Daniel Lubetzky

Useful NYTimes article about how to travel more cheaply in 2010 – good tips to know.

Michael Malone from ABC News wrote an interesting article on Apple’s iPhone and its overall new product development strategy, with interesting strategic lessons for new product development and business in general.

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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.

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.

This fascinating article doesn’t directly address global governance. But the increasing uses of information and technology at the municipal level portend positively for models for global governance for the 21st century. And at all levels, this trend hints at the sweeping changes that will come in how we leverage data.

Further to my earlier post about Apple’s cool ads, I got hooked on the songs in there and tried to find the original videos.  For Chairlift-Bruises I came across the video immediately below and was struck by it.  It seemed so cutting edge and professional, yet so casual and young (uncomfortably so for my wife – and I can understand why as a parent I’d also be concerned).  Was it possible that kids did this on their own? Or was the video director so sophisticated as to make it look so down-to-earth? It turns out it was all done by an 8th grader who is quickly building a following.  And it’s actually far better than the official video! You factor in these considerations and you understand why we are just in the beginning of what will be a revolution in content generation, with repercussions for business, culture and society that we cannot begin to comprehend.

Enough with such manipulation by the food-industrial-complex!  First Coca-Cola asserts that Coke is all natural! Then the Corn Refiners assert that High Fructose Corn Syrup is all natural, without regard to evidence, or to the damage that this causes to our bodies.  And most recently 10 of the largest food companies create a self-serving industry-designed nutritional scoring system that manipulates the truth to tout most of their food products – from mayonnaise to fruit loops – as healthy "smart choices."

When will these companies realize that effective marketing should be rooted in truth?

When will the food-industrial-complex recognize that our communities’ health is more important than profits at any cost?

When will hype and fads and simplistic diets hawked by marketers (100-empty-calorie-packs, low carb or low fat obsessions) give in to wholesome balanced truths about nutrition?

When will consumers and companies that are fed up with these shenanigans rise up in indignity to demand ethical behavior? 

Fortunately a number of nutritionists, watchdog groups like the Center for Science in the Public Interest, academicians from Dr. David Katz at Yale to Michael Pollan at Berkeley, and now even the CT Attorney General, are standing up to hold companies accountable and demand truthful assertions.

But if we are really going to overcome such concerted manipulation, a lot more will need to be done to educate consumers.

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Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust presents:

Tuesday, November 17, 7 P.M.

Making Money and Doing Good

Moderated by Andrew Ross Sorkin, The New York Times

Daniel Lubetzky, Kind Inc. and PeaceWorks Foundation/OneVoice Movement; Nancy Lublin, Dress For Success and Do Something; and Barry Nalebuff, Honest Tea

The news has been marked in recent years by the moral and literal downfall of prominent businesses. Meet a new generation of Jewish entrepreneurs who are leading a shift in corporate culture and philanthropy by integrating their business plans with social activism.    

Join us for a tour of The Morgenthaus: A Legacy of Service at 6 P.M.  Space is limited.  Pre-registration for tour is required. Call 646.437.4202.

TICKETS:

Free with suggested donation.

Advance reservations recommended.

TO RESERVE TICKETS:

http://www.ticketweb.com/t3/sale/SaleEventDetail?dispatch=loadSelectionData&pl=jewishheritage&eventId=2817044

OR CALL 646.437.4202

In Person: Visit the Museum Box Office at 36 Battery Place, Battery Park City, New York.

Over the last several weeks I have been reading a Sunday NYT Business column that I find to be consistently useful for my professional growth:

http://projects.nytimes.com/corner-office

The columnist asks CEOs from diverse companies about their lessons in leadership and management and synthesizes them into concise interview pieces that are quite insightful.

About Corner Office

Corner Office, a feature by Adam Bryant in the Sunday Business section of The New York Times, offers highlights from conversations about leadership and management.