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A “wake-up call” isn’t enough

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It takes courage to change, and forge a new future: Have you got that courage in you?

I was not at this presentation, and can only base this on Dan Nakaso’s article written for the Star Advertiser, but I am newly encouraged knowing that Richard C. Lim is our new director of DBEDT, the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism.

Perhaps that “T” should be dropped at the end.

Nakaso wrote: “Future of tourism called into question: The state economic director surprises business leaders with his stark outlook.”

“Lim, who has been running DBEDT for six months, outlined a gloomy economic picture for the islands and said tourism has essentially remained stagnant for the last 20 years and can no longer be relied on to move the economy into a prosperous future.”

He is absolutely right, and being kind in saying it’s only been this way for the last 20 years — try 30 or 40. The business model is broken; it’s dysfunctional, or in many cases, missing completely. Any business models which are in place for so-called Tourism Leadership are sadly irrelevant to our community challenges.

I’m a product of our hospitality industry, as is my values-based Managing with Aloha philosophy, and readily accept that writing this can be viewed as my biting the hand that fed me — but how well did that really happen? What is not mentioned in this article, is the sad fact that tourism has not improved our lot in life locally as its wage-earners either; I would much prefer to see our youth and all residents focus on industries which improve their standard of living individually too — and not just for the community infrastructure needs Lim mentions in the article recap.

Our state (and all communities for that matter) need not do for us, when we can prosper and thrive on our own because we work in more visionary industries.

Even if we blindly claim to be good at tourism, or Aloha-suited to it, it’s time we learned even more, and got good at endeavors which will serve us better, via the industries which rely on building our innovative talents with math and the sciences. Tourism has not sustained us well enough in exchange for all the resources we have put into it, especially when you count up our service-industry poor.

This part of the article absolutely floored me, especially reading who was quoted:

“Paul Brewbaker, principal of TZ Economics and chairman of the state Council on Revenues, told Lim that his ideas “provoked a lot of good thinking in this room. This is the first time I’ve heard any of this.”

Give me a break! If we assume he is speaking his truth, how has he come to hold the position he holds? Where have they been, and what on earth have they been doing in Hawai‘i economic circles if this is the first time he and others have “heard any of this?” Do they know how to read and evaluate all their charts and economic reports?

Will anything happen now that this speech has been delivered, or was it simply a way to while away some time for those in the room who are too NIMBY entitled and complacent? (stuck in the quagmire of “not in my back yard” thinking and will-not-try opposition).

Knowing all of which Lim speaks is one thing, and having the courage to do something about it is another when you have so many sacred cows grazing in your home pastures.

We can do better, I know we can. I pray we get the will to do so.

Donation Jar
Progress reduced to a donation jar

The Real Problem with Leadership

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One problem with leadership, is simply that we don’t have enough of it.

The bigger problem with leadership is that it isn’t attractive to us. We, as individuals, aren’t accepting it as our Kuleana, and personal responsibility. We keep looking for someone else to lead, for the truth of the matter is that we prefer being followers (and sadly, armchair quarterbacks ready to complain.)

Here’s the catch: The best leaders are the ones who expect more leadership from you, not ‘good’ following.

In Lost, Jacob was on a quest to find another leader, and someone who could do what he could not. Photo courtesy ABC.

Are we looking in all the wrong places?

If you do a search on Amazon.com for leadership books, over 61,306 results come up, and those are only the ones with the word ‘leadership’ in the product description’s keywords. (If you’re curious about the comparison, as I was, 603,208 results come up for ‘management.’)

My theory is that so many people write about leadership because we’re still yearning for it: We seek it by trying to articulate it better, so we’ll know exactly what we’re looking for, especially in a world which is anything but static and stable. As with most things, we can better grab onto something we can tangibly identify.

I’ll often remind myself of this longstanding leadership quest so that I focus better in my own writing about it. What I’m trying to do, is to help you see leadership as the visible evidence of self-leadership behaviors: Leading is for you, and not just “the other guy.” If you look for leadership in someone else, you will always be looking, and you’ll always feel frustrated.

