One of the big responsibilities of an executive coach is to help the client step back to a broader perspective and observe how what he’s doing connects or disconnects with the results he’s trying to get.  It’s helping the client move, as Harvard’s Ron Heifetz would say, off the dance floor and onto the balcony. I don’t know for sure, but based on recent reporting, I’d have to guess that no one is providing that kind of support to Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs. As the Financial Times  thoroughly summarized this week, Goldman finds itself the subject of an unexpected shift from headquarters of the masters of the universe to object of universal scorn and anger over the $17 billion bonus pool it has set aside one year after taking billions of dollars in Federal assistance. Not content to fly under the radar screen (which wasn’t really possible in the first place), Goldman CEO Blankfein recently gave a long interview to the Sunday Times of London in which he said, among other interesting things, that he’s just a simple banker, “doing God’s work.”

Talk about pouring gasoline on a fire. If I was coaching Lloyd Blankfein, there are three basic questions I’d want to ask him to help him reframe his perspective and better align his actions with the results required in this new situation. Ideally, we would have talked through these questions about a year ago. It may too late for them to do any good now, but here they are:

If you happen to have 100 million Euros (about $150 million) to spare, you might be in the market for the yacht, The Why, pictured to the left. Yes, that’s the stern of a boat that was featured in the House & Home section of a recent edition of the Financial Times Weekend. 

As described in the FT, The Why is a one of a kind yacht with 3,400 meters of guest space and an optimal cruising speed of only 12 knots. (You can see more pictures of The Why at http://www.why-yachts.com .)

I’m taking a wild guess here, but I’m doubting that very many of my readers are in the market for a $150 million boat. (I know I’m not!  Not in this lifetime, anyway.)

So what’s the point of all this in a leadership blog?  It’s this excerpt from the FT quoting Pierre-Alexis Dumas, one of the designers of the 12 knot yacht:

For the past four years, the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership has conducted an annual public opinion poll to determine the sector leaders in which Americans have the most and least confidence and the factors behind those confidence levels. The 2009 results have just been released and there are some pretty interesting conclusions.

First, the sectors where the confidence level in leaders are up in a statistically significant way over last year are the military, the executive branch and business. Those that showed a significant decline are medical, nonprofits and charity, state government, the news media and Wall Street. Based on an index where 100 indicates a moderate amount of confidence the only three sectors that scored higher than that level were the military, medical and nonprofits and charity. Of those three, the military is the only sector to score well above 100 on the confidence index with a score of almost 120.

According to the study, there are six key factors that have the greatest impact on Americans’ confidence in their leaders. These factors are:

Something appeared in my inbox this week that sparked an opportunity to follow up on a post from last week – Feedback:  Why You Need It and What To Do With It. As an alumnus and faculty member of the Georgetown University Leadership Coaching Certificate Program, I’m a member of a Yahoo list serve in which all of us in the community share resources and get advice from each other. It’s a wonderful ongoing conversation from which I learn a lot.

Yesterday, one of our members put out a question about how to deal with an executive coaching client who has received some clear developmental feedback from colleagues that doesn’t square with his self-image. As my colleague described it, his client spent his energy in the feedback session comparing all of the constructive comments to his own standards and arguing that everyone offering the feedback should be more like him.

By definition, executive coaches coach executives. Most executives have become executives because they’re smart and focused and driven to succeed. Sometimes, their track record of success reinforces a self-perception that they’re right all or most of the time and that everyone else should get with their approach and program.

Needless to say, it can be really difficult for executives who fit this profile to accept feedback that suggests they’re less than perfect. Here is what I think I’ve learned over the past 10 years about coaching an executive who argues with the clear consensus point of view in their feedback and spends all of their energy arguing about how people should be acting or thinking: It’s important to understand the difference between what “should” be and what is. The fact of the matter is that if, when given the chance to provide anonymous feedback, 10 to 20 people have a consensus point of view on what you need to change to be a better leader, that’s what is. Their perception is your reality. If you get tough feedback and you want to keep your team engaged and on board, you’re going to have to change your behaviors to change their perception.

Earlier this week, President Obama appointed Rajiv Shah to head the US Agency for International Development. The appointment comes after a 10 month vacancy at the top of the Agency and a 40 percent reduction in its full time staff over the past 20 years. Since the effective deployment of foreign aid is a critical component of the United States’ diplomatic and security strategies, it’s important that Shah get off to a fast and successful start in his job.

