BIF-6 came with killer credentials. i deeply respect saul kaplan, BIF’s founder and chief catalyst, and my cohealth collaborator, greg matthews, couldn’t sing BIF-5′s praises enough. as many of you’ll appreciate, high expectations can be an experience’s undoing. it’s hard, if not impossible, to meet one’s fantasized version of a much-touted movie, book or gastronomic junket. so, while i went to BIF-6 with these high expectations, i also heard my internal skeptic whispering, “we’ll see.”

my inner voice was wrong and greg was right. BIF-6 delivered two days of non-stop exposure to folks you’d typically never find together in one room. a retailer. college presidents. government agents. a 12-year-old. technologists driving civic engagement, student engagement and climate change. a skateboarder turned scientist. a hospital CEO/concierge. the list goes on and on and makes for the most stimulating intellectual soup you can imagine—and a most demanding intellectual experience as well. for unlike other conferences, BIF-6 refuses to do the thinking for you. what it offers instead is random collisions of unusual suspects, to quote from saul’s introduction, and a chance to create your own narrative based on what and whom you respond to.

with that intro, here are the memorable lines and moments that sang to me:

• luck is being open to opportunity. testing for this mental framework is part of zappos’ hiring process. zappos asks potential hires to answer on a scale of 1 to 10 how lucky they are, knowing that luck is often about what we bring to bear. or, to paraphrase zappos’ ceo tony hsieh, resources aren’t the limitations; resourcefulness is.
• it’s not about being smart. it’s the acceptance of being stupid. this line came from richard saul wurman, TED founder and agitator extraordinaire, but the concept was repeated by many. embracing our stupidity (AKA our naiveté or fresh eyes) is not something we do with relish, and yet that very reluctance keeps us from discoveries, understanding, and the ability to translate experience and content for ourselves and to others.
• our world is shrinking but its inhabitants are not. through the camera lens and captured story, peter menzel and faith d’aluisio bring attention to our global health issues. this thread was picked up by gerard van grinsven, a former ritz-carlton executive who is bringing his concierge-like mentality to health care in the form of the henry ford west bloomfield hospital. gerard struck out to create the “cirque de soleil of health care,” an institution that’s the community center of well-being, not illness. he’s creating new methods to maintain health and boost revenues, with tea sommeliers, concerts, a cafeteria people seek out even when they have no clinical reason to be there, and a catering department that hosts functions and offers cooking classes.
• the passionate person expresses their vulnerability and builds trust-based relationships. this definition was expressed by john hagel, co-chairman, deloitte center for the edge, along with the depressing stat that in the US only 20% of us are passionate about the work we’re doing and the (unsurprising?) fact that passion has an inverse relationship to the size of an organization. those with passion and the drive to enhance their performance exhibited both a “questing” and “connecting” disposition. they actively seek out challenges, and they have an instinctive desire to connect with people who share their passion. as others, such as don tapscott, len schlesinger, john maeda, richard leider and bruce nussbaum spoke about generational change, rethinking our institutions and aligning our work with our passion and values, the lingering question was how will large institutions adapt?
• what exactly will get us to change in a massive way? this was posed by jigar shah, CEO of the carbon war room, who’s on a quest to reverse climate change. his question could be asked by many of us in the work we do. i know it got me thinking about how we can remove workplace barriers to being healthy and inspire employers to become global health activists.
• being a different thinker was more difficult than being a woman or a latina. carmen medina, a former CIA agent, gave voice to many of us when she shared her response to a question about being a “first” in the agency. how many of us feel like a square peg in a round hole, not fully utilized or understood? how many of us can’t fully contribute because of a lack of openness to new ways of thinking? for me, this tied back to an equation for “fit” described by richard leider, the founder and chairman of the inventure group: gifts + passion + values = right work.
• tomorrow is a time of infinite possibility and finite resources. the elegant keith yamashita, founder and chairman, sypartners, brought the summit to a close with his thoughtful ruminations on is it worth it to be great? i truly cannot do his speech justice; give yourself the pleasure of hearing it firsthand.

there are so many other memorable moments and lines. rather than dwell on the experience, i’m going to unleash the learning, for it’s not innovation until it works in the real world (saul kaplan).

