Daniel Lubetzky

Leadership is the process of bringing a new and generally unwelcome reality to an individual, organization or setting, and helping them successfully adapt to it.

-Rony Heifetz (as quoted in a Harvard Kennedy School study (by Dutch Leonard) on Leadership in High Uncertainty Environments, as part of Young Global Leaders executive program.

Other interesting insights from that course with important applications for movements like OneVoice as well as to fast-growing companies like KIND:

• On the danger (and opportunity) of Vantage Bias:

     When you are holding a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

Cognitive Biases to watch against: giving too much weight to personal experience/illusion of experience; overconfidence of influence/power, or ability to predict future, and of ability to control future; ignoring disconfirming evidence; inability to perceive radical change; escalation of commitment in the face of "evidence"; tendency to turn issues into personal convictions;

• Affirm Values at Difficult Moments
• Never let bad news be a surprise; prepare people to enable them to adapt
• Eye contact in some African countries is disrespectful.
• Build deep team cohesion during times of stability to enable you to deal with uncertainty in the future
• To manage well in a crisis, prepare AHEAD by thinking of, and hiring, the right people with the right values – resilience, team spirit, loyalty, courage
• Create structured discipline in the mundane, so the unanticipated is compensated by expectable outcomes
• Grounded Confidence is important; false optimism is not sustainable;
• Learning most effective when: Positive, Immediate, Certain, and Reinforced.
• Ensure issue (rather than person putting it forward) is what is evaluated and ranked.
• Listen to warning systems – forms of dissent, dissonance; encourage feedback;
• Don’t dismiss disconfirming evidence; question if you are not too narrowly focused – lighthouse/boat scenario; must remain open to possibility that you are wrong;
• A leader can change the conditions in which the team operates, out of which new models for leadership will emerge.
• Ecologist: when you reach in and try to take out anything out of the universe, you find out that it is interconnected to everything else.

Yesterday I tried Softsoap’s Pure Cashmere Hand soap.  I was struck by the proposition that a soap could contain "cashmere extract" because a while back I had wondered what "cashmere" really was.  Most consumers just know Cashmere sweaters as exceptionally soft but don’t know where "cashmere" comes from, so I guess the marketing team at Softsoap’s parent company, Colgate, figured that they would make things romantic with the cashmere association. 

The trouble is, cashmere is the fur of a type of goat – the cashmere goat.  Colgate tries to connect to this silly gimmick by using "hydrolyzed keratin" – a protein extract from the goat’s hair.  This ingredient, besides being the least present in the formula (see label), has no discernible impact on the purported features of the product.  It is just used for smoke and mirrors.  Too bad that most consumers have not yet caught up with this deception – though I did find one colorful site that brought them to task on it.

You’d think Colgate would be a bit more responsible with its claims and advertising.

Then again, liquid soap is a modern invention that pollutes water at such greater levels than regular soap, for the sheer fact that it is used in much ampler and less efficient form than regular bars of soap.  The same reason why companies created shower gels and liquid soaps  – because they can command a higher price and accomplish more turns than using regular soap bars – is also the reason why consumers should avoid using such products, which harm the environment and are just wasteful.

This is another in a series  (see prior examples here and here) of magical uses of art in real life situations – which accentuates all that is good about art and about life – and can be a phenomenal marketing tool:

This season many millions of pine trees are being chopped off to decorate Christmas living rooms.  With growing awareness about the harm of reducing the footprint of trees in our globe, this tradition (which I assume does not have any grounding in biblical or canonical precepts of Christian religion) must be getting questions more and more. 

One answer for environmentally-conscious Christians may be to just pass up the tree altogether – or to use an artificial Xmas tree.

But what if a company were to offer to go further: that for a fraction of the cost of buying such a tree, it would actually plant a new tree in the honor of the family foregoing the actual tree.

Or a company in business of making the artificial trees could sell a version that included this environmentally-conscious commitment – not only would buyers forego killing trees, but the company would actually pay to plant X number of new trees…

Leave it to a Mexican Jew to think this up…

I am often struck at how some of the best people at the best companies make big mistakes just because of lack of attention to detail.  Some wonderful ideas or initiatives can get in trouble because of bad execution.

