Big Think

Captain Kirk, management guru? Yes, say management experts, in a clever article assessing Kirk’s management of the Enterprise. It highlights six things the typical CEO could learn from Captain Kirk:

Know when to be a pal, and when to be tough. As Kirk found when he split personalities, you can’t be too nice or too tyrannical, but have to mix both elements of your personality.

Know both sides of the story. Kirk forged a truce between a monster and some miners by finding out the root of the anger on both sides.

Know when to change. Kirk intervenes in an ancient struggle by forcibly reframing the problem. A good first step for any management dilemma.

Don’t be afraid to manage up. The example is Kirk being insubordinate (what else is new?), so it’s really about not being a yes man. What usually  happens is you don’t get your own spaceship. But Kirk’s bosses don’t like yes men, and he gets promoted.

Change your style. Don’t manage everyone the same way. Kirk didn’t.

Managing Generation Y. Same as 5, really, but more direct in reminding CEOs to value the perspective of their youngest employees.

In fact, after seeing the new Star Trek movie this weekend, I am reminded that Kirk, for all his leadership qualities, was capricious, cocksure and something of a con man. His best management skill? Having a good Hollywood scriptwriter on his side. Star Trek management will only work so well in the real world.

[Creative Commons image from memory-alpha.org]

It’s a global economy, and other economies will continue to outgrow the U.S. economy. Is it time to emigrate? Tam Harbert, who writes for the electronics publication EDN, takes a look at this question in light of IBM’s Project Match, where U.S. and Canadian employees were offered the chance to follow their jobs overseas, primarily to India. In If your job moves to India, follow it, Harbert quotes people noting the obvious: you can probably make a decent living overseas, even working for local salaries, but you shouldn’t expect to come back. As one expert says to Harbert,

“From a purely economic perspective, IBM’s view is that this work is best done somewhere else. They’re saying that they can’t support this job in the United States, but if you’re willing to move you’ll get first crack at the job. I think it’s better than just kicking you out the door.”

Besides, international experience might boost your career. And if you really don’t want to go, Harbert notes that Wipro, Infosys and Tata are hiring in the U.S.

Still, it begs the question: if you really couldn’t get a job in the U.S., would you emigrate?

Fans of Ram Charan will like his newly published “Leadership in the era of Economic Uncertainty.” It’s a short synopsis of what he thinks each level of worker in a company needs to do in these times.

I was impressed that it went from him to bookstands in about a month. Perhaps that’s why it felt like a collection of obvious statements. Maybe the chief information officer doesn’t actually know that “you should assume the IT budget will be cut.” Perhaps management generally needs to hear that “as challenging as a downturn can be for a company, it also is a great opportunity to make sure the right people are in the right jobs.”

Charan says he wrote it because most of the business leaders he’d been talking with at the end of last year were either “deeply worried or frankly scared.” In other words, they were frozen and needed to be thawed out by Charan’s Six Essential Leadership Traits for Hard Times:

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Do incentives really work? We’ve seen a spate of behavioral economists arguing incentives do, and encouraging companies and government to offer incentives, or ‘nudges,’ to promote behaviors.

A reader, Peter A. Hunter, sends this review of “Punished by Rewards,” Alfie Kohn’s 1999 book arguing that incentives often fail. He notes:

Alfie tells us one story about a scheme sponsored by Pizza Hut in North America to encourage children to read.
He tells us that in order to encourage literacy, children were promised a pizza for every book that they read.
On the surface it sounds perfectly laudable until you examine the detail of what actually happened.
These children instead of being encouraged to read, now saw books as obstacles between themselves and a pizza, and that the obstacle had to be surmounted as quickly and with as little effort as possible.
Thus instead of finding joy in the act of reading, the books these children read were selected by them on the basis of how thin they were and the size of the typeface so that they could qualify for their free pizzas as quickly as possible.

As Alfie notes, instead of encouraging children to develop an interest in books, this programme produced “fat kids who couldn’t read.”

The reviewer acknowledges that it’s difficult to get the argument without reading the book. But, it does fit in with at least some recent research. (more…)

Robert J. Barro has come up with an answer to the question  What are Odds of U.S. Depression?

