Inner CEO

4 Communicator To-Dos
Warren Bickford, 2005 IABC Chair, in his IABC Cafe blog, offers four excellent to-dos every communicator should put in their weekly planners:
1. Become familiar with the blogosphere as it is fundamentally changing how we will interact with our stakeholders and audiences.
2. Review the IABC Code of Ethics because I believe governance and ethics issues will continue to have an effect on how we communicate. Open, honest and transparent. It’s harder than it sounds.
3. Find and champion the updating of their organization’s crisis communications/business continuity plans or become the champion for creating them. It is not a matter of if; it is a matter of when.
4. Take one hour every month to leave their desks (leave behind all pagers, cell phones and other electronic devices) and go somewhere quiet to just think about the profession they have chosen - what it means to them, how they can do it better and what it means in the “grand scheme of things”.

Why Do You Work So Hard? 
There remains this enormous and wicked sociocultural myth. It is this: Hard work is all there is. Work hard and the world respects you. Work hard and you can have anything you want. Work really extra super hard and do nothing else but work and ignore your family and spend 14 hours a day at the office and make 300 grand a year that you never have time to spend, sublimate your soul to the corporate machine and enjoy a profound drinking problem and sporadic impotence and a nice 8BR mini-mansion you never spend any time in, and you and your shiny BMW 740i will get into heaven. This is the American Puritan work ethos, still alive and screaming and sucking the world dry. Work is the answer. Work is also the question. Link to article at SFGate

Interview with Super Entrepreneur Mouli Cohen
Remember ... Weak managers are the killers of business.
... Leaders manage by creating a vision and then get out of the way so that their people can run with that vision. 
... Leaders instill confidence and respect in their people.
... Leaders ensure that people not only see the vision but that they live and breathe it, and evangelize it across the organization.
... Leaders probe and push with a curiosity that borders on skepticism, making sure their questions are answered with action. 
... There are a lot of great leaders out there.  Article in Wisdom

In the beginning was the word.
Words are the building blocks of language.
Language is the basic building block of leadership.
Communicators are (or should be) masters of language.
Therefore… communicators should be powerful and influential leaders of our organizations.
Are we? If not, why not?  Discuss (must be logged in as Member)

This was the opening of John Gerstner's Bringing Out Your Inner CEO (pdf) workshop, presented at Ragan's Corporate Communicators Conference in Las Vegas, June 8-10, 2005.  The presentation redefines CEO as Communicator-Educator-Organizer, and teaches CEO vowels.  They are A=Adaptability; E=Excellence; I=Integrity; O=Originality, U=Understanding, and Y=You.  Next workshop will be this fall in NYC.  Inquiries?

What's your leadership style? 
Korn/Ferry International, the world’s largest executive search firm and leadership solutions provider, has identified four key Leadership Styles among all executives: the Task-Oriented Style, the Social Style, the Intellectual Style and the Participative Style. Take this quiz and find out your CEO style. 

It's the customers - stupid. 
"Innovation' isn't what innovators do....it's what customers and clients adopt." Michael Schrage, co-director of the MIT Media Lab's eMarkets Initiative and a consultant to MIT's Langer Labs on technology transfer issues,  makes this very important point about innovation on his Web site, and in a December, 2004 interview in Ubiquity, an ACM, IT Magazine and Forum. Innovators only come up with the raw building blocks; it takes great customers to give wings to an innovation. Schrage:  "I want to see the biographies and the sociologies of the great customers and clients of innovation. Forget for awhile about the Samuel Morses, Thomas Edisons, the Robert Fultons and James Watts of industrial revolution fame. Don't look to them to figure out what innovation is, because innovation is not what innovators do but what customers adopt."

"The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he's always doing both." - James Michener.  That's the quote in the intro of the new book Rules of the Red Rubber Ball by Former Nike "Katalyst" Kevin Carroll.

Learn business, IT and communications -- in that order? 
The best IT leaders are business people first and technologists second. And communications skills are also key, say virtually all of the 2005 Premier 100 IT Leaders honored by Computerworld. In a survey of best advice for launching and managing a successful career in IT, Lancelot Braunstein, executive director, Morgan Stanley, New York said: "Focus on the business. In most cases, IT is an enabler. The most successful IT professionals I have known are those who can integrate business savvy with technology experience." Nancy Mulholland, deputy executive director and CIO, New York State Workers' Compensation Board, Albany answered: "Excellent writing skills, verbal communication skills, and adaptability and flexibility are the most important skills to cultivate - because you can bet the technology will just keep changing!"