Our National(s') Pasttime (Sgt Delgado's Response)

Sgt Delgado, the subject of my last blog entry, responded to the opportunity that he had to throw out the first pitch at the National's game in a letter to his CO. He included the quote below as the preface. Quite a touching impact.

A man who is good enough to shed his blood for his country is good enough to be given a square deal afterwards. More than that no man is entitled, and less than that no man shall have.

-Theodore Roosevelt, on Patriotism

Sean,

I'm writing you today to inform you of the outstanding day me and my son Giovanni had at the Military Appreciation Game Phillies Vs Nationals. To begin, Never in my life did I imagine myself throwing out the first pitch it was the most amazing experience that wouldn't have been possible without your support. Nadia of the Nation

als was also very instrumental in allowing SPC Wood to catch the 1st pitch, at the same time allowing my son to walk with me onto the field. When walking to home plate I was able to see Jesus Flores who then signed my Jersey, and gave my son a baseball. The walk to the mound was also an experience which I shall never forget, it's great to know that all present at the game support our Troops. After throwing the pitch, it's was great that SPC Wood dropped the ball and now my 1st Pitch Ball has official dirt from the Stadium. The excitement still didn't end after the pitch, the entire Nationals Dugout came to shake our hands. We had an amazing time during the game, and the NATS won the game for the Troops talk about an amazing game. (HOOOAH) Need less to say the excitment still didn't end, after Adam Dunn hit a homerun, the BIG 44 came over to me and son and gave him the bat. I would have to say that this was one of the few times Gio was speechless. As I saw Adam walk I called out his name and said Thank You Very Much, Adam kindly turned and said no problem. It was at that moment that my son turned to me with tears in his eyes " Daddy, yes Gio, this is a day I will never forget I Love You". Sean I want you to know that you will always be in our hearts even after I have finished my time at Walter Reed. I would also like to Thank the Nationals" Orginazation ( Especially Nadia,) and all the players for making this the most memorable day in my son's life as well as mine. May God Bless You Always.

Sincerely,

SSG Delgado Rafael - Able Company WTB

6900 Georgia Ave. N.W.

Building 14 Abrams Hall #2080

Washington DC 20307

Our National('s) Pastime

On Thursday night, 17 April, I had the priviledge of attending The Washington National's Military Appreciation night down in DC. Our company, Force 3, sponsored the night, and as such we were able to go down on the field for batting practice and Rocky Cintron, our CEO was able to welcome the crowd as well as some guests of honor. I've reproduced Rocky's own Blog (it's published inside our fire wall at Force 3 so I was unable to link to it) together with some photos of the event. I think you will enjoy the read and perhaps remember that its not just on Veteran's day that we should remember our veterans.

These are Rocky's words....

Last night was a fitting reminder of why I'm still a baseball fan. The weather was glorious for mid-April, no rain, a slight breeze, temps in the high 60’s, the intoxicating smell of Hot Dogs as you enter the stadium and 20,000 hopeful fans (1/2 of them from Philly) believing anything is possible with 150 games left in the season. It didn’t matter that the Nats were 0-7. I still remember 1988 when the O’s began the season 0-21 having the good fortune of gracing the cover of Sports Illustrated (no O’s fan will ever forget the downtrodden look of Billy Ripken sitting in the dugout, head in hands) – eventually finishing the season at 54 – 107, 34 ½ games back in the standings. Gratefully, and solely because Force 3 sponsored Military Night, the Nats will not succumb to an 0-21 start, having successfully bashed the World Champion Phillies 8-2. There was joy in Mudville last night.