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to feel at home, stay at home.
—clifton paul fadiman

you can’t push the envelope if the only shape you know is the one you created. to shake things up, interact with those who are taking old ideas and reconstituting them. through them, you’ll learn the present shape of their envelope and where and how to push yours.

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i’m feeling the pain of mott’s communication professionals; things don’t look pretty over there. in a year of record profits and with nary a word about leadership sacrifice, they’re faced with the unenviable task of fashioning palatable communication messages for why mott’s is asking employees for pay and benefits cutbacks.

to lend them a hand, i’m taking up a collection. drop your suggested copy in the comments. i’ll start things off:

mott’s new people strategy

• Reduce (your pay and benefits)

• Reuse (your uniform)

• Recycle (our workforce with those more compliant)

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when i left hewitt, i knew it’d be hard to find another company as flexible. during my time there i’d worked traditional hours, compressed hours, and an altered full-time schedule of 7 to 3. unwilling to compromise on flexibility and creative, challenging, and rewarding work, i chose to start my own firm and create my chances. so far, so good.

i’m one of many.

david leonhardt writes today:

“Taking the next step toward workplace equality probably has to start with an acknowledgment that most parents can’t have it all—at least as long as part-time work, flexible schedules and long leaves do so much career damage.

A growing number of parents already seem to have come to this conclusion. That’s one reason for the rise in the number of mothers who have dropped out of the labor force. Lacking good part-time job options, more are choosing full-time parenting.”

leonhardt goes on to project that:

“The best hope for making progress against today’s gender inequality probably involves some combination of legal and cultural changes, which happens to be the same combination that beat back the old sexism. We’ll have to get beyond the Mommy Wars and instead create rewarding career paths even for parents—fathers, too—who take months or years off. We’ll have to get more creative about part-time and flexible work, too.”

because he’s talking about gender inequality, he limits himself to a parent’s need for flexibility. women who choose to have children are the ones who still make less. a study he cites shows that women who had no children and never took time off didn’t fall behind. their career arc and pay looked like men’s because their life looks like the traditional male’s.

the conversations we’re having about flexibility, “millennial” needs, and wellness tell us it’s not enough to look at creating equality based solely on parents’ needs. that doesn’t address our desire for a flexible work path that allows us to take care of our parents, other family, or simply ourselves.

i don’t believe in having it all. i do believe in having a strong facsimile, and i’ve created it for myself. that’s not an option for many. if, like moi, you’re at all risk-averse, you need certain things in place: a steady financial base, health care benefits, and the right temperament and skill set, for starters. if you can’t have it all:

• what’s close enough for you?
• what do you need from your employer to make that happen?
• what do you think is reasonable to expect from them?

lay it out for me.

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additional reading on the subject:

• change the game: add aging to the parent-centric work+life debate

i first encountered zappos ceo tony hsieh’s thoughts on happiness when i stumbled upon his article how twitter can make you a better (and happier) person while researching a post about using twitter throughout the employee “life cycle.” his points from that twitter = happiness post stuck with me, as did his belief that companies can and should do more than merely profit. when i heard he was writing a book to expand on these ideas, i was quick to sign up to read it.*

BLOT (bottom line on top)

delivering happiness: a path to profits, passion, and purpose is one part autobiography, one part cliffhanger, and one part business book. it details hsieh’s youthful business exploits from his first worm farm (they died, or escaped) to on-campus pizza pioneering to…too many to detail. buy it, borrow it, or take it out from the library. it’s a quick read and one that’s bound to leave you more impressed by both hsieh’s and zappos’ achievements.

