Educating Governing Board Members About Cabals

Cabals are very small groups, typically three or four people, who conspire to control, co-opt or undermine organizations outside the normal channels of influence, decision making and policy, usually for pecuniary gain but sometimes out of boredom.

Many people who fall into cabals by association with a ring leader not by intent or conspiracy but the result unfortunately is the same, a pain in the butt and a tremendous waste of productivity to the organization.

During a nearly four-decade long career as a CEO for organizations in three different communities, I gained experience dealing directly with five or six cabals that I know of and several others while serving on other boards. Some were entirely internal to the governing boards, others fronted for outside special interests.

Hey, as Joseph Heller wrote in Catch 22, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”

Here are ten clues that may help CEOs and, more importantly, governing board members for organizations learn to recognize, avoid and disarm cabals:

• Cabals try to avoid processing concerns directly to or through chief executives, preferring end-runs instead that will paint the executive into a corner or in extreme cases behead the organization.

• Cabals prefer opinions, especially their own, to information-based decision making and firmly believe they are smarter.

• Cabals form around a consistent ring leader but members may change over time and even be innocent to the primary motive or ulterior motive.

• Cabals prefer the push and shove of politics to logic or best practices and appear to disrespect organizational codes of ethics and governing board job descriptions.

• Cabals rarely read or don’t read to digest content or for understanding, sometimes for plausible deniability, so they can continue to resurrect the same concern to new faces.

• Cabals disrespect normal channels for giving input or resolving concerns and dismiss any answer, no matter how well grounded, that doesn’t go their way.

• Cabals disrespect and seek to undermine governing boards, sometimes blackballing others or using internal factions and rump sessions or by fronting for outside special interests.

• Cabals can be persistent, trying again and again, often over a number of years, probing for new or unsuspecting board members misrepresenting that governing responsibilities must include content expertise.

• Cabals are equally prevalent among public, private or non-profit sector individuals and sometimes involve a combination.

• Cabals are best disarmed when board members respond by arranging a face to face meeting with the chief executive and then helping the executive report the results to the full board including naming the individuals involved.

Cabals have little fear of being revealed or of participants “paying a price” because, by nature, organizations want to avoid controversy and embarrassment. They are often governed by business people immediately focused on keeping the “boat from rocking,” bored adrenalin junkies stirred by any excitement or controversy and elected officials who are glad to have company given the state of partisan politics.

Cabals are protected most by sound-bite-understaffed-he said-she said-conflict-fueled news coverage that given limitations just won’t be able to distill or pinpoint the reality.

The best way to avoid or quickly disarm cabals quickly is to thoroughly orient board members on how to immediately identify them and redirect their concerns through proper channels.

Trends Underlying A Not So Quiet Desperation

Once again I’ll miss the Travis Tritt performance when the country singer returns to Durham, North Carolina’s historic Carolina Theater next February.

In part, this blog post will try to shed light on a number of conditions responsible for concert attendance being down - or at best flat - in the United States for many years including several high profile closings in the news recently.  In fact, I may be part of this problem.

Hint – the conditions impacting the live performing arts have nothing to do with lack of awareness, nor are these conditions something marketing can resolve.

As I joked with a long time theater executive last week, after four decades in community marketing and cultural and economic development, I don’t miss it for a second.  Empathetically, he noted he will probably never enter another theater when he retires.

The motivation for researching and writing essays from time to time, such as this one (more like a chapter,) are inspired by a feeling of obligation to give back to young people just starting out in my former field, as was so often done for me early in my career.

In this instance, my reason for missing Mr. Tritt’s performance is that it occurs just a few days from when I have made prior plans to attend a performance a few blocks away of The Book of Mormon, thanks to a friend’s season tickets at the Durham Performing Arts Center.

While my involvement lapsed many decades ago, Mormon is my ancestral religious heritage going back eight generations.  Ever since the now-acclaimed musical debuted on Broadway more than two years ago, my niece, a returned missionary, has been singing its hilarious songs.

As I recall, Mormons are known for their sense of humor and poking fun at their culture, but no culture is eager to be in the cross hairs of the geniuses who created South Park.

However, if memory serves me,  Mormons are also resilient and good at turning what may seem a disadvantage into an advantage.

Very telling is that news reports note that the Christian faith (Mormon is a nickname) has even run notices in the performance Playbill distributed to attendees at the door and some attendees have even been inspired to convert. 

However eclectic my personal musical tastes are, they lie far more toward country than Broadway musicals.  But I also spent a now-concluded four-decade career in community destination marketing, in part trying to weave arts and culture of all genres into overall community brand appeal.

