On Thursday, May 3, Mariano Rivera, the New York Yankees closer suffered what appeared to be a season-ending injury, a torn anterior crucial ligament in his knee.  The commentary on the effects of his absence on the team and the requirements for a closer was quite interesting. The New York Post article by columnist Joel Sherman in the Saturday, May 5 issue is a good example of this commentary:

http://www.nypost.com/p/sports/yankees/stuff_start_Q8XILKn7AcY70jJEiJpjOK

The core message of all this commentary is that a successful closer, in addition to having the required athletic skills, must have the temperament to bounce back quickly and decisively from adversity.  In reading this commentary, I am reminded that I believe this quality to be required for all great leaders and for business people who have important jobs.  Adversity is a given; how people respond to it separates the successful people from those who will fail.

In fact, the ability to learn from, but emotionally distance oneself from, adversity is important in all competitive endeavors.  My younger son James competed at a very high level in chess for many years.  What astounded me about him and other high-level chess players was their ability to lose a long, grueling, and highly disappointing match, often because of an avoidable mistake, and to be ready to compete fully in a new match a few minutes later, as if the prior defeat had never happened.

I also saw this quality in my predecessor as Pitney Bowes CEO George Harvey.  Whatever happened, good or bad, was put aside quickly so that he and the organization could focus on the challenges ahead of us.  I also see this quality in abundance in the Eaton CEO Sandy Cutler, and saw it particularly during the horrific economic crisis in 2008 and early 2009, which hit the diversified industrial companies particularly hard.  Decisions were made in terms of the best way to address adverse market conditions, and the organization methodically executed on them.

This is an underestimated and undervalued quality of great leadership, and it is why Mariano Rivera’s response to his injury is particularly noteworthy.  He could have withdrawn quietly from the competitive arena and gone on to have his surgery and undergo his rehabilitation.  However, he did not do that.  He announced quickly that he would be back and quietly, but forcefully, communicated that he would continue to be a mentor to the other pitchers and to the rest of the team to help them through this transition.

The tone he set in his remarks was quite interesting.  I heard several messages, in addition to the encouraging message that he would return:

• He would influence the speed of his recovery, rather than leaving it to chance.
• The organization and the team would be fine because no one, including him, is indispensable.  His modesty over his entire career is uncharacteristic of many world-class athletes, who are often highly self-absorbed.  This combination of incredible self-confidence and modesty was specifically described as a core capability of great business leaders in Jim Collins’ From Good to Great.  Collins referred to such leaders as Level 5 leaders, individuals with ferocious competitiveness and self-confidence, but a strongly modest demeanor.  If Mariano Rivera were a business leader, he would be a Level 5 leader.
• He believes that the team will step up and that many people will perform better individually and collectively to take up the slack.
• He was glad that he, rather than someone else, would have to bear this burden, because he believed himself fully capable of managing it.
• He is a strongly religious and faith-driven individual who is confident that grace will be visited upon him if he submits to a higher power.

Great leaders articulate and live these kinds of values.  Even those who are not fans of the New York Yankees admire Mariano Rivera, not only for what he has accomplished, but the task he has undertaken and will accomplish in helping himself and his team through this difficult process.

Many statisticians making the compelling case that closers are overvalued, and as a baseball statistical buff, I would agree with their conclusion.  However, Mariano Rivera is more than a closer; he is a true leader and inspirational figure whose value cannot be captured in his on-field accomplishments.  He has never won a Most Valuable Player award for a full season, but, oddly enough, the way he has handled this situation may make those who never voted for him think differently about the value he provides to his team.

He is the last player to wear uniform number 42, the number worn by Jackie Robinson and retired by Major League Baseball for all players in the future.  When Rivera retires, no one else will ever wear number 42 on a Major League Baseball field, except as a temporary tribute to Jackie Robinson.

No one can compare with Jackie Robinson, in terms of the impact he had, not just on baseball, but on sports and society as a whole.  However, Mariano Rivera has carved out his own niche as one of the most inspirational athletes of all time, with an impact far beyond baseball.

Like many people, I will eagerly anticipate his return.

As both a parent of college-age children and a member of a publicly held diversified industrial company (Eaton Corporation) board of directors, I have more than a casual interest in the state of U.S. manufacturing investment and employment. I am struck by the fact that, on the one hand, our country has a nominal unemployment rate of a little over 8%, but a real unemployment rate (which includes those who want to work, but have given up applying for new employment) of over 10%; while, on the other hand, according to a 2011 study conducted by Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute, it is highly likely that over 600,000 available manufacturing jobs are going unfilled because of a shortage of skilled workers to fill them.

http://www.themanufacturinginstitute.org/~/media/A07730B2A798437D98501E798C2E13AA/2011_Skills_Gap_Report.pdf

What distresses me when I read a report like this is the dysfunctional direction in which parents of college-age children and the colleges and universities nudge young people.  Given what I know about the exciting and innovative products and services industrial companies like Eaton Corporation (a company led by a once-in-a-generation CEO, Alexander “Sandy” Cutler) provide to the global marketplace, I would jump at the chance to get started in a career in a manufacturing-oriented company.  Moreover, unless I had a passion for a four-year college education, I would seriously consider either a two-year community college degree, or a time-compressed college education (graduating in 3 or 3 ½ years, instead of four).