memorable bits

look, we all know hsieh’s a pretty remarkable guy. that’s confirmed in the book, where you learn he applied to brown, UC berkeley, stanford, MIT, harvard, princeton, cornell, and yale. i doubt he had a safety school or a need for one. he was accepted by all of these and chose harvard for the parental bragging rights. he then proceeded to not study and still excel. he’d be easy to dislike, given this and his whopping success, if he weren’t so darn likable, a terrific storyteller (making me more excited to see him live at BIF-6 in the fall), and a model employer. he winningly conveys his passion and conviction about how businesses should be run.

the first lesson comes via the book itself. because hsieh chose not to work with a ghost writer, the writing is personal and fresh, and not always what you’d expect. i got the feeling that he’s an experiential learner and that he was writing this book to see what it required and what he’d change the next time. basically, it’s how he approaches development: do-learn-do. (at times, there’s a “fail” thrown in the cycle.)

a large part of zappos’ growth and learning stems from flying by the seat of their pants, somewhat. (this same idea is part of jason fried’s, rework, which i’ve not read yet.) it’s the idea that a business plan and forecasting are nonsense. that they’re, at best, guesses. in delivering happiness, we see this business-planning-on-the-go in action—the cliffhanger part of the book.

it may seem sometimes like we don’t know what we’re doing. and it’s true: we don’t. that’s a bit scary, but you can take comfort in knowing that nobody else knows how to do what we’re doing either…so there are no experts in what we’re doing. except for us: we are becoming experts as we do this.

what makes in-the-moment business planning work is committing to your beliefs, even when that means making the tough call. at two junctures hsieh and his team make choices that keep zappos afloat and determine its culture. early on, hsieh sold his home and left himself nearly destitute to throw zappos a lifeline. later, when zappos was more established, hsieh severed its drop-ship business, which ran in conjunction to the delivery service most of us know. this risky move eliminated a guaranteed revenue stream, one that interfered with zappos’ ability to deliver a WOW! experience—their intended core competency. hsieh pushed ahead, partly to control the customer experience and partly to bolster the employee-leadership one.

the best leaders are servant-leaders. they serve those they lead.

trust between employee and leader is critical at zappos, and it lies beneath much of their culture and ways of working. unscripted and untimed customer rep calls and the publishing of uncensored employee stories in their culture book are some of the proof in that pudding.

toward the end of the book, hsieh transitions to a discussion about happiness theory. being a perpetual “why” asker, i particularly liked his notion that asking “why” repeatedly can drive you to a greater understanding of what delivers happiness. from a business angle, he outlines how happiness drives individual and organizational success through perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness, and being part of something bigger than yourself. his walking away from millions several times lends credibility to his argument.

as expected, there’s lots about zappos’ culture in the book. hsieh shares his growing appreciation for a strong company culture, beginning with stories from school through to a culture gone awry at linkexchange, and landing finally at zappos, where hsieh cultivates and nourishes theirs, largely by turning over much of the development and articulation of it to employees. readers will find plenty to take back to their office for discussion.

one knock against the book

although hsieh invites us “to be a part of a movement to help make the world a better and happier place,” delivering happiness mostly equates higher purpose with WOWing customers; developing passionate, inquisitive, and empowered employees; and building a thriving business.

there’s nothing bad in all that. most of us would gladly go work for zappos or a company like them. it’s simply that when i consider a higher purpose, i think of something that will dramatically alter the way we live. maybe i’m quibbling. perhaps, for example, if BP was following the “zappos way” they would’ve made the up-front investment in safety that could’ve prevented the ecological nightmare we’re facing. and the world truly would look different.

as i said up front, i’d recommend the book. and i’d love to visit zappos and learn firsthand more about what they’re doing there. heck, i’d love to work with them. how can you not love a company that has “create fun and a little weirdness” as one of its core values?

ultimately, if more companies operated at the same level as zappos, i think we’d all be happy(ier).

