Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson lasted just four months before revelations of résumé padding forced him to resign over the weekend.

Best Buy Chairman and founder Richard Schulze exited Monday after directors determined he used poor judgment for failing to disclose CEO Brian Dunn’s personal relationship with a young subordinate, a violation of company ethics that led to Dunn’s departure last month.

And JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is under fire after the investment bank’s $2.3 billion trading blunder that’s already cost a key deputy her job.

• PHOTOS: See some of the most famous CEOs caught up in ethical lapses

Most corporate executives aren’t on the endangered species list and probably never will be. But increasingly, their personal and professional decisions are placing them in the cross hairs of angry shareholders, opportunistic hedge funds, disgruntled employees and even their own boards of directors — making the imperious CEO far more vulnerable to personal, public and corporate missteps than ever before.

“Certainly, anybody who is doing something that can be construed as unethical, immoral or greedy is being taken to task,” says Paul Dorf of Compensation Resources, a consultant to boards of directors.

Ethical lapses such as extramarital affairs and résumé padding were part of Corporate America’s dark underbelly long before the anything-goes era portrayed on TV’s Mad Men, but lies and embellishments are no longer tolerated. Neither, it seems, are cozy arrangements like those of Chesapeake Energy’s CEO Aubrey McClendon, who profited handsomely from personal stakes in company wells as part of his board-approved compensation package until he agreed to end the arrangement under pressure last week.

Excessive compensation packages are getting blowback from investors. In a rare advisory vote, Citigroup shareholders recently rejected a large compensation package for CEO Vikram Pandit. Other CEOs, including Avon Products’ Andrea Jung, have been forced out — or up to a figurehead role — in the wake of poor performance.

Read Full Article in USA Today.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

Think an overseas work assignment gives you a lock on a senior role? Think again—and start packing your bags.

As the process of bringing products to market involves an increasingly global web of commerce, managers gunning for the C-suite should be ready to complete multiple stints abroad. Such double- and triple-dipping workers are in high demand, because time spent overseas develops their ability to manage complex, interconnected operations—skills that just can’t be developed back at headquarters or in one brief foreign assignment, recruiters and human-resources executives say.

“There’s nothing like being on site to see the realities of how business actually gets done,” says Tom Kolder, president of executive-recruiting firm Crist|Kolder. “We’ve seen it go from being ‘nice to have,’ to ‘must have.’ ”

A foreign posting once signaled an executive was no longer vital to daily operations, says James Hertlein, a managing director at executive-search firm Boyden. Now, seven in 10 clients request international experience when seeking C-suite executives or board members; of those, roughly half have recently begun requiring a few years’ tenure in multiple countries, Mr. Hertlein estimates.

Driving the change are chief executives who say they want a headquarters team with practical business skills in almost any part of the world, from finding local partners to anticipating customer tastes.

As Xerox Corp. XRX -0.65% has shifted design, manufacturing and supply work to partners abroad, workers with experience in several regions are best suited to manage those partnerships—for example, overseeing a product from its early production stages in China and rolling it out for retail customers in Brazil, says Tom Maddison, chief human-resources officer for Xerox.

Read Full Article in Wall Street Journal.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

A few years back, I interviewed some of the most successful CEOs in the world in order to discover their management secrets. I learned that the “best of the best” tend to share the following eight core beliefs.

1. Business is an ecosystem, not a battlefield.

Average bosses see business as a conflict between companies, departments and groups. They build huge armies of “troops” to order about, demonize competitors as “enemies,” and treat customers as “territory” to be conquered.

Extraordinary bosses see business as a symbiosis where the most diverse firm is most likely to survive and thrive. They naturally create teams that adapt easily to new markets and can quickly form partnerships with other companies, customers … and even competitors.

2. A company is a community, not a machine.

Average bosses consider their company to be a machine with employees as cogs. They create rigid structures with rigid rules and then try to maintain control by “pulling levers” and “steering the ship.”

