Global Crosswinds, LLC

Robert A. Simpkins

Global Crosswinds,L.L.C.

Gone Too Soon: 

This blog is being written the day after the legendary Michael Jackson died.  I don’t know exactly how to express my feelings, but as a friend of mine said, “It sucks”.  I can’t think of any better way to put it. I’m usually writing about business, politics, communications or something similar, but with Michael’s passing, I felt the inner need to write something. 

As a member of the generation slightly older than Michael, I had, as so many people had around the world, mixed feelings about him. Trying to reconcile the various Michael Jacksons has always made me feel uneasy.   There seemed to be three disparate and unreadable variations of him, but, in my simple evaluative mind, I desperately wanted just one. That would never happen, though, and he passed on leaving us with, not one, but three voids.

Thriller:

As an unbelievably ingenious writer, producer, arranger, stage performer and entertainer, Michael exceeded anyone who had come before and may hold that eminent status for a long, long time.  How could anyone deny his creative brilliance?  It was definitely a gift from the gods, and one he repaid every time he recorded a song or took to the stage.  There were imitators, but in truth, no one ever came close to changing the expression of music the way he did.  On his worse days, Michael was still better than everyone else.

Off The Wall:

As a public figure, bridging the entertainer with the private man, reality became a little more clouded.  Whether one believes the charges against him or not, Michael always seemed to have difficulty making choices that were not apart of his musical life.  My personal feeling is that he was only at fault for blurring childhood fantasies with acceptable societal expectations; something all of us experienced at an early age.  The problem was that Michael was a full grown man, as well as an overly-scrutinized celebrity, and some of his decisions were too child-like.  I’m sure, in his mind, he was just acting innocently, and the truth is that I really have no interest in the opinions of those who joyously wallow in his troubles.  No matter how I felt previously, I am now so saddened that I just want to put behind his judgmental lapses.  Hopefully, the world will too.  They somehow seem inconsequential when comparing them to the loss his death brought to the world of music and visual imagery.

Man in the Mirror:

When one looks at the private figure, I can only think about Michael from the comments of those who knew him best.  They tell of a man-child who was very different than the performer. As has been played out so many times, he never had the opportunity to be a child and, therefore, never knew how to be Michael Jackson, the man.  He seemed to have a great deal of difficulty even understanding how to envision his own identity.  The fantasy worlds, the costumes, the plastic surgeries, and the veils just seemed to be an attempt to hide the fact that he didn’t know who he really was or wanted to be.  I have a feeling that every time he looked in a mirror, he saw an uninvited stranger.

Remember the Time: 

As the media explores every finite aspect of his life, I have come to a decision about how I will always think of him.  Michael Jackson does not deserve to be compared to anyone else.  He unrelentingly created and sustained his own category of lasting greatness. Whether it was his music or his charities, he achieved a plateau that few will every reach.  When he performed, each of us was taken to a far-away world on which he, and only he, lived.

Thank you, Michael.  You lived and shared an amazingly expressive life and we are all the better for it.  You will be missed.  May you now, finally, rest in peace.

Robert A. Simpkins

Global Crosswinds, L.L.C.

Mr. President;

As a citizen of the United States, and a really, really hard-pressed taxpayer, I’m curious about a few things.  I hear a lot of sounds bites about the wars, the economy, and other really important stuff, but these questions are a little different.  Some of my queries relate to your early term in office, and some relate to the actions of your predecessors.  If you or your staff could clear up my uncertainties, I’d be very appreciative.

Question1: If we need to spend our money wisely, why again are we bailing out General Motors?  I know their collapse would be horrific for all those workers who would be out of a job, but does the corporation, itself, deserve to be saved.  Couldn’t you have just given the same amount of money to extended unemployment insurance programs and retraining initiatives for the GM workers to find other jobs?  To be honest, sir, GM is a company that has screwed up over and over since the 1970s and I can’t see how they plan, if they have a plan, to do anything different once they come out of bankruptcy. 

Question 2: If the legislation passed by Congress is so important to every American, how come they exempt themselves from so many of the new laws?

Question 3: If government needs to become more lean and efficient, why do we still have so many legacy agencies and commissions that are no longer needed? Do we really still need the Panama Canal Commission?

Question 4: If America’stomorrow is so dependent on our future generations becoming more global in their perspective, why isn’t more money being invested in teaching our youth about the world and its wonderful cultures?  I’m sorry to tell you this, Mr. President, but a huge percentage of your younger constituents couldn’t find Iran, North Korea, Myanmar, Cuba, Somalia or Pakistan on a map if their lives depended on it.  I’m not even sure they could find Brasil, England, France, Germany, China or Japan (I won’t even talk about their inability to find where you live in Washington, D.C.). Why not subsidize opportunities for education abroad or, at the very least, expand geography and cultural diversity courses in our schools.