So there’s three ways I’ll break leadership down when writing about it:

  1. I’ll connect it to the creation of energy as our most important resource (my way of defining leadership), for hopefully, that’s very desireable to you: Gathering your own energy is where you must start. You fuel up.
  2. I’ll write about the opportunities we have to lead, and state them as your calls to action (recent examples have been Sense of Workplace and Job Creation).
  3. I’ll write about that action as activities that are not larger than your life, but highly possible: They are tangible bits which squarely sit in your own circle of influence.

However what’s very frustrating for me, is that I constantly hear back: “It needs to start at the top, right?” and the finger-pointing at the boss will begin immediately. Maybe so; maybe improvement does need to happen with your boss too, but what if it never happens? Will you really be content with playing the victim forever? Why not start any necessary improvement with you?

We have to stop this blame game where we constantly look at someone else as the reason we do not take action and behave better, or with greater bravery. Please stop focusing on what the other guy is doing about it, and look within. Leadership is scarce when there’s a scarcity of initiative — yours.

Be honest: We’re looking for saviors

Leadership is open to everyone, and opportunity abounds, but we don’t see it that way. We refuse to, and shield ourselves in self-righteousness instead. Pure yuck. It’s a cop-out to say that the problem with leadership is the way someone else does it (or doesn’t).

This is something that really bugs me about election seasons, such as we’re in right now: They proliferate the misconception that leadership is about title, position and placement. We get stuck in believing that “winner takes all” and he or she will now be the only one who is “the leader” when that simply isn’t true. The smartest thing the so-called winner can do is tap into the leadership desires of his or her previous opponents to channel them, such as President Obama did when he asked Hillary Rodham Clinton to work with him as our U.S. Secretary of State.

However if he hadn’t done so, would Clinton have stopped her practice of self-leadership, neglecting to renew her initiative? I sincerely doubt it. She would have looked for another opportunity, and so can you.

Be your own savior. Solve the leadership problem by always asking, “What about me? What can I do?” or if it’s more comfortable for you, ask, “How can I help?” and “Where can I start?”

The way we solve “the problem with leadership” is to solve our problem with self-leadership being missing from our personal practice. Your small wins can create big domino effects.

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Archive Aloha: Here’s a Take 5 of related postings:

  1. Initiative, Humility and the Local Way
  2. Who leads? You do. In the Sweet Spot Quote: “The trouble with all or nothing is that it is often too intimidating to choose all, making it much too easy to choose nothing.”
  3. Guilt-Free Self-Leadership: 12 Possibilities
  4. “What’s in it for me?” is a Self-Leadership Question
  5. Leadership is Why and When and Management is What and How

Check out the post tags for more.

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sayalakai_rosasayMy mana‘o [The Backstory of this posting]
Each Tuesday I write a leadership posting for Say “Alaka‘i” at Hawai‘i’s newspaper The Honolulu Advertiser and will add copies to Talking Story when they blend nicely with our conversations here. If this is the first you have caught sight of my Say “Alaka‘i” tagline, you can learn more on this Talking Story page: About Say “Alaka‘i”. There are some differences in this Talking Story version, most notably that most of my hyperlinks will keep you here on this blog.

The Top 7 Business Themes on my 2009 Wish List

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2010 Update: I made the decision to bring Say “Alaka‘i” here to Talking Story in late May of 2010 when the Honolulu Advertiser, where the blog previously appeared, was merged with the Star Bulletin (Read more at Say “Alaka‘i” is Returning to the Mothership).

Therefore, the post appearing below is a copy of the one which had originally appeared there on December 28, 2008, so we will be able to reference it in the future when the original url it had been published on is no more…

Hibiscus

The Top 7 Business Themes on my 2009 Wish List

From the Say “Alaka‘i” mailbox:

You get to visit lots of different workplaces, see different approaches, and listen to people’s ideas. What do you think will be the trends which emerge in business over the course of 2009 for Hawai‘i?