Extraordinary bosses see their company as a collection of individual hopes and dreams, all connected to a higher purpose. They inspire employees to dedicate themselves to the success of their peers and therefore to the community–and company–at large.

3. Management is service, not control.

Average bosses want employees to do exactly what they’re told. They’re hyper-aware of anything that smacks of insubordination and create environments where individual initiative is squelched by the “wait and see what the boss says” mentality.

Extraordinary bosses set a general direction and then commit themselves to obtaining the resources that their employees need to get the job done. They push decision making downward, allowing teams form their own rules and intervening only in emergencies.

Read Full Article in Inc.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

A couple of years ago, Yvon Chouinard—founder of the outdoor-clothing brand Patagonia—gave a talk at a sustainable-fisheries conference in Vancouver. He’d been invited to speak in recognition of Patagonia’s longtime commitment to environmental issues and its reputation as a company that manages to churn out profit while minimizing ecological impact. Chouinard delivered his spiel, but he came away frustrated by the surprising ignorance of his audience. “They didn’t know what they were doing,” he says of the seafood merchants. “They had no idea about toxins, about incidental catch. Their customers are all going to want to know this stuff soon. Restaurants will want to know.”

So, despite having zero background in the food business, Chouinard decided to launch his own salmon fishery. Patagonia Provisions, which debuted at the beginning of April, sells packets of salmon jerky ($12.50 for two ounces) next to rain jackets, hiking pants and organic cotton shirts. The salmon is caught in British Columbia’s Skeena River, using traditional equipment that the company describes as “First Nations fish wheels and dip nets.” Chouinard has so far poured $1.3 million into this curious experiment. He isn’t sure when he’ll make it back. “I can’t help myself,” he says. “I just want to show the fishing industry how it can be done.”

Read Full Article in Wall Street Journal.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

High CEO pay is like a zombie that will not die.

And it’s hard to understand why, considering most leadership advice and organizational theory would stop

Courtesy: Galina Barskaya/PhotoXpress Free Images

excessive pay packages dead in their tracks. They put too much emphasis on one person’s contribution, distort decisions, encourage excessive risk-taking, and damage morale at a time when the rest of the company is being forced to cut back.

Study after study also shows that high differentiation in pay between the CEO and lower-level staffers hurts organizational performance. And there is no shortage of outrage over CEOs who get rich whether their companies do well or not.

But social psychology helps to explain why so little has changed — and why not much is likely to, either. CEOs and directors are people, too, and succumb to a number of decision biases.

For one, when decisions are questioned (and decisions about CEO pay have certainly been under attack), the first thing people do is justify the choices which, after all, are part of their identity. This justification and rationalization of past decisions actually escalates one’s commitment to them. In the process of explaining their choices, leaders may not convince their opponents, but they will certainly further convince themselves.

Moreover, research shows that when under threat, leaders and the people who work for them retreat to what they know and do best, a process sometimes called the “threat rigidity” effect. External threats lead to internal rigidity and a resistance to change. Put these two processes together, and ironically, the very attacks on CEO pay are almost certainly reinforcing the status quo. No one wants to feel pushed around or pressured, powerful CEOs least of all.

Read Full Article in Washington Post.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

NOW that the latest round of America’s ongoing “Mommy Wars” appears to be simmering down, it might be a fitting time for cooler heads to consider the substance of the issue that generated all the faux-rage. At issue are Mitt Romney’s recent claims that Barack Obama’s policies have actually been bad for women—specifically, that as a result of the incumbent’s policies, 92.3% of the net jobs lost in America since January 2009 have been lost by women.

“The real war on women is being waged by the president’s failed economic policies,” is how Mr Romney put it. For Mr Romney’s critics, the claim is a cynical gambit: an effort to convince the voters that despite what Mr Obama might say about women’s rights, and despite the fact that some Republicans are inveighing against them, it is the president, armed with his economic policies, who is waging war. Even among Republicans, the claim has been received sceptically. “It just doesn’t sound right,” notes Byron York; most of this year’s voters have been around for a while, that is, and they’ve noticed men losing a lot of jobs too.