This included helping performance venues harvest the 4.5% of visitors who will attend concerts on a trip including just less than a percent for which the performances are even the main reason for the trip.

For those who turn up their nose because the proportion seems small, it is the same as the percentage who participate in festivals or attend sports events or visit historic sites or museums (caution – often enthusiasts inflate this potential by showing it as a percentage of some types of visitation rather than overall visitation.)

Among daytrip visitors to integrated destinations such as Durham, which has long been noted for weaving the arts into its overall destination appeal, the proportion of visitors attending concerts can nearly triple, with 1-in-4 taking in a concert while on trips made for other purposes.

Visitors now make up 70% of attendees at Durham’s seven largest performing arts venues or nearly 420,000 admissions annually, including one venue regularly ranked second or third highest in attendance nationwide and in the top 10 worldwide among venues of its type on quarterly metrics.

Studies of cultural vitality show that Durham’s ability to draw attendance from outside its borders outstrips its comp set and is also 72% greater than the national average, evidence that awareness is no longer an issue.

Overall, if you include performances in venues such as places of worship and schools, close to a third of Americans attend a concert during a given year. But less than 5% attend any one particular musical genre such as country in a given year.  Rock is an outlier, drawing 11%.

Collectively, touring Broadway productions such as The Book of Mormon have 13 million admissions annually, down about 20% from 2010 and 30% from a peak in 1996.

An average of between 30 and 40% attend repeatedly as season ticket holders according to the Broadway League, so by my calculation, between 3 and 3.5% of American adults attend touring musicals and plays.

The problem with averages is that each type of performing art draws from a different demographic.  For instance, particularly in the South, touring Broadway skews much older, much more female, much higher income and overwhelmingly Caucasian, compared to the general population. 

But for me, there is more for me to the significance of Tritt’s visit to Durham.

In 1989, just as I was being recruited to Durham, where I still live, Travis Tritt was one of a handful dubbed as “hat acts” to hit the charts because they often wore hats and they once again steered country music back to its more traditional sound.

Others included Vince Gill, Alan Jackson, Clint Black and of course, Garth Brooks.

These artists stepped into the boots of performers like George Strait and Keith Whitely, who died suddenly that year just as Tim McGraw, another “hatter” arrived in Nashville.  In a few years he was also on the charts, along with two other “hatters” Toby Keith and Kenny Chesney.

But as much as I still listen to these artists today, I must admit I have passed more than once on seeing each of them in concert.

What place-research guru Dr. Richard Florida calls “big-ticket cultural events” are not panaceas to “place-building” because, as he notes in his break-out book on the topic, these events tend to be “one dimensional” and “consume a lot of recreational resources.” 

More indispensible to members of the bellwether “Creative Class” are the more “eclectic,” “indigenous” events that offer a “multi-dimensional” “smorgasbord” where one can go to maximize recreation.

Why?  Simply because they allow people to “modulate the level of intensity” and involvement, to use Florida's words.  For communities seeking to be attractive, it is a both/and proposition, but far more appealing are the latter and that is a hurdle for those operating large-scale facilities.

People turn away from concerts because they require a four hour time commitment, more from daytrip visitors who must commute from other communities.  Often the view at concerts is disturbed by late arrivals or people unable to hold it until intermission or by people jumping up and down or standing to watch, oblivious to those behind them.

Often, even excellent facility or imported sound is a disappointment in comparison to recordings or streaming concerts and there is no way to fast forward past less interesting pieces to favorites.  There is also no way to modulate the cost of tickets, concessions, parking and other fees involved.

These are only a few of the reasons that concert promotion today is about so much more than merely increasing awareness.

I’ll note more of these conditions below but a key influence on the struggles of performing arts attendance is that consumers now have so many other less “mainframe” ways to experience what concerts provide but with better sound quality, flexibility and with the option to tailor to one’s taste at much lower costs.

It is not really the fault of those operating or programing facilities that “big ticket cultural events” appeal to shrinking demographics. But many seem slow to adjust to the findings of numerous studies and analyses noting that merely “amping” up efforts to draw attention is not the solution.

There was a time several decades ago when awareness really was the issue. Many of us involved in community-destination marketing back then worked hard over the 1980s and 1990s to persuade cultural facilities and events to embrace marketing.

Adoption of that advice seemed to break along gender lines.

