When Tragedy Strikes, How Can You Help?

Posted by: Bruce Weinstein on April 8, 2010

In light of the West Virginia coal mine tragedy, you may find yourself asking, "How can I help?" This question is especially hard to answer when misfortune hits close to home. Well, I’ve discovered a Web site that helps not only those in need but also the people who want to be of service in some way. It's called LotsaHelpingHands, and here’s an example of how it works.

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Management Lessons from a Triumphant Olympics

Posted by: Nanette Byrnes on February 26, 2010

Members of the U.S. Nordic Combined Ski Team won gold and silver yesterday in the sport's final Olympic event. It was the culmination of an amazing winter games for the team, which won medals in all three of the sports' competitions. It was also one of the more amazing turnaround stories of the Olympics.

How Nordic Combined went from dead last in the world in 1988 to regular trips to the podium is a lesson in slow, deliberate growth managers at struggling US companies like General Motors, Delta, or even the New York Times Co., might take a page from.

Tom Steitz, who we first wrote up on the blog last week, took over as Head Coach for the team in those dark days of 1988, inheriting little money or athletic talent to work with. But he set a methodical approach to turning the team around, and set ambitious goals that put it on the path that would lead to Vancouver.

On February 14, one of the skiers he recruited and helped develop, Johnny Spillane won the silver in the first of three events, the first American ever to win a medal in the event. On February 25, Spillane repeated his silver finish in the large hill Nordic Combined, crossing the finish lines seconds behind teammate Bill Demong, who's gold medal makes him the nation's first ever champion in the sport. In between four of the American team, including Spillane and Demong, won the silver in the Nordic Combined team competition.

How do you get from dead last to dominating at the most important contest in the world? Steitz seems some lessons in the team's transformation that can be applied to business. No longer the team coach, Steiz is now a leadership consultant who works for big companies like Johnson & Johnson and Hewlett-Packard. Be he's still a welcome adviser to the athletes, and spent February at the Games.

Here are some of the lessons he learned from Nordic Combined that he thinks apply to businesses looking to win.

* Move the unproductive out quickly - Right away Steitz overhauled the coaching staff and started to hunt for promising athletes who had good team spirit, who wanted their teammates to do well.

* Set big goals, and plan to build to them - Just attending an Olympics couldn't be anyone's goal, Steitz says. They had to want a medal, and every athlete had to be improving whether they were already easily going to make the team or not. Steitz tied those goals to fund raising. He asked sponsors for modest contributions up front, but a promise that they'd give more if the team rose in the world cup rankings. That strategy took them from the worst funded team to the best competing in the 2002 Games.

* Spend time together -- Steitz relocated the whole team and all their coaches, nutritionists and medical staff from all over the country to Steamboat Springs, Colorado. He lost a third of his athletes and staff, but he knew those who stayed were committed.

Not everything from sports transfers to business, of course. A coach will invest 10 to 15 years into training an athlete, Steitz notes, only to find that competitor's age start to slow them down. Corporate managers face a different problem: the chance their great talent will jump ship for another company.

How likely someone is to pick up a headhunter's call is one of the metric's Steitz recommends managers track. And it's one he uses to measure his own performance. Of course there's no goal medal for coaching.

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Vulnerability Paves the Way for Healing (by guest blogger John Baldoni)

Posted by: Patricia O'Connell on February 19, 2010

I hope no executive in a position of authority accepts Tiger Woods’ prepared statement as a blueprint for how to make a public apology. The words were right, but the sincerity seemed lacking for one simple reason. It was designed more for self-protection rather than self-improvement.

Continue reading "Vulnerability Paves the Way for Healing (by guest blogger John Baldoni)"

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Tiger Woods: Finally, He Shows His Stripes

Posted by: Patricia O'Connell on February 19, 2010

Good for Tiger Woods for including his sponsors (including former ones), his foundation, and his employees in his much-anticipated apology.

