Top Executive Coaching with Tony Mayo

Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something.

The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into

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I prithee tell me;
cram us with praise, and make us
As fat as tame things.

One good deed dying tongueless
Slaughters a thousand waiting upon that.

Your praises are our wages.

You may ride us
With one soft kiss a thousand furlongs ere
With spur we heat an acre.

–Queen Hermione in
Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale

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Business Week has a short article about Jerry Levin, the former head of Time Warner. He lead the merger with AOL. The merger is generally considered a disaster for Time Warner and Levin left under pressure. What did he learn?

From the article and his life after leaving the executive suite, it sounds like he learned how to learn:

…understanding that it’s O.K. to be open and vulnerable, to ask for help.

To state it in different terms, it’s probably helpful to invoke the feminine principle and be compassionate, empathetic, understanding, give respect to everybody, don’t get deluded by the natural hierarchy. And don’t get too self-satisfied that you have all the answers.

He has gone on to establish a holistic retreat, Moonview, with his wife. What learning is he most eager to share with executives?

My strong advice would be to find a calm, meditative state every day. With the tempo of executive life, that seems almost impossible, but it’s probably the most important thing that you can do.

Namaste, Mr. Levin, and thank you.

See also Gandhi on silence.

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Lessons for managers from how the Army re-made itself between Vietnam and Desert Storm.

I was moderating a conference of business owners in the late 1990s as they lamented the poor work habits and other failings of “Gen-Xers.” Finally, I’d had enough so I said, “Say what you will about body piercing and Starbucks, I don’t think that’s the key issue. It looks to me that our generation’s contributions were the drug culture and Vietnam while the present generation has given us the Internet and Desert Storm.” The question becomes, how did this happen? Into the Storm provides part of the answer.

I am a baby-boomer who came of age in the Vietnam era, so my interest in things military was slight and my general opinion of military organization, I’m ashamed to say, came more from Catch-22 and MASH than reality. Yet, the U.S. Army has done some huge and useful things, so I was willing to take a fresh look with this book.

In the aftermath of Vietnam, “the Army began a revolution in

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Integrity is usually a major conversation when I coach groups of executives. It almost always comes up in the context of arriving to the meeting on time or returning from breaks. This leads to a discussion of consequences, by which people mean punishments for not being on time: fines, humiliation, etc. This opens a powerful examination of monitoring, enforcement, and integrity throughout the organization.

Consequences come in two flavors. Imposed consequences are punishments contrived by an authority exerting its power to compel behavior. Natural consequences are what reality delivers in response to actions. If I

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Only the modern age’s conviction that man can know only what he makes, that his allegedly higher capacities depend upon making and that he therefore is primarily homo faber and not an animal rationale, brought forth the much older implications of violence inherent in all interpretations of the realm of human affairs as a sphere of making. [p. 228]

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We are perhaps the first generation which has become fully aware of the murderous consequences inherent in

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One of my CEO coaching groups recently discussed the creation of the President/COO role in their companies. I came up with this alliterative and highly distilled suggestion.

• Decisions may be:
  • Dictated,
  • Discussed, or
  • Delegated

To help define the duties of your #2, examine the range of decisions you make as head of the company and notice which you will dictate, discuss, or delegate. Core values, for example, are yours to dictate; the COO complies with your decision or leaves. Strategy is something to discuss, create together, and have a healthy back and forth conversation about between the CEO and COO. Hiring a sales rep or changing your health care provider are probably best left entirely to the COO; delegate those areas and keep your hands-off.

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“With such an abundance of information available simultaneously at all levels, micromanagement can creep unnoticed into the chain of command and pull it apart. For example, if a general is able to follow an ongoing firefight through email and IM, and he is inclined to believe he knows what’s best for the units in contact, then he very well might start directing those small units from afar, consequently eliminating the need for his colonels, captains, and sergeants to do any thinking of their own.

…

“a commander may be dismayed to find his soldiers have become too heavily reliant on headquarters for critical decisions. That’s dangerous, because sooner or later headquarters won’t be available. Equipment will break; signals will be lost; communications will go down, and almost certainly at the worst times. That’s when the commander will wish most that he had cultivated his men’s initiative rather than tamped it out through incessant electronic directives or rebukes for mistaken decisions.”

IT vs. initiative: The Internet age comes to the battlefield

former US Marine Captain Tyler Boudreau
in The Industry Standard

See also: Your greatest strength is your #1 blindspot

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I got a call from a salesman looking for my help with a business owner. The salesman was frustrated because the owner so needed the product but was not making a decision, though he was willing to keep talking.

The business owner was tired and frantically busy as his business grew past 100 employees. He was traveling more and more, continually meeting prospective clients, reviewing active projects, and checking on employees. He was proudly a stickler for quality and involved with every detail. His company’s reputation for excellent work was a foundation of their success and growth.

My immediate response was, “Wow! He must have a terrible time retaining key employees.”

“How did you know that?” the salesman exclaimed “He says that is his #1 problem.”

“Of course it is. The best people don’t want to be micro-managed. The most creative, responsible, and growth-oriented people are going to run from him like fleeing a fire. He’s going to be left with the people who need to be monitored.”

The catch is: his passion for control seems to be what made the company successful. Why would

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While coaching top executives, I often paraphrase contemporary philosopher Ken Wilber to the effect: I have found that most of my trouble comes from trying to control things that, if left alone, would take care of themselves.

We have all heard the advice to empower self-directed teams, push responsibility down close to the action, give authority over service decisions to the person in contact with the customer. Implicit in all these dicta, however, is the assumption that it is properly the executive who has the power, responsibility, and authority being meted out. What is it about showing up for work that strips people of agency? Maybe management should stop ignoring the fact that people are doing a fairly good job of managing their lives and consider that these skills can be used at work?

Before you agree or

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