Female cultural decision makers tended to view marketing holistically, but in general,  male decision makers were very slow to embrace marketing as anything other than advertising, an element already in decline even back then, and now a negative return on investment.

Often this was due to what analysts back then called the “ego effect,”  the same thing that mires so many old-school hoteliers in direct sales.  These are  only two of several elements of a marketing blend and for several decades now they have been the least productive.

Similarly, this is why males more often fall prey to “crony marketing,” seeking advantage and favors based on “who they know” or so-called “power brokers” or seeking through cabals and surrogates to co-opt others into doing their job.

None of which makes for effective marketing.

I presume I was only saved from this fate of gender by early adoption of information-based marketing decision making, but the phenomena is prevalent nation-wide.  While I’ve worked with some of the best in the three cities I served, none were immune.

Several years ago, I was asked to co-chair a joint national panel of cultural and community destination marketing executives.  It was while chairing those sessions that I was first introduced to the growing tendency of some in performing arts to adopt a bullying technique similar to the one long plied across the nation by a few who operate hotels.

Desperate, they attempt through cabals to co-opt marketing meant for the community overall and re-direct it instead to substitute for their own responsibilities.  This led one long-time arts representative on the panel to joke that a reduction in testosterone was in order.

This self-defeating behavior seems to thrive where there is a basic misunderstanding of “roles.”  As one enlightened hotelier put it, community marketing is about tomorrow, marketing individual businesses is about today.

In other words, one is strategic and the other tactical in nature.

Joking about too much testosterone aside, there are good reasons for rising feelings of frustration and desperation among those involved with performing arts and related events and venues.

In addition to circumstances already noted above, the challenges impeding the success of “big ticked cultural events” revolve around several pervasive conditions:

Leisure time is the same as in 1900

While studies show that over the past century, hours worked per employed person in the U.S. have fallen from 2,700 to about 1,600, this doesn’t mean an increase in leisure time, which remains the same as it was in 1900.

In fact, researchers believe “pure” leisure time has actually declined since 1965, especially for women and much of what seems like leisure is really now “fragmented” leisure.

Even on weekends, only an average of 1-in-10 hours of so-called leisure time is available for attending events such as sports or concerts, including travel.

In the meantime, competition for this narrow slice of leisure time is fueled by an ever increasing flood of options that continues to increase exponentially including live concerts streamed over Netflix and via websites.

Leisure activities literally cannibalize each other, leading to desperate hubristic attempts to divert resources meant for overall development, which ultimately undermines a community’s overall appeal.

Over Supply Leads to Dislocation

Economists have long warned that increasing the supply of opportunities to participate in an activity does not lead to either an increase in the proportion of the population who participate in an activity nor the amount of discretionary spending devoted to that area.

Instead, if the increased supply (e.g. performances or performance venues) is not carefully calibrated, a dislocation of existing demand occurs, creating disruption when existing demand is divided into smaller slices.  The same is true of underwriting and volunteers.

This is particularly tricky in a regional context where the balance is even more fragile.  If one community seems to buck the trend, it very well may be that another is being eroded.

Both feasibility consultants and enthusiasts often fail to explain this to decision-makers and those who do are often ignored, especially when zero-sum power brokers are involved.

In destination development, as the old saw goes:

“Everything that glitters is not gold…

For everything you win there’s something lost.”

At the margins, the effects can be invisible for many years but not, if they are looking close enough, to those charged with filling seats and recruiting sponsors.

Access to Opportunity Lessens Motivation

Behavioral economists also know that the more opportunity there is to participate in an activity such as attending concerts, the less urgency consumers feel to participate and more they gravitate to alternatives that require fewer recreational resources.

For instance, it is no surprise that touring Broadway attendance has declined as the number of theaters involved increased.

No amount of marketing or increased awareness will make a difference because it isn’t lack of awareness that is the problem.

It is a paradox that the more opportunity there is, the less urgency there is to participate.  In time it catches up with all venues.

Performing Arts Competes with Baking

According to the Census, about the same percentage of the population attends some type of concert in a given year (including those in schools and churches) as will attempt to bake something in the oven.

As I noted earlier leisure activities are in competition with the broad spectrum of other leisure activities.

Marketing a community to draw visitors can certainly expand the pool somewhat but that dissipates once participation in an activity exceeds the fair market share visitors interested in that activity.

Officials seeking to enrich a community’s cultural vitality should take their cue not from enthusiasts for a particular activity or those with self-interest, but by seeking diversity and balance of offerings.

It starts by asking the organization responsible for visitor-centric cultural and economic development to identify where a community is underperforming compared to its potential and competitors.

