Xenophon grew up in Athens and was a direct student of Socrates in the fifth century B.C.  As a young man he joined a military expedition from Greece to Persia and went on to become a battle-tested general before retiring to southern Greece and writing on philosophy, history, economics, politics, and other subjects.  Woven throughout his writing is Xenophon’s observations and lessons about leadership.  The systematic book that Drucker mentioned was The Education of Cyrus (or Cyropedia), based roughly on the life of Cyrus the Great who lived over a hundred years before Xenophon.

Xenophon writes about his own initiation into leadership in  The March Upcountry (or Anabasis), which has been classified as military history but is actually an epic of leadership written by a participant who saw good and bad leadership at close quarters.  I first read this book in 1988, and didn’t know what a gem I had.   I’ve gone back since then and learned some important lessons.  One of those is how the military holds some great lessons for leadership.

The military as a learning laboratory for leadership?  The notion is not so far-fetched.  In my interviews with officers who served in the U.S. Army and Marine Corps (2009) and who later transitioned into civilian leadership roles in business I noticed some common themes that went far beyond admirable traits or desirable leadership characteristics.

The military does an excellent job of training and reinforcing leadership in its combat officers.  This is done through recurring education, through reinforcing good disciplines of decision-making, by job rotation and merit-based job promotions, and through reinforcing a culture of honor, sacrifice and service.   William Cohen writes about these in A Class with Drucker (2008).  Together these make a powerful combination for solid leadership development.  The military does not often get the very best raw talent to join their ranks, but their system of rigorous development allows them to produce a disproportional share of the strongest leaders in any sector of society (whether business, education, politics, healthcare, social service or entertainment).

How do they do it?  If you have had experience as a military officer this will all be familiar.  For the rest of us I’ll share a few points.

First, the military takes training seriously.  They operate on two basic assumptions  The harder you train, the better you’ll perform; and everyone carries some degree of leadership responsibility.  Anyone involved in sports understands and agrees with the first assumption.  If you want to perform well and consistently win, you have to train hard.  Businesses today hardly train their people for leadership, either formally or informally.  It creates a huge gap when real leadership is needed.  The second assumption in the military, that everyone has some degree of leadership responsibility, arises from the realities of battlefield situations.  Combat is very fluid; leaders can be killed, injured or taken out of commission in other ways.  Every soldier has to be ready to assume greater responsibility and leadership without notice when the situation changes.  In most businesses today the owner or CEO may wish that every employee was more responsible, or thought like an owner, but the ethos and expectation of leadership is missing from most organizations except at the top.

Second, jobs or roles are assigned based on merit and rigorous review.  The military is a meritocracy, which means the decision to “hire” and promote is primarily based on merit and demonstrated competence, not on personality contests or other forms of fundamentally unfair competition.  There are ongoing performance reviews and counseling, promotion boards, and practices designed to ensure that there is a rich pool of leadership talent to draw from at the higher levels.  If only more companies were so lucky…

Third, the military has a rich and meaningful culture of leadership that sets high standards for honor, character and service.  Individuals don’t always live up to those standards, but through discipline and tradition the standards are not negotiated down.  Culture is articulated and maintained by the leaders of any organization;  morale is an indicator of the health and condition of the culture at any given time.  On both counts the military pays a lot of attention to how well its leaders embody the culture and maintain high morale through example.  Good businesses that are run in a disciplined way do the same.

The best-kept leadership secrets really are out in the open.  The military is certainly not perfect, and even the practices I’ve talked about are not implemented with uniform equality.  However, if you compare them in design and in execution with any other leadership program, you’ll find it difficult to come up with a close second-place contender.

What are your thoughts and experiences with these leadership practices?

Do you know how hard your online employees are working?  Did you say you don’t have any employees?  If you have a website, blog, Facebook page, eBay store or any other kind of online commercial presence, I suggest you do have online employees, and it would be in your interest to think of them that way.

I was coaching another consultant today who does not have a website but who said she wanted one and knew she needed one.  She’s not super-savvy on web technology, nor does she care to be.  I suggested that she think of building a website/blog as if she were hiring an employee.  Here’s how the logic works…Most businesses of a certain size have a website already.  Larger businesses also employ one or more full-time people to maintain the website and other forms of online presence.  Several years ago I coached a manager who was on the web team for Avaya, the telephone equipment maker.  They had multiple people on the web team, spending multi-millions every year, using all kinds of outside vendors to run analytics on their site and to implement specific projects.  For large enterprises, it makes sense to think of their web team as a business in its own right.

