Category Archives: E Pluribus Partners

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What would Jack Bauer do?

24wallpaperIn the current season of the show “24,” the President of the United States is about to uncharacteristically agree to cover up a murder for the sake of a peace treaty. When Jack Bauer, the show’s hero, confronts the president, she admits she doesn’t like to do this but in this particular instance the end justifies the means. Bauer disagrees and is now working against the American government to expose the murder.

It’s a thrilling story and I have to admit I’m hooked on this season of 24. It’s interesting to note that Jack Bauer in pursuit of justice is not averse to torturing suspected enemies to get information that will help him prevent harm to others or protect America. His justification, like the president’s, is that the end justifies the means.

The story in this season’s 24 also happens to be relevant to a series of presentations, articles and a book I’m working on about character values and how they impact the performance of individuals and organizations, including employee engagement, strategic alignment, productivity and innovation. In June, Jason Pankau and I will be speaking about this at NASA’s Johnson Space Center where during the Apollo 13 mission Gene Krantz uttered the line “failure is not an option” that was made famous in Ron Howard’s spectacular movie Apollo 13. Was Krantz right? Are there indeed times when anything and everything is acceptable to achieve success? If not, when is failure acceptable?

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Darden’s Leadership Sage


Jason Pankau and I were at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business this week to speak about our work on Connection Cultures, leadership, productivity, innovation and employee engagement.  We gave a three hour presentation to students in the MBA for Executives program and briefly visited friends such as professors Marian Moore and Alec Horniman.

Darden has so much going for it.  World class professors and a great culture.  No doubt the business school’s culture benefits from Alec Horniman’s wisdom as a thought leader in the fields of leadership, organizations, change and ethics.   Take a look at the excellent video of Dr. Horniman discussing the importance of ethics in business and you’ll see what I mean.

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Career Potential Webinars

Interested in improving your career prospects?  Check out Launch Summit: Conversations on Career Potential.  This series of free webinars includes presentations from experts in diverse fields related to career.  It begins tomorrow at 10:00 AM Eastern and continues through Thursday.  I’ll be speaking about healthy work environments at 1:00 PM Eastern on Thursday, April 22nd.

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Two Easy Ways to Boost Employee Engagement

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Small things can make a big difference when it comes to employee engagement. Here’s a couple easy things you can do to help improve employee engagement.  On a Friday at lunchtime, get employees together in a conference room for pizza and salad or go outside of work for an informal lunch and time to mingle.  When you do this, take time to chat with your colleagues and ask them what their interests are outside of work.  You’ll be amazed at the interesting activities your colleagues are involved in.  Also, be sure to look for the loners and make a special effort to connect with them and help them connect with others.  This time reduces stress and energizes most people.

Last week when I was in Miami Beach, one morning I stopped at a Starbucks on the Lincoln Avenue Mall.  Starbucks partners were gathering there for a walk (see picture above) to raise money for a non-profit organization.   There was a terrific energy among group participants.  They were handing out t-shirts and Starbucks baseball caps for participants. What a simple idea!  Why not let employees vote for a local charity and organize an outing to help them.  Maybe its a group walk for the breast cancer, helping out on a Habitat for Humanity project or offering to put a fresh coat of paint on wall at a local Boys and Girls Club.

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Tom Peters, Top Leadership Blogs, and New Friends

Quote of the day: “Connection is the force that transforms a dog-eat-dog culture into a sled dog team that pulls together.”  – Jason Pankau

It’s been a very good week.  This morning I received an email that Tom Peters was following my tweets. In the early 1980s, as I young employee of Texas Instruments I read In Search of Excellence and went through a training program based on Tom’s book and ideas.  I still have the audio tapes from his lectures!  What I found so enthralling was that he described what was possible, a better work culture and an organization where people thrived individually and collectively.  It put a fire in my belly not to settle for the current reality.  For Tom Peters influence in my life, I am sincerely grateful.

Other good things that happened this week:

Jurgen Noop from the Netherlands recognized my blog as one of the top leadership and management blogs.  Many thanks, Jurgen!

This week I thoroughly enjoyed speaking about the Connection Culture, Fired Up or Burned Out, employee engagement, leadership, productivity and innovation with Zane Safrit on his Blog Talk Radio program, Nathan Ives on the StrategyDriven Podcast, and Roy Saunderson and S. Max Brown on their Real Recognition Radio program.  What wonderful people to get to know.  I encourage you to check out their work.

Yesterday, I spoke at an organizational development network conference on Long Island.  It was a tremendous group with great energy and intelligence.  I’m still buzzing from the experience.

