A Year-End Toast to Leadership FINESSE

It's the Holiday Season which means it's time to reflect on the past year and all that I have to be thankful for.  Which is A LOT, for sure.

Mostly, I'm thankful that my wife and kids are happy and healthy and that our family "thrives" in a loving & supportive home.  I'm thankful for my parents and parents-in-law.  I'm thankful for my brothers, their families and my extended families.  I'm thankful for my friends.  I am thankful for my community.  I am thankful to have a great job working with and for great people. 

For me, it's all about the PEOPLE.  And, I am blessed to be surrounded by great people.

If my thankfulness ended there, it would be more than enough.  But, 2012 has also been a particularly memorable year, marked by a few life-altering, if not life-DEFINING milestones.

One of the coolest happened earlier this year when, after years of blood, sweat & tears, my wife, Sara, launched her first book, "You According To Them" along with its companion Career Acceleration workbook.  In short, Sara's book helps people to understand themselves, how they are perceived by others, and how to align the two for greatest personal and professional success.

I love this book.  It is not only a brilliant reflection of Sara's professionalism and passion for what she does but it is also a spot-on premise - that what other people think, MATTERS, with spot-on, actionable, guidance for how to exploit one's attributes without going overboard.

After all, like with wine, too much of a good attribute, even if it's usually considered a strength, can be detrimental!  Ever known a leader whose confidence was perceived as over-bearing & cocky?  I have, and I didn't like how it "tasted".

A purposeful BALANCE is the key to success. 

It reminds me of a tidbit of wine history I recently read about in Matt Kramer's "Making Sense of Wine".  In the late 1700's and early 1800's, at Matt explains it, the rise of the Romantic Movement ushered in an era where "everything had to be louder, brighter, faster".  (Sound familiar?)

Fortunately, at this same time, connoisseurship of wines also continued to increase and "the lust for power in wine eventually yielded to a recognition that power without subtlety, depth of flavor without balance, color without underlying substance were unrewarding.  At this imprecise point in time...the concept of finesse.....began to make itself felt."

Sara is a vintner of sorts.  Instead of working with grapes, Sara works with corporate leaders, teams and individuals, but their objectives are the same - to achieve FINESSE through balance.

I'll Toast to That!

LeaderSips Tips:

• Hold a Blind Tasting and establish a Rating- Know Yourself -  What are your relative strengths and how do others perceive you? If you were a wine, would Robert Parker rate you a 90+? Action:  Conduct a thorough, anonymous 360-degree assessment.  
• Determine how your strengths can become barriers, or blind spots, if they are overused or Underused? Action:  Read "YOU According to THEM".
• Seek to Achieve Finesse - Action:  Identify YOUR "blind spots" and build an action plan to close the gaps.  Do you need more oak, more acid, less tannin?
• Improve the next Vintage - Action:  Adjust & Repeat Annually

"At present, a wine with finesse can be said to be one that has achieved a particularly striking harmony of its parts" - Matt Kramer

 

On launching Purple Cows and Purple GRAPES

Over the last year, my "relationship" with wine has changed.  What started as a gastronomic exploration has progressed to a more exciting phase.....wine making.

Searching for and tasting other peoples' wine is rewarding but creating, tasting and sharing my own.....is priceless. 

To be transparent, I'm not yet growing or harvesting any grapes.  (I have trouble keeping my Sago Palm alive in this Texas heat).  What I'm doing is buying the raw materials like the must (from the Latin vinum mustum, “young wine”), yeast, wood chips, etc, through my friends at Water2Wine.  I select the grape varietal, do the mixing, design the labels and eventually bottle final product.  The W2W pros do the hard work....managing the fermentation process and such.

It's fun.  It's educational.  It's relatively inexpensive. And, the final product is more rewarding to drink and to share than any Premier Cru!  

To date, I've made 3 batches of wine.  My first was an Amarone.  Amarone is a stunning Italian wine whose grapes are "raisinated" prior to crushing & fermentation. The resulting wine is bigger, deeper and more multi-dimensional than wines made through more traditional fermentation processes.

I named my first bottling, BlueJay Red, to commemorate the launch of an innovative data Storage Platform (The Dell DX Object Storage Platform, code named "BlueJay"), for which I was the Product Marketing Manager. 