Gosh, that’s a million dollar question!

I don’t feel I am that great at predicting trends, for we human beings are so unpredictable —and in many ways I like that we are” I think our gut-level impulsiveness has a direct correlation to our creativity. However I can share what I hope will be the themes which emerge, and I am encouraged, for I think many of our business leaders are already talking about them.

These top my 2009 Wish List for Hawai‘i Business because they will simultaneously deliver two vital behaviors to us in the process of our pursuing them: Leadership courage, and management reconstruction.

Altogether, the theme I am encouraging within the coaching I currently do, is “out with the old and in with the new.” My list would be the same for the private and public sectors, profits and non-profits, and for social entrepreneurship (itself a trend I hope continues to flourish).
7 initiatives are on my list:

  1. Impatience for Change and New Ideas
  2. Financial Literacy
  3. The Entrepreneurial Mindset
  4. Aloha asset creation via a Ho‘okipa obsession
  5. The Role of the Manager reconstructed
  6. Talking Story Grows Up
  7. Training Becomes Learning Constant, NOT Budget Luxury

These are very likely to be the themes you will see I write most about in my blog posts here too. For now, I will explain each briefly.

1. Impatience for Change and New Ideas

One of the first posts I had written for Say “Alaka‘i” was, Leaders Don’t Wait for Any Cycle, and it remains one of my hot buttons: Virtually every single business model in every industry must evolve and improve, and we cannot rest on our laurels. Long before this recession hit us with economic reasons, we were talking about the demographics ones, for the generational character of our workplace has shifted dramatically. The evidence of our need for new ideas and substantial change is blatantly clear; we know the old way isn’t working. Yet our sense of urgency and commitment to the action steps needed is not as clear, and our hesitation is driving me crazy. We need to get more impatient —and more courageous.

The good news? Everyone knows this, and resistance is at an all-time low (more on this silver lining with no. 3 below). So what in the world are our business leaders waiting for?

2. Financial Literacy

The change we need to see happen in business requires our collective intelligence, and there best be NO leaders or managers who ever make “need to know basis” judgments or valuations of anyone else in their organizational culture, especially when it comes to the financial literacy of a company’s business model. Let people judge for themselves when your sharing is “too much information” for them; chances are they are far more intelligent than you give them credit for.

Further, they must be involved. Every stakeholder in every business needs to relearn everything financial, understanding how they directly impact each variable and each fixed cost (of which there are really very, very few). Money itself is not evil; on the contrary, it’s liberating. Ask anyone who doesn’t have it! Money is simply currency we need to be putting toward better use. The filter for this “better use” is value-alignment, where we do what we believe to be good and right. (as in virtuous values.)

3. The Entrepreneurial Mindset

Connected to financial literacy and our evolutionary business models, business leaders and managers need to understand there is a cool silver lining of our current economic mess: Entitlement mentalities of the past few years are at an all-time low, or are gone.

We have never been in a better time to teach each other (again, collective intelligence versus hierarchal dictation) to groom a new entrepreneurial mindset, where we ALL work for profit versus paycheck, and we ALL create the intellectual property we can continue to market successfully as we age and must self-sustain our increased lifespans. Retirement is an outdated concept; any Baby Boomer will tell you they are not expecting to retire —not ever. Even if they could afford to, they would be totally bored. What will you do when your body is too old to keep toiling, but your mind is still working better than it ever has before? The answer is in your entrepreneurial mindset. A business can have one too.

4. Aloha asset creation via a Ho‘okipa obsession

It’s high time we stop paying lip service to the Aloha Spirit and get it back again. The only way I see that can happen is for us to return to our Sense of Place as a Hawaiian island chain of diverse yet connected communities which are Lōkahi [harmonious and unified]. This is a tall order to be sure, one requiring much Ha‘aha‘a [humility and open-mindedness] from many of us, but it is a societal order of civility and mutual respect we MUST work on.