Beyond the drama of the game and before the players took the field I was witness to something much more heartfelt. I had the privilege of being able to go down on the field and watch batting practice with some other lucky fans some of which were in our armed forces. I walked over to one of the soldiers, Sgt. Delgado, and introduced myself. Sgt. Delgado had recently gotten out of Walter Reed after his tour in the mid-east. He had a cane with him and was leaning against the concrete wall behind home plate. I quickly found out that he was going to throw out the first pitch. By his side was his friend (I never got his name), not in uniform who was going to assist him out to the pitcher’s mound. Sgt. Delgado informed me that his buddy was a rabid O’s fan and was a walking encyclopedia of Camden Yards, and indeed he was. His friend told me that last week he had a dream come true and actually threw out the first pitch at Camden Yards. The two men were like 10 year old boys basking in the glory of America’s favorite pastime. Sgt. Delgado actually thanked me for sponsoring Military Night and said “you guys are heroes for doing this. I never thought I would get the chance to be on a Major League field watching batting practice, let alone throwing out the first pitch.” My response was simply “you are the hero”. I looked behind the Sergeant and saw a little boy with bright eyes, a wide grin and a baseball mitt. Sgt. Delgado turned and told me that the little guy was his son. A Nats representative then came up to Sgt. Delgado and handed him the baseball that would be used for the opening pitch. Delgado’s friend asked the representative if he thought it would be OK if he caught the first pitch. The rep had the right response, “I don’t see why not”. The two men were absolutely giddy, high fiving each other and talking “smack”. I wished them good luck and walked away smiling at how this game can turn any of us into little boy’s once again playing on the sandlot.

Minutes after this exchange it was time for the Star Spangled Banner and immediately after came the ceremonial first pitch. Sgt Delgado, began his walk out to the mound, aided by his cane, concentrating on his dual prosthetic legs to carry him forward, flanked by his buddy, who we soon found out also had a prosthetic leg. Sgt. Delgado positioned himself and waited as his friend walked back towards the plate. Delgado’s battery mate assumed a makeshift crouch, bending his right knee with his left leg straightened to the side as they prepared to once again team up and deliver. This time it was not for their country but solely for the joy of the moment, to feel what it is like to hear the cheers of thousands. Delgado delivered a strike to his buddy, and although he momentarily dropped it, he deftly scooped it up, and then quickly hobbled to the mound to embrace his friend. Sgt. Delgado’s son was jumping up and down cheering on his dad while many watched – tears leaking out of the corner of their eyes. These two men gave much more than their commitment to our country. They were thankful that they served and grateful that they and their colleagues were acknowledged for their service. This is why Force 3 sponsors Military Night at the Ballpark.

Rocky Cintron, CEO Force 3, Inc. Crofton, MD

Meetings -- the Silent Killers

If you are like most people, much of your day is taken up by meetings. And, when you really dissect the amount of time you spend in meetings, can you determine how much of that time was well spent?

I've spent a good deal (of productive) time trying to deal with this issue in my own situation. I've shared this with my colleagues. Below are my thoughts.

Premises:

• People are very busy.
• Meetings represent a sizable percentage of our busy days.
• Meetings are often too large.
• Meetings are often unproductive.

Suggestions:

Meetings need to be tightly controlled – the agenda should be set in advance; not everything is fair game – if it wasn’t expected to be discussed, it shouldn’t. People need to arrive on time and meetings need to be completed on time. Cell phone calls should not be accepted. Any follow up items and decisions from the meeting need to be documented.

Preparation is key – all meetings should have a known purpose. EVERYONE who will participate in the meeting should come prepared. If there is information that will be discussed in the meeting it should be disseminated in advance. If people are not prepared, the meeting should be postponed.

Meetings are for decisions – Meetings should not be show and tell – That was for elementary school. Unless a meeting is to a large group and specifically designed for mass dissemination of information, necessary information should be disseminated in advance so that it can be read and digested prior to the meetings. Meetings should become less presentation and more decision making. This should speed along the process.