The DX scales beyond traditional file storage platforms and provides unique file management features.  If the DX were a wine, it would be an Amarone!  

My 2nd bottling was a Brunello, another big & bold Italian varietal. I dedicated that bottling to my peers, commemorating the launch of our big, bold Data Management Strategy for helping customers to solve the challenges associated with storing Big Data.

My 3rd batch, just released, is an integration of Grenache & Tempranillo grapes.  Blending grapes is a 1+1=3 proposition where the combination accentuates strengths while mitigating rough edges to create an exceptionally gratifying experience.

Fittingly, I dedicated this wine to our Fluid Data Architecture vision.  Fluid Data is about the integration of industry-leading storage and data management technologies architected to work better-together and supported by an intuitive and consistent user-experience framework.
  

The Fluid Data Architecture can be what Seth Godin refers to as a Purple Cow....a stand-out in a field of monochrome Holsteins.

The Fluid Data Architecture represents an exciting but challenging transformation for my team and our employer.  Success relies, among other things, on the effective integration of technologies where ownership of Intellectual Property is imperative. 

Charting this new path will present new challenges beyond just the IP integrations (stay tuned for a post on solution selling versus box selling!) but the results can be groundbreaking.

After all, selling another company's black box was rewarding but designing, building and sellling our OWN "Purple Cows" will be......priceless!    

Don't Read this Blog Post!... Fruit Forward Focus

Couldn't resist? Well, there's good reason. Read on.

I've always described my favorite wines as being "fruit forward"....California Zins, Australian Shiraz's, New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs (specifically when blended with Semillon), White Bordeaux (also Sauvignon Blanc blended with Semillon) and my absolute favorite, Amarone, are good examples (actually, I'm fond of pretty much anything from the Valpolicella region).

Admittedly, to describe my favorite wine style as "fruit forward" is a cop-out. After all, wine is fruit. But, wine tasting lexicon can be confusing and many of the tasting reviews are lost on me. (I don't know what a black currant looks like, much less how it tastes.) The fact is, I don't really know how to accurately describe my favorite wine style, I just know that I prefer a wine that, to me, tastes "fruity".

Master Sommelier Andrea Immer offers some insight. In her book, Great Wine Made Simple, Andrea confirms that "fruity" is often a catchall term that is used as a synonym for "sweet", "soft", or "approachable". It's not "fruitiness", per se, rather the type of fruit that matters. On one end of the fruit spectrum are "lean" fruits such as lemons and on the other end are "luscious" fruits such as mangos. I prefer the latter. As it turns out, my wine style preference is more about lusciousness, not fruitiness.

All this time I've been missing out on the chance to discover some really great "luscious" wines because my focus has been misplaced.

One of the most important roles of a leader is to make sure that the collective energy and attention of an organization are properly focused. Focus is a powerful tool that can be leveraged to make progress or that can become more of an anchor, holding people and organizations back.

Simply put, you get what you focus on.

Too often I've found that people and organizations focus on fixing problems (i.e. looking backward) rather than reaching an end goal (i.e. looking forward). I'm guilty of it myself. I sometimes spend way too much time thinking about what's not working versus focusing on what IS working and trying to get more of it.

This requires a new mindset but the good news is that there are some very easy ways to make the shift. My favorite is one that I picked up from Enlightened Leadership, by Ed Oakley and Doug Krug, which they call The Framework for Continuous Renewal. This framework represents a series of focus choices that can be utilized to effectively harness the attention and energy of people and organizations. The Framework consists of:

1. Celebrating small successes

   Cover via Amazon

2. Extensively researching what you are doing to generate these successes
3. Continually clarifying/re-clarifying in great detail your specific objectives
4. Helping all parties (employees, customers, partners....) to understand the benefits of achieving the objectives, and
5. Continually searching for what you could be doing more of, better or differently, to move closer to the objective

In fact, next time you encounter a problem, instead of asking "what happened and why?", simply ask, "what can we do more of, better, or differently in order to achieve the desired outcome?" The mindset shift will have begun.

Oh, and could that have been the reason why you decided to read this blog post? The title said not to read the blog post but since the focus was on "reading the blog post", that's exactly what we got!