We must live true to our values before we can work with them, manage with them, and lead with them. There are several values, inherent to our ancestry that I would love to see thrive and flourish again, and the one which comes to mind most for me is Ho‘okipa, for it is more than good customer service: It is a gracious, virtuous hospitality borne of Aloha as the unconditional acceptance of all others, and Lokomaika‘i, the generosity of good heart.

From the Say “Alaka‘i” archives:
Hawai‘i’s Primary Recession-Proof Strategy is Ho‘okipa

5. The Role of the Manager reconstructed

Managers matter, yet we still don’t quite understand why they matter and how. Managers still work and operate in that vast wasteland called “middle management” where they are babysitting the mediocrity tolerated in our organizations instead of being stewards of the smart, professional, and mission-based disciplines which make them healthier. I am afraid that until the role of the manager changes, nothing else will.

A future preview:

Marketing Guru Seth Godin is enjoying some success right now with his latest book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, and I will review it in a future blog post. In short, he seeks to elevate leadership —and I applaud his ideas in that regard, however he does so at the expense of management, and he depreciates the worth of managers nearly every single time he mentions them. I understand the comparison he is trying to make, however please don’t buy in to that notion that we don’t need managers —he is dead wrong.

6. Talking Story Grows Up

‘Talking story’ might be just as important to our Hawai‘i communities as is ‘sense of place’ and our cultural values of Aloha. We have a way of communicating with each other that is an exceptionally positive expectation, unspoken yet pervasive in our islands, and that expectation is this: Create a good relationship first, and do your business transaction second (even those ‘business of life’ transactions) and then that transaction will be good too.

When talking story grows up and really, truly comes to the workplace with us, we will enjoy another kind of evolution, one in the way we communicate with each other and create a larger verbal asset. Our ancestors had a great word for this: They called this ‘asset’ the mo‘ōlelo. Can you imagine how little we would know about our heritage today without it? What is the mo‘ōlelo we have stopped creating for Hawai‘i’s future generations?

7. Training Becomes Learning Constant, NOT Budget Luxury

Business has a very annoying habit, one we fall into way, way too often: The moment money is tight, training gets cut from the budget in our first wave of belt-tightening. No need for me to go into why that is a very bad idea; we all know it, yet we do it anyway.

I think that shifting our vocabulary might help us break this habit once and for all. Equate ‘training’ with learning from now on (in fact, replace the word totally), for you certainly wouldn’t cut continuous learning from your budget, would you? (Auwe” we’d be in really deep kim chee then!)

In 2009, please set this goal: Learning will be inculcated into our organizational culture as a non-negotiable constant and sacred essential. And by the way, more seminars don’t constitute learning either; we’ll talk about ‘Ike loa (the Hawaiian value of learning) more as time goes by.

Let’s Talk Story:

What are the trends that YOU hope will emerge?

What are the intentions YOU plan to set in motion early in 2009?

I am pretty confident that we WILL see a lot of these things, for business has no choice if it is to survive and get healthy again.

What I wish for most? That the big business we call Hawai‘i government is the first to lead the way in each of these areas. The willingness to discard their comfort zones, partisan alliances and “incumbency mindset” is THE leadership courage we need from them most.

Your Aloha has created Sunday Koa Kākou

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2010 Update: I made the decision to bring Say “Alaka‘i” here to Talking Story in late May of 2010 when the Honolulu Advertiser, where the blog previously appeared, was merged with the Star Bulletin (Read more at Say “Alaka‘i” is Returning to the Mothership).

Therefore, the post appearing below is a copy of the one which had originally appeared there on November 23, 2008, so we will be able to reference it in the future when the original url it had been published on is no more…

Hibiscus

Your Aloha has created Sunday Koa Kākou

Wow, mahalo nui loa!

In my first post here last Tuesday, I said that Sundays on Say “Alaka‘i” would be a “maybe,” depending on any need created by your questions and comments, and boy, did you respond! Thank you so much for your Aloha.

I have a terrific assortment of suggested topics and requests from you to get us started, and I’ve decided to add a category to contain our third day’s talk story that will be called “Sunday Koa Kākou.”