An abject, ashamed-looking Tiger Woods finally spoke out publicly about--and admitted to--his infidelities and the seismic fallout. He admitted to getting therapy, said that he has merely begun the process of becoming a better person and a better man, and yes, he said the magic words, "I'm sorry." (Actually he said, "I'm deeply sorry.")

While I absolutely think Tiger mismanaged this situation early on by not addressing it sooner, he gets points for realizing that as a public figure, an ambassador for the sport of golf, and as a corporate spokesperson, he owed an apology to all constituencies. He drew a line in the sand between the public and the private selves while doing justice to both. Look, I'm not a golfer, or a particular fan of the sport. I'm not Tiger's target audience for most of the stuff he pitches (or pitched). But that said, I am now rooting for him.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said "There are no second acts in American lives." That's certainly been proven false numerous times, in many public arenas: sports, business, entertainment. I hope Tiger writes one of those chapters now.

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States Face Huge Retiree Medical Shortfall

Posted by: Nanette Byrnes on February 18, 2010

Yesterday the Pew Center on the States painted a dismal picture of the pension and retiree healthcare programs operated for State workers. This is bad news for everyone, because as the center's managing director Susan K. Urahn noted yesterday, these promises will have to be met. That may very well require cuts in other services or higher taxes for all.

As shocking as Pew's $1 trillion tally of the shortfall is, it may actually be sharply understated. The main reason for that is the quickly rising, and nearly completely unfunded, retiree health care bill.

States have a mixed record of funding their pension promises with states like Illinois regularly skipping payments and now holding just over 50% of what it needs to pay out while others, including New York, have been conscientious about their payments. But in healthcare the record's much more uniform, and much worse. No one's put much aside at all, and twenty states have zero saved. Instead they "pay-as-you-go" and each year pay more as health care inflation rises.

The result: more than half of the $1 trillion comes from retiree healthcare.

Even that maybe understating the medical costs. A GAO report published in 2008 cited studies that put the figure at somewhere between $600 billion and $1.6 trillion

Governments may be short changing this healthcare promise because of an impression that pension obligations are more certain, that healthcare could have some wiggle room, says Richard Raphael a group managing director at debt rating firm Fitch. "The pension is a more locked in kind of liability than retiree healthcare where there tends to be more flexibility," he says.

Retiree healthcare promises "were unfunded. They’re still unfunded. and they're Not likely to get funded in this time," says Alicia Munnell, the Peter F. Drucker Professor of Management Sciences at Boston College's Carroll School of Management and Director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

The problem for the elected leaders looking to test that flexibility is that what tax payers won't cover, retirees must take on themselves. So after decades of working for often modest wages, an elderly retired school teacher or court clerk will find that benefit they'd expected to rely on in old age is suddenly gone.

In West Virginia, a state with chronic pension shortfalls and a &7.8 billion unfunded healthcare promise, legislators have made fixing this hole a top priority in the last year.

They have agreed to put some money toward the debt, but most of the savings will come from benefit cuts. In a press release announcing a special panel's recommendations, State Senate President Earl Ray Tomblin said “We need to get a jump on it and on it now, before the liability becomes so large that it literally consumes all our future economic growth.”

West Virginia state retirees began paying more of their health insurance several years ago, a minimum hike of $750 a year says Ernest Terry, a state retiree from Nitro, West Virginia who's been fighting to retain benefits. West Virginia is a notoriously low paying state, Terry says, now his former colleagues are taking jobs at the local 7-11 and Wal-Mart to make ends meet.

"We're under a lot of stress," he says. "One of my tag lines when I’m speaking to the legislature, I tell them, what I would like is for my fellow retirees to be able to eat at McDonalds. Not work there."

Sharp tax revenue declines and budget problems mean more states will be facing the questions West Virginia already is grappling with. "It’s when you get to times like this when you start having to make some of the tough choices, cutting back services, cutting back staff, raising taxes. All of those are very tough choices," says Edith Behr, a senior credit officer for Moody's.

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