After all, you get what you focus on.

"Success....My nomination for the single most important ingredient is energy well directed."

Louis B. Lundborg, Former Chairman, Bank of America

Lubricating the Groundswell

In their book, Groundswell, Forrester Research VP's Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff define the groundswell as "a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other instead of from companies". I love this book because I'm seriously intrigued by what's happening with online social technologies and the impact they are having or can have in my life, both personally and professionally.

There are so many online "social" tools and their use-cases are mind-blowing. My current favorites are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Campfire & Netvibes.

But, these technologies are changing so fast that I can hardly get comfortable with one tool or use-case before another one pops up. That's where I've found Groundswell to be insightful and useful.

Part One of the book is dedicated to providing context....Why the groundswell and why now? It then gives an overview of the key groundswell technologies and how to use them. Part One ends with The Social Technographics Profile, which is "a way to group people based on the groundswell activities in which they participate. This is some seriously cool stuff and you can even use their free tool to profile your customers' social computing behaviors! After all, it's important to know your audience's profile in order to create an effective social strategy.

Part Two goes on to discuss strategies and tactics for "tapping the groundswell" and Part Three, which I haven't finished yet, outlines the real impact of the groundwell on corporations now and in the future.

What I've learned about myself is that I reside somwhere between "Critic" and "Creator" on the Social Technographic Profile. At a minimum I'm keeping track of what's being said out there on the web and am contributing my 2-cents worth in response to what I see. Today, for instance, I posted my comments ("Disappointed...") and rating ("C") for the movie "Wall-E" on Yahoo Movies.

By evidence of this blog, I'm also participating in some "creator" behaviors although I'm not yet consistent enough to consider myself a full-fledged "creator". In the context of the groundswell, afterall, "creators" are at "the top of the ladder" and are unique in their ability to influence the behaviors of others. I'm not there, yet, BUT....

...I'm intrigued enough about the power of the social web that I'm going to keep exploring ways to leverage its tools personally and professionally.

Consider a case study presented in Groundswell. The authors present the story of Jason Korman, the founder of South African winery Stormhoek. Jason "decided his wine would be the first to succeed thru the groundswell", realizing that the key was to concentrate on the wine experience. In Jason's words, "....wine is about what happens after you open the bottle." "Wine is a social lubricant".

Jason's strategy was to get people who were having a good time with his wine to start talking about it, online. Apparently they did! After sending bottles of wine to bloggers across the UK and Ireland, over 300 blog posts later, Stormhoek had created a new meaning for "wine buzz". Two years later, Stormhoek's business had grown from $1M to $10M.1

I think it's fascinating how the dynamics of influence are changing thanks largely to online social media technologies and the people who use them.....

What social technologies do you use and to what end?

".....there is something fundamental behind this drive to be social - something that touches, or will touch, all of us. It's a need to connect." - Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff

1 Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. Groundswell-Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. Harvard Business Press, 2008.

Just One Thing!

I was happy to see that The Kevin Eikenberry Group's 2nd Annual Best of Leadership Blogs 2008 includes several of my personal favorites. In fact, using the Netvibes aggregator, I've been following 4 of the 10 finalist blogs on a regular basis for over 2 years! Check them out, along with all my favorite blogs, at my personal Netvibes Universe, or link directly to those 4 leadership blogs below.

• Leadership Made Simple

• Management Craft

• Slow Leadership

• Extreme Leadership

One of my particular favorites is Management Craft, by Lisa Haneberg. Lisa seems so pragmatic and I like how she contributes her own personal perspective to everyday, relevant, management and leadership topics. It doesn't hurt, either, that my opinions tend to align with Lisa's!

Take, for instance, one of the best leadership-related posts ever, in my opinion, was first posted by Lisa on Management Craft back on 2005. It was called Leadership is Just One Thing. In that post, Lisa establishes one really cool definition of Leadership, ultimately likening it to a fine wine in that "...there's a lot going on, but one overwhelming impression.

Check out Lisa's definition of Leadership and I think you'll agree with her when she concludes that:

"Anyone can lead if they do just this one thing".

What's your favorite definition of leadership? What's your favorite Leadership blog? I'd like to hear back from you!

