The Greatest Leadership Role Model for All Time

To whom do you look to as your leadership role model? Perhaps you’ve studied the leadership styles of Jack Welch, former chairman of GE or Doug Daft, chairman at Coca Cola, or Leo Mullins at Delta or Bob Nardelli at Home Depot. If you have, you are not alone.

Dan Cathy, President and COO of Chick-fil-A says that in his efforts to stay relevant in a rapidly changing world, he like many of us, spent a great deal of time studying these corporate success stories. Cathy says, “All of us need to stay relevant to the world in which we live. When the rate of external change exceeds the rate of internal change, disaster is imminent and we lose a sense of relevance with the organization that we are in.”

On April 29, 2002, Cathy found a new perspective on leadership and relevance in his Christian faith as a result of a brush fire accident in which he suffered first- and second-degree burns. After his son Ross poured five gallons of gasoline onto a brush pile, Cathy struck a match. The vapors ignited. Seconds after being engulfed in a wall of flame, Dan Cathy was on the ground with his face in the grass and a searing pain spreading through his arms.

Writing about the accident, he said, “I lit that pile of brush with fresh gasoline when the fumes were all around me. It could have been not only permanently tragic for me, but also for my son, Ross. But God used this experience to take me into waters; just deep enough to receive a rich blessing from the experience, but not so deep that I was of no use to others.''

While in the hospital, as a nice gesture someone sent Cathy an audio copy of the Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. His wife brought in a boom box and for the next ten days he listened about what the Bible had to say about the life of Jesus. As a result, he experienced a deep conviction over the way he spent his time trying to stay “relevant” by studying the corporate giants instead of listening to what Jesus has to say. He asked himself, “Is He really my leadership model and does He stand up to the others that are out there?”

Ken Blanchard is recognized as a premier thinker and writer on leadership, he has authored or co-authored more than thirty five books including The One Minute Manager, Raving Fans and Gung Ho! Ken lifts Jesus up as the greatest leadership role model and co-founded Lead Like Jesus in 1999 whose mission is “to glorify God by inspiring and equipping people to lead like Jesus.”

Blanchard says, “I realized that Christians have more in Jesus than just a great spiritual leader: we have a practical and effective leadership model for all organizations, for all people, for all situations. The more I read the Bible, the more I realized that Jesus did everything I ever taught or wrote about over the years and He did it perfectly. He is simply the greatest leadership model for all time.”

Setting the spiritual component aside, what kind of leadership role model is Jesus?

As a leader, Jesus set clear goals and motivated His followers to the degree that they left their homes, families and jobs to walk with Him. He altered His leadership style as necessary to meet the needs of those He influenced (situational leadership). He always told the truth, stood up for what He believed, and demonstrated and taught the principles of servant leadership. He always has the best interest of His followers in mind and equips them for success. He touched the lives of many and left us a legacy that continues to have a positive impact on all those who believe in Him. Jesus truly is the greatest leadership role model for all time.

QR Codes Are Here To Stay

Perhaps you’ve been browsing on a web page or in a magazine and noticed an image like the following:

Have you ever seen anything like this before? Do you even know what it is?

This is a QR Code^®, destined to become as ubiquitous as the standard barcode we see on virtually all products we purchase today. A QR Code is a matrix barcode or two-dimensional code, readable by QR scanners, mobile phones with a camera and smartphones. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded can be text, URL or other data. It is two-dimensional because it carries meaningful information in both the vertical and horizontal directions.

QR Codes were invented in Japan and released in 1994 by Denso-Wave, a Toyota subsidiary. “QR” means Quick Response. Their creator intended the code contents to be read and decoded at high speed. Originally designed for tracking parts in vehicle manufacturing, today they are used in a much broader context, including both commercial and convenience applications. It is also the foundation of the modern practice of “Mobile Tagging.” Mobile Tagging is the process of providing data to mobile phones when the QR Code is “read” by the phone’s camera.

In the not too distant future, you’re going to see QR Codes in magazines, on signs, the sides of buses, on business cards, on billboards or on just about any other object where information can be distributed. For example, the image below is a photo of a billboard found in Tokyo, Japan displaying a company’s website URL.

