I read an article over Christmas which appealed to the executive coach in me; with that in mind I want to share it with readers of Forum, as we all gear up for another year of frenetic activity. The article was in Toastmaster magazine, the journal of Toastmasters International. Here’ s a flavour for 2012:

“You will never pass life’s achievement test if you ask the wrong questions; those which include:

- how much money do I make?

- how many square feet is my house?

- how does my job title sound at a drinks party?

- do I get dizzy thinking about my rung on the success ladder?

- how many people report to me?

- how many walls are needed to display my degrees, awards, honours, trophies and tributes?

These questions have one thing in common: the answers determine your grade on your life’s achievements test based on other people’s definitions of success. Other people drive by your property and estimate your net worth; other people measure your success by your job title; other people put weight on whether you give orders or take them; other people size up your achievements by counting the awards and recognitions bestowed upon you with a pinch of pomp and circumstance. If you are asking yourselves these questions, you care more about what they think about you than what you think about yourself. You trust your precious self-esteem to everybody else. 

To really pass life’s achievement test, we need to focus on asking the right questions:

- how many times did I refuse to quit?

- how often do I learn from my mistakes?

- how do I react when they move my cheese?*

-how many times did I graciously let others have all the glory?

- how often have I taken criticisms gracefully?

- how many times did I make someone else’s day?

Sure these questions might prompt you to think of your imperfections. But they might also succeed in highlighting the true you, as you rise to to great heights, turning ordinary moments of your everyday life into events of extraordinary significance. That’s Achievement with a capital A! Achievement cannot be condensed into resumes of net worth; real Achievement is always an inside job.

When you ask yourself the right questions you may be surprised to find that your Achievements were greater than you thought. It is just possible that you pass life’s achievements test with flying colours.”

* Who Moved My Cheese: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life, by Dr Spencer Johnson. A brilliant little 1.5 hour read, guaranteed to make you smile, think and reflect on the way you (and your organisation) via and manage change.

Only one thing left to add: best wishes for a 2012 of personal growth and achievement.

When Steve Jobs stepped down recently it was obvious that all was not well on the health front. although I doubt many thought he would be dead within weeks, and at the uncomfortably young age 0f 56. The response to his death typifies much of his life, a media event focusing on an Apple-centric performance; all over the world, and unprompted, people gravitated to their local Apple Store to leave flowers, messages and sympathy. This response was of proportions normally reserved for the likes of John F Kennedy and John Lennon. So, what has the world lost with the passing of Steve Jobs? The broadcast and print media has largely rallied around the world visionary. The Economist turned over its leader column to Job’s death, highlighting his talents for “showmanship, strategic vision, astonishing attention to detail and a dictatorial management style which many bosses must have envied…but perhaps most astonishing about Mr Jobs was the fanatical loyalty he managed to inspire in customers. Which other technology brand do you see on bumper stickers? Many Apple users feel themselves to be part of a community, with Mr Jobs as its leader…his insistence on putting users first, and focusing on elegance and simplicity has become deeply ingrained in his own company and is spreading to rival firms too….But in the end he conjured up a reality of his own, channelling the magic of computing into products that reshaped entire industries.”

On the other side of the fence are those who have long argued that Steve Jobs was a control freak, that his products and systems were closed and inflexible, in the name of greater ease of use. The Daily  Mail in the UK took a churlish line, describing him as a self serving publicist who created a monopoly; whist the ageing and respected British historian A N Wilson thought him a long way from greatness,  suggesting (predictably from establishment man) that greatness is what one associates with the creme de la creme of poets, not businessmen with a penchant for toys we don’t need. For me Jobs was above all a visionary because, unlike so many leaders and companies who seem to get stuck at the mission statement stage of imagining, he had a real vision from the very beginning: “We are going to put a ding in the universe!” And he did just that, by ensuring that the world he left behind uses technology and listens to music in a way that is easy, fun and beneficial – and  in a way that would have been unimaginable when he started work in his Californian garage. RIP Steve, and thanks for the business and personal inspiration.

D’Arcy Forum welcomes your views on this and all posts.

With the News of the World now consigned to the history books, a number of former MPs and Peers still in prison for stealing taxpayers’  money via fraudulent expense claims, and Britain’s streets daring to return to normality after some pretty unsavoury summer scenes, the debate about ethics is never far from the top of the agenda. Inevitably business is part of the same debate;  bankers are widely seen as unethical and profit is still seen by many as deeply unpleasant, if not unethical. My keyboard turns to this subject because of the currency of the above issues, and also in response to a leading article on the subject in this month’s Edge magazine, the journal of the Institute of Leadership and Management.

In my experience most people in business know the difference between right and wrong, and feel that doing the right thing makes good business sense. Yet  some still question whether it’s profitable to be entirely ethical, especially in recessionary markets. Yet according to the Ethisphere Institute, which recently announced the World’s Most Ethical Companies (WME 2011), WMEs have outperformed the S&P 500 Index every year since its inception in 2007. So some hard numbers to suggest that it pays to be ethical. This side of the Atlantic the big boys seem to be on board too; according to the Institute of Ethics (IBE), 80% of FTSE 100 companies have a code of ethics, and the likes of Marks and Spencer can demonstrate the value of ethics in terms of profitability.  But what about the other 20%, and how do we know that the 80% actually turn the code into behaviours that mean something? As any employee and manager will tell you, having a code of ethics is meaningless unless it is understood and owned by every employees, starting in the board room, and integral to recruitment, induction and ongoing training.  And, at the end of the day, all the pomp and talk about ethics comes down to behaviours; in the final analysis it all boils down to leadership, and at the root of that rare commodity is courage. Of course there are other factors involved, but I highlight courage because that is what is required when the order book, P &L and underlying economy are all screaming at you to take a short cut; “just this once, no one will notice”.  Except, perhaps, the people that are instructed to do the deed, the customers who experience it in some way, the suppliers who feel shafted or at best aggrieved. All of these people are citizens in their own right as well as part of the business chain; all sense what is right and wrong, as well as needing their cash-flow, salary or profit.