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* in exchange for a free advance copy, i agreed to write this honest review.

i ushered my family into a tight club this weekend: those who love the movie “breaking away.”

billed as a coming-of-age story, it’s truly a film about nourishment. the type we give and take from our family and friends. that we luckily and greedily receive from excellent managers and mentors. that we derive from pride of purpose. and that we need when our dreams get derailed, are discarded, or go bust.

if you haven’t seen it, watch this original trailer and get it on your netflix queue. if you have seen it, i’ve only one word for you: refund?!

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the corner office, a regular column on leadership in the new york times, is typically the first article i flip to on a sunday morning. and i often bookmark favorites the old-fashioned way—cut out and file.

reading this week’s interview (cristóbal conde, ceo of sungard, below), i thought of others i’ve savored over the past year. here are my 2009 favorites that are still available online. if you have a favorite as well, add it to the list.

1. will wright, video game designer

wright explores the relationship between personal passion, daunting tasks, and failure.

a sample of what you’ll find:

• “so, that’s part of how i filter prospective employees—when they are faced with the impossible, do they get excited or do they get depressed?”

2. brian dunn, chief executive, best buy

dunn is out there, virtually and IRL, listening for hiccups and insights from employees, customers, and competitors.

a sample of what you’ll find:

• “i think the ceo job is designed to insulate people from things that really happen. i want to make sure that i’m sort of out there in the white noise and the messiness of it all. if you don’t, you run the risk of becoming insulated and ineffective.”
• “people don’t line up outside my door to tell me how they’ve screwed something up. you know, you sort of get the ‘yep, everything’s going terrific and it’s a-o.k.’”

3. alan r. mulally, president and chief executive of ford motor company

mulally understands story-telling. he drives his vision by uniting employees behind the universal.

a sample of what you’ll find:

• “is the airplane really about an airplane or is it about getting people together around the world so they can find out how more alike they are than different? and is a car about just a driving experience or is it about safe and efficient transportation, and your family, and freedom? and so the higher the calling, the higher the compelling vision that you can articulate, then the more it pulls everybody in.”

4. carol bartz, ceo of yahoo

bartz is a little more introspective than some of the other interviewees. she discusses missteps and reflects on working for her early-career ceo self (she wouldn’t have wanted to).

a sample of what you’ll find:

• “you need to build your career not as a ladder, but as a pyramid. you need to have a base of experience because it’s a much more stable structure. and so that involves taking lateral moves. and it involves getting out of your comfort zone.”
• “everybody has politics. and so be an expert at it. figure out how to influence people to get things done, as opposed to running and ratting on them.”

5. joseph j plumeri, chairman and ceo of willis group holdings

plumeri delves into the knock-on effect of small things: mood, hand-written notes, and mistaken identities.

a sample of what you’ll find:

• “and i think anybody in a leadership position, where people depend upon you, you simply can’t have that one off day that’s bad, because you’re going to affect a lot of people.”
• “what i’m trying to say is that little things are big deals. they are a major ingredient in building a great company.”

6. nancy mckinstry, ceo and chairwoman of the executive board, wolters kluwer

mckinstry speaks to my biases, so of course i like her. she discusses how understanding culture and backgrounds informs how you inspire employees globally.

a sample of what you’ll find:

• “so what i’ve learned in holland is that if you invest a lot of time upfront to explain what you’re trying to accomplish, get people’s feedback, then when they do say yes, the time to implementation is really fast. but if you don’t invest that time up front, you’re going to get such resistance that you’ll never get to the end.”
• “if you know how to solve problems, you have a shot of performing at a higher level. you obviously need some subject-matter expertise, but i’d rather have someone who’s really strong on problem-solving, and maybe a little less on the subject-matter expertise, because we can teach them that.”

