 'What's
New'
Has
Cash Been King for the Past 10 Years?
If you're like most
investors, you've been nearly brainwashed with conventional
market "wisdom" that stocks are the best way to grow your
portfolio.
You would be crazy not to
have your money in the markets, right?
But when markets drop, as
we've seen in this credit crisis, it's amazing how quickly
the story changes.
Steve Hochberg and Pete
Kendall, editors of Elliott Wave International's Financial
Forecast, challenged the notion of stocks' superiority years
before this latest downturn.
Learn how cash has been
king – and will remain so – far longer than the
latest news headlines may have you believe in this free
excerpt from Elliott Wave International's Credit Crisis
Survival Kit.
Elliott Wave International
has also made the full Credit Crisis Survival Kit available
free for a limited time. In addition to this excerpt, it
contains 14 other articles, reports, and videos that reveal
how to survive and prosper during the credit crisis.
Visit
EWI to download the kit, free.
The Fear of the
Year
This year, the fear is
that entire governments may go under.
The anxieties about
"sovereign debt" have been most acute in Europe, where some
countries--Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain--have
huge debt burdens. Greece, in particular, is in dire need of
assistance as it owes four hundred billion
dollars.
And now, people are
wondering if American state and city governments are headed
for their own Greek tragedy. Recently, The Wall Street
Journal asked, "Who Will Default First: Greece or
California?"
While American states are
typically required to balance their budgets annually, that
hasn't stopped them from amassing a pile of long-term debt
by issuing municipal bonds. And, like Greece and other
countries & some banks, states have used accounting
techniques to under-report the amount they owe, even while
accumulating huge, unfunded liabilities like pension
obligations.
State governments from New
Jersey to California that are struggling to close budget
deficits are skipping or deferring payments to already
underfunded public employee pension plans. The moves could
help ease today's budget pressures, but will make tomorrow's
worse.
Just like a default by
Greece would have nasty ripple effects across the global
economies, a state-government default would have all sorts
of unpleasant consequences, as state bonds have
traditionally been considered a thoroughly safe investment.
Concern over a potential liquidity shortage at Greece's
private-sector banks fueled a sharp selloff in Greek debt
and equity markets Thursday. More
alarmingly,
investors drove the
interest rate of the Greek two-year bond to 7.45% Thursday,
6.64 percentage points more than what Germany pays. This
example illustrates that the market is the dog wagging its
central bank tail, not the other way around.
In the past, much of the
assistance that states get from Washington is close to
automatic: in normal times (which these are not now), the
government sends almost half a trillion dollars in aid
directly to the states. Last year's stimulus sent more than
a hundred and fifty billion dollars to state and local
governments. But the question today is: Can the federal
government be counted on to step up its efforts in this year
of critical state and municipal budget failures?
Source: THE NEW YORKER,
April 12, 2010
Download
the most important investment report you'll read in
2010
Mentoring
Matters
The mentor and
mentee relationship is one of mutual benefit.
The
mentor gains
the satisfaction of helping develop the talent and mentees
get access to "someone who has been there" as knowledge and
experience is shared from one generation to another. Many
successful people believe a key factor in their success was
and is having a mentor or coach. Mentoring programs have
become popular ways for organizations to groom "high
potential" employees for future leadership positions.
Companies are hot on the practice these days, believing it
encourages loyalty, diversity, and cohesion. Fully half of
the 500 biggest businesses in the U.S. now offer mentoring,
up from about 10% five years ago, according to Menttium
Corp., which sets up such programs for corporations.
Mentoring
takes on many forms.
Mentoring can be a one-shot intervention or a lifelong
relationship. It can be carried out informally, as
relationships develop on their own, or formally as part of a
highly structured program. One of the most common problems,
especially with formal programs, is simply that the mentor
and mentee are incompatible. Even the best intentions and
most thorough questionnaires can't always identify what
might really irritate you about the other person. Many
companies have discovered that it is best for
the
mentee to choose his or her
mentor
rather than having the company do the matching.
Here
are three steps for preventing a brain drain where you
work:
Identify
your vulnerabilities. Create an age profile of your
workforce by work unit or by function. Determine the average
age of employees in each unit and identify who's likely to
retire or leave the company for other reasons.
Identify
types of knowledge at risk. Use interviewing and social
network analysis software to find out what knowledge is most
valuable. This will help you decide where to focus your
knowledge-retention efforts.
Choose
your tactics. If you're focusing on transferring "tacit"
knowledge, or experience that is hard to catalog, establish
mentoring programs that bring older and younger workers
together for extended periods.
Overcoming the
Leadership Paradox
A survey of 3,000 leaders
and associates in 117 organizations reports that 63% plan to
increase spending on leadership
development programs that
75% of HR executives surveyed don't give a high quality
rating to.
The paradox of
spending more on what's not working is due to leadership
development being seen as a classroom event. Yet, you don't
fix people by sending them off to executive education.
Managers need ongoing
coaching to get in
the habit of being
good leaders.
The survey
reported that two-thirds of the respondents said leaders at
their company exhibited at least one potentially fatal flaw
or "derailer"--a personality attribute that interferes with
leadership
effectiveness.