Thinking Inside the Box

I'm sitting here drinking a glass of boxed wine, a 2006 Paso Robles Cabernet, from Black Box Wines. Two weeks ago, I'm not sure I would have admitted that. Why? Well, there are a few reasons. First, part of what I love about wine are the bottles. I can spend hours just exploring the different labels. The bottles are just cool to me, period, so buying wine in a box feels a bit like cheating. Second, there was a stigma that I associated with box wine which is that it's wine's equivalent of the beer keg.....high quantities of bad-tasting alcohol for cheap. OK, I admit it, the thought of drinking wine from a box made me feel like a cheap, cheating wino. There, I said it.

Then, rather suddenly, my perspective changed....

It started one night at a friend's house when I was served a glass of very drinkable Merlot. At the end of the night and a few glasses later, I was shocked to learn it had been served from a box. And, not only did it taste good but the box contained the equivalent of four 750ml bottles of wine at an unheard-of per bottle cost of $6. But here's the kicker......the box had been opened for over 3 weeks! Are you kidding me? I'm used to opened red wine going stale after only 2 days!

So, it was then that I realized I'd been thinking wrong all along. Buying boxed wine isn't for cheap, cheating winos, after all. It's for smart, value-conscious wine lovers who would sometimes rather nurture an opened wine over the period of weeks rather than days!

Having found justification for the occasional boxed wine purchase, I admit it still feels different. After all, CHANGE IS NOT EASY!

In the workplace, a very important leadership role is to help people and teams to initiate, implement & sustain change. Based on what I'm experiencing, workplace change is constant and increasingly complex. For instance, in the last 12 months, the following are examples of changes that have impacted my local organization: 1) Reduced headcount 20%, 2) Reduced product development process phases from 7 to 5, 3) Eliminated an offshore development center, 4) Eliminated an incentive program, 5) Transitioned training duties to a new team, 6) Acquired & integrated 3 complimentary companies, 7) Launched new document management tool, 8) Initiated new metrics reporting, 9) Reported to a new Vice President. And, there were more! The point is, a leader's capacity for enabling effective change is as important as ever.

So, what can leaders do to enable effective change? In my opinion, it comes down to a few key things.

• Involve those who will be impacted in planning the change
• Continuously seek to surface & understand people's concerns
  
• Over-communicate before, during and after the change and in an emotionally intelligent manner
  

Doing the above can build loyalty while increasing the probability for broad acceptance. It can also result in a more thoughtful & viable plan. Most important, though, it acknowledges that leadership is as much about managing the journey as it is about establishing the destination.

However, if you cannot achieve the other two, Over-Communication is an absolute MUST. Absent consistent, authoritative, accurate & honest communication, people will come to their own conclusions and those conclusions will usually be materially inaccurate and will over-emphasize the negative. Ultimately, that will undermine any change initiative.

I'm interested to know, what are the reasons why your change initiatives have succeeded or failed?

Cheers!

"People who are left out of shaping change have a way of reminding us that they are really important" - Robert Lee

(For more on wine in a box, check out The Boxed Wine Spot blog. Maybe you'll find yourself thinking "inside the box", too. )

Getting our Feet Wet

"Wet Feet" refers to roots planted in soil with poor drainage. Well, grape vines don't like wet feet! Master Sommelier, Andrea Immer, says that grape vines should struggle for their water and that grapes often owe their higher quality, subtlety, and elegance to the struggle. This winemaking axiom, that stress is good for grapes, reminds me of the "What-Doesn't-Kill-You-Makes-You-Stronger" principle that seems prevalent in corporate environments today, including mine.

But, whereas toughing it out under constant stress might be good for Pinot Noir, it's not good for employees in the workplace! Stress, unmitigated, leads to frustration, disengagement and anger (not to mention, illness), each of which can lead to some form of decreased productivity if not worse. Now, this can't be good because, unless I'm missing something, stress is plain ubiquitous in the workplace these days. Between the do-more-with-less credo, the "globalization complexities" that are stretching the workday, creating new communication inefficiencies, and introducing cultural sensitivity concerns, the speed at which technology is changing, and the endless stream of e-mail, it's a wonder anyone can keep from going nuts, much less have a successful & rewarding career!

A key leadership challenge, then, is to create & foster an exhilarating, nurturing work environment, in spite of the stress!