Reduce the number of participants – In my opinion, the most important meetings are one-on-ones. This is where you really connect, where you can direct feedback and where you can actually understand how the other party is feeling about the topic. When the number of people grow, the communication generally gets worse. It’s been said that your ability to get each person in a meeting to understand the information discussed goes down by the square of the number of participants. So if you have five people in a meeting it is 25 times more difficult. Think of a meeting with 10 people, where it is 100 times more difficult. Having people who are not critical to the meeting (not just who will be impacted by the meeting) participate usually explodes the scope and expands the agenda, waters down the communication, or just wastes time.

Everything should not be fair game in every meeting - Just because people are together in a room does not mean they should discuss whatever they needed to raise with that person. That happens better in one on ones. Group discussions need to be limited to the specific topic and only to things that critically matter to that topic.

It’s OK to hurt someone’s feelings by not including them in a meeting – When it comes to meetings, titles and positions should not matter. Meetings should be focused on accomplishing a goal. People who are needed to create that solution should attend. Everyone else should be happy not to be burdened.

Follow-up is critical – If the meeting was important enough to have, it was important enough to document. Certainly any critical decisions that were made in the meeting, and ideas that were uncovered, or any follow-up items and commitments made, should be documented. If this is a regularly scheduled meeting, then this summary should be discussed at the start of the subsequent meeting and people who committed to follow-ups should discuss the completion (or not) of their committed actions.

Executive Skills in the "New" Economy - newly minted MBAs (and others) take note!

A colleague of mine provided this article that he found on the web. I thought it would be important reading for any executive who is struggling with managing people under the current economic reality.

The hard work of soft skills

15 March, 2009
By Dr. Carol Kinsey Goman, HR Columnist, Troy Media Corporation

At a claim office of about 125 employees, the head of Human Resources spent the day observing the local manager. Not only had the office ranked high on productivity, but this particular manager had received fantastic feedback on her company's Leadership Measurement survey. So the HR executive was curious to watch her interact with employees to figure out what generated this great response.

As they walked through the office, conversing about the normal work conditions, the manager would often stop and refer to specific individuals: "Steve over there has been in our area for 15 years. Steve also coaches Little League. They won their game last Thursday."

Then they'd move on to someone else, and as they left that person's area, quietly the manager would say, "Sally had some problems with her daughter this year. You know how difficult teenagers can be. We've had many sessions behind closed doors where Sally's trying to sort through these problems."

Months later, when I interviewed the HR executive, that day at the claim office was still etched in her mind. "It became apparent to me," she explained, "that this manager knew all of her people. And I don't mean just knew their jobs. She knew each individual - their backgrounds and hobbies, what their concerns were, what got them excited. She knew when they were upbeat because things were going well, and she knew when they were struggling and needed her time and attention. I asked her how on earth she could do this for 125 people. Her response: 'That's my job.'"

Great leaders understand that you can't pay people to excel. You can only pay them to show up. But once you've got them there, the leader's job is to encourage people to excel by creating an atmosphere of caring, trust and inclusion. Sun Tzu, author of the Chinese "The Art of War" put it this way: "Regard your soldiers as your own children, and they will follow you into the deepest valleys. Treat them as your own beloved sons, and they will be with you even unto death."

As an expert on the "human side" of organizational change, I have been a guest on hundreds of radio call-in programs over the past several years, but I especially remember one in the Northwest, when an unusual number of disgruntled employees were phoning in with corporate "horror stories."

People complained about being unappreciated and overlooked. They spoke of callous treatment from uncaring bosses, and reported that they worked for organizations "just interested in making a buck." For the entire hour, calls followed the same line. Finally, in genuine disgust, the interviewer said to me: "The principles you're giving us sound so simple, why aren't more managers following them?"

I didn't have to think twice about my reply: "With all the diet books on the market, why aren't we all thin and trim? What could be simpler than reducing calories and increasing exercise?"

The answer to my question and his is the same. Things that are simple are not necessarily easy.