Smaller businesses, and even solo professionals, don’t have the same kind of resources as a large corporation, but if their business has any reason to be online I recommend that they think of their website, blog, online store, Facebook page, or Twitter account as if they are employees.  Adopting that kind of mindset allows them to make better decisions about their online presence.

First, what’s the job to be done?  Employees are usually hired to perform a job–or several jobs if it’s a small business.  I find that far too many employers don’t think enough about defining the job.  Even written job descriptions are usually inadequate at communicating what the job is; they usually are a listing of tasks and basic qualifications.   For an online presence, what is the job that needs to be done?  Is it essentially marketing, or is there also some selling (e-commerce or online store)?  Do you need your website to perform customer service by giving customers an avenue to communicate with you, ask questions, make complaints, get answers or additional information?  Some websites actually deliver a product or service online via training, webinars, surveys or assessments.  What job do you need your online presence to do for you now and in the next year or two?  Define the job first.

Second, conduct a talent search.  Think of a website or blog as an employee.  You could start with an infant (a blank page in an editor), then by using html, css and php you could create the personality and behavior of your kid-employee.  You could dress up your growing teenager with the right colors, design and site structure.  Then you could train your entry-level employee in the basic courtesies of answering questions (through forms) and check their performance monthly through an analytics package.  Do you get the picture?  This is an apparently “cheap” way to go, but it requires massive work and training on your part and lots of hands-on maintenance.

Maybe you’d like to rent-an-employee.  You can do that through Yahoo, GoDaddy, 1and1, Sitebuilder, or any number of online services that promise an easy website within hours for merely $10-20 a month.  You use their templates, and besides the content (words you provide) it all belongs to the webhost.  If you decide their rent-an-employee doesn’t represent your company well or you outgrow them, there’s not much that you can carry with you except your content (if you kept a good backup copy).  You could also get a smart, self-sustaining employee who will easily assume your look, feel, personality and do lots of small mindless but essential chores in the background (because a smart designer wrote it into their code) and pay a lot, if you want lots of interaction and handholding by a human web designer, or pay a little, if you pick one of the newer platforms with a customized theme or design that you manage and fill in with content.

Third and finally, be willing to state your expectations and to make a reasonable up-front investment in your new employee.  You’re going to have to do some amount of work on the front end getting this employee up to speed, providing content, making decisions about how your online presence will work.  Do you want a one page, long copy sales page?  You have to write (or hire someone to write) the copy.  Do you want an interactive, information rich blog/website?  You still have to provide the content and the decisions about what a typical viewer will do on your site (yes, provide links and instructions that show people where to go next or what to do).  Personally, I want a smart, efficient employee who looks like me and who needs a minimum of supervision.  This ultra-low maintenance online employee still needs me to show up occasionally, to provide some new content for the store, to handle those few difficult customers whose needs are not the routine and predictable ones that I’ve anticipated already.  I also want an employee who provides a minimum 5X ROI (return on investment) within the first six months.  If I’m going to spend $500 on this employee, they need to help generate at least $2500 in additional revenue in the first six months.  I don’t consider that unreasonable.  Some people may expect more, some are willing to settle for less, but I suggest you do consider what ROI you are expecting.  It will help you in your decision-making process.

If you’ll think of your online presence as an asset, or better, as an employee, I think you’ll be more realistic and also happier with the results from your online efforts.  And remember, don’t settle for just any employee; aim to attract, hire and develop top talent!

I was also intrigued by an article last month in the Wall Street Journal about marathoners and the impact on personal fitness.  If you have run a marathon, my congratulations to you.  If you’re a serial marathoner like the optometrist I met on the plane last month between Boise and Denver, you’ve got my respect.  For those who have run a marathon (and those who never will) and who struggle now to stay fit, read on.

How do you stay fit?  Through practice and regularity.  You continue exercising, eating healthy, and finding enjoyable and emotionally satisfying ways to keep doing both.  For one-time marathoners, they train for the event, alter their lifestyle in the short-term to run the marathon, but after the peak event, they return to their previous routine and habits.