And finally, I connected via email with Parker Palmer, author of Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation.  Jason Pankau, my best friend, business partner, and author of the foregoing “quote of the day,” gave me Parker’s book as a gift some years ago.   It had a profound effect on me.  I still revisit it periodically.  It is a small book that’s packed with wisdom.   If you’ve not read it, I highly encourage you to check it out along with everything else Parker writes about on the website for his organization The Center for Courage and Renewal. He is a man of remarkable wisdom and character.

Over the weekend I’m finishing the remarkable book Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, by Eric Metaxas and working on an article with Howard Behar, the extraordinary leader who turned around Starbucks.

Have a great weekend!

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Employee Engagement Podcast with StategyDriven

I recently recorded a podcast interview on the topic of employee engagement and how it affects strategic alignment, productivity and innovation with Nathan Ives of StrategyDriven, a terrific group out of Atlanta that provides resources to help business leaders.  You can hear the podcast and learn more about StrategyDriven at this link.

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Sandra Bullock: Wishing Her Well

David Brooks asks the question in his New York Times column entitled, “The Sandra Bullock Trade,” if you were in Sandra Bullock’s shoes and could somehow choose between winning an Oscar for best actress or having a strong, supportive marriage, which would you select?  He goes on to describe why you should select the strong, supportive marriage and then describes what I refer to as the force of connection, including how it affects so much in our lives from happiness to the productivity of nations.

Thanks to an introduction from David Bradley, owner of The Atlantic, David and met for lunch in Washington D.C. some years ago.   We discussed my ideas on the force of connection and my concern that the decline of connection in market democracies was having a detrimental effect on well-being and economic productivity.  A few years later I wrote about it in The Connection Culture: A New Source of Competitive Advantage that was published by changethis.com.

My heart goes out to Sandra Bullock. I’ve always liked her as an actress and she seems like a terrific person. In an earlier post , I heaped praise on Bullock’s tour-de-force performance in The Blind Side.  Watching her acceptance speech for best actress at the Academy Awards, then, I was surprised to see her remarks and demeanor seemed bittersweet.  Of course, at that time, I was not aware that her husband has been, as David says, “an adulterous jerk.”   In hindsight, it would appear that she was struggling, as any of us would, to make it through a difficult season in her life.  My hope is that Ms. Bullock has a group of close loving family members and friends who can help her through this.  That’s the most important benefit of connection in my opinion.  It helps us get through the inevitable difficult seasons in life, a topic I wrote about from personal experience in Alone No Longer.

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Reenergizing Employees Amidst and Following the “Great Recession”

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Jason Pankau and I are delighted to announce we are presenting a webinar for Communitelligence entitled “Reenergizing Employees Amidst and Following the ‘Great Recession.'” The webinar will occur on May 5 from 2-3 PM Eastern. Here’s an overview:

Conference Board research shows job satisfaction is at its lowest point over the 20 years it has surveyed employees. Corporate Executive Board research shows 90 percent of employees are disengaged or not aligned with organizational goals. In this webinar, Michael Lee Stallard and Jason Pankau describe what must be done to reconnect and reenergize employees.

Topics covered include:

Additional details and registration information can be found at this link.

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Duke Men’s Basketball’s Secret Weapon: The “Women K”

Duke men’s basketball team lead by Coach K are in The Final Four again.   What’s their secret?  According to Coach K, it’s what might be called the “Women K”: his wife Mickie and their three adult daughters.  Read all about it in this fabulous article entitled “Follow Me” written by Michael Sokolove that appeared in the February 2006 edition of Play magazine, a supplement of The New York Times.  If you read the article and Coach K’s books you’ll see that he clearly describes what we refer to as a Connection Culture, including its three elements: vision, value and voice.

Most leaders are intentional about developing task excellence but they are not intentional about developing relationship excellence.  Not Coach K.  Here are just a few of the quotes that appear in the article that show Coach K strives to develop relationship excellence via connection:

“Almost everything in leadership comes back to relationships”

“When he recruits a player, Krzyzewski tells him, ‘We’re developing a relationship here, and if you are not interested, tell me sooner rather than later.’  That word — relationship — os one he uses frequently.  [He tells players] ‘If you come here, for however long, you’re going to unpack your suitcase.  We’re going to form a bond, and you’re going to be part of this family.”

“Game day is not a day for long, drawn-out speeches.  It is a time for interaction.”

“There’s an empathetic part of leadership, and this is what my wife and daughters have taught me.