QR Codes are poised to revolutionize certain industries dependant on hand scanners. Their application is limited only by the imagination. I once worked for a major auto parts distributor. The powers that be debated endlessly about distributing barcode scanners to their drivers to track deliveries. The commercially available scanners cost upward of $900 each! Now imagine having to distribute $900 scanners to drivers just to read a barcode printed on a delivery receipt. If the company has 3,500 drivers, the cost will exceed $3.1 million dollars! Since QR Codes can be read by virtually any cell phone that has a camera and there are many, many barcode reader apps available for phones at no cost, the impact to a business’s bottom line can be significant. All drivers are issued cell phones as part of their normal equipment. Place a free app on the phone and use QR Codes instead of specialized bar codes, and you’ve saved your company millions in capital spending.

QR Codes are here to stay. If you want to learn more about the technology, visit QRcode.com. You can also visit the website by scanning the following QR Code with your camera:

If you’d like to play with QR Codes yourself, here’s a link to a handy QR Code generator: QR Code Generator. And again, if you prefer to scan the URL with your mobile phone camera,  here’s the QR Code for the URL:

Do Cell Carriers Need To End “ForceWare” Practices?

You’ve no doubt heard the terms software, freeware, shareware, vaporware, shovelware and bloatware. Today, I want to introduce you to a new term I coined to describe the practice of cell phone carriers who embed unwanted and uninstallable software into their cell phone ROMS. The new term is “ForceWare.”

I am really enjoying my Droid X from Verizon Wireless. It’s an incredibly capable Smartphone. It has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and a compass. It runs on a flavor of Linux known as Android. You can print from it and take photos or stunning high definition video on its 8 megapixel camera. It’s a music player and you can watch television on it. And with the Swype keyboard, I can type faster on it than on my desktop or laptop. It certainly is a technological marvel and a credit to human ingenuity.

The greatest problem I see on this phone and other phones running Android, is the inclusion of ForceWare. ForceWare is a regular topic of discussion on the Verizon Wireless Community forums, often resulting in very long and angrily toned threads. There’s even a petition circulating on the Motorola Support forums demanding an end to the practice. (I’ve never heard anyone ever say they like MotoBlur!)

But what are cell phone carriers supposed to do? They are in the business of generating revenue for their shareholders, aren’t they? Isn’t that the purpose of any business, to generate revenue? The carriers highly supplement the cost of these new Smartphones when you agree to a multi-year contract. They have to recover the revenue somehow, don’t they?

This is where ForceWare comes in. It’s part of the cell carriers’ revenue model. Third party companies pay dearly for the right to include their revenue generating apps in the Smartphone ROM image. The Driod X comes with applications for Blockbuster and CityID, both useless in my opinion. It also has the VZ Navigator app which essentially does the same thing as Google Maps except Google’s app and service is free. The problem with the ForceWare is that you can’t remove these apps unless the phone is “rooted” which voids the warranty, could brick the phone on subsequent OS updates; and loses the support of the manufacturer. “Rooting” is the practice of hacking the phone to give yourself root access to Android.

The arguments against ForceWare remind me of the lawsuits brought against Microsoft and their practice of forcing end users to make use of their software by embedding it into the Windows OS. In Microsoft’s case, it was determined that their practice resulted in unfair competitive practices and they were ordered to allow third party apps top be installed and used as the default apps for browsing and media.

Does ForceWare result in unfair competitive practices? I don’t think so. Even though we’re forced to keep the apps on our phones and we have to periodically endure annoying nag screens, we are not forced to use it or prevented from installing third party apps that do the same things for free. I sincerely doubt the carriers are going to change their practices any time soon unless they are challenged in court in which case the challengers are likely to lose. But until if and when they do, we’re going to continue to see ForceWare on our Smartphones and hear the complaints of unhappy end users.

An iCalendar Tale Featuring Android and the Cloud

"A cloud does not know why it moves in just such a direction and at such a speed...It feels an impulsion...this is the place to go now. But the sky knows the reasons and the patterns behind all clouds, and you will know, too, when you lift yourself high enough to see beyond horizons.” –Richard Bach, author of “Jonathan Livingston Seagull.”