Here are a few examples of derailers: an inability to
listen, lack of self-control, pessimism, self-centeredness,
know-it-all, not a team player. Derailers are more
personality-oriented than skill-based and are more difficult
to change than teaching someone a new
skill.
For all the money
spent on them, we still don't know if executive leadership
programs spent in the classroom work but we know that
personal
leadership coaching does
work.
Bottom
Line: Leadership
development is
self-development.
Learning how to not micromanage, not be overly
concrete, not fail to explicitly state expectations
and other unproductive inter-personal behavior only happens
through the increased self-awareness
gained in a personal coaching or mentoring
relationship.
On-demand,
immediate leadership
coaching insights in
digestible bites allows for on-the-job application while
fitting easily into action-packed schedules. That's why
enrollment
in leadership coaching is Leadership
401.
Register
me for six months of Leadership 401 personal
coaching.
Transformational
Leadership
Leading
a business transition through a cultural change, to deliver
dramatically increased value, is a tough assignment. Getting
the people side right can make all the difference. Business
transitions are times of heightened emotion where
perceptions, feelings and hunches trump
logic.
Everyone's decision making is emotional, not
rational...subconsciously under the control of their
emotional brain (limbic system), not their analytical
(neocortical) brain. When people make decisions, their
decisions are not just about rational data weighing of the
pros and cons. Buying a car, choosing a mate, selecting a
new home, following a career path, perceiving how the world
works is all decided emotionally. Emotion is always
operating below the surface and the executive doesn't
recognize how important his or her feelings are at the time
of the decision. That is why it is important to help leaders
of organizations to be emotionally stable, free from the
fear of failure, when making important decisions.
Albert Einstein once said, "We should take care not to
make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful
muscles but no personality. It cannot lead; it can only
serve."
Transformational leaders have a clear collective vision
and manage to communicate it effectively to all employees.
By acting as role models, they inspire employees to put the
good of the whole organization above self interest.
Transformational
leaders know and
science has discovered emotionality's deeper purpose: the
timeworn mechanisms of emotion allow two human beings to
receive the contents of each other's minds. They are using
the power of emotion to get managers to innovate through
taking risks on-the-job.
Yet, after years of cost-cutting initiatives and growing
job insecurity, most executives don't feel like putting
themselves on the line. Add to that individual performance
incentives, where a one-year term determines a large bonus,
and investing in risky long-term payoffs takes a back seat.
Most managers postpone risky decisions for fear
of failure---to
not make the incremental mistakes that can lead to
innovative successes. That's why it is difficult to make the
shift from a play-it-safe
corporate culture
to an innovation-driven
culture.
Here in Metro Detroit, the automotive industry is
talking about innovation-driven cultures that are imperative
in today's
globally competitive world.
But where are the fearless transitional leaders that can
instill the confidence of automotive industry executives to
innovate? When will the Lee Iacocca’s of the 1960s and
1970s reappear to overcome the present corporate paralysis?
Changing the organization's culture requires
recruiting
or promoting emerging leaders
and helping them
get up-to-speed quickly.
Lee Iacocca's career within the automotive industry
illustrates how emerging leaders can change corporate
cultures to walk the talk of innovation. When the over
hyped, oversized and overpriced 1960 Edsel failed in the
marketplace, Ford Motor Company needed to listen to new
ideas from within the company. The introduction of the 1964
Ford Mustang was an innovative product tuned into customers'
call for stylish affordability. Iacocca went on to become
president of the struggling Chrysler Corporation where his
streamlining measures and new product innovations, including
the first innovative front-wheel drive Dodge Caravan
minivan, made the difference between failure and success.
When an industry or company is restructuring to survive
in the global economy, executives are all driven by the fear
of not surviving the transitional period and this fear can
adversely affect their decision-making abilities. The
turnaround won’t be complete until the fear of failure
is confronted in the minds of the executive survivors.
After a corporate restructuring, it is important to
provide newly recruited or promoted executives with access
to inside mentors and outside
executive coaches who
can help their perceptions to evolve. Executives often leave
a coaching session feeling calmer, stronger, safer and more
able to manage within their corporate culture. With every
mentoring or coaching
session, the
executive learns to self-coach—reducing
the dependency on the coach. The executive’s leadership
capacity grows and becomes a natural part of the self, like
knowing how to ride a bike or tie one’s shoes.
Executives are then ready to guide the cultural
transition by instilling confidence in each employee's
ability to meet and overcome workplace challenges.
Confidence precedes competence. Each employee must first
believe he or she can succeed by developing a winning
attitude reinforced by skill-building practice.
As each person's talents are built into strengths and
then merged with others, a positive energy emerges. This
energy force builds and reinforces each individual's
confidence to create a critical mass. Then it is the
leader's job to keep the momentum going; so
as not to lose the positive energy
flow.
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Assessment and
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Want
to learn about the costs of executive leadership
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Want
to check out some coaching cost and plan
options?
If
you are really committed to what you want to do, let's
have a
conversation about getting there from here. Call
734.426.2000
(US Eastern
Time Zone) or email johnagno@signatureseries.com
to arrange
for a free consultation to discuss where you are
heading.
To learn
more about John Agno, certified executive &
business coach,
click
here.
Success
has ruined many a man. - Benjamin
Franklin
Disclaimer:
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Financial,
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