My work has enabled me to deal with business leaders around the world, and not once have I encountered a boss who despised all his or her employees. On the contrary, the leaders I've met were genuinely concerned about the well-being of people who reported to them. (Even the occasional leader whose only focus was on the bottom line understood that the best way to increase profits was to build the commitment of talented employees.) When you think of the qualities that leaders need to encourage in their employees -- responsibility, creativity, caring, commitment -- you can see why coercion or manipulation just doesn't work. The leaders who influence us the most are those who understand that engagement and productivity are not about rules, regulations, and rewards -- or the struggle to keep people "in line."

In general, it's the soft skills of leadership that are paramount. Leaders (and their organizations) won't succeed without a genuine caring about people and the ability to develop and nurture interpersonal relationships.

This is something that the MBA industry is grappling with today. Many business schools are revisiting their offerings to see if they still have relevance in the 21st century. Consider Harvard Business School, the blue-chip brand of all MBA programs, which used 2008 (its centennial year) to convene worldwide experts on business education and plot its directions for the next 100 years.

The results: Deans and recruiters said that MBAs in general needed better communication skills, increased self-awareness and an enhanced capacity for introspection and empathy. HBS is now looking at several change proposals, among them a program to develop various soft skills in its students.
Isn't that simple?

Not easy, mind you, But simple.

Carol Kinsey Goman, Ph.D., is an author and keynote speaker who addresses association, government, and business audiences around the world. Carol is the author of 10 business books. Her latest is THE NONVERBAL ADVANTAGE - Secrets and Science of Body Language at Work.

Start Up the Risk Takers

It seems that Thomas L. Friedman, the economist and author of The World is Flat, agrees with the premise in my 21 December blog post on bailing out the auto industry. In his op ed in the New York Times published on 21 Feb 2009, Mr. Friedman suggested that it would be better to invest this money in startups than with the zombie auto industry. Great minds think alike (or he read this blog first).

For his column please see: Start Up The Risk-Takers

Bring on The Entrepreneurs - It's Time!

The difference between the great and good societies and the regressing, deteriorating societies is largely in terms of the entrepreneurial opportunity and the number of such people in the society. I think everyone would agree that the most valuable 100 people to bring into a deteriorating society would not be 100 chemists, or politicians, or professors, or engineers, but rather 100 entrepreneurs.

Abraham Maslow

Seems like its high time to bring in the entrepreneurs in America!

Business Debriefing

Many years ago, I became acquainted with the CEO of a storied software publisher. Bill Goodhew had recently taken over as CEO of Peachtree Software in a management buy-out. While Peachtree had the pedigree of being one of (if not) the first personal computer based accounting software packages, it had never made a profit. Peachtree was sold to Management Science America (MSA), an early mainframe software company, and during their tenure as owners, the division still did not make any money. Bill and his management team took it over, drastically reduced the price of the software, and marketed it predominantly using direct response advertising.

While that seemed very extraordinary at the time, Bill filled me in on his seemingly simple strategy. He selected three different advertising placements, all with coded responses, so he always knew which was producing the results. He continued these for some set period of time and then would pick the one that worked the best and double its frequency. The one that was the worst, he discontinued. And the other, he continued as it was. He also added one more publication and tried that.
Interestingly enough, using this strategy and the much lower price, Peachtree’s owner-management team made money for the first time in the company’s history. Bill made it very clear that he was no marketing genius. In fact, Bill seldom guessed correctly in advance which advertising placement would work. However, after receiving the results, he was in a perfect position to learn and adjust.

The lesson I learned from Bill’s strategy expanded well beyond advertising and marketing. What this taught me was the value of feedback. Learn & Adjust - that idea has lived with me for the several decades since our encounter.

Every business process can benefit from this concept of learn & adjust. None of us is smart enough to predict the actual results of our actions. But assuming we have a clear and available way to listen to the results of our actions, treat them as objective data – free from our personal prejudices, and be willing to act and adjust our behavior based upon this data, we can create learning systems that create impeccable institutional knowledge that can be shared within our organizations.