Today, we start with our Ho‘ohana; our purpose and intention with this work we shall make happen each Sunday. It will be a day to practice the two values of Koa [courage] and Kākou [togetherness and inclusiveness], two values I believe to be woven into Alaka‘i as the value of leadership.

Alaka‘i ka ‘ike; Our guides with learning

Why Koa Kākou?

I am not a Hawaiian linguist; I have much, much more to learn about our native tongue, but as you can tell, I do love to invoke the power of words, and I love the concept of kaona —hidden, storied meaning which becomes part of our language of intention.

I am also fairly bold with using our Hawaiian words because to use them often (and quickly) forces the learning challenge with me, so to all the Hawaiian speakers and kÅ«puna [elders] out there who might have any helpful corrections for us, please write to me if I mess up! I will gratefully and eagerly receive your teaching. I also humbly ask your understanding and patience with me if I leap to new words too quickly, for I err on the side of making a mistake I will learn from, versus hesitancy which stifles the creative impulses of my mana‘o with Alaka‘i.

Mary Kawena Pukui’s ‘ÅŒlelo No‘eau and the Hawaiian Dictionary she collaborated on with Samuel H. Elbert are always on my writing table, and I promise to do that homework study first!

Koa; “Courage begets courage”

There is one more book I strongly recommend to all who choose to study Hawaiian value alignment, for it was written by someone I believe to be one of our greatest teachers. KÅ« Kanaka, Stand Tall, A Search for Hawaiian Values by George Hu‘eu Sanford Kanahele should be in every Alaka‘i Library.

This is what Dr. Kanahele has to say about Koa [courage] as a value of Hawaiian society:

“In a society whose chiefs were trained in the arts of fighting from childhood, and who proved their mettle on the battlefields, physical courage can be expected as a badge of leadership. But courage has two sides: the physical, and the nonphysical, that is, the emotional, moral, or spiritual. Opposition to a hero comes in many different forms.”

The Hawaiian value of Koa is more than bravery and fearlessness. It is also resolution, conviction, and emotional strength. When we manage and lead with Alaka‘i, Koa is a value we constantly must draw from if we are to lead with ideas of nerve and daring in times when our world largely cautions us to tread lightly —and when our own voices of self-doubt caution us to tread lightly. We call on courage from within.

To make a difference for someone else, we must make a difference for ourselves first. We must wear leadership like a warming coat when our bones rattle with inner fears. On a more basic level, this means that we have to welcome our mistakes from day-to-day for all they can teach us. Have you noticed how you remember and retain more when you emerge victorious from what was a mistake at first?

King KamehamehaIn KÅ« Kanaka, Dr. Kanahele discusses intellectual courage, moral courage, and the courage of conviction and bravery with examples demonstrated by King Kamehameha. He ends with this:

“No one surpasses Kamehameha the Great in leadership, historic achievement and lasting impact, or in having a transcendent vision for his people. … Kamehameha no doubt recognized that courage begets courage; the more you use it, the more of it you produce. Conversely, the less of it you use, the less you have. This is a truth that every leader learns sooner or later, although not every leader learns this hard lesson in time.”

Photo (and more on Kamehameha I) from Wikipedia

Kākou; Communication begets collaboration

Within the context of work, I think of Kākou as the value of collaborative communication. Now again, don’t restrict ‘work’ and think of it as your job; think of work as your Ho‘ohana, [intentional work] and simply as anything you need to get done.

Kākou is about inclusiveness. At its elemental core, the spirit of Kākou acknowledges that we are not on this Earth alone, and as the human race we seem to survive better —we thrive —in each other’s company, sharing the ups and downs of our day-to-day existence.

Kākou is less intimate than ‘Ohana [family] for it applies to everyone that surrounds you in the consciousness of some particular striving or effort or task. Kākou is a distinctively verbal word; when you say it, you speak of your inclusive intentions instantly. For instance, when I address a group of people, large or small, I normally start with the words “Aloha mai kākou,” meaning that I offer my Aloha to everyone there. Mai kākou includes me as the speaker, and it’s my way of asking permission to be included in their conversation, in their attentions.