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Recently, I stumbled on an online article about the Google effort to lobby the State of Nevada to allow self-driving automobiles to be used within the state.  That article is available at the following link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/science/11drive.html?_r=1

A more recent and broader article about self-driving cars was posted on Friday, March 31, 2012.

http://news.yahoo.com/coming-soon-self-driving-cars-120300164.html

If self-driving cars were to be broadly available, they would profoundly affect how society functions today.  There are many obvious consequences from having the ability to acquire and use a self-driving car:

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In the last year, I have become far more involved in the process of improving the quality of education in lower income communities and reducing the achievement gap between the highest and lowest performing communities in Connecticut. To a great degree, those who care about these problems focus on the need to educate young people in the core subjects of reading, writing, and math. Reading comprehension is clearly first among equals with respect to these core subjects.

However, I have become increasingly convinced that we need to redefine the goal from “reading comprehension” to “optimal learning.”  The technologies with which we interact with the world about which we want to learn must drive us to think differently about the learning process.  Additionally, we need to understand what works in engaging people, whether that engagement is designed to focus on learning, healthy behaviors, or responsible financial management.  Thus, the two relevant questions are:

• What causes people to learn most optimally?
• What causes people to be engaged in the optimal learning processes?

Phrased another way: what works best, and what motivates people to engage with what works best?

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On Monday, March 26, 2012, the United States soccer team failed to win a qualifying game against El Salvador and, as a result, will not be able to participate in the 2012 Olympic Games.

On Tuesday, March 28, 2012, on a National Public Radio program, there was a lengthy set of interviews with different U.S. soccer experts.  The general conclusion all of them reached is that the U.S. lags behind other countries because it does not have a sufficiently robust program for identifying great future soccer players early enough and for developing their skills in the most intensive training and competition environment.

This story was most interesting because it compares and contrasts with stories from other sports that grabbed my attention when we decided to develop and film From the Rough.  Those countries that decide to focus on a sport or competitive activity to excel in international competition tend to do far better than those which simply use the talented participants that decide they are interested in competing and make the effort to excel on their own.

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Every day, I see or read about innovations that force us to think differently about some part of the world.

Electronic cigarettes

One recent example is the electronic cigarette, which has been invented by tobacco companies to separate the unquestionably negative attributes of tobacco ingestion, the exhaling of smoking, the ingestion of tar and other hazardous chemicals, and the creation of fire hazards from cigarette butts and ashes, from other attributes that are important to tobacco marketers, but are less obviously harmful, such as the addictive qualities of tobacco.  The March 2 issue of The Wall Street Journal highlights the battle between proponents and opponents of electronic cigarettes, but it has the most difficulty with a vocabulary that is poorly suited for this product.  A lot of the terms we associate with tobacco no longer make sense, such as “smoking” or “lighting up a cigarette.

E-books

The electronic book has changed how we think about reading material.  Bookstores become showrooms for content we download instantaneously (possibly from a vendor other than the owner of the bookstore) and can take with us anywhere we have a portable electronic device.  That device can provide us with enlarged print, the ability to convert text to speech, and, most importantly, can give us the ability to carry a library with us everywhere we go.

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During my 35-year career at large organizations, the description of the goal of providing equal opportunities for women, people of color, and other disadvantaged groups changed from “equal opportunity” to “diversity.” Today, that word would be “inclusion.”

What is inclusion?

“Inclusion” means three things:

• building a diverse organization;
• respecting everyone in it; and
• welcoming and act upon their input.

Excelling at inclusion requires qualities Jim Collins describes in a Level 5 leader in Good to Great, particularly, the combination of modesty and strong will, and the ability to seek out market feedback, which he calls “confronting the brutal facts.”  Inclusion requires more listening than talking, and more consultative and less traditional “selling.”

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Because of Whitney Houston’s recent tragic death, a number of articles have been written about the continuing challenge of helping prevent and treat drug and alcohol addiction.  Not surprisingly, the articles have particularly focused on the failure rate of treatment programs used by entertainers and other celebrities.  As a former CEO, and a 30-year veteran of life in a big organization, I knew, and became aware of, many people with drug and alcohol addictions.  I even have a few long time friends who are recovering addicts.

I am not surprised by hearing that celebrities enter an expensive residential drug or alcohol treatment program, and then experience a relapse relatively soon after finishing the program. The first critical success factor in addressing an addiction is recognizing that the behavior occurs in a particular set of social settings.  Success means removing the addicted person from the social settings supporting the addiction.  Unfortunately, most celebrities return to the same world from which they came, and, even if they disengage from the particular relationships that spawned the addiction, they find other destructive relationships.

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One of the recurring challenges my wife and I have experienced, both in business and in our personal lives, is identifying people who are honest about what they have done or can do, versus those who lie or exaggerate their capabilities.

In desperate economic times, more people have learned about resume inflation, or about inflating their accomplishments in conversations and meetings.  This resume inflation is at its worst in the entertainment industry, but it exists everywhere.  What have we found?

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In the January 21, 2012, issue of The Economist, the main focus of both the feature articles and the special report was on the resurgence of “state capitalism.” The magazine’s reporters described a world in which major companies in major markets were either owned directly by national governments, or subject to control or heavy influence, even if they were privately owned or had issued shares to the public.

The stories reminded me that, for the last 21 years of my Pitney Bowes career, I dealt continuously with the encroachment of state capitalism in the postal sector.  In the late 1980’s and throughout the 1990’s, we successfully fought a series of battles with the U.S. Postal Service to keep it from becoming another entity with all the powers and privileges of the federal government, but with none of the regulatory constraints associated with federal government agencies.  Several senior postal officials aspired to create a power base similar to many government-owned entities, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority (which Marvin Runyon, the Postmaster General from 1992 to 1998, had led) or the New York-New Jersey Port Authority.

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