I have found the best way for me to stay fit and keep exercising and eating healthy is to use variety and a nudge of motivation/accountability.  I track my exercise routine in a small spiral-bound memo pad.  I time my exercise and try to improve on my previous performance, even by a few seconds, or a few repetitions, or a few pounds of weight.  I practice a martial art in which I help teach others to practice techniques,  which lets me see how well I have really learned the art.   I also measure progress there as well by testing for belts/ranks.  In eating, I keep track of how much energy I have and what foods affect me in a good way or a bad way.  Of course I weigh myself and check body fat percentage.  These different actions don’t take up a lot of time nor do I center my life around them.  I simply see them as necessary for keeping my body and physical health in good condition.  I also consider physical conditioning to be a key necessity to staying mentally sharp and on top of my game.

Top talent keeps working hard and practicing while measuring progress toward a worthy goal.  If fitness is one of your personal battles, I encourage you to get yourself back on the path to improved health and well-being.

How can this be?  Productivity is supposed to be a good thing.  Productivity is the measure of how much a business produces divided by the number of workers, so if productivity goes up a business should make more money.  How can this be a talent killer?

Think about the definition again.  One way to “juice” productivity is to lay off workers.  In the short term, productivity goes up (and investors usually cheer as the stock price rises) until the burden of producing weighs too heavily on a workforce that is too lean.  Another way to increase productivity is to sell more, take on big orders, without fully staffing for the increased demand.  This will also lift productivity–for a a short while.  You can cheapen the brand, cut development or innovation, or manage by dictate:  management declares a super-stretch result that leaves everyone scrambling to “hit the number.”

All of these examples (which are far too common) involve a focus on the short-term, some degree of manipulation, and a failure to deal with longer-term consequences.  And those are what is killing good talent practices in business.  How?  By treating people like human resources, not people who can contribute to the company if given the opportunity.  By failing to invest in sustainable gains in revenue, growth and productivity.  By stressing out workers, you give them an incentive to go to your competition.

The path to illusory productivity involves short-term thinking, shifting the burden to workers, or some kind of management shell game that hides the real dynamics–for a while.  These kinds of productivity gains are what is killing good talent in American business.

Not all productivity has to come with these tradeoffs.  There are other ways to grow productivity that promote good talent management:  through more employee engagement; by investing in training and skill development; through analyzing business processes and cutting out the waste and rework; by building a valued brand and unique culture that is hard or impossible to duplicate elsewhere.  The productivity that results from these kinds of practices is sustainable for the business and it tends to engender more loyalty and trust in the workforce.

Which kind of productivity is your company focused on ?  Let me know by leaving a comment.

I owe inspiration for the headline and article to Henry Mintzberg, management professor and contrarian thinker at McGill University in Montreal (see his article in Harvard Business Review July 2007).

I found it interesting that Goldman Sachs wanted to quickly return some of the government money it took last fall, partly so they would not be limited by government meddling in their compensation/bonus policies.  CEO Lloyd Blankfein knows that Goldman’s business model is based on generous financial rewards to top performers.  Other investment banks have said compensation caps will cause a flight of top talent.  Maybe multi-million dollar compensation only buys temporary rather than enduring loyalty.   They don’t call it a “money culture” without reason, and when the money isn’t flowing, the talent may not stick around.

Contrast that with the approach taken by Zappos.  The online retailer has quietly grown to $1billion in sales and in the process has built a culture that looks a lot like the exuberant workplaces of the dotcom era.  Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh has focused on building a culture devoted to customer service and employee engagement.  Zappos gives a lot of attention to recruitment and training-hallmarks of firms that are committed to truly developing top talent.  Employees have some degree of latitude in making sure customers are satisfied, and Zappos has a very high number of repeat customers and they are still growing, even in a serious economic downturn. 

Developing a culture and keeping top talent doesn’t happen automatically and it’s not something that is simply fixed with money.  Oh, if only it were that easy.  But it is doable and companies like Zappos are showing it may be one of the few paths to competitive and strategic distinction.

There are two types of capital:  finance and non-financial.  Why does this matter to those who care about talent?  Because the two are closely connected,  and there are many fallacies about both which pass as fact.

When companies get in trouble, capital spending usually stops.  Expense control and cost-cutting become a central concern.  One of the highest cost items on the balance sheet is employee costs which includes wages, benefits and liabilities.  

People are also the source of added value in business – their skills, insights, how they work together or collaborate to get the work done.   In normal times, capital (the financial kind) goes where companies can realize good returns either because labor is cheap (and taxes and regulations are usually lower) or where labor is highly productive (because of education, good health and good infrastructure).

As the recession winds down and business gears up, these economic fundamentals are going to once again come into play.  The quest for cheap labor is what causes businesses to relocate where they can get good returns.  Not all of this is going overseas.  Hyundai invested over $1 billion in a new plant in Montgomery, Alabama, that began production in 2005.  That’s a significant capital investment, and they sought less expensive labor away from traditional autoworker union strongholds where costs are much higher.  Hyundai is one of the automakers that is doing quite well even in this economic downturn, though you don’t hear much about it in the news.

Other companies have to make smart decisions about investing in their human capital and focus on worker productivity.  There are many ways to do this, and some approaches have a more immediate payoff than others.  Training, management development, and product or service innovation are just a few examples.  It is clear though that companies which simply hunker down or focus only on cutting costs through this recession will recover slower and will lose a lot of ground to those with more of an investment mentality.

I won’t go into all the background here about aikido (*see the footnote below if you’re interested).  Since we don’t have competitions or tournaments in aikido, testing (and the training that leads up to that) is one of the times when we are able to assess what we have learned and how much more there is to learn.  Besides demonstrating specific techniques that are called out early on, the last part of the test involves multiple attackers coming at you from all directions and you have to effectively deal with each attack without injuring yourself or anyone else.  It is a true test of poise under pressure.

What does this have to do with talent?  Aikido emphasizes constant development over time through practice.  You learn about your own fears and limits and abilities by practicing with many different partners of different ability levels.    Since I’ve been practicing for over 10 years, I’ve seen a lot of people come through the various dojos where I’ve studied.  Some people are naturally gifted.  Others clearly are not.  Both benefit greatly through regular practice. 

It is the same with talent in organizations.  Some people are more talented than others, but if there is no real contest then there is nothing to prove.  The emphasis can shift from competitive ”games” and politics to learning and development.  We are all on a path, we will all face a test and the real question is how will you perform under pressure?   I believe that organizations whose cultures resemble a dojo more than an alley are going to do a much better job of attracting and retaining the right kind of talent to be truly competitive and productive over time.  What do you think?

*aikido is a Japanese martial art that emphasizes a non-violent and peaceful resolution of conflict; it’s also a rigorous practice that works on multiple levels-physically, emotionally, spiritually-depending on what a practitioner is looking for.  For more information you can google “aikido” and finds lots of information (and lots of misinformation) on the web.  I recommend you watch a class or demonstration if you ever get the chance.

I’ve wanted to start working with a personal trainer for some time.  Last year I talked about it with my doctor and she made some recommendations to me.  We worked on my diet and I spent most of last year getting the nutritional picture right (my doctor has an emphasis–and expert training–on functional medicine, which is exceedingly rare to find in my experience).

So I started looking at gyms close to where I live.  I was also looking for a personal trainer that specialized in a fairly new methodology called cross fit. 

First gym:  closest to my house, new building, local-not a chain.  I felt homey when I walked in and the owner gave me a quick tour.  Nice aesthetics: as you do cardio you look out the windows onto a lake.  I met the head of personal training.  He seemed professional and as I mentioned cross fit training, he played along but I wasn’t sure he knew what I was talking about.  He asked me to wait a second while he went to get another trainer to talk with me. 

Dr. “Ken” came out and talked with me about what I was looking for.  He wasn’t trained in cross fit, but confident he could help me.  He asked about my diet then proceeded to call into question everything my doctor had been doing with me.  He didn’t ask many questions, but he acted like he had all the answers.  It just so happened he also came from my hometown (in another state)–small world.  But this potential rapport clashed with his rough manner.  Besides being a trainer (and the most expensive one, he informed me) he was also the designated nutritionist at this club.  The deal breaker for me was when I realized that throughout our conversation he had been spitting in the trash, and what he was spitting was part of a wad of chewing tobacco in his mouth.  I kid you not!

Next gym:  a little further from my house but still close enough.  Much larger and more anonymous than the first club, but well-equipped.  Lots of space to move around.  The head of training gave me the tour then listened to what I was looking for.  He had one trainer certified in cross fit, but he wasn’t working that day.  I wanted to interview the trainer, so I arranged to come back the next day. 

When I returned the next day, Blake was working with another customer, but he talked as he worked.  It gave me a sense of what he was like in action.  He obviously knew what he was doing, communicated confidence  and was professional.  He was young and talked fast, but I didn’t hold that against him.  I could see the talent and I knew I could work with him.  I haven’t regretted my decision.