In spite of his relatively young age of 36, Shah has a background that seems perfectly suited to the role.  He’ll be moving to USAID from the US Department of Agriculture where he has played a number of roles including overseeing USDA’s participation in the global food security initiative. Prior to USDA, Shah worked at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as the director of agricultural development and manager of the Foundation’s $1.5 billion vaccine fund. Shah has an MD from Penn, a masters in health economics from Wharton, an undergraduate degree from Michigan and spent time at the London School of Economics.   It’s pretty hard to argue with those credentials.

Still, Shah is stepping into one of the tougher challenges a leader can face which is leading the turnaround of a highly visible and critical organization. Especially in a political environment, it’s important to get off to a fast and successful start in this situation. What you do in the first weeks and months on the job largely determines the path for success or failure over the longer run. With that in mind, here are a few tips for Dr. Shah or any leader getting started on a turnaround:

First, let me apologize for implanting Subway’s Five (five dollar), Five Dollar Foot Long ear worm in your head for the rest of the day. I hope that you’ll agree with me that it was worth it to learn five lessons about winning support for change from the top leaders in your organization.

The lessons were inspired by a story in the current issue of Business Week on Miami Subway franchise owner Stuart Frankel. He owns a couple of Subways close to Jackson Memorial Hospital and five years ago was tinkering with ways to boost his sales on Saturdays and Sundays. From that, the original five dollar foot long was born. Since then, the sandwich has generated $3.8 billion in sales for Subway and put the company on pace to surpass McDonald’s in worldwide store locations.

So, you’d think it would have been easy for Frankel to win everyone over to such a great idea, right?  Not so fast, my friends. Even though he was raking in the dough (bad pun intended), Frankel had to work hard to convince the top brass at Subway that the five dollar foot long was the way to go. In reading between the lines of the Business Week article, I’ve come up with five (what else?) lessons for anyone who is trying to convince senior leadership to take a good idea and run with it. 

Here they are:

One of the things that I’ve come to count on over the past couple of years is that my blogging friend, Dan McCarthy of the Great Leadership blog will write consistently grounded and practical posts on how to be a better leader. His latest post, 10 Ways to Get the Most from a 360 Degree Leadership Assessment,  is the most recent example of the contributions he consistently makes. If you care about leadership, you need to subscribe to his blog.

As an executive coach, I read through a few hundred 360 degree assessments a year in my company’s Next Level Leadership™ group coaching program. From that experience and the experience of being the subject of six or seven 360’s in the 15 years that I was a manager and executive myself, I know that Dan’s advice is spot on. I also know from talking with my clients and HR professionals that have been around the block a few times that it’s often the case that not much happens when someone gets a 360. From the standpoint of your leadership development and your credibility in the organization, you’re almost better off to not get any feedback at all if you’re not going to communicate and act on what you learned from the feedback. It can be hard to admit to your colleagues that you’re not perfect, but guess what, they already know you’re not perfect. All of us have something we can improve on. By asking for feedback, telling people what you learn and then visibly acting on it, you get better and your organization gets better.

So, with that in mind, I want to pick up on three particular points that Dan made and add a little bit of my own coaching perspective and advice to the mix:

The morning after election day 2009 was probably not a particularly fun one in the White House. As noted in a first rate summary by John F. Harris and Jonathan Martin in Politico, the outcomes of the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races and even the New York City’s mayor race didn’t really go the President’s way. As an historical analysis by Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post points out, it’s important to not over interpret the results,  but one thing about the 2009 election results does seem clear. Voters who identify themselves as independents are looking for  leaders who seem to address the issues that are most important to them. 

As an example, since I live in Virginia, I had a pretty direct line of sight into the governor’s race here.  The winner, Bob McDonnell, ran a very effective straight down the middle campaign centered on jobs, transportation, taxes and government spending. His opponent, Creigh Deeds, seemed to never get any traction on explaining exactly what his priorities would be if he was governor. (See Dan Balz's post election analysis in the Washington Post for more on this.)