Little did I know that when it was time to upgrade my cell phone, that it would lead to an exciting new adventure navigating the world of cloud computing. How I used to dream of a seamless integration between the calendar on my cell phone and Outlook. Over the years, I’ve tried Palm Pilots, Windows Mobile phones, Blackberries and many more. The problem with all of these legacy technological wonders is that they all relied on synchronization software to make them work. Sometimes the software worked well, more often than not, it didn’t. With the lone exception of the Blackberry, they also required you to be connected to your computer with a sync cable. And if your company didn’t have a Blackberry server, you would either have to sync through Blackberry’s service requiring additional software on your computer or through a sync cable.

It’s different today. I just got a Droid X. It runs Google’s Android operating system. Out of the box, the supplied calendar application automatically synchronizes with your Google account calendar. No muss. No fuss. It just works! And it uses the cloud to do so. It was so easy to set up, I had a hard time accepting its simplicity.

The next step was to look for a way to synchronize the Droid X with Outlook 2010 on Windows 7 x64. The Google Sync application only works on Windows x86. Search as I might, I couldn’t find a free application that allows Outlook 2010 to easily sync with my Droid X and Google calendar. I did find some applications that you could buy, but since I got laid off in December, I’m all for doing things on the cheap these days. Once again, I turned to the cloud. I started thinking about the different calendar formats Outlook supports and checked to see if Google supports the same formats.

Sure enough, both support the .ics or iCalendar format. iCalendar is a file format that allows Internet users to send meeting requests and tasks to other Internet users via email, or the sharing files with an extension of .ics. iCalendar is used and supported by a large number of products, including Google Calendar, IBM Lotus Notes and also partially by Microsoft Outlook.

Setting up Google calendar to synchronize with Outlook is extremely easy. Here is a simple tutorial to get you going:

1. Go to the Outlook Calendar and click the Open Calendar icon on the ribbon bar.
2. Select “From Internet”
   
   
3. The next dialog box asks you to enter the URL of the Internet Calendar. Finding the URL to enter into this dialog is the hardest part.
   
   
4. Go to your Google calendar in your browser. On the top right hand side of the screen select the Settings menu, then Calendar settings.
   
   
5. Select the Calendars tab and click on the calendar with which you want to synchronize. In my example, it’s the one with my email address.
   
   
6. This brings you to the calendar detail page. Look at the bottom of the page on the left side. See the heading for Private Address:? Click on the ICAL icon. This displays the URL you copy and paste into the dialog box in Step 3.
   
   

Now I can enter a new calendar appointment on my laptop in Outlook, on the internet through Google or on my Droid X. No matter where I make the entry, all three systems are updated automatically. Well, let me qualify that a little. Google and the Droid X integrate seamlessly. There are no extra steps to perform for them to synchronize. For Outlook, you have to do a send/receive to sync with Google.

When it comes to cloud computing, I mirror Richard Bach’s sentiment, “It feels an impulsion...this is the place to go now.” You’ll have to agree too “when you lift yourself high enough to see beyond horizons.”

Warning – Serious Uninstall Bug with Broadcom Bluetooth Software

My laptop just got wiped clean! I used the laptop to write my book. It’s gone too. I am so grateful that I backed it up to at least two places.

How did the laptop get whacked? I updated my Broadcom (Widcomm) bluetooth software to a newer version. The install program of the new version runs the uninstall program from the previous version to clean out old files. Unfortunately, the uninstall program doesn’t stop with just the bluetooth software. It wipes out everything on your hard drive. All applications, all data, all documents, the registry, etc. are wiped clean by the widcomm uninstall. This is without a doubt the single worst software bug I’ve ever encountered. Apparently, it’s a known issue that Broadcom has not addressed. Here’s a link to a thread I found on social.answers.microsoft.com.

I was able to boot from my system recovery disk and am running the standard Windows system restore process. It’s been running for about an hour so far. If it doesn’t work, I’ll let you know.

Does Evil Exist?

The university professor challenged his students with this question, "Did God create everything that exists?"

A student bravely replied, "Yes, he did!"

"God created everything?" The professor asked.

Yes, sir," the student replied.

The professor answered, "If God created everything, then God created evil since evil exists and according to the principal that our works define who we are then God is evil."

The student became quiet before such an answer. The professor was quite pleased with himself and boasted to the students that he had proven once more that the Christian faith was a myth.

Another student raised his hand and said, "Can I ask you a question professor?"

"Of course", replied the professor.

The student stood up and asked, "Professor, does cold exist?"

"What kind of question is this? Of course it exists. Have you never been cold?" The students snickered at the young man's question.

The young man replied, "In fact sir, cold does not exist. According to the laws of physics, what we consider cold is in reality the absence of heat. Everybody and every object is susceptible to study when it has or transmits energy, and heat is what makes a body or matter have or transmit energy. Absolute zero (- 460 degrees F) is the total absence of heat; all matter becomes inert and incapable of reaction at that temperature. Cold does not exist. We have created this word to describe how we feel if we have too little heat."

The student continued. "Professor, does darkness exist?"

The professor responded, "Of course it does."

The student replied, "Once again you are wrong sir, darkness does not exist either. Darkness is in reality the absence of light. Light we can study, but not darkness. In fact we can use Newton's prism to break white light into many colors and study the various wavelengths of each color. You cannot measure darkness. A simple ray of light can break into a world of darkness and illuminate it. How can you know how dark a certain space is? You measure the amount of light present. Isn't this correct? Darkness is a term used by man to describe what happens when there is no light present."

Finally the young man asked the professor. "Sir, does evil exist?"

Now uncertain, the professor responded, "Of course as I have already said. We see it every day. It is in the daily example of man's inhumanity to man. It is in the multitude of crime and violence everywhere in the world. These manifestations are nothing else but evil."

To this the student replied, "Evil does not exist sir, or at least it does not exist unto itself. Evil is simply the absence of God. It is just like darkness and cold, a word that man has created to describe the absence of God. God did not create evil. Evil is not like faith or love that exist just as does light and heat. Evil is the result of what happens when man does not have God's love present in his heart. It's like the cold that comes when there is no heat or the darkness that comes when there is no light."

The professor sat down.

Author unknown – public domain.

The New King of Beasts – The LinkedIn LION

In one of the first conversations I had with the Editorial Director of a major publishing house about my book, she asked if I did any kind of social networking or blogging to help self-promote myself. This was back in December of 2009 and at that time I had to say, “No.” My entire social networking experience up to that point was a single LinkedIn account with an unfinished profile and 255 personal contacts made over the course of my professional life. In January I decided to “test the waters” of social networking to see how successful I could be in “building my network.”

The first thing I did was finish my LinkedIn profile and began joining groups. I created a blog on WordPress, opened a facebook account and joined the opennetworker.com website. Actually, I have three more blogs that are identical to the WordPress blog. WordPress is my main blog site and the statistics I’ll be reporting are all from that site alone. The other sites either don’t track stats or don’t make them available.

Opennetworker.com is an incredibly useful resource. Let me quote from the opennetwork.com website:

OpenNetworker.com is THE secret of how to build larger, more diverse, and more valuable networks on the world's top social networking sites.

People who are part of OpenNetworker.com are people like you - people who know the incredible value of being open to new opportunities and new connections.

They are the most helpful and connected people on any social networking site.

By enrolling in the opennetworker service you place you name on invitation lists to any of the major social networking sites you choose. Before you sign up for a social networking site, make sure you are actually a member of that site first. When I signed up, I used the open networker list for LinkedIn to send out my first 1,500 invitations. In one week, I jumped from my 255 connections to over 2,000! Almost everyone accepted although I did have a very small number of bounced invitations because of bad email addresses. About 200 people didn’t respond at all. Opennetworker.com is not free. There is a small, highly affordable annual charge to use the resource.

You may not be aware of this, but LinkedIn has a cap on the number of invitations you are allowed to send out. The limit is 3,000. The real secret to becoming a LION, which is an acronym for LinkedIn Open Networker, is to attract people to you! Three thousand invitations run out rather quickly. After you run out, LinkedIn will increase the number in increments of 500, but getting them to do so is as easy as extracting teeth without anesthetic. As of today, I have 4,756 LinkedIn contacts which gives me a network with over 1.3 million at the second level. Sixteen percent of these contacts are in the IT industry. for someone who has just written an IT book, this is a huge potential market of over 200,000 people!