Systemic Greed

Performing arts venues in North Carolina will now be required to add a 7% tax to tickets instead of 3% because a loophole has been closed.

Some communities such as Raleigh are a seeking competitive advantage by seeking to again exempt non-profits, creating an unfair advantage.

It is not clear whether those who vehemently objected a decade ago to a menu-approach to visitor related taxes, as those behind a new theater in Durham did, now understand the cost of their shortsightedness.

At the time, a 1-2% tax on admissions such as exists in South Carolina and other states would have been used to finance facility construction and upkeep of cultural facilities.

Now there is a 60% increase in the taxes paid by on admission tickets with none of it earmarked for those uses.

Even though facility operators raise the most fuss, taxes such as this are predominantly paid by consumers, not organizations.

But ticket prices since 1989 when the “hats acts” launched have risen by 400%, more than two and half times inflation, a far greater inhibitor than any amount of awareness marketing can overcome.

Only 1% of all acts now rake in 56% of all concert revenue compared to 26% in the mid 1980s.  This greed has left little room for discretionary consumer budgets to absorb the increase.

The top 5% of performers now take in nearly 90% of all revenue.  Add in special parking fees, $10 cokes and other hidden costs and it isn’t hard to see why it is now harder to motivate the small sliver of Americans inclined to attend concerts.

It’s a problem worthy of desperation but lets not blame it on closing a tax loophole, which for profit-making enterprises will be more than offset by a reduction in corporate taxes.

Awareness is no longer the problem nor the solution for performing arts venues.  Its issues are systemic and go far beyond what any amount of amplified marketing can overcome.

Arts and culture are a type of ecosystem and so is a community’s overall visitor appeal.  Leaving portions under-resourced when new favorites evolve is a formula for predatory behavior and cannibalism that only sows the seeds for decline and erosion of those facilities that make a community unique.

Any cultural master planning for new facilities and events should include a plan for not only what’s wanted but more importantly what’s warranted to fill gaps in cultural infrastructure.

Equally important but almost always neglected, this planning must link a plan to increase resources for upkeep and nurturing of existing facilities when new ones are added.

Cultural planning should at the very least include a plan for obsolescence and moth-balling, or better, adaptive reuse of existing facilities and events to serve a an area of the cultural ecosystem that is underserved.

These are not outcomes that should not be left to predation or “power brokers or the fatalistic churn endorsed by some developers.  And siphoning off community destination marketing resources is not the solution to poor destination planning.

Marketing a community is a role distinct from the responsibility to market individual businesses or cultural facilities or events.

Examples across the nation are legion of the disaster inherent when either role is usurped by the other.

Blackballing Is A Form Of Organizational Incest

“Politics isn’t logical, it’s personal” was the ominous warning an elected official gave me many years ago when he told me I could either look the other way with my organization’s legal restrictions on use of funds or pay with the loss of my job.

I didn’t look the other way and instead kept seeking a win/win solution, but that didn’t stop those bent on violating those restrictions. For them it was purely win/lose. It was personal and all about power.

Given that official’s revelation though, you’d think elected officials would be better at discerning controversies in other realms that only appear to be about money but are usually about something more personal such as the practice of blackballing or cabals.

One of the things that can give any governing board, but especially non-profit boards, a deadly reputation is when, or if, the practice of “blackballing” potential board recruits is permitted or enabled or practiced in any form.

Blackballing doesn’t have to be by secret ballot anymore, it can be done informally through a whisper campaign or a side-comment, but it is almost always deployed to keep people off a board either as retribution for a past position or out of fear of diverse opinions or losing control of a hidden agenda.

Many boards and executives form strong opinions and then look for information and sycophants to support them and blackball those who don’t.

They flunk “real-world 101” according to the award-winning book What Intelligence Tests Miss; The Psychology of Rational Thought by Keith E. Stanovich a professor at the University of Toronto. He identifies key attributes for successful “real-world” judgment and decision making that go beyond IQ, the first two being the “tendency to collect information before making up one’s mind and to seek various points of view before coming to a conclusion.”

The practice brings to mind the immortal words of Phil Everly, “I’ve been cheated, been mistreated” in a song later made even more famous by Linda Ronstadt. Two organizations that I know of blackballed me during the time I’ve lived in Durham. But thankfully I never had to worry about “when will I be loved” during my time here.