Question 5: If America truly values its rich heritage of cultural diversity, what happened to the Native People (Indians, First Americans or whatever European title you want to give them)?  The greatest atrocities ever committed by the United States government were against these people who were here long before Christopher Columbus haughtily “discovered” the new land.  I think it’s great that you’re supportive of so many of the minorities that make this country great, but I don’t see any full-blooded Native People in your entourage.  Please don’t tell me about the Bureau of Indian Affairs or Bureau of Land Management. I’m not even that enthralled about the new National Museum of American Indians in D.C.  I’m talking about a real policy-making position.  Don’t you think it’s about time they were given a stronger voice in government?

I know you are very busy, sir, what with fund-raising events and keeping Congress’ attention-deficit-disorder focused on your initiatives, but these questions (and so many others) bother the heck out of me.  If you could answer them, I’d be so appreciative.

 Very, Very Respectfully Yours;

Robert A. Simpkins

www.robertsimpkinsbestsellers.com

www.globalcrosswinds.com

PS: How’s the new dog?  Not digging up the Rose Garden, I hope.

PSS: Oh, sorry, please say hello to the First Lady for me. (You’re a lucky man. She’s a keeper)

Robert A. Simpkins

Global Crosswinds, LLC

I’ve been doing strategic planning, in one form or another, for a long time.  There’s a downside and an upside to that lengthy experience.  The downside, causing endless frustration, is that I see that same mistakes repeated over and over again by the same organizations and the same leaders.  They just don’t seem to learn from their mistakes or completely understand the root causes of their success.  The upside side is that I’m able to track and log information about the undermining behaviors that tend to cause strategic plans to fall short of expectations or fail completely.

With all that experience, what do you think is the number one problem with most strategic statements – language!  Heaven help those who try to understand what the stated vision, mission and purpose of the organization, and how it relates to their daily job function.  I’ll try to protect the innocent by not naming specific organizations, but let me give you some examples:

•   A very large private enterprise states that their goal is to enrich the lives of their employees (What does enrich mean?)

•  Another private enterprise states that, in its support of the Federal government, they bring a strategic systems perspective to their customers.  (What is a strategic systems perspective?)

•  Another agency says they are Mission Oriented (Does that mean they orient all their activities to their Mission Statement?)

•   Still another says their goal is to Energize People (They’re never going to energize them with statements like that)

• Another states that their objective is to embrace innovation (What does embrace mean, and for that matter, how do they define innovation?  Are employees supposed to huge a robot?)

In most situations, senior leaders have a vague sense of what statements like these mean, but they leave it to the lower and non-management to figure it out for themselves.  Unfortunately, this is a critical chasm rarely bridged.What what’s the result of expressions of vague and poorly defined words?  Senior leadership repeatedly experiences disappointment and frustration.  A friend of mine, Dr. Neil Stroul, expressed it very well when he said “Resentment is when you fail to honor a request I never made.”  In other words, the leadership believe, and function, under the misguided belief that they have expressed their desires well and are requesting that everyone function in that manner.  Unfortunately, the operational personnel can’t define the intent and are not sure how to behave.

Robert A. Simpkins

The Problem

As we have recently seen, the world is regrettably capable of severe economic downturns.  Banks and financial institutions are going under, mortgage lenders are collapsing, legacy institutions are teetering on the precipice of bankruptcy, and the unemployment numbers continue to rise.  In the modern world, a chaos like the current one has the potential to be like no other previous economic downturn.  Advancements, and perhaps entanglement, in the global economic infrastructure, the ascension of second and third tier economies, and modifications to the hegemonic pyramid have created a spider web of ever-changing dependencies. 

Clearly, industrial and organizational leaders bear a large portion of the blame for the current state of the world economy.  Also, regulatory and governmental bodies have been unwitting co-conspirators to the debacle.  And, finally, the personal greed demonstrated by individual speculators was, and still is, a major contributor.  In the end, it was all these groups of individuals who saw only short-term gains and failed to take into account the consequential longer-term trends who generated the recent crisis.

A recent TV interview with a CEO of one of the world’s largest automobile companies is a perfect example of the blind-sightedness of leadership. The interviewer asked him what his organization needed to do differently if it received bail-out money.  The response was that his organization “would do nothing differently and continue to produce the cars that America loves.”  Does this make sense to you?  Their automobiles are not selling because the consumer has shifted their values!  This great value shift is being ignored and, as this auto manufacturer sails toward the rocky cliffs, the captain chooses to maintain the organization’s legacy track. It would seem that a more prudent action would be to analyze the shifting currents, tides and winds, and adjust the course.

So, why are so many leaders, and the operational members of their organizations, failing to see and understand the trends that are taking them to the precipice of failure? 

The Cause

The fault lies, partly, in two areas.  The first is information overload and the second is the resulting chasm that grows between leaders and operational personnel. If we look at the first one, the truth is that those in charge today are having greater and greater difficulty separating the knowledge they need from the unnecessary and irrelevant information that abounds in the world.  They can’t tell the realistic and measurable facts from the speculative and unsupported prejudicial fiction. 