Barro, a Harvard economist, looks at data from stock market crashes in 34 countries, and projects a one-in-five chance that the current crisis will morph into a depression in the U.S., defined as a 10 percent decline in per-person consumption or GDP.

He eventually points out the obvious: the U.S. has an 80 percent chance of not having a depression (there have only been two since 1870, from 1917 to 1921 and then the Great Depression).

What do you think?

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So far, this recession is nowhere near as bad as 1948’s. That’s according to a nice new graphic from the Minneapolis Fed.  It looks at every American recession since World War II, with a tool to let you compare unemployment and output data.

Nobody ever gave me a list of books to read when I started working. But 800CEORead has a First Five Books list (really,  six books).

The list wasassembled with the idea that good stories, based on real world experience, and context are the most important things for someone just starting out.

Their picks:

• Financial Intelligence, Karen Berman and Joe Knight, with John Case
• What the CEO Wants You to Know, Ram Charan
• StrengthFinder 2.0, Tom Rath
• Influence, Robert B. Chialdini
• Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath
• Six Thinking Hats, Edward De Bono

I found this list interesting, in part because none of these books were ever recommended to me when I became a manager (I got books on organization, people skills, organization, basic management, organization…). Then again, managing journalists is probably a bit different from other white-collar environments.

What do you think, BNET? Do these six make the grade? Or are there better ones for beginning business people?

So far, the news out of Davos would suggest capitalism should be on a suicide watch. The World Economic Forum, has featured leaders from state-dominated economies like China and Russia thumbing their noses and pointing their fingers at American-style capitalism, with pundits and professors piling on. Here’s this striking bit about Nassim Nicholas Taleb dancing when Lehman bros. collapsed. At the same dinner of doom described in this post, Niall Ferguson, author of the “Ascent of Money” (here’s a link to the recent PBS special based on his book) said the world was entering a lost decade.

This year’s WEF promised a theme of ‘Shaping the Post-Crisis World.’ “Wallowing in Crisis”  seems more apt.

Still, there is a subtheme of increased cooperation among governments and institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. That suggests we will avoid nasty trade policy tiffs of the sort that exacerbated the effects of the Great Depression. Then there was this somewhat unexpected advice from Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin to the West:

“Interference of the State, the belief in the omnipotence of the State: that is a reaction to market failures,” Mr Putin said in his keynote address at the opening of the four-day meeting. “There is a temptation to expand direct interference of state in economy. In the Soviet Union that became an absolute. We paid a very dear price for that. (quoted in the Times of London)

I guess articles about Putin reasserting control over the Russian economy, like this one from the Washington Post in 2006, were misguided.

My bet is that capitalism’s defenders will assert themselves as the WEF wears on.

What do you think, BNET? Is there still hope for capitalism?

800CEORead is offering a Three for $30 deal — for $30, you get three books, including one that was at least a finalist for its Best Books of 2008 list. In turn, it donates the money to Room to Read, a well-regarded educational charity which works in developing countries.

Viral marketing is growing up. The term, coined in the mid-1990s to describe how Hotmail got users by letting people invite their friends to join, as if they were passing a virus, is now branching out into different forms. David Meerman Scott is coming out with a book on why he thinks viral marketing now should refer to only professional campaigns, where companies or ad agencies try to get people to spread their marketing materials. Scott, whose book “The New Rules of Marketing and PR” got a thumbs up from BNET’s Geoffrey James, has a new book coming out about the original, Hotmail-type viral marketing — where you get your growth because people love your stuff. He calls it “World Wide Rave: Creating Triggers that Get Millions of People to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Stories.”

You can check him out in this interview, where he talks about the concept. I think the interview makes it clear that his new Rave concept is a bit forced.  I remain skeptical that you can package up love for a product or idea. That said, there are certainly things we could all do to make our products and ideas more likely candidates for getting spread around, and Scott’s tips on how to make this work are still valid. You can probably get most of those by downloading this free precursor to the Rave book, The New Rules of Viral Marketing.