7. jeffrey swartz,  president and ceo of the timberland company

from solving process breakdowns to interviews and new-employee meetings, swartz digs into the personal to frame information, motivate, and create bonds.

a sample of what you’ll find:

• “people resist the unseen. they fear what they don’t know, what they can’t put their hands on. so i learned from that experience that i’ve got to help people see what they can’t see.”

8. gordon m. bethune, former chief executive, continental airlines

straight-talk and common sense. that’s what bethune delivers. he discusses management style and communication, and the common denominator is always that simple things are easy to do—and even easier to forget.

a sample of what you’ll find:

• “i was a mechanic in the navy. and mechanics in the navy are like mechanics in airlines. you may have more stripes than i do, but you don’t know how to fix the airplane. you want me to fix it? you know how much faster i could fix the airplane when i wanted to, than when i didn’t want to?”
• “you don’t lie to your own doctor. you don’t lie to your own attorney, and you don’t lie to your employees. and if you never lie, then when it hits the fan, and somebody says you’re wrong — you can say, “no, i’m not,” and they’ll believe you.”

9. tony hsieh, chief executive, zappos.com

this has been a wildly popular article, as with all things zappos. what comes through loud and clear is that employees set and maintain the culture, and there’s trust in their doing so.

a sample of what you’ll find:

• “i basically sent an e-mail out to the entire company, asking them what our values should be, and got a whole bunch of different responses. the initial list was actually 37 long, and then we ended up condensing and combining them and went back and forth and came up with our list of 10.”
• “one of our teams—the outdoor team in our merchandising department — decided to decorate one of the conference rooms, and transform it so that when you’re inside, you feel like you’re in a log cabin. they spent the weekend tearing up the floors and putting in a fake fire and all this stuff. it was pretty cool…the next thing we knew, within two or three months, all 20 or so conference rooms were all decorated by different teams.”

10. cristóbal conde, ceo of sungard

conde highlights what many of us on twitter already know: by sharing information publicly and without regard to rank or celebrity, good ideas and remarkable thought leaders rise to the top.

a sample of what you’ll find:

• “the answer is to allow employees to develop a name for themselves that is irrespective of their organizational ranking or where they sit in the org chart. by creating an atmosphere of collaboration, the people who are consistently right get a huge following, and their work product is talked about by people they’ve never met. it’s fascinating.”
• “if you start micromanaging people, then the very best ones leave. if the very best people leave, then the people you’ve got left actually require more micromanagement.”

as you read these, a common theme of passion and empowerment appears. when you unleash people with a yen to do great things, they typically do.

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last week an exchange among fellow members of a communication professional group got my attention. they were discussing service anniversaries. one member shot off that recognizing service anniversaries is nonsense—it’s what you’ve done that matters, not how long you’ve done it.

in my humble opinion, what’s nonsense is that a lousy performer is around long enough to celebrate service anniversaries and that it’s considered too much to stop—just for a moment—to say something other than “what have you done for me lately?” to the rest.

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let’s just get this out of the way, shall we?

would i want to be laid off by george clooney? hell, yeah.

would i give up my severance for the opportunity? probably; i’m not above that.

would i think less harshly of my company’s layoffs if he were doing the dirty work? possibly. i mean, c’mon…it’s george clooney we’re talking about, people. if my company could wrangle attention from this level of heart-throbbing talent, i’d have to give the whole process some props.

now that i got the fantasy portion of this post out of the way [poof!], let’s get down to business. the business of layoffs.

in case you missed it, george clooney’s bringing his characteristic dash to layoffs this holiday season in a new movie, up in the air. he plays ryan bingham, a high-flyin’ layoff artist, hired by corporations too spineless to deliver the bad news themselves.

the concept got me thinking of firing and layoffs, of which we’ve been reading or personally experiencing far too much lately. this post isn’t about the layoffs that a company arrives at due to harsh economic times and after exhausting other alternatives, like change in leadership, process improvement, hiring and salary freezes, temporarily cutting salaries, and work furloughs. it’s about seizing layoffs as a simple solution to a complex problem―as in an across-the-board 10% rif to quickly cut costs.