In connecting the dots on the different races, I find myself looking for some common denominator lessons we can learn about effective leadership communications.  After all, that’s what a campaign is ultimately about.  In reviewing this week’s results, I’ve come up with four questions that I think leaders need to address either implicitly or explicitly if they hope to win over their followers. These strike me as important questions for any leader – not just political candidates – to address when they’re attempting to mobilize people in a challenging situation. Here are the questions:

In its almost always interesting series, Sunday’s New York Times ran a Corner Office interview with the president of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust. I’ve often thought that because of the range of different stakeholder groups involved that running an academic institution is one of the toughest leadership jobs there is. It was interesting to read what Faust had to say about what she’s learned about leading in this type of environment. Most of the points she made apply to leaders in all arenas  whether it’s academia, the private sector or government.

Here are some of the takeaways (in bold face quotes) I had from the Faust interview along with some of my thoughts about how they apply to the world beyond the Charles River.

Regular readers may recall that I ran a post last week on the leadership lessons that can be learned from not doing what Redskins’ owner Dan Snyder is doing with his organization. In the category of “doesn’t happen every day,” I got a call from a producer at DC’s Fox TV affiliate to ask if I’d do an interview on what I was hearing from fans about the situation. Fox 5 ran the piece on a few of their broadcasts following the Redskins’ Monday night loss to the Eagles this week. Roll the tape:

The next time you’re feeling challenged about how to reach a goal, think of the sailors from the USS Carl Vinson. As reported in the Washington Post,  30 sailors from the Vinson set a goal to make last Sunday's Marine Corps Marathon their first 26.2 mile race.  More and more people are running marathons these days, but not very many have their training space limited to the confines of a Nimitz class aircraft carrier. The sailors from the Vinson were inspired by the example set by their former commanding officer, Walter Carter, a recently promoted rear admiral who shared his enthusiasm for running with his crew.  Carter has left the Vinson for his next assignment but came back to DC to run the race with his men. Through his own commitment to fitness and his and camaraderie with his team, Rear Admiral Carter is the embodiment of what a positive leadership footprint looks like.

I’m honored to report that I got a first hand account of how the race turned out for the sailors from the Carl Vinson when I was one of the opening speakers last Sunday for the Navy’s annual Flag Officer and Executive Training Symposium at a federal training center in the suburbs of DC.  (This is a week long annual event for the newly promoted admirals and their civilian colleagues in the federal Senior Executive Service. )

The speaker that followed me on Sunday was the head of the Navy’s Fitness program. She was there to brief the participants and their spouses on the range of support available to help these leaders stay fit in their very demanding roles. As she wrapped up her remarks, she read from the Post story and asked if Rear Admiral Carter was in the room. He was indeed and reported that all 30 of his sailors had successfully completed the race and that he had finished it in 3 hours and 36 minutes himself.  Bear in mind that this briefing came about six hours following the marathon.  Let it be noted that the admiral did not have the bearing or tone of someone who had just run 26.2 miles in under four hours.  He pretty much looked fresh as a daisy!

There were a number of  things I took away from the Sunday session that I think are worth offering as food for thought for leaders. Let me share three of them here.

There’s an old, old phrase that, “A fish rots from the head down.”  It dates in English from at least 1674 and has probably hung around all these years because it’s true.  The Washington Redskins are one of the latest example of the truth of this aphorism.

Since the NFL season began, I’ve thought of writing a post on what can be learned about how not to lead an organization from analyzing the Redskins’ owner Dan Snyder.  After Sunday’s 14 – 6 loss to the previously winless Kansas City Chiefs that included a safety in the closing minutes, the time finally seems right.  After all, the Redskins have lost to the 1 and 22 Detroit Lions and haven’t beaten a team this year with a winning record.  As the Washington Post has reported, the team sues its fans who have fallen on hard times and can’t honor their ticket contracts.  They have one of the most bloated payrolls in the NFL and week by week, publicly humiliate their head coach Jim Zorn (a classic example of what I refer to as an NGB – “nice guy, but…”) by removing one more aspect of his duties.  (This week it was play calling.)

Seriously, if we can’t learn something about how not to lead an organization from watching Dan Snyder then it’s probably time to move onto another topic.  What are his secrets for leading a rotten organization?  Here are a few that catch my attention:

The range of reactions to President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize has been really interesting to observe.  Depending on which person or group you’ve been watching or listening to, you’ve had the opportunity to witness a full spectrum of emotional reactions from happiness to anger, from satisfaction to surprise.  One that I think is out there but perhaps hasn’t been commented on so much is resentment.  There are those who resent the award because they say Obama hasn’t proven himself yet or that others are more deserving. (Obama himself essentially said as much in his remarks just a few hours after the Peace Prize announcement.)

