Monthly Archives: February 2015

Don’t judge a book by its meat dress

I find it very hard to watch the Oscars or any awards show any more. I’m in my 40’s and I’m getting crabbier every year. It’s not like I’m not happy for people that win and achieve their dreams. I think the Oscars are one of the few awards that still matter. There are so many music awards any more that it’s hard to keep track of them. I also find it very odd that there is “an academy” that votes for these awards and there are always really good performances and great movies left off the list and strange one’s that win and that makes me mad. It’s one of the reasons why I prefer sports with scoreboards like basketball or soccer or clocks like swimming and track & field to those with a panel of judges like gymnastics and figure skating. Never trust a panel or an academy to get it right.

This year, there were also a lot of very strong messages delivered by winners about women’s pay equity, and self worth, and terrible diseases that need cures. If you win, you get to have the microphone for like 45 seconds so by all means, make an impression. Not everyone can make a memorable impression by what they wear on the red carpet, so they better make people remember their performance and what they say. One performance in particular was shocking to most of us – Lady Gaga singing a “Sound of Music” medley. It made me think of one of my favorite lines from the movie Pretty Woman after Richard Gere walks in on Julia Roberts in the bathroom and thinks he catches her taking drugs but in actuality she was just flossing her teeth. Here was the dialog that ensued:

Edward Lewis: It’s just that, uh, very few people surprise me.
Vivian: Yeah, well, you’re lucky. Most of ’em shock the hell outta me.

I don’t think that many people recognized Lady Gaga or thought she could sing like that (or dress like that) so that shocked us all. If you missed it, here’s a link to her performance. I myself have never been a huge Gaga fan with her weird costumes and behavior but she has an incredible voice. I think that was a great message for a spectacle like the Oscars and from now on, I will appreciate Lady Gaga a bit more and I will try not to judge her just for her hair, or tattoos or her dress made out of meat.

I love Girl Scout cookies, just not the propaganda

Now before anyone gets all wound up about this, let me just say that I love Girl Scout cookies and I probably like most girl scouts as well. But, after devouring a few of my favorite cookies this week, I decided to take a look at the box – pictured here. Now I’m sure that the Girl Scouts actually do teach girls some lessons that they retain throughout their lives but I think they are laying it on a little thick. Let’s approach this one skill at a time, shall we?

skills

            

1. Goal Setting – I set a few goals to eat fewer cookies and I think that each girl (and their family) probably has to decide how many boxes they can realistically sell. So, I’ll give them this one.

2. Decision Making – Should I walk around my neighborhood in the freezing cold selling cookies or should I have one of my parents just put the sheet out in the break room at work? Easy.

3. Money Management – I’ll give them another one, they do have to collect money and turn it in.

4. People Skills – I don’t know, I’ve asked the little salespeople where the money goes and gotten nothing but blank stares. One particular girl this year actually didn’t say anything at all. She just showed up with her girl scout vest on and a bag with cookies in it and my wife filled out the form, wrote the check, took the cookies and the salesperson was on her way. Not a lot of people skills. Not a lot of skill building for little girls who sell cookies because their parents leave a form in the break room either.

5. Business Ethics – This one is really the one that put me over the edge. I mean come on, are 8-year-old girls really learning business ethics from selling cookies? I’m not saying that the world doesn’t need all the help it can get as far as ethical behavior goes but I’m having a hard time associating what I’ve observed as the cookie sales process with any meaningful ethics lessons.

So, as far as I’m concerned, cookies and girl scouts are a good thing but I think that the propaganda could be toned down a little, don’t you?

What if we were nicer?

Two stories of bad behavior caught my eye this week. I get that it’s “business” not “charity” but there are examples every day of businesses with a heart – Costco, Lowes and Starbucks offer benefits to part time employees for example but President Obama singled out office supply retailer, Staples, for trying to prevent its employees from getting health insurance. I’m not saying that I always agree with the President or with his health care policies but you can read the story here: http://www.philly.com/philly/business/Obama_slams_Staples_big_companies_on_healthcare_Shame_on_them.html

Here’s a quick summary of the situation:

  • The Affordable Care Act requires companies with more than 50 employees to pay for health insurance for people who work 30 hours a week or more. Reuters has reported that some businesses are keeping staffing numbers below 50 or cutting the work week to less than 30 hours to avoid providing employee health insurance.
  • Staples, the No. 1 U.S. office supplies retailer, who just announced a merger with Office Depot worth $6 billion, has told its employees not to work more than 25 hours per week, according to a Buzzfeed report on Monday. Oh, by the way, Staples CEO Ronald Sargent brought home $10.8 million in total compensation in 2013. The company reported net profit of $620.1 million through Feb. 1, 2014.
  • President Obama said, “There is no reason for an employer who is not currently providing health care to their workers to discourage them from either getting health insurance on the job or being able to avail themselves of the Affordable Care Act.”
  • Staples responded with a snarky statement indicating that the president did not have all the facts (not sure I agree with them either).

It sort of all starts with leaders right? Leaders have to care and insist that their companies adopt policies that are people first. What if we use pay as a measure of fairness. Seattle-based REI has more than 12,000 employees and it’s CEO makes $750,000. That’s a pretty flat pay scale that most employees would look at and say, “well the CEO has more responsibility than me so he/she is entitled to make a little more.”