Most of us want ethics, and there’s research a plenty to confirm that,  but it takes leadership to see that and then make it happen. Of course with politicians, bankers and the media all to often head down in the trough, that can be difficult; because all leadership and ethics has to start from the top and be demonstrably and consistently behaved throughout the organisation. But there is an ethical mood abroad, and WME’s research shows that it pays off. Even in a hard market people will pay for trust and integrity. As my late father always used to say, “it’s never the wrong time to do the right thing – just occasionally uncomfortable.”

It could be argued that leadership has never been more necessary than at the current time; at government level, whether in Europe or in the States, citizens watch as their ‘leaders’ evade the tough decisions, especially the tackling of crippling debt issues, while in business we marvel at the abdication of morality which led the bankers to the crisis they visited upon us. Writing in the current issue of Edge magazine (the journal of the UKs Institute of Leadership and Management, ILM) Penny De Valk cites recent research by the ILM; not surprisingly, the research points to the critical role trust plays in the leadership equation, with integrity and competence being the critical drivers of trust. And visibility, she argues, is the key to demonstrating this those whom one would lead; to this in would add consistency of behaviour and performance. “If no one sees you or knows who you are , if no one knows what you stand for and believe in, you cannot earn their trust. And, when there is a communications void, people will fill in the gaps themselves, often with ill-founded conjecture and rumour”, comments De  Valk. All common sense stuff we might agree; and yet why is it so hard, in a world of mass communications and social networking, to create authentic and visible leadership? perhaps it has something to do with a combination of lack of intent and ignorance. Intent: as Dr Penny Tamkin, associate director at the Institute for Employment Studies, observes, “there are lots of competing priorities that demand your attention and maybe it feels like a luxury you can’t afford to do at that point.” Some luxury, because the best leaders realise that this is a central part of their role, to be close to those whom they would lead. Ignorance: it is my experience, working with leaders in large organisations that they are often ignorant at two levels about the effect they can have by being conspicuously visible; the first is generic, they just don’t get the idea or the importance; the second is personal and often based on modesty – my colleague and I can cite two CEOs whose impact on the staff when going walkabout was electric, yet it took us to point out this fact to them. So, I guess the message is pretty simple; it’s not enough to be a good leader (though that’s tough enough), one has to be seen to be a good leaders. And if the leadership patch is too big, once the personal presence has been established there is the support offered by modern media; podcasts, intranets, social networking and DVDs.

But, not all leaders are good, in fact some are plain toxic. This is the interesting theme picked up by Tim Phillips, in his new book Fit to Bust: How Great Companies Fail (Kogan Page, £14.99). In investigating the reasons why good companies fail, he explains how being fooled into believing in a leader who turns out to be toxic can take a company down. “The trick is to discern what’s genuinely innovative and inspiring from the poisonous bluster that kills companies”, he contends. Implicitly he warns against the downside of charismatic leadership, citing organisational psychologist Dave Arnott, who contends that modern corporations can function as a cult, having charismatic leadership, becoming separate from outsiders and assuming many of the paternalistic roles that society previously filled; this, he argues, can bind the employees to the leader, offering a sense of common purpose, whilst encouraging the toleration of poisonous behaviour, especially when the business appears to be successful. Enron springs immediately to mind, together with leading UK corporate for whom we worked recently. Of course charismatic leadership can be, and often is,  immensely powerful, but the genuinely transformational leader inevitably keeps clear of Tim Phillip’s worst scenarios.

Back with Penny De Valk, and the oft-asked questions, ‘are entrepreneurs born or made?’ I have often reflected on the fact that the natural default position of human beings is the market, and with it the currency of barter. Go way back in history and that is what humans did, quite naturally. Whether fishing or farming, mining or making, they created a market space and traded. But that was a long time ago, but maybe the instinct is still there. One thing is sure in the UK, as the government tries to cut back the influence and spend of the State; we are all being told now that it is entrepreneurship that will have to fuel the recovery and future prosperity of the nation. According to the Centre for Economics and Business Research, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) contribute £1.6trillion of total national business turnover – more than the entire FTSE 100; and in the process accounting for 49% of UK business expenditure and 53% of business tax contributions. SMEs are a powerful force for sure, making up 90% of UK firms and employing over 60% of the private sector workforce. This is where entrepreneurs start their careers, and in recessionary 2010 over 310,000 businesses were started from scratch, a UK record. This is a trend that OECD, in their publication Innovation Strategy: Getting a Head Start on Tomorrow, recognises as it argues that future growth in economically advanced countries must increasingly come  from innovation-induced productivity growth.

So back to the central question, born or made. Academics have tried to study it and inevitable end up settling for the ‘bit of both’ conclusion. Ask Richard Branson and he will tell you it’s in-born, whereas Poly Gowers, founder of Everyclick thinks it was both nature and nurture, being the off-spring of 24/7 work-driven self-employed parents. Sahar Hashemi, founder of Coffee Republic, the UK high street operator, is quite clear: “We all have entrepreneurial qualities inside us. It’s a  question of whether they remain dormant or you find a way to activate them.” And she has some words for those running large corporates: in her latest book, Switched On, she argues the need to find ways of ensuring that the entrepreneurial spirit can flourish inside the corporate body.  And that, like so much else, will need inspired and determined leadership.