67,000 such Starbucks-devoted members. What is it that leads to the phenomenal growth of this enterprise not only in its native United States, but in most major regions of the world, including the Paris jewel, thought by almost everyone to be impervious to the seductions of a foreign taste of the bean?
In my just published book, YOUR INNER CEO: UNLEASH THE EXECUTIVE WITHIN, on pages 147-151, I lay out the three good reasons—and the sensational one—that explains why Starbucks, along with Porsche, Caltech, Coca-Cola, Harley-Davidson and Southwest Airlines stand far apart from their me-too competitors to demonstrate day-in and day-out their singular, unmatched value to their customers.

More important to you, YOUR INNER CEO, in its first two chapters, takes you through a drill that will make clear what your singular value proposition is in your life and work. You’ll learn how best to share that with the world whether your career and other engagements are in organizations large or small, for-profit or not-for-profit. This will pay off if you’re an established executive or a student preparing for your life’s work. Finding out what you have that is uniquely you and giving it is a good working definition of collaboration. This is how people and organizations go from good to great.

Howard Behar is a member of the Board of Directors of Starbucks and has held virtually every key operating job in this company, both domestic and global. I’m proud and flattered to have his endorsement on the jacket of Your Inner CEO:

“If you are a board member or report to a board, you need to read this book. The chapter on boards alone is worth the price of admission. Allan Cox gets it right on all accounts and gives great advice on how to make potentially difficult relationships both collaborative and productive.”

Visit my website, http://www.yourinnerceo.com, to learn more about the book, get a free download of the chapter on boards that Howard Behar cites, and order the book. You’ll be glad you did.



All the best,

Allan Cox

http://www.yourinnerceo.com

November 5, 2007 | 5:18 PM Comments  0 comments
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Who's Alfred Adler and What Can He Do for Your Inner CEO?
Related to country: United States






WHO IS ALFRED ADLER AND WHAT CAN HE DO FOR YOUR INNER CEO?

The short answers? He’s the first community psychologist and he can take you all the way!

Readers, I want you to know that the detail on Alfred Adler that follows in this blog does not appear in my new book, YOUR INNER CEO. But I offer it here so that, if you're interested, you'll know the original thoughts of this brilliant man that underpin the points of the book from cover to cover. If this kind of thing makes your eyes glaze over, just visit my website http://www.yourinnerceo.com and click on the FAQ tab to see 23 answers to the question, "Why should I buy and read this book and tell my friends about it?

Now about Adler . . .

Alfred Adler (1870 to 1936) crossed over a significant boundary in 1911. At the time, he was president of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Union, a group founded and dominated by Sigmund Freud. Adler’s growing conviction and public statements that we’re shaped by our goals more than our past greatly displeased Freud.

This strain was made doubly difficult for both men because Adler had been Freud’s close colleague. Even so, in that year, Adler broke from his collaboration with Freud and later went on to give us many groundbreaking concepts that have crept into our language in a big way. They include (1) birth order, to account for the ramifications of the fact that every child in a family is born into a different environment than that child’s other siblings; (2) family constellation, a given family’s grid, a clinical pattern of how it functions and malfunctions; (3) organ inferiority, later popularized as organ jargon, to convey how our emotions are often expressed physically in our bodies; (4) inferiority feeling, later popularized as inferiority complex; (5) social interest, that conveyed Adler’s view that a person’s highest, most effective and authentic striving lay in her reaching the state of cooperation with and contribution to mankind and nature; (6) creative self, by which he meant we each have made ourselves who we are and yet will be; and (7) early recollections, his ingenious innovation of using people’s earliest memories to ascertain what goals they live by today. However, the centerpiece of his theory of personality, his crowning achievement, was (8) Style-of-Life. By Style-of-Life, he meant an individual's "organized set of convictions about life of which that individual, at best, is only dimly aware.”

Not Neo-Freudian

The last time I visited Wikipedia online and clicked on their list of psychologists, I found that it included 161 names, a true honor roll of the field. Only one person on that list has his work included as one of the 32 Great Books and also has his name side-by-side on a book as co-author with Albert Einstein. As you might expect, that’s Sigmund Freud.

Goethe wrote that a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant can see further than the giant. Freud was certainly such a giant. The power of psychoanalysis has put its imprint on the world forever and many Neo-Freudians have stood on his shoulders and taken his brilliant work further. Alfred Adler, whose name appears first on this alphabetical list, was often called a Neo-Freudian, but he wasn’t one. Neither was he a dwarf.

He was the first close associate of Freud to break from him in a manner that was different in kind, not degree. He was, in fact, the founder of the social school of psychiatry. The social school didn’t neglect the study of the individual, but tapped out a steady drum-beat that emphasized that the individual’s life is embedded in the community at all times. From a theoretical and practical standpoint, members of the social school were concerned with “what’s between” persons and their world that surrounds them. This boundary-declaring social psychology was a refreshing, compelling alternative to Freud’s inward-looking id, ego and super-ego, sexual nature of the libido, and repression.