To quote some famous pop song, “it’s not all about the money, money, money…” right? What about how you treat people – are you nice to the people around you? Do a search for “who are the nicest business leaders?” The results include, the greatest, the best, the most innovative, but not a single result for “nicest.” I found a person who wouldn’t make the list this week.

Amy Pascal, former co-chairman of Sony Pictures who was involved in the now infamous cyber-attack on the studio and subsequently lost her job, commented publicly for the first time this week. Here’s the full interview with the BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-31434419

I don’t want to work for her. She doesn’t sound like a nice person or the kind of business leaders that we need in this world. She said things like:

  • “If we all actually were nice, it wouldn’t work.”
  • “Here’s the problem: I run a business,” she continued. “People want to work for less money, I pay them less money.”
  • And she closed out her master class on leadership (and niceness) saying that she “learned a lot from the hack about how to relate to people.” And said “You should always say exactly what you think directly to people all the time,” she said. “In the moment, the first time.”

So, do businesses have to make more net profit than $620 million to pay for their employees healthcare? Would it all work if we were actually nice?

That’s not farming

I know a lot about farming and I know what a farmer is, I was one for the better part of 20 years. When my kids make comments about how much fun they had at their soccer tournaments and sleepovers and ski trips, I jokingly say, “when I was a kid, I was working on the farm.” Yeah, I’m that guy.

I’ve written a lot about farming and every time someone makes a comment about organic this or GMO that or Free Trade or subsidies for “rich farmers,” I have an opinion. I actually hear the voice of my dad yelling in my ear and he’s using bad words. I saw a review of Super Bowl commercials this year and there were several comments that none of them were as good as last year’s “farmer” spot by Dodge with the brilliant voice of Paul Harvey – check it out here if you haven’t seen it in a while.

Well, my dad, Paul Harvey and I saw this story today and couldn’t resist commenting…

Apparently the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources is intervening because a Fargo, ND-based “agriculture firm” is trying to buy 27,000 acres of forest land in north-central Minnesota to convert it to farm land. This particular agriculture firm is called R.D. Offutt and in addition to being the world’s largest potato producer at more than 65,000 acres and the owner of the world’s largest collection of John Deere dealerships (more than 82), they own tens of thousands of acres of land in other states and many other agriculture-related companies as well.

What do they want to do with this new land you might ask? Irrigate it, fertilize it like crazy and plant potatoes that can be turned into frozen french fries for the fast food industry. That doesn’t sound like a good trade to me. The world does have a food crisis but more frozen french fries (and less photosynthesis from trees) is not going to solve it. Now, when I say I was a farmer, I mean the kind that Paul Harvey describes – my family feeds animals by hand, my dad stayed up all night with sows when they were having piglets, we carried calves into our basement and bottle-fed them. I drove tractors and combines and spent hundreds of hours in our fields. That’s what a farmer is. An agriculture firm is not a farmer.

That’s what’s wrong with farming today – there are fewer and fewer farmers. Through its spokesperson, another thing that a farmer does not have, R.D. Offutt said that it was “committed to preserving ground and surface water quality.” I’m not sure that I believe them. My dad never cut down one tree in my whole life time so he could farm more land, in fact, we planted trees and cover crop and my nephew is planting more trees around the home that I grew up in. That’s what a farmer would do.

Disappointed…in leadership

I watched the super bowl. My family and I were so excited to cheer for the Seahawks. We had lots of good reasons. We sort of adopted the Seahawks after many years of disappointment with the Minnesota Vikings. Yeah, call us bandwagon if you want but we started cheering for them in December of last year when my son said, “Dad, we need to find a new team.” So, I ordered him a Russell Wilson jersey and off we went. Little did we know that they would run through the playoffs and embarrass the Denver Broncos to win the city’s first super bowl.

So, we were ready this fall. With all the drama surrounding Adrian Peterson, we were solidly Seahawks fans again. They really played well towards the end of the season and their division fell apart and before we knew it, they were in the NFC Championship against the Packers. Being Minnesotans, we never like to see the Packers win, so that game was painful to watch. It looked like Green Bay was going to head back to the Super Bowl but the Packers found a way to lose and the Seahawks were winners again.

The whole world knows about “deflate gate” and when I asked my daughter, a non-football fan, who she was rooting for in the Super Bowl, she said “I don’t cheer for cheaters.” So, true. We were really hoping that good karma was on our side against New England. At the end of the game, I felt a little ill. Yes, I ate too much but I also couldn’t believe we lost. Then I searched my memory bank for some good sports quotes and came up with “you win some and you lose some” and “players win games; coaches lose them.” What really struck me today when I read about the aftermath of the Super Bowl and all the analysis of Seattle’s last play call, it was a study in leadership. When asked about the last play call, Pete Carroll, Seattle’s head coach, quickly said, “it was my fault.” No second guessing, no throwing anyone under the bus. He just took responsibility. As they day went on, the exhausting analysis continued and I heard the answer to the question of responsibility posed to Seattle’s offensive coordinator, Darrell Bevell. He was actually the one most responsible for that play call and instead of following Pete Carroll’s lead, he blamed his wide receiver for not getting to the ball fast enough.

So, there you have it. Leadership 101 – Don’t cheer for cheaters and take responsibility for mistakes.