I think there’s another reason that a lot of people resent the Prize going to Obama and it’s one that has a lot of parallels in countless organizations around the world.  You’ve probably seen it yourself or have perhaps even been the subject of it.  I’m talking about what I call the “smartest kid in the class” syndrome.  Whatever you think about Obama, there’s not much point in debating that he is one highly intelligent guy and has had a lot of success at a very early age. He’s probably the most extreme example I could come up with of the “smartest kid in the class.” 

While we may not be around Nobel Prize winners on a regular basis, most of us have had some experience on one side or the other (or both) of this phenomenon.

With this in mind, I came up with some rules of the road for how “the smartest kids” should handle themselves when working with others who might feel intimidated and threatened by their success:

In the category of “Man, I wish I’d written that,”  my blogging friend Mike Figliuolo had a great post last week called “Ten Reasons Your Team Hates You.”   It was a brilliant piece with so true they might hurt items such as you don’t fight for them,  you micromanage, you’re a suck up and you’re above getting your hands dirty.   It’s gotten a lot of well deserved attention, is definitely worth a read and is a post you’ll likely want to share with others.

So, it was with Mike’s post in the back of my mind that I watched Brett Favre lead the Vikings this week to a 30 - 23 win over his old team, the Packers, on Monday Night Football.  If you follow football at all, you understand why I’m making the connection between Mike’s “Why Your Team Hates You” post and Favre. Even non-sports fans are likely aware and completely sick of Favre’s multi-year act of will he retire or not retire, who will he play for, when will he play, etc., etc., etc. He’s done about as much as he possibly can to make his colleagues skeptical of his motives and intent. And yet, the Vikings at 4 and 0 so far this season seem to be gelling around him. 

If you take the publicity, the uniforms and the bone crunching hits out of the equation, Favre appears to be successfully doing what you’ll likely have to do at least once in your career – stepping in to lead a team that for whatever reason is skeptical of your motives and has their doubts about whether or not you’re the right leader. In spite of all the drama baggage he carries with him, Favre is winning the Vikings over. How is he doing it? Here are a few things he’s doing that I think apply to leaders in fields other than football:

The end of last week brought a couple of mirror image stories about leaders in the world of finance.  The first was the sudden announcement from Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis that he intends to retire at the end of the year.  As reported in The Economist, the B of A board is going to have to scramble to come up with a successor. In contrast is the news coming out of JP Morgan Chase that CEO Jamie Dimon has named a new head of investment banking in what he acknowledges is a key building block of a leadership succession plan.  As quoted in the New York Times, Dimon said, “It’s my duty to the board to focus on succession.  It’s important that we have people trained and tested with experience to succeed me.”

As Joe Nocera pointed out in his weekly Talking Business column, one of the most important duties of a leader is to prepare his or her successor. This is true not just for CEO’s, but for leaders at any level. How do you do it?  Here are five simple yet actionable ideas for preparing your successor:

Any week you can check something off your bucket list is a good week.  This was one of those weeks for me as I checked off a long held goal of seeing U2 in concert. Bono and his band mates are on a six week tour and they stopped at FedEx field here in the DC area to rock the house. Thanks to some really nice long term planning on my wife’s part (she bought tickets for my birthday back in April), the two of us  were there.  I’ve been to countless concerts in my life and (I don’t think it’s just the recency effect speaking here) this one was the best.  (In case you’re wondering what they’re playing on this tour, here’s a very cool web site with the set list and links to performances of each song.)  The show that U2 put on was a combination of rock concert, multimedia extravaganza,  political rally, massive party and religious revival.  And, oh yeah,  anytime somebody is keeping 90,000 people standing up for two and a half hours singing, dancing and completely engaged there’s probably something to be learned about leadership.

While it’s unlikely that most of us are going to be global rock stars anytime soon, I saw some great leadership lessons from Bono and the band that I want to pass on for your consideration.

This is the last of three posts that I’m writing based on some great presentations I heard at the Inc. 500 conference in Washington, DC last week. The primary keynoter for the conference was leadership guru Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great and the new book, How The Mighty Fall. I had never heard Collins speak before and when I found out he was going to be speaking in my hometown zone, I signed up for the conference.  It was the right decision. Jim Collins is a fantastic speaker. He offers incredibly rich and though provoking content delivered with the passion and energy of a world class evangelist.  If you get a chance to hear him speak, take it. You won’t be sorry.

In the meantime, I thought I’d share with you the top 10 to-do’s for leaders that he offered at the end of his two hour segment.  (These are paraphrased based on my notes.) It’s unlikely that all ten will resonate with you, but my guess is that you (like me) will find at least two or three that hit home.  Here they are:

This week I’ll be sharing some insights I picked up at the recent Inc. 500 conference in Washington, DC.  Today’s come from Jet Blue’s founding CEO, David Neeleman who was one of several terrific speakers at the conference.

Lots of people in the United States are familiar with Jet Blue and have experienced the energetic service, seat back TV’s and Terra Blue potato chips that the airline is known for. What may not be as familiar is the story of Jet Blue’s founder David Neeleman and that he is now involved in starting his fourth airline. The first was Morris Air which was a regional carrier that began as a travel agency. In his Inc. presentation, Neeleman told the story of being approached by Herb Kelleher, the legendary CEO of Southwest Airlines, and being asked if he wanted to sell his company to Southwest. Neeleman idolized Kelleher and told the audience that he would have sold Morris to Southwest for a lot less than he did to get the chance to work with Kelleher.  Neeleman hit the ground running at Southwest and started pushing big changes on a number of fronts.  Five months after getting there, Kelleher took Neeleman to lunch at a Ruth’s Chris Steak House in Dallas and told him he was fired because he was just too impetuous. Neeleman told us he cried after that conversation.

Have you ever felt like you were being watched? I’m not trying to induce panicked paranoia here, but if you’re a leader you should be feeling that way. The more senior a leader you are, the more you’re being watched. You need to pick up what I call a big footprint view of your role because, as a leader, your actions have a much bigger impact than you may realize.

That’s a lesson that Linda Hudson learned when she became a business unit president at General Dynamics back in the 1990’s. Hudson, who is now the president of the land and armaments group at BAE Systems, described her first few days as a BU president at General Dynamics in a “Corner Office” Q&A in Sunday’s New York Times. Wanting to make a good impression in her new role, Hudson picked up some new suits at Nordstrom’s and, as part of her ensemble, learned some interesting ways to tie a scarf to complement her suits. She showed up as president on day one looking really sharp. The surprise came on day two when, as she described to the Times, she ran “into no fewer than a dozen women in the organization who have on scarves tied exactly like mine.”

When you’re the leader, people take their cues from you. When you’re aware of it, this can work for everyone’s benefit. If you aren’t aware of your footprint or ignore its impact, you can quickly set yourself and the organization up for failure.

So, with your leadership success in mind, here are five tips for how to successfully live with a big leadership footprint:

One thing I’ve learned in my years as an executive coach is that you can’t convince a leader who is heavily focused on results to work on relationship building skills just because it’s the “right thing” or a “nice thing” to do.  To motivate the client to change, you have to make a direct connection as to how stronger relationship skills will support the client in getting the results they’re looking for. The results oriented leader usually needs evidence of how relationships can help him achieve what he wants to achieve.

So, it was with great interest that I read David Rock’s article, “Managing with the Brain in Mind,” in the latest issue of Booz and Company’s Strategy + Business magazine.  Rock is an executive coach specializing in the connections between neuroscience and leadership. He is the author of Quiet Leadership and the forthcoming book, Your Brain at Work. In his S+B article, Rock opens with the story of recent MRI based research that demonstrates that people who feel rejected or treated unfairly activate the same regions of their brain as people who are taking a literal blow to the head. The brain’s responses to relational and physical attacks are quite similar.

Rock quotes a neuroscientist who says the link between social discomfort and physical pain makes sense  “because, to a mammal, being socially connected to caregivers is necessary for survival.”  In an economic environment where people are naturally worried about the future, this strikes me as a very important thing for leaders to pay attention to. Rock offers a helpful acronym, SCARF (which stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness), which can help leaders better understand and act on the relationship factors that people naturally need to have addressed.  He outlines a number of ideas in his article about how to act on these needs. Building on Rock’s model, I’ll offer a few of my own here:

No, I’m not talking about some schlocky movie that didn’t make it into theatres this summer.  I’m talking about Brad Garlinghouse, a former Yahoo Senior Vice President who was hired this week to be a key part of the leadership team charged with spinning AOL out of Time Warner over the next year. For fans of memorable business communication, Garlinghouse is best known as the author, in 2006, of a memo to the top executives at Yahoo that came to be known as “the peanut butter manifesto.” 

Among other points in the manifesto, Garlinghouse wrote:

“I've heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.

I hate peanut butter. We all should”

His memo, which was eventually featured in a front page article in the Wall Street Journal, was a clarion call for Yahoo to get its act together and recapture its leadership position in the Internet space. That hasn’t happened yet (and may never happen), but the memo set off a chain of events which led to a change in top leadership and the implementation of many of the strategies that Garlinghouse wrote about.

So, as Garlinghouse joins AOL to help lead what is a combination of a turnaround and a start-up, I thought it was worth taking a look at the peanut butter manifesto to see what we can learn about how leaders can influence their bosses through highly effective communications. Here are a few takeaways:

And for this latest edition of the Leadership Lessons Podcast, something completely different. I’m talking today with the Tony Award winning Broadway star Michael Cerveris. Since his Broadway debut in 1993 as the lead in The Who’s Tommy, Michael has been nominated for four Tony Awards including best actor for Sweeney Todd and winning best actor for his role as John Wilkes Booth in Stephen Sondheim’s The Assassins.  His credits are too numerous to mention here but you may also know him as The Observer in the Fox series, Fringe.  This Fall he’ll be appearing in the new film, The Vampire’s Assistant with Salma Hayek and John C. Reilly and, beginning in October, will open at Lincoln Center as one of the leads in In The Next Room.

An impressive career to be sure, but why is Michael doing a Leadership Lessons Podcast?

You’ve no doubt seen the videos of members of Congress such as Arlen Specter and Claire McCaskill conducting (or, more accurately, trying to conduct) town hall meetings on health care reform. This seems to be rapidly turning into the summer of the shouters. My friend and blogging colleague John Baldoni picked up on this trend and posted a solid piece this week on how speakers should deal with an unruly crowd. My concern is that with all of the cable TV coverage of the health care shouters, leaders in other domains may soon face more of this behavior in town hall meeting type settings. The health care town halls feel like the latest example of how the bar for what passes as civil discourse in our country keeps getting lowered.  

So, with the goal of prepping you for leading and communicating effectively the next time you face a contentious group, I want to recap John’s good advice, see what we can learn about what not to do from Senator Specter and share with you a lesson I learned when I had to defend a tax increase to a bunch of beer fueled construction contractors twenty years ago.

One of the questions that I get asked all the time in coaching sessions and speaking engagements is, “How do I work with or influence my new boss?”  That’s a great question because it outlines a situation that most executives are going to face multiple times throughout their careers.  I wrote about this topic a few months ago in a riff on how Secretary of Defense Robert Gates rather seamlessly transitioned from working for George W. Bush to Barack Obama.  (You can see that post here.)

A  couple of weeks ago, I got a call from a reporter who was working on a story about how to influence your boss and found the Gates post online. He was pitching the story to a web site that’s focused on Gen X and Gen Y guys in the workforce.  When he told me the intended audience, my first thought about how to influence your boss was, “Ask for directions.” Of course, as any wife or girlfriend who has been lost with her guy in the car knows, asking for directions is one of the hardest things for guys to do. Getting into why that’s the case would provide enough material for a whole separate blog. So, let me focus in on why asking for direction is my first piece of advice for anyone (not just guys) who wants to influence their new boss.

Here are three quick tips:

Been to a Starbucks lately?  If so, what do you think?  If you’re a long time Starbucker, how does the experience in the stores lately compare with the way things were four or five years ago?

What do any of these questions have to do with leadership, you ask?  (After all, that’s what this blog is supposed to be about.)  Here’s where I’m coming from.

There was an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about how Starbucks is starting a company-wide program to implement the concepts of lean manufacturing to raise the efficiency and productivity of its stores. In a tight economy, it’s understandable why Starbucks or any organization would focus on controlling its costs.