But, short of installing an Enomatic system outside every conference room, what are the features of an exhilarating & nurturing work environment and how can leaders create & foster that environment? (p.s. For more on the Enomatic, check out the Vino Venue wine tasting bar in San Fran. What a cool mix of wine, technology & art! Another Enomatic installation is pictured below...)

For sure, there can't be just ONE right set of features but I think there are some fundamentally important features necessary to create and sustain such an exhilarating & nurturing work environment. Just as both Chateau Latour & Chateau Margaux each create a great first-growth Bordeaux using different tools & techniques, they do share the fundamentally important gravely edge of the Gironde River. It's that stony soil, after all, that provides the drainage necessary to avoid the "wet feet" conditions mentioned earlier!

In fact, based on feedback from over 200 of our employees we've isolated what I think to be three of those fundamental features that we'll be trying to create, thru a strategic initiative, within our organization. Those features and their corresponding "objectives" are:

1. Unity - To unify employees and teams through strong relationships and a shared, igniting purpose
2. Empowerment - To empower individuals and teams with critical skills & relevant, right-time information, and
3. Reinforcement - To get more of what we want and to instill pride by celebrating, recognizing & rewarding successes in efficient and meaningful ways
   

We've also established some critical success criteria based on our collective experiences & lessons learned from having been involved in other similar organizational development initiatives in the past. The critical success criteria are:

• Our initiative must be "owned" by the leadership team. Otherwise, it will lack the credibility and support necessary to have a meaningful impact on the organization.
  
• Our initiative must solve real business problems and/or must support defined business objectives. First, this is the only way to expect leadership team ownership. Second, unless tied directly to business objectives, these efforts are at risk of being relegated to an "activities committee" where holiday luncheons and team building events become the dominant themes.
  
• Results must be measured and continually optimized. An effective environment, after all, is the "ends", not the "means", so we need to establish real goals and measure our progress to those goals. Also, as the old saying goes, "you get what you measure"!
  

So, we're off and running and will be getting our "feet wet" with all sorts of new leadership experiences along the way. Collectively I'll refer to this initiative as "Org Enrichment" and will post some updates as we go. Check back often!

In the meantime, here's a question begging your feedback:

Based on your real-world experience, in addition to Unity, Empowerment & Reinforcement, what are some other features that you think are fundamental in an exhilarating & nurturing work environment?

"Empowerment is the creation of an organizational climate that releases the knowledge, experience, and motivation that reside in people" - Ken Blanchard

A "Winning Viti-Culture"

In viticulture, the science of grape growing, the term terrior seems central. Terrior (tear-WAHR) is a French term referring to the distinctive location-based characteristics of a grape vine's plot. These characteristics include weather, soil type, slope, altitude, and others. Some say that a wine's taste and smell can, and perhaps more accurately should, reflect the character of its terrior. So important is terrior with respect to wine that in the "Old World" the perspective is that a winemaker's job is to simply shephard the vineyard's nuances into the bottle. In her book Great Wine Made Simple, Andrea Immer describes it this way: "Freedom of Expression is left up to Mother Nature". The notion of terrior also shows up in the European tradition of identifying wine based on where the grapes are grown instead of by the grape varietal, as is usually the case in the "New World" (Heck, I just recently learned that a Valpolicella isn't a grape, it's a place!*).

Regardless, though, of how omnipotent terrior may seem, it can't be considered separate from the grape variety being grown. Grape varieties prefer certain growing conditions. Whereas Zinfandel prefers relatively warm temperatures, Pinot Noir & Riesling, prefer relatively cool temperatures, and so on. Based on what I've read, the diehard opinion is that truly great wines are the result of grape varieties that have been perfectly matched to their environment. (I knew the winemaker was more than just a shephard!) As Matt Kramer asserts in his book Making Sense of Wine, "when you taste a wine that has it, you know it". Actually, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't know it, but I don't mind trying.....

In the context of the corporation, terrior is a lot like corporate culture. As terrior represents the intrinsic characteristics of a place bestowed upon its wine, through the grape, corporate culture similarly represents characteristics of the work environment bestowed upon a company's products & services, through its workers. It follows, then, that leaders play the role of both "Mother Nature" and "winemaker" within their organizations - on the one hand constructing the cultural foundation while shepherding core values/tenets and matching people to the right roles, all in an attempt to optimize the outputs.