The US Air Force uses Stealth Debriefing sessions after every sortie. Immediately after a flight, the pilots debrief in an objective and selfless manner. They learn and adjust from these sessions so that they can institutionalize better practices in their very next encounter. As the Air Force puts it, for them it’s a matter of pure survival.

In business we usually survive multiple mistakes. But the best organizations are compulsive about feedback and learning processes in everything they do. I have participated in great sales organizations that use debriefs as a critical part of their process. After each sales call, the sales person and her team, get together to discuss what went right and what went wrong. These sessions enable the team to determine what is working and what is not, enabling them to hone in on their sales pitches in their very next call.

Seems pretty simple? Yet there are all too few organizations that institutionalize this type of behavior. Meetings occur without any summary of the results. Business decisions get made without the benefit of any recorded feedback. Marketing dollars get spent, without any clue as to their effectiveness. In today’s economically stressful times, using this simple (and cheap) process to immediately improve what we do, every time we do it, is long overdue.

Bailing out the US Auto Industry

Friday, President Bush agreed to "loan" the US Auto Industry $17+Billion to stave off sure bankruptcy. No matter whether you are in favor or not of this use of taxpayer money, I've taken several lessons from this debacle and have a suggestion on how better to spend our money.

Here are the four takeaways I learned from what has gone on between the odd bedfellows in Washington and Detrioit.

1. If your product stinks and no one wants to buy it, there is little recourse from the free market other than to fold one's tent. That is unless the government decides that you deserve a few billion of tax payers' money.

2. Just because you pioneered an industry and once were great, does not mean you still are, unless you happen to important enough to the well being of 1/10 of the whole country's population.

3. Politicians are short sighted. They only look to solve the problems they are currently confronted with and have no vision to what the long run holds. And they certainly can't stand short term suffering for the long term value it may create.

4. But, in the long run, we all are dead anyway. So does any of this matter? What's another $17 Billion anyway?

The government has less business being in the auto business than the incompetent fools who have run the big three into the ground. Ultimately, we are moving all too close to a socialist state, where failure is protected by increased taxes on the successful.

I have a new proposal Mr. Bush. How about we take the $17 billion and create a seed capital fund to breed the next generation of great companies. And the US can be a shareholder! So not only will we all as taxpayers benefit from the hundreds of thousands of new high-paying jobs that will result, but we put ourselves in line for VC like returns on our investment. Can you imagine what value might be bred by that influx of risk capital. This certainly is a less risky bet than investing in the three auto companies!

An Execution Model For The Ceo

Bob Sywolski, a former operating executive, turned venture capitalist, gave this presentation at a recent (October 2008) JMI Equity Executive meeting in San Diego. I've posted this presentation (with Bob's permission) and think it's got critical lessons for any founder/CEO. You can send any questions or comments you have to me directly here on the blog or you can find Bob at the JMI Equity web site.

Bob Sywolski An Execution Model for the CEO

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It's the economy stupid!

Many CEOs and founders have been focused on the current economic downturn. Some take knee-jerk actions to cut expenses (and layoff employees), some clamp down on all activities, and some ignore reality hoping it will change. Not being old enough to have lived through the Great Depression, except through tales that I've heard, the only analogy I have is the economic aftermath of 9/11. At that time, I was running Transcentive, a stock plan administration software company. And, as you might imagine, stock options and enterprise software were not the top priority on everyone's list as we all struggled to understand the new reality that an attack on our homeland and the ensuing stock market crash and economic turmoil caused.

I've searched for some guidance during this unique patch of our economic history. One of the best, is an article found on CNN Money's web site by Ram Charan, a writer and management guru entitled:

Managing your business in a downturn

As the optimistic entrepreneur that I am, I like to view turmoil as a friend. Turmoil and uncertainty typically are great times to topple the status quo, to empower new market leadership, and to cause customers to look for new solutions.

Ram's article was written with this particular downturn in mind, but I see it as a handy reminder to refer to any time the macro economic conditions turn abruptly south.