let me give you three straightforward reasons i don’t like them. feel free to refute or add to them.

reason #1: they’re inhumane. in up in the air, the young, female upstart determines companies can save money by laying off via videoconferencing. über-efficiency! clooney, because he’s clooney and we can never really be allowed to hate him, throws down his cloak of integrity (and his mileage card, which would soon be worthless if technology held sway) and insists that’s no way of doing business. there’s honor in laying people off face-to-face, tissue box properly positioned in front of you. well, i tell you. there are plenty of managers who would kill to implement that policy. because laying people off is damn hard, no matter how well executed. it takes a toll on those on both sides of the table. and those who bear the message are often play pieces too―not the ones who engineered the layoff or influenced consideration of alternative cost-savings efforts.

reason #2: they’re cowardly. tell me you can’t think of someone who was laid off who should’ve been let go for lackluster performance long ago. or of someone else who got caught up because of the formulaic approach and the headcount reduction required. layoffs are the lazy manager’s performance management system, used to weed out poor performers and suggest a high performance culture. layoffs done in this vein may offset survivor’s guilt, but they destroy the credibility of the company’s talent processes and equate layoffs with the shame and embarrassment that affect 46% of unemployed americans today.

if you’ve experienced a layoff, you know about reason #3: they stick in a company’s craw. it’s not just the too-much-work, too-few-people scenario. that’s an everyday fact of corporate life. or the loss of focus while everyone tries to figure out who’s next on the chopping block. or even the survivor’s guilt and subsequent lack of engagement that takes years to restore. it’s the severing of company promise—the hidden costs of layoffs.

yes, layoffs can be a necessary part of keeping a business alive. and yes, companies rebound from them. but once a company uses layoffs to manage the numbers, employees know they are just a number and that the leadership who asks them to give their all is not willing to give them even 5-10%. that’s a problem not even the dreamy george clooney can fix.

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note: i haven’t seen up in the air yet, so my comments on the movie are based solely on my intellectual and artistic admiration for george clooney and available reviews.

last week i wrote a post about diversity training for fistful of talent. hint: i’m not for it, in its most practiced form. there are many reasons why, but one is because it doesn’t alter the makeup, race- and gender-wise, at the top of the house.

this weekend, i had no need for research-backed statistics to understand the power of seeing someone like you in a role you aspire to some day have. i got the most charming lesson on the subject while waiting with my girls and my mom for the noontime showing of  “the princess and the frog.” we were one of two white families, and we were there to see a movie. others were there to see a revelation: tiana, the first black disney princess, a full 70+ years after disney’s debut princess, snow white.

say what you want about the film’s failings and the flaws of disney princesses, in general (i certainly have), not even the most stalwart anti-disneyite could have stood inside the bridge cinema and denied that disney achieved something. when the doors of the theater opened, little girls swept past us wearing twirling gowns and sparkling tiaras. trailing them were the big girls, the mothers, wearing tiaras too and the broad smiles of those who’ve wanted—and waited—for this, for themselves and their girls.

to disney’s credit, they sneak in positive messages that make tiana a vast improvement over the some-day-my-prince-will-come garden-variety princess. of course she gets “the prize,” a disinherited, unskilled, philandering prince, but not before she saves his frog ass many-a-time and, this being a fairy tale, transforms the lout into a hard-working champion of her real passion—owning her own restaurant, a dream realized through hard work, denial, and determination.

while the movie’s message of self-empowerment may take some time to sink in with the under-12 set, it was not lost on any that, for once, the girl who ended up a princess wasn’t the blonde. she was the black daughter of a seamstress.

today, the aspiration is for the highest of disney achievement. tomorrow, it may be for the c-suite. we’ll hope they can see a girl who looks just like them there too.

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