Small example: I was forwarded by a team member a very cool and innovative program from CHASE to donate $5 million dollars to charities chosen by the community.  Beyond being generous, it also was designed to build the CHASE brand and goodwill by encouraging Facebook users to vote for their favorite charities – nothing wrong with that in my book.

You’d think that when you are donating FIVE MILLION DOLLARS you’d be very careful with how you phrase things and execute.  Yet the home page of the campaign had the following image describing the program:

Can you spot the problem?

They commit to donate $5mm yet their plan only adds up to $4mm!!! ($2.5mm made up of $25k to 100, plus $1mm big gift, plus $500k made up of 5 grants of 100k).

I couldn’t believe it.  I spent a lot of time trying to figure it out and deeply-buried in the site’s legalise was an innocent answer – they had failed to include another step through which they are going to give out $1mm more.

The eligible charity receiving the most votes will be awarded $1 million, the top five runners-up will receive $100,000 each and the 100 finalists, including the top winners, will be awarded $25,000 each. Additionally, a special Advisory Board led by prominent national philanthropists will allocate $1 million to the nominated charities of its choice. [emphasis added]

But countless users will be suspicious of CHASE’s generous plan just because of a silly lack of attention to detail.

I may be cheesy, fine, I admit it.  But I really liked this email forward:

Written 
By Regina Brett, 90 years old, of The Plain Dealer, Cleveland , Ohio
"To celebrate growing older, I once wrote the 45 lessons life taught me. It is 
the most-requested column I’ve ever written. My odometer rolled over to 90 
in August, so here is the column once more:"
1. Life isn’t fair, but it’s still good.
2. When in doubt, just take the next small step.
3. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.
4. Your job won’t take care of you when you are sick. Your friends and parents will. Stay in touch.
5. Pay off your credit cards every month.
6. You don’t have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.
7. Cry with someone. It’s more healing than crying alone.
8. It’s OK to get angry with God.. He can take it.
9. Save for retirement starting with your first paycheck.
10. When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.
12. It’s OK to let your children see you cry.
13. Don’t compare your life to others. You have no idea what their journey is all
about.
14. If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn’t be in it.
15. Everything can change in the blink of an eye. But don’t worry; God never blinks.
16.. Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.
17. Get rid of anything that isn’t useful, beautiful or joyful.
18. Whatever doesn’t kill you really does make you stronger.
19. It’s never too late to have a happy childhood. But the second one is up to you and no one else.
20. When it comes to going after what you love in life, don’t take no for an answer.
21. Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie. Don’t save 
it for a special occasion. Today is special.
22. Over prepare, then go with the flow.
23. Be eccentric now. Don’t wait for old age to wear purple.
24. No one is in charge of your happiness but you.
25. Frame every so-called disaster with these words ”In five years, will this matter?".
26. Always choose life.
27. Forgive everyone everything.
28. What other people think of you is none of your business.
29. Time heals almost everything.. Give time, time.
30. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.
31. Don’t take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
32. Believe in miracles.
33. God loves you because of who God is, not because of anything you did or didn’t do.
34. Don’t audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.
35. Growing old beats the alternative — dying young.
36. Your children get only one childhood.
37. All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.
38.Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.
39. If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else’s, we’d grab ours back.
40. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.
41. The best is yet to come.
42. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.
43. Yield.
44. Life isn’t tied with a bow, but it’s still a gift.

Natasha Singer wrote a very compelling piece here about the way the pharmaceutical industry aims to turn all of our ordinary weaknesses and human frailties into pathologies in need of a pharmacological cure. 

“PE” or premature ejaculation may be a rite for passage for young people who discover their passion for someone, yet for the drug companies this too can be fixed – for a price. 

The biggest danger, though, beyond trying to turn us all into robots who are sedated and desensitized, is that pop culture and humor would also die with a “cure” for PE.  How else will the next generation otherwise be able to enjoy such risqué gems as this one from Saturday Night Live’s mock video of Boy Bands?

Interesting UC Berkeley study on human compassion…

[Read more →]

Following on a great tradition for visually impactful, stylistically creative and unforgettable holiday ads, GAP just released this very sweet commercial for GAP Sweaters for kids.

Some of my favorite GAP predecessors:

• Among the funniest is this one 
• Beyonce’s dance
• Will Kemp’s ad – makes you want to dance
• Khaki Swing

And of course the all-time best – Audrey Gap in Black:

really nice stuff…