It may sound absurdly repetitive, but decision-makers are challenged, like never before, to find the time to separate out the specific knowledge they require for successful execution from the biased information.  Of course, leadership can be demonstrated at all levels of an organization, but let’s take a look at those at or near the top.  Typically, the senior leaders come from one of two sources; they can be organically-grown or they can be recruited from the outside, but both suffer the consequences of information overload.

An unfortunate result is that, in many instances, the new CEO institutes changes too quickly and the consequences can be dire for the organization.  Being too quick to act, the CEO can cause major disruption, second- tier leadership desertion and demoralized employees.   Although the search committee did a reasonably thorough job of finding and evaluating the new CEO, the Board of Directors may not have expected such dramatic, unsettling and challenging changes. As a result, in far too many cases, the Board gives the new leader a shorter and shorter leash, and places him or her on a hot seat of tenure unpredictability.

The second fault, the growing chasm, can be found between senior leaders and the operational personnel in far too many organizations.  When either the organically grown or imported leaders realize they have very little understanding of the day-to-day operational actualities, they often isolate themselves even more and begin to create visionary strategies and directional changes in a detached reality.  It would be hard to identify a historical period when the gap between senior leadership and the operations of their organization has been so wide. 

There are solutions, but any approach to bridging this gap must be initiated by those in power – the senior leadership.  They must take the time to learn from those who know more about the realities than they do, the operational personnel, to evaluate value shifts among their stakeholders, associates and customers.  Then, they must initiate and sustainably support performance improvement actions to meet the more current shifts, and transformational actions to better prepare for future value shift trends.

Does anyone out there feel like we’re traveling through a series of classic Hollywood movies?  I certainly do!  As I watch the unfolding escapades in Washington, D. C., real world behaviors and movie title fantasies become more and more entwined.  Let me demonstrate.

It seems that our new President lived A Wonder Life in a world where the financial institutions were supportive of the growth in home ownership.  Everywhere one looked, could Mr. Blanding Builds His Dream House in the Big Country? Yes!  But all was not as it should have been, at least according to our Hero, since it seemed like the financial institutions were really Pulp Fiction and, perhaps, a Touch of Evil.  Soon, our main character came to believe that the leaders of the institutions were Notorious and behaving like Slumdog Millionaires.  He decided to leave his Green Mansions behind, run for the highest office in the land, and defeat the Great Dictator’s gang.  Our Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but finds the path to be a broken and decaying Asphalt Jungle.  He soon realized he must change from The Invisible Man to The Natural.  While traveling the Big Country, our hero commits his Body and Soul to his dreams and puts the Big Heat on his competitors.

His Ace in the Hole is that he is a very smart man and has a strategy team that might be called The Incredibles.  In his battle to be the American President, he selects a running mate and, together, they become the Odd Couple.  Once on the campaign trail, they encounter the Usual Suspects, plus one new woman who is Almost Famous.  Our soon to be president overcomes all obstacles by telling the voters that he will make everyone Walk the Line. In the end, indeed, he wakes everyone from the Big Sleep, and convinces the voters that this is No Country for Old Men.  The electoral votes are counted and his competitors are Gone with the Wind. A Star is Born!

Although he wins by The Narrow Margin, there are wonderful plans for a Great Parade.  The new President and Vice President travel into Washington, D.C. like Strangers on a Train.  Once there, he comes to realize that the financial institutions have, through Charade lending practices, created a Nightmare on Elm Street that is so inter-tangled and confusing it looks like the Matrix.  Although his political associates are not, themselves, The Innocents, they believe they can fix everything by throwing cash at All That Money Can Buy; from Sunset Boulevard to Fargo.  Funds travel out the front door and through the Rear Window. Unfortunately, most of this new money comes from far outside the United States and creates a growing China Syndrome discomfort among the constituents.

So here we are.  Our new leader says Stand By Me while he and his American Beauty attempt to correct all the wrong deeds done during the previous terms of Night of the Living Dead.  Is our future going to be a Chinese Fortune Cookie or is it going to have us all Singing in the Rain.

My only hope is that the Freshman President becomes the Pride of the Yankees and is not just a Brief Encounter.  He’s experiencing, right now, the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and is, indeed, in a very Lonely Place.  Pray he doesn’t decide to flag down a Taxi Driver and make the Great Escape heading North by Northwest (the general direction to Chicago from D.C.).  It is for America and the world, after all, about to be the Greatest Game Ever Played, and the outcome will have a lasting impact on Hoosiers, residents of Chinatown and Key Largo, citizens of Casablanca, workers on The Waterfront, and those from the Naked City in every Metropolis.  

I must confess to a Shadow of Doubt, but Horse Feathers, what I know.