A Machiavellian Perspective on Political Super PAC's

Since the election is now over, and the candidates spent over $6 Billion for a job paying $600 thousand a year, we should examine the behind-the-scene tactics as viewed through Machiavelli.

From a Machiavellian perspective political Super PAC's are great. The politician knows who his Super PAC supporters are, and they do the dirty work. They are not constrained by federal limits on donations, or how they use the money. The PAC's seize the moment and attack potential rivals like a virus. Meanwhile, the political candidate, stands in front of the voters and  says, “I am powerless to stop the Super Packs and what they are saying about my competition”. Invariably, an arms race develops when the other side creates their own super pack to retaliate. Eventually, you see mutual destruction rain down on both sides. The winner use to be the candidate who has the most affluent friends who are engaged in his / her candidacy and are willing to invest early in development of the Super PAC.  The Super Pac's must now think more strategically. Chose a side to early and they may get wiped out by investigators who find dirty secrets hidden in the candidates past and have time to further develop the story. Get in to late and the voters may have already made up their minds.  The Super Pac must find new, and previously untapped, pathways to get the message out while containing their opponents message.  The Super Pac must infiltrate the media. It is imperative to have someone willing to run the news stories you want, with the angle you need to get into a favorable light. The media can spin a tail to the public that sounds exciting and realistic.

Social media provides a plethora of communication pathways to beat your opponent into submission. Websites are nice, but anyone with a twitter account can blast messages out 140 characters at a time extolling the virtues, or vicees, of a candidate. A good social media manager, supported by the Super Pac, can use multiple portals to deliver a tidal wave of information that can not be surmounted.   

Today's candidates must utilize a combined arms strategy to not only beat but concur their adversary. It requires the combination of early arrival, combined with the financial firepower, a media elite to carry your message  and a willingness to eviscerate the competition; simply stated, fire early and often with the intent of ruthless destruction.

Ordinary People Doing Heroic Work Everyday

While preparing to teach a seminar on situational leadership and leadership branding, I was approached by a friend offering advice. He stated that I should discuss the techniques professional coaches use to create world championship teams. I thought about the idea for a few minutes and decided "no". Not just “no,” but “Hell No”!

Let’s see, professional athletes are truly gifted individuals, not like mere morals.  They play sports to make money, no problem there. However, both the National Football Leagues and National Basketball Association players just went on strike for more money. Not that earning money is wrong, but when players make comments such as: “This is about putting food on my table and I may have to sell a Bentley,” we have certainly skewed the perspective of the American dream.

The reality of the situation is these players are independent contractors who work for a team. The coach is actually someone who must create a picture that focuses everyone on a single mission: win the game, or your value may decrease. Every year, the average players’ contracts are up for renewal and each one tries to get the most money, because there may not be a next year. They want the ball so they can improve their statistics and use that as leverage in contract negotiations. The team owners want to win; the players want lucrative paying positions. These are not the people I want to talk about as leaders, after all they're playing a game. At the end of the day they all go home safe.  

I want to talk about the firefighter who gets a house fire call at 3:00 AM and jumps out of the bed while saying, “Let’s Rock.” The EMS crewman responds on a hot July day to an intoxicated person who has fallen down and urinated all over himself. The guy should probably go to jail, but he has a laceration to his forehead and must be taken to the hospital. or how about the EMS worker tells they guy, “Its OK, I’ll take care of you.” The rescue crews who respond to an overturned vehicle where the front seat passengers are mangled, but there is a shout that a small child in the rear seat still has a pulse. You hear several rescue members yell, “Come on, I’ll get under there.” Several members slide past the remains of the parents and take care of the injured child as other members use the jaws-of-life to pry open the car. After it is all over, the child will survive and the rescue workers patch each other up from the scrapes of metal and shards of glass. Finally, we have the police officer who makes a routine traffic stop and finds himself fighting for his life to arrest a violent offender. Everyday these events, or something similar, occur across America.

These brave people do not have camera crews following them around, they do not hold out for multi-million dollar contract extensions. They perform these dangerous jobs because they are truly willing to give more than they receive. These are ordinary people doing heroic work everyday. These are the people I want to talk about in a leadership seminar.

Understanding the use of "Power and Force" in modern business

If modern business organizations understood those two principals of “Power and Force” the potential of American industry could again be unleashed for our benefit. In many instances people confuse and intertwine Power with Force. Power and Force may seem similar, but are in fact completely different in how they are generated and applied. There can be no force if a person has no power. If a person has power, but choose not to use it, then they are not going to be effective.

People who head organizations have “Power” based on their positions within an organization - direct power; or, by people wanting to follow and be led by an individual – indirect power. The higher up you go the more power you have. Simply stated, the greater authority the greater the power. Power can then be broken down into hard or soft power. With hard power you make commands and edicts based on your power and authority to reward or punish. With soft power other techniques, sometimes call coercion, are utilized to get a specific task completed. As an individual moves up in an organization and receives more power they must learn restraint. Unloading a lot of power at once only leads to destruction. The careful application of power is a technique that must be mastered through understanding of the principals of force.

Force requires action; greater the action the greater the force applied. With enough force, a large round piece of wood and be shoved through a small square hole.  Force is broken down into positive and negative force, with the effect graded by the amount of destruction caused by its application to any given situation. For example, a middle manager may hate all of his subordinates and want them all gone, but does not have the power to make the decision; therefore, he has no force to use. A CEO of a company has the power to hire and fire people. He or she may fire and individual or the staffs of an entire business unit, depending on the amount of force he or she cares to use. Likewise, the CEO may use targeted power and force and fire the middle manager, thus relieving the subordinates of a potential tyrant who wanted more power.  

It has been said that power corrupts absolutely. This is only true for people who are not disciplined with their power. Someone may have a lot of corrupt power, but if they do not unleash the force of it then it has no impact. Likewise, a powerful person who is benevolent can still inadvertently unleash a plethora of untamed force and harm an entire workforce.

So, which is more dangerous, power or force? Power is more dangerous. Power is the stored accumulation of energy that gets turned into force. The amount of destruction to a workforce is measured by the force applied, but may only be a pittance to the amount of power that could have been unleashed. Therefore, business schools need to develop curriculum that teach and describe how to gain power in one semester. How to force is used for good and bad the next semester. In the last semester utilize a capstone class to test to see if a person can build power and use the potential force correctly.

As people apply power to develop American industries, it must be understood the force from such action will have an impact on other countries and their industrial complexes. Power and Force can not exist without each other. They can be used to ones benefit, but someone else will see their application as destructive. It is always better to be on the positive effects rather than suffer the negative effects.  Machiavelli and Sun Tzu understood the principals and how to correctly apply them centuries ago.  

Leaders Inspire Creative Thinking - Managers Make Rules and Policies

I found the quote “Rules and policies are created to help make jobs easier” in a book about leadership. Clearly the author does not understand what differentiates leadership from management; To protect their ego, I left the name of the author out.

Rules and policies are the tools of management to protect the organization. They set out lines that are not to be crossed. Rules and policies are necessary for organizations to operate and protect employees from harm, each other, and potential criminal and civil penalties for violating state and federal laws. If you need to know how to request time off you “follow the policy”. If you need to fix a widget you follow the “procedure”.  You follow the rules or you pay the consequences. This is about management, period.

The reason why everyone encourages out of the box thinking is it shows leadership through courage and a willingness to break the rules. . Leadership is about freeing people to innovate and use their energies to be greater than they thought possible. Management, on the hand, tries to quell out of the box thinking because of the loose of control. Management is used to rein employees in and keep them following the rules.   Companies that have high performance cultures cleverly integrate management and leadership techniques to create synergy and take their organizations to the next level.

History is filled with organizations that once were innovative and on the cutting edge of technology for that day. Leaders lead and people dreamed of taking the company to the next level through a shared vision of what could be. As success came someone always decides we need more “rules and policies” to keep things running smoothly. Then as more rules piled on innovation was stifled and the most creative people left to start their own companies. The large management centered company then looses product share and eventually closes. Don’t lose cutting edge leadership by becoming a bureaucratic organization centered on management. If you have people who think being a good leader is setting out clear rules and policies then it is time to realize your company’s days are numbered.

  

Encourage leadership that creates motivates, inspires and takes your organization to the next level of success. Never let your company be run by managers who think they are showing leadership by creating rules that stifle your employee’s creativity.

Our biology in how we read impacts how we see our leaders.

How is effective leadership reflective in the way we read? The question is actually very interesting, and one of those ah ha moments, where you see deeper into biology and psychology of everyday life. In the book by Susan M. Weinschenk “100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People”, she explores how we actually read through the use of saccade and fixation patterns. We don’t read smoothly and actually work through patterns. While we are reading, our eyes are using their peripheral ability to scan the letters coming up. So, we are interpreting patterns as information that we use to create images for what we are reading. We are so well tuned to figure out patterns, when reading words that are misspelled, we can instantly figure out what the misspelled word should have been: example wihch bird hsa hte sharp lcaws?  