You may be asking, “How did he build such a huge network in a few short months?” Here’s how I did it. During the month of January I wrote 25 blog posts on an eclectic variety of topics. That month I had 625 readers with 80 recorded on the highest day. I didn’t write any blog posts from the end of January until May 14th. This is when I was writing my book. Even so, I had 186 readers during the quiet months. Since May I’ve had 908 readers to date. This is a total of 1,719 readers since starting my blog. Since I have no way of knowing the numbers the other sites produce, this metric may be significantly higher. For an author this is most encouraging!

Every time I write a blog article, I post a link to it on LinkedIn, Facebook (714 friends) and tweet it on Twitter (236 followers). I also post in various LinkedIn groups if the topic is appropriate to the groups’ posting rules. Always obey group posting rules. I generally see a spike in the number of readers on posting days, sometimes reaching 50 or more. Besides the blog posts, I also answer as many expert questions as I can on LinkedIn and participate in as many group discussions as possible. A polite introduction of yourself is welcome in most groups. Using this strategy I get more than 100 invites per week and build my overall network by over 20,000 per week. I estimate I’ll go over the 5,000 contacts mark by the end of September.

I’ve heard a lot of people stand up at networking groups in the Raleigh area to introduce themselves and mention they only accept LinkedIn invitations from people they’ve met personally. While I understand this is their preference, I believe its not a forward thinking preference. These folks generally fear they’ll be inundated with spam. There certainly is a small percentage of spam that reaches you, but from my experience, the percentage really is miniscule.

Open networking has allowed me to meet people, make new friends and has led to diverse opportunities that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Since I became an open networker, I’ve received invitations to speak, have met some very interesting and successful people over breakfast, coffee or lunch and have had doors open for me that I didn’t know existed. The one common characteristic that I’ve observed of all open networkers that I’ve met is their willingness to help others succeed. If an open networker can open a door for you, he/she will. And so will I.

Lead Like Jesus Encounter Workshop

The Leadership Encounter Workshop

"But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant. And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.' --Matthew 23:11 (KJV)

Overview:

A Leadership Encounter is a one-day workshop in a collegial environment with a trained facilitator and others seeking to Lead Like Jesus. Packed with action-oriented learning and reflection, the workshop closely examines Jesus as a leader and a model while equipping participants to lead as He led.

Whether you seek a relevant and effective model for day-to-day leadership or want to learn more about leadership skills, you will be challenged like never before to look at Jesus in a new and life changing way. Throughout the day-long event, you will not only discover your own personal barriers to effective leadership, but you will also learn about the power of the heart, head, hands, and habits of Servant Leadership.

Participant Benefits:

• A new appreciation for Jesus as a viable role model for leadership in the 21st century
• Insight into the common struggles and strategies of leaders trying to walk their faith at home, work, church, and in their community
• Direction on the path of discovering or refining your leadership point of view
• Meaningful experience with five of the ways that Jesus stayed focused and on purpose with His leadership assignment from the Father
• A feeling of support from a faith-based community
• A recommitment to a better way to lead – with Jesus as your model and the Holy Spirit as your teacher
• Tools to assess your current leadership motivations and behaviors and a method for re-aligning them daily in the way that Jesus would want

Workshop Developers:

Ken Blanchard, co-author of The One Minute Manager, is the co-founder of Lead Like Jesus and is also the Chief Spiritual Officer of The Ken Blanchard Companies, a full-service global management training and consultant company. Ken and his longtime friend, Phil Hodges, co-founded Lead Like Jesus “to inspire and equip people to Lead Like Jesus.” Phil has many years of experience in corporate America but his current passion is inspiring and equipping others to Lead Like Jesus. Phil is also the Chief Content Officer for Lead Like Jesus

To discuss further or plan an encounter of your own, please contact me at vfont@nc.rr.com or 919.604.5828.