I'm particularly interested in corporate culture and the idea of leader as Mother Nature and winemaker. For one thing, I'm sensitive to cultural factors in the workplace and the impact it has on people, and I wholeheartedly believe that the leaders in an organization are responsible for creating and shepherding an effective culture. But, what makes it even more relevant for me is that I've recently proposed a "Winning Culture" strategy within my org, and I want to talk about it!

My next few posts will be dedicated to outlining the "Winning Culture" strategy. Thereafter, as appropriate, I'll discuss progress (or lack thereof), challenges & learnings. Your comments, ideas and observations will provide great value to the effort, so I hope you'll join in the discussion.

"Never Does Nature Say One Thing And Wisdom Another" - Juvenal

*Valpolicella, I've learned, is a blend of the Corvina, Rondinella, Molinara and sometimes Negrara grapes. One of my favorite wines is Amarone, which is a Valpolicella whose grapes have been left to ripen on the vine longer than normal. Once harvested, the grapes are set aside to dry for months, becoming raisinated and further concentrating their sugar. This style of winemaking, called recioto, results in an opulent, full-bodied masterpiece....at least in my opinion! Try the Tommasi Amarone and I bet you'll be hooked!

Connoisseur?

con·nois·seur [kon-uh-sur, -soor] : a discerning judge of the best in any field1

Me, a connoisseur? Of wine? Heck no, at least not yet. I love everything about it, that's for sure! I love the shared experiences, I love searching for that new favorite, I like the process of learning about wine. I even like shopping for wine! I could browse the wine section for hours just looking at the labels! But, though I can usually tell the difference between a Zin and a Pinot, the difference between dry and sweet and I know it when a wine has "nice legs", I still can't recite the top rated old-world cabernet vintages, I forget the difference between the AOC (Vins d'Appellation d'Origine) vs. the DOC (Denominazione di Origine Conrollata) and my tastebuds wouldn't know a black currant if one was standing in front of me!

A connoisseur of leadership? Sure. I've spent 20 years leading successfully in corporate environments, almost forty years either leading or being led everywhere else, and a heck of a lot of time trying to figure out how to be a better leader, regardless. I spend a good deal of time staying on top of leadership & workplace trends, reading about leaders and their lives and observing leadership behaviors. I know good leadership practices from bad ones, period.

Unfortunately, for me, wine is just a hobby. Leadership, on the other hand, is my job. And, I've often thought, wouldn't it be a good idea if I could combine the two? Blending (pun intended) passions, it's often said, is a good recipe for success. But, short of opening a wine shop (my dream, but not realistic at this particular point in my life), the options are limited when it comes to blending wine with leadership. Until, one evening, it hit me.....

There I was, sipping on a glass of a 2001 Rosenblum Rockpile Road Zinfandel, flipping through one of my favorite wine books (The Wine Bible, by Karen MacNeil) when I came across a snippet describing the fiasco. A fiasco is the bulbous straw or wicker-covered bottle that Chianti used to come in. But, "fiasco" was also a good way to describe my day at work! (According to the Oxford English Dictionary, our word fiasco - meaning a failure or complete breakdown- comes from the Italian expression fare fiasco, "to make a bottle". Wine experts speculate that fiasco came to it's present day meaning because of the poor quality of past Chianti.2) And, voila! The basis for my leadership blog, LeaderSips was born. You see, Leadership & Wine do have an awful lot in common. So, why not explore it?!.....

LeaderSips will explore real-life business leadership topics against the backdrop or in the context of wine, when possible. When the correlations fade or don't exist I will simply focus on leadership OR wine....whichever is most compelling at the moment. In the process, I'll learn more about wine AND about leadership. And, if YOU participate, all the better.

In any case, if and when the subject matter resonates with you, I hope you'll join me. It will be fun.

"Nothing more excellent or valuable than wine (or good leaders) was ever granted by the gods to man" - Author Unknown

1. connoisseur. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Retrieved February 02, 2008, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/connoisseur
2. MacNeil, Karen. The Wine Bible. New York: Workman Publishing, 2001.