The first instance occurred a month or so after I was recruited here to jump-start Durham’s community/destination marketing organization. An organization to which I had belonged in other communities for nearly 15 years didn’t have a Durham chapter because some folks in Raleigh had blackballed Durham by claiming their chapter was “regional,” hoping to perpetuate the myth that these two very separate and distinct communities were just one big place.

Understandably, having me as a member, with my express mission to protect and foster Durham’s identity, would have upset their agenda or been awkward to say the least. Anyway, I didn’t really have the time or desire to commute all over an area twice the size Rhode Island just to attend meetings as they rotated from community to community.

I was also blackballed by a Durham organization that could have used my expertise given their tendency to use tourism as a rationale. But apparently, as sources eventually volunteered, I just had “too much information” at my fingertips and besides powerbrokers, often non-residents, knew from past experience that when facts didn’t support a proposal, I just wasn’t a “go along to get along” kind of guy.

It may have been their loss but I definitely never needed “more meetings” to attend during my now-concluded four-decade career as a community marketing executive. While friends and family know I’m a bit of a hermit, I never went so far as the Groucho Marx quote that “he didn’t care to belong to a club that would have him as a member,” later made famous again by Woody Allen in one of my favorite movies, Annie Hall.

But the temptation to blackball is also why non-profits with self-appointed governing boards should beware of any members with that tendency or even those who might tolerate it. Any credible organization should also be very careful to insulate all qualifications, procedures, practices and policies from this schoolyardesque behavior.

In fact the whole idea of an entirely self-appointed board, either by policy or practice or maybe just from laziness is never a good idea. Like any form of incest, inbreeding always has serious consequences.

Public bodies in particular should avoid funding any organization that tolerates blackballing; and should there ever be a need to identify underlying reasons for any controversies surrounding a funded organization, the composition of its board and how it is appointed along with any evidence of blackballing might be the first place to investigate.

Remember, politics is personal, not logical.

When Stakeholders Get Greedy

There are now 85 destination marketing organizations accredited to the new International standards for community marketing including DCVB, which was among the first two dozen in North America and the first here in North Carolina.

But I know at least one DMO that isn’t going to be accredited any time soon and it is very sad. It’s a destination that was one of the first to organize for marketing the destination as a whole. It also has a very enviable blend of place based, cultural, built, and historical assets.

But instead of preparing itself for accreditation, this destination marketing organization is being slowly but agonizingly cannibalized from within by an unholy alliance of greedy and obviously very uninventive stakeholders bent on feeding on its flesh.

No matter that this destination has been hit harder than most by the downturn, the jackals are too busy ripping it apart to care. It will bleed out before the community as a whole and officials who should be protecting it figure out what they’ve lost.

The formula isn’t new and thankfully it almost never works. One stakeholder, feeling entitled to special treatment, gets greedy and engineers a coup. It’s usually about money. Someone needs money…big money…for a pet project. Someone else suggests the way to pay for it is to get the destination marketing organization to foot the bill.

Another stakeholder who should have put its foot down because it stood to lose out to the imbalance created, panicked and instead of defending what was best for the community, jumped in to grab its share. Yet still another stakeholder that should have been sticking up for the business community is complicit because its aging funding model is rendering them impotent to do much more for the community than to promote itself.

None of it would be happening if Nero wasn’t fiddling while Rome burned.

What’s truly remarkable is how seldom this formula succeeds. And even when it does, once the jackals are sated or the community awakens to see how fast and far its status as a destination has eroded, how far behind other destinations it has fallen in reaping a fiscal yield from visitors…people who care about the destination will rise up, run the jackals out of town and begin the arduous task of rebuilding a true destination marketing effort, free of special interests:

- One that pursues market segments based on potential for that community overall, not any one stakeholder group

- One that brands the community based on its true personality and character, not what one stakeholder group or another demands it should be, out of arrogance.

- One protected from power plays like this.

- One that generates the community's full potential for the business climate and the tax base.

- One interested in striving for best practices rather than self interests.

Any community is only a heart beat from this type of disaster if it ever drops its guard or permits egomaniacs to form unholy cabals of self interest. It can happen anywhere -but not for long. You see destination marketing is based on sound organic principals of community interest…not self interest…there is nothing that can replace it…just ask communities that had to resurrect a DMO.

10 signs to spot these rogue stakeholders:

• Big ego and arrogance


• Personal and Political agendas


• Full of themselves, never listen, because they are always talking


• Zero sum gain...its always about "them" not "us"


• Expert at everything


• Self-righteous and self serving


• Conniving and duplicitous


• Uninventive and greedy


• Make decisions based on who’s asking


• Corner people