So, what does my lack of proof reading have to do with leadership? Answer, everything! Everyone has said sometime in their lives, “I wish my boss would be consistent”.  Realistically, you want a great leader over a good leader. You want a good leader over a bad leader, right?  But, I bet you want a bad leader who is consistent over one that fluctuates from good to bad at the drop of a hat. It all comes back to consistency in action. If you have a great boss, you can prepare each day to have a relatively good day. If you have a bad boss, you come in, sit down, strap in, prepare for work, and sharpen your resume. It’s the boss that fluctuates that drives everyone crazy.  Your peripheral vision cannot read the pattern and prepare you for the future. It’s like a roller coaster ride through a dark tunnel. You never know what is about to happen and you don’t know if you are coming or going.

It is easier to improve a bad leader than an inconsistent one. Why, because the inconsistent one sometimes makes good decisions. They have to learn to look deeper into issues and how they would naturally react. Then, they have to learn which action they would normally do is correct. They have to relearn and apply new decision making patterns to become more consistent. Sometimes they become bad leaders, but that can be easily fixed. Hopefully, they become great leaders, and that should be reinforced. But it still comes back to how biology has helped us survive through the use of patterns.           

Ego vs Perspective On A New Job

When you get promoted, or moved to a new temporary position, with more responsibilities you have to look at your reasons for wanting the position. What does it really entail? What is the impact on your family? It is about ego or your conviction that you can make a difference?

Luckily for me, I have the opportunity for a "test drive" right now. I'm responsible for the downtown area of a capital city. I have neighborhoods, a general business district, and protecting half a billion dollars in new hotel development. All with 33 people? Can I make a difference? Absolutely . Am I up to the challenge?Yes. Is it worth the damage to my family spending 12-14 hours a day trying to stop crime, and turn around a demotivated group of people? No, no it's not.

So, what is it really about? Determining what is important in life and setting priorities, that's it in a nutshell. The "ego" drives people for more. People who can facing struggles and coming up with a workable solution have always fascinated me. It's like watching chess, and seeing a master in action. One always wonders if you are really that good. Hopefully you are. Hopefully, you are taking the assignment because you want to make a difference, and believe you have something to contribute. Hopefully, it is not to make a difference in your take home check, because you will loose more than you gain.

The challenge for me it to motivate people who have been neglected for a long time. The key is to do it one small victory at a time. To reach the individual, three layers below, who works the middle of the night, and make them believe they make a impact. Again, the "ego" in action. However, the impact of touching an individual to do their best transcends a single career. They will one day motivate someone else to do their best.

Together we success or fail. The true test is determining if the job is right for you, or is the "ego" that says go ahead and take it. To quote Buddy the Elf, " Some people forget what is important in life, and they end up on the naughtly list."

Leaders Inspire Creative Thinking - Managers Make Rules and Policies

I found the quote “Rules and policies are created to help make jobs easier” in a book about leadership. Clearly the author does not understand what differentiates leadership from management; To protect their ego, I left the name of the author out.

Rules and policies are the tools of management to protect the organization. They set out lines that are not to be crossed. Rules and policies are necessary for organizations to operate and protect employees from harm, each other, and potential criminal and civil penalties for violating state and federal laws. If you need to know how to request time off you “follow the policy”. If you need to fix a widget you follow the “procedure”.  You follow the rules or you pay the consequences. This is about management, period.

The reason why everyone encourages out of the box thinking is it shows leadership through courage and a willingness to break the rules. . Leadership is about freeing people to innovate and use their energies to be greater than they thought possible. Management, on the hand, tries to quell out of the box thinking because of the loose of control. Management is used to rein employees in and keep them following the rules.   Companies that have high performance cultures cleverly integrate management and leadership techniques to create synergy and take their organizations to the next level.

History is filled with organizations that once were innovative and on the cutting edge of technology for that day. Leaders lead and people dreamed of taking the company to the next level through a shared vision of what could be. As success came someone always decides we need more “rules and policies” to keep things running smoothly. Then as more rules piled on innovation was stifled and the most creative people left to start their own companies. The large management centered company then looses product share and eventually closes. Don’t lose cutting edge leadership by becoming a bureaucratic organization centered on management. If you have people who think being a good leader is setting out clear rules and policies then it is time to realize your company’s days are numbered.  

Encourage leadership that creates motivates, inspires and takes your organization to the next level of success. Never let your company be run by managers who think they are showing leadership by creating rules that stifle your employees creativity.