Kākou promotes sharing, and making the effort to promote the well-being that is felt with inclusiveness. When we teach the value of Kākou to our ‘Ohana in Business, (a business-model concept) we coach them to involve and include their peers in all they do, promoting Lōkahi; cooperation, unity and the harmony that comes from togetherness.

Kākou is the language of “we.” And the language of we stimulates ownership and personal responsibility in the all-encompassing initiatives of a company —or of a blog where communication is highly valued for it’s collaborative and creative properties, like this one!

Our Koa Kākou Language of Intention

So this is my kaona [storied, hidden meaning] for Sunday Koa Kākou: We’ve defined leadership as being about vision, and working on our ideas. Therefore, our Sunday Koa Kākou will be to work on those ideas which earlier in the week have come from YOU; we will offer up the day in a brave charging forth with the collaboration we can create.

I trust you may have read some of the comments which have already been shared here. Great stuff, so if not, do check them out! These came via my email:

Ian wrote:
“Today, more than ever, we need Alaka‘i. A friend once asked me to think of a hero – someone I look up too. I thought of my mother, my dad, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela… then he asked, ‘How many people look up to you…want to be like you?’”

David wrote:
“Yes it is time to reinvent ourselves again! I am addressing this in my latest blog posts and in my custom framing business. I feel that times will be very challenging for the next year at least and those that survive will have solved the problem of presenting their products and services as necessities rather than discretionary purchases.”

Andrew wrote:
“Now is the perfect time for this. We all need personal energy to enable us to lead our businesses through current times.”

Marianne wrote: “I like this!”

I do too Marianne!
Our partnering to learn more about management and leadership through our Alaka‘i value-filter is going to be more timely and on-point with your help; the braver you are about sharing what you are thinking in the comments here, the better the result will be.

I do welcome your emails, however Koa Kākou will happen most in the comment boxes because you are talking with each other and not just me; Sunday will be the highlight reel and the celebration party. We will have a current and highly useful laboratory to work in; calling this a ‘blog’ will just be a shortcut to explaining how we started.

Again, thank you for the warm welcome this week

Mahalo for reading this first week’s worth of Say “Alaka‘i” and bearing with all the introductory stuff. Bloggers refer to it as designing ‘About pages’ and ‘category generation.’ We in the islands know it’s more than that, and we know why it’s important.

It is akin to our Hawaiian practice of stating our genealogy, of asking our permissions, and of being forthright about our Aloha intentions as we write new stories which we hope will honor the histories of our ancestors [the mo‘ōlelo]. For me, it is also about a gathering together of that crucial sense of place, with Say “Alaka‘i” as a place for all of us to learn management and leadership together, and of assembling an energetic, positive community; I am here for conversation with you, not to write a broadcast.

For today, I’ll end with one more suggestion for your Alaka‘i Library and a quote from another respected kupuna;

“There is a prophecy that, if seven generations pass and the seeds are not planted, then the next generation passes away. We’re in the seventh generation now of the past 200 years. So, we need to inculcate into our younger generations that there are so many things to be proud of —tremendous riches to be learned and passed on. We must commit ourselves as Hawaiians, be proud of what we have and understand our past, [and yet] commit ourselves confidently about achieving things.”
—chanter and hula master John Lake
quoted within Voices of Wisdom, Hawaiian Elders Speak by MJ Harden

Perhaps that can be our first Sunday Koa Kākou conversation? What are some of those “many things [we need] to be proud of —[the] tremendous riches to be learned and passed on?” What must we commit ourselves to? For example, Joanna had offered this in her comment:

“Values, purpose and intention can make such a difference to the way that we feel about ‘work’. Even the word ‘work’ can make us feel heavy, deadened, burdened whereas if we shift to the focus on what we’re trying to do, and why, and how it connects with our core values, what we’re about (and yes, where we come from) it starts to feel like task, a project, a challenge that we can approach with more vigour and energy.”