This raises two questions. First of all, is it true? And secondly, if it were true, what should policymakers do about it, if anything?

The first question is relatively easy. We can refer to Politifact, which rated the statement “Mostly False“. (This elicited an e-mail from Mr Romney’s policy director asking for a recount; Politifact did review its research in response to the questions raised, and confirmed its initial rating.) Politifact’s reasoning, which I would agree with, is that the statistic itself is misleading, and the causal analysis is incorrect. It’s easy to see where the Romney campaign came up with the figure—between January 2009 (when Mr Obama was sworn in) and March 2012, America had a net loss of 740,000 non-farm payroll jobs, and of those, 683,000 jobs were lost by women. By January 2009, however, America had already been losing jobs for months; between December 2007 and June 2009, men lost about 5.4m jobs, net, and women lost 2.1m.

Per the labour economists consulted by Politifact, then, the numbers show a predictable pattern of job losses during a recession. Men lost jobs first, as the private sector shuddered. The losses for women (who are overrepresented in, for example, schools and civil service) became more noticeable over time, as states and cities started slashing their budgets in response to the recession. In addition, as one wonk notes, Mr Obama had actually asked Congress to authorise more aid to the states, which would have forestalled some of those government layoffs, but Congress declined; so whatever you think of Mr Obama’s economic policies, if we are talking about specifically about job losses among women, Mr Obama, if he had his druthers, would have forestalled more of those losses than Congressional Republicans.

The second question is a bit trickier. If women have been hit harder by economic stresses outside of their control than men, I would argue that that would be a problem for policymakers. I would argue that it would be a worthwhile concern. Unemployment is difficult for those affected, and it has negative externalities for their families and communities. Intractable inequality also has negative externalities: while it’s worse for the have-nots, obviously, no normal person benefits from other people’s struggles. So if some subset of a population is disproportionately affected by a particular problem, addressing it is a worthwhile goal for others, whether the subset is people in a certain region, people who have been working in a particular industry, or people of a certain race or gender.

Read Full Article in The Economist.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

Leaders often perceive innovation as the province of the few, isolated to white-lab coat wearing research scientists or “out-of-the-box” thinking marketers. That’s not right. In today’s quickly changing world, innovation should be a corporate-wide capability.

Isolating innovation hurts a company’s ability to compete. After all, shrinking product life cycles driven by globalization and rapid advances in communications technologies means that competitive advantage is increasingly a transitory notion. Companies like Yahoo! (YHOO) go from darlings to also-rans seemingly overnight. Widespread innovation capabilities improve a company’s ability to incrementally improve today’s offerings and create tomorrow’s offerings.

Further, it isn’t just the way in which companies compete that needs to change; it is the way in which people fundamentally do their work. Think about the rise of communications technologies such as Yammer (the corporate equivalent of Twitter) and WebEx or collaboration tools like Campfire. It seems as soon as you master a new tool, a new one starts to emerge. A corporate-wide innovation capability helps an organization’s employees more readily adopt and adapt to these new technologies.

Companies like Apple (AAPL) and Amazon.com (AMZN) seem to have innovation in their DNA; others like Procter & Gamble (PG) and General Electric (GE) have spent decades developing systems to support innovation. If you are just starting your innovation journey, consider the following three tips.

MORE: How Microsoft grew into a giant

Forming and spreading a common language of innovation.
While innovation discussions often carry mystical tones, innovation is really nothing more than finding new ways to solve problems. But when people define innovation differently, it inhibits an organization’s ability to have productive discussions on the topic. And makes it more difficult to identify, understand, and respond to innovation challenges — or opportunities.

Read Full Article in Fortune.com

Sheryl Sandberg is the chief operating officer of Facebook, a mother of two, and an outspoken advocate for women leaders.

