In the foreword of his game changing new book for education,  The Leader In Me my good friend Dr. Stephen R. Covey misspoke.  Rare for him.  With this the 20th anniversary year of his landmark book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People it’s about time I tell one on him.  My dear Dr. C, the comment in the foreword that I take such exception to is your reference to the 7 Habits that “the book caught a wave that even I had no way of anticipating”.  Not only did you anticipate it, you willed it into being.  You epitomize Jim Collins level 5 leader that he refers to in Good to Great as having a perfect blend of deep personal humility and intense professional will.

 I remember it clearly, I had only worked with Dr. Covey for a couple of years and we were having a meeting with our publisher Simon & Schuster in thier headquarters in Rockafeller Center in New York City.  Their entire team met with us around the big round marble table on the executive floor.   I considered myself an optimist even then but Dr. C exceeded my expectations.  This was 1989 and we were trying to convince the S&S brain-trust that they should do a first print run of 100,000 copies for The 7 Habits, which for a first time business author was unheard of.  I can still see the S&S executives rolling their eyes as we suggested such an absurd proposal. (You S&S folks know who you are).  It gets better.  As support for his request Dr. C proceeded to inform them that he predicted that 7 Habits would sell 10 million copies by the end of it’s first decade. You could have heard a pin drop as the S&S executives looked at each other like whose gonna be the one that tells this guy he is out of his ever loving mind and is as naive as a country bumpkin (from Utah no less).  Well, you know the rest of the story, 7 Habits did sell over 10 million copies the first decade and darn near an additional 10 million in the second decade and is still a top 100 book of all books on Amazon as we speak.

Al Ries and his daughter Laura’s new book War in the Boardroom: Why Left-Brain Management and Right-Brain Marketing Don’t See Eye-to-Eye–and What to Do About It is dead on insightful.  Of course I am biased, I’m a serial marketeer.  We built this city (read business) on rock n’ roll (read marketing). As Al and Laura point out “Perception always trumps reality.”  I could not agree more.  The first chapter is worth the price of the book.  Al has been behind the scenes advising executives for years and supports his conclusions with plentiful evidence. This example is priceless.  “We can visualize what happened in the boardroom.  Grown men, with decades of experience in the automobile field, sat around a conference table and decided to launch a Volkswagen vehicle with a price tag reaching 6 digits. (we don’t know any right brain marketer who would have thought that was a good idea.)”   As the adage goes visionary entrepreneurs can not manage scale but with out their vision there will be no scale to manage.

Our friend Paul Allen an internet entreprenuer extraordinaire,  quoted The Speed of Trust in a very interesting explanation of the power of referrals on his blog entitled The Power of LinkedIn and The Speed of Trust.   Paul is one of the brightest minds we know and you will enjoy his insights on the potential of social networking from a marketing perspective.

Link & Covey as "The Ugly American Tourists"

Believe it or not Stephen and I have rarely spent free time together.  When we travel on business together once or twice a year it is usually just that, we do the business and immediately fly off in different directions.  We enjoyed the 4 hours we had together in Beijing immensely. It turned into quite a memorable adventure. We happened across the network, familiar to most savvy international travelers, of starving art students that speak English and love to “show their work” to international tourists.  Actually it was refreshing to see first hand that the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in China.  Stephen and I were an easy mark. We stood out like a sore thumb as we tried to jam days of sight seeing into a few hours.  We were approached by a college student (read lead generator) who suspected we were lost.  He offered to walk us to Tianimin Square.  

My propensity to trust waned however, as he attempted to convince us that we needed to turn right, away from the square,  when we clearly had two blocks left to go.  (He did not realize that I had been there before.)  Undaunted he graciously served as tour guide but ultimately managed to lead us out the side entrance of the Forbidden City which conveniently led us to his Art Studio on a side street.  From there we experienced a sales process second only to the American timeshare industry.  Turns out, the shop is owned by his “Art Professor” and the student was trying to raise money for a trip with the professor to the USA. Never mind that they contradicted each other several times on what cities they planned to visit. The art was actually quite impressive.  Stephen really liked one of the professor’s pieces, but loving soul that he is. did not want to offend the student by not buying one of the student’s pieces.  Voila, in a masterful tour de force that I thought was exclusively American, the student turned Stephen over to the Professor (known as a T. O. in the car and timeshare industries) who generously solved Stephen’s dilemma by offering to throw in the student’s work if Stephen bought the more expensive Professor’s piece (known as the drop in the US car and timeshare industry).  It was really  beautifully orchestrated.  The good news is that the art Stephen bought is an extraordinarily beautiful Oriental ink drawing.  As we laughed about our experience while we walked back to the hotel taxi stand to return to the airport it dawned on us that neither one of us had any idea the market value of the art.  Fortunately value is in the eye of the beholder and both Jeri and Stephen love the piece and Stephen and I have a great road warrior story and a great laugh together.

Birds Nest with rare blue sky

This very articulate woman from Pakistan made a powerful case for the underrepresentation of women in leadership through out the world and even on the panels of the World Economic Forum.  I attempted to speak to her but the press of the nearly 2000 people in the room prevented me from getting to her.  I also have searched the photo album of participants to find her name but was unable to find her.  If you know her, email me.

I resonated with her straight talk in respectfully confronting the forum about this unfortunate reality in business and government.  I am a staunch advocate for women in leadership and have a bias that they have traits of intuition, vision, and empathy lacking, or at least way underdeveloped, in many of their male counterparts.  It has also been my experience that women are more influential in negotiating.  This is the purest evidence for their case as a disproportionate number of women excel in sales which is the ultimate level playing field with no ceiling, glass or otherwise.  Trust is an extraordinary gender neutralizer.   We trust people based on their integrity, performance and behavior regardless of gender or ethnicity.