Theory and Practice Threaded Together

It has been said often by some scholars that psychoanalysis is a theory in search of a practice. What in Europe came to be called Adler’s theory of “Indivisible Psychology,” was joined with practice. Indivisible Psychology (mistakenly translated in the U.S. as Individual Psychology) was committed to the flowering of the person based on discovery and expression of her unique wholeness—her true indivisibility—wired for social connection. That self discovery of unique wholeness took place in therapy by laying bare unknown goals by which clients lived—that were destructive—and replacing them with those that were growth-inducing. Freud wrote many books, including Future of an Illusion (anti-religious) and Civilization and Its Discontents. Adler also wrote many books including What Life Should Mean to You, Understanding Human Nature and Social Interest. Can you hear the difference in the spirit of the book titles? Adler reached outward, opening clinics throughout Austria and Germany. He was popular, accessible, and known for the use of humor in therapy. Later, he came to the United States, joined the faculty of Columbia University, practiced, and was a sought-after lecturer worldwide.

The leading lights of the social school of psychiatry were, of course, Adler, the pioneer, Karen Horney (pronounced “horn-eye”—thought I’d put you at ease about that), Erich Fromm and Harry Stack Sullivan. When Adler broke from Freud in 1911, Horney was age 25 and two years shy of her medical degree, Sullivan was 19, and Fromm was the ripe old age of 11. So there can be little doubt that these brilliant minds were following in Adler’s footsteps. Since all three began their careers firmly planted in Freud’ inner demonology (id, ego, super-ego), then broke away to a social grounding, it’s odd they were labeled neo-Freudians. It would be more accurate to call them neo-Adlerians.

A Fresh Turn in Career Building: Abraham Maslow

Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) was a psychologist younger than Adler and Fromm, but friendly with both. His work is well-known to management thinkers. The concepts he developed that are part of our everyday language bear the marks of the social school, and Adler in particular. The main one was “self-actualization,” a term Maslow said he actually got from colleague Kurt Goldstein, and another was “hierarchy of needs.” Maslow was the one who said famously, “Man lives by bread alone, when there’s no bread.” He was also one of the founders of “Humanistic Psychology,” a sub-group within psychology that’s very much alive today.

Maslow took Adler’s curative optimism further and extended psychology’s reach beyond people with severe impediments in their lives to those who more nearly realize their potential. He cast a wide net of study over historical figures such as Lincoln, Jefferson, Whitman, Thoreau and Beethoven, and self-actualizing friends and acquaintances that included Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt. His clinical investigation produced 15 traits that distinguished them from the general population. They are: (1) realistically oriented, (2) accepting of themselves, others, and the natural world, (3) spontaneous, (4) problem-centered rather than self-centered, (5) seen as having an air of detachment and need for privacy, (6) autonomous and independent, (7) appreciative of people and things in fresh ways—not stereotyped, (8) mostly known for having profound mystical or spiritual experiences—though not necessarily religious in character, (9) quick to identify with mankind, (10) involved in intimate relationships with few specially loved people, profound and deeply emotional rather than superficial, (11) committed to democratic values and attitudes, (12) clear on the difference between means and ends, (13) philosophical rather than hostile in their sense of humor, (14) in possession of a great fund of creativity, (15) resistant to conforming to the culture.

These are all qualities of people with a Style-of-Life that I call a “Guardian Presence.” This is in contrast with Styles-of-Life that I call “Looming Threats.”

When he died in 1970, Maslow left a rich legacy—turning psychology’s resources toward pro-growth applications, many of them in business. Yet, unfortunately, the powerful tool Adler developed and used so effectively in clinics and schools is a baton that never was passed to the world of executive performance and the management of complex organizations. That tool is Style-of-Life, an uncanny method for clarifying the real goals by which individuals and organizations live. These goals, identified and made apparent to you, are far different from the ones you and your organization often deceive yourselves into thinking you live by. Understanding your own Style-of-Life—and that of your organization—is the payoff from my new book, YOUR INNER CEO: unleash the executive within, due out in October, 2007. The lessons from this book, learned and applied, can spell the difference between your personal and organizational success and failure.

The Promise for Today

Unlike Freud’s absorption with the past, Adler’s work is forward looking—what philosophers call teleological. The dictionary defines teleology as the study of design or purpose; use of ultimate purpose or design to explain what happens or is likely to happen; the belief in or perceiving purpose that leads to some end—in nature, behavior or history.

So as you lay plans for your career and the steps you’re going to take to excel in it, please take to heart what Adler espoused: Your central goal that governs your life for better or worse, and the same for such a goal for your organization itself is an expression of purpose—for good or ill. Adler treats goals as engines of attraction, pulling you into the future in a way that either enhances your life or derails it. With guided self-examination you can ferret out these goals and rid yourself of them if they threaten you or nurture them if they support you. Adler shows you the way to do this and that way is reproduced in YOUR INNER CEO.

Let me point to just two blockbuster business books in recent years that embody this teleological reality and show, without having thought much about it, how much we believe in it: (1) Steven Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and (2) The Gallup organization’s First, Break All The Rules, written by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. In Covey’s book, the starting point of his guidance is “Begin with the end in mind.” In First, Break All The Rules, the authors list as one of their four keys to success, “Define the right outcomes.” A second of the four is “Focus on strengths”—which they state repeatedly, can come about only by “self discovery.” YOUR INNER CEO is totally geared to help you gain such self discovery.

In both your personal career and organizational effectiveness, where the words goals, objectives and outcomes have top priority, wouldn’t it be of supreme value to know that the goals you live by are right and real for you?

Gaining such knowledge clears the way, as nothing else can, for bringing your unique strengths to bear on the challenges you face. YOUR INNER CEO gives you a clear, direct path to such useful knowledge.

October 31, 2007 | 4:10 AM Comments  0 comments
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