Here’s one more reason she rocks: she doesn’t pretend it’s easy.

“So there’s no such thing as work-life balance. There’s work, and there’s life, and there’s no balance,” said Sandberg in an interview for the Makers series from PBS and AOL, The Huffington Post’s parent company. Sandberg described pumping breast milk while on conference calls at the office during her time at Google.

The Facebook COO acknowledged the difficulties of being a working mother trying to juggle family responsibilities with a high power job. She also shared practical things women — and, importantly, men — can do to help women succeed in their careers and make a challenging situation work a bit better.

Women should choose a spouse who will support their ambitious not only by offering words of encouragement, but by doing half of the work at home, from changing half of the diapers to doing half of the laundry, Sandberg advised.

“The most important thing — and I’ve said it a hundred times and I’ll say it a hundred times — if you marry a man, marry the right one,” she said. “If you can marry a woman, that’s better because the split between two women in the home is pretty even, the data shows.”

Women face two key challenges men do not, Sandberg argued: they experience guilt for working full time, and the more they succeed, the less they’re liked.

“I feel guilty when my son says, ‘Mommy, put down the BlackBerry, talk to me’ and that happens far too much. I think all women feel guilty. I think what’s interesting is I don’t know many men who feel guilty,” Sandberg said. “I don’t know a lot of men who feel guilty for working full time, it’s expected that they’ll work full time…I wonder if there were more shared responsibility if more men would feel guilty too and women would feel less of it.”

Read Full Article in Huffington Post.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

Managing people is a difficult job–so difficult, in fact, that some bosses resort to shortcuts and dirty tricks.

Here are seven of the ugliest management tactics in the business world, along with better ways to handle the challenges. Make sure you’re

Courtesy: Galina Barskaya/PhotoXpress Free Images

following the better example.

Challenge: You need an employee to take some donkey-work assignment that’s way outside the employee’s job description.

A lousy manager … paints a rosy picture of how impressive the project will look on the employee’s resume. Best-case scenario is that the employee will not only do the grunt work, but actually feel grateful.

Better approach: Make it clear that the crummy assignment is beyond the call of duty, that you appreciate the extra effort, and that it’s not going to be a regular thing.

Read Full Article in Inc.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation

Accountability comes from the presence of trust and the absence of fear.

When a manager – or better yet, the leadership team – is both trusted and trusting, others in the organization know where they stand. They have greater confidence in their ability to do the work and in the people they work with. It’s not frightening to take ownership and initiative.

But when you and your fellow managers undermine trust, fear finds a foothold. Being accountable becomes risky. And overall performance suffers.

As a boss and leader, you need to do everything you can to create an atmosphere of accountability. There are also specific steps you can take to earn a personal reputation for being a trusted, accountable leader:

1. Define and clarify roles, goals and expectations. Remove as many unknowns as possible. Be clear about what you know and what you need. Work with your team to define and clarify their roles, communicate them and manage any confusion or conflict. If you are sending confusing or mixed messages, you fuel uncertainty, doubt and fear.

2. Don’t accept denial, blaming, excuses and scapegoating. When things don’t go right, beware the “victim mindset.” First, set a good example and avoid denial, blam­ing, excuses and scapegoating. Second, help others to see that these are not useful responses to mistakes or missteps. Third, listen carefully. Work to understand the system’s role before over-reacting to one person’s behavior.

3. Don’t let department heads and team or project leaders off the hook. When results fall short, team managers often claim that their hands were tied. An inherited staff, a lack of staff, remote team members, and matrix management resulting in conflicting priorities are common woes. But you need to ask, were these limiting elements really a surprise? For team leaders to be accountable, they have to understand their context, think ahead and inform senior management of potential shortcomings in advance. Waiting until trouble hits or targets are missed is a career-limiting behavior in accountable organizations.

Read Full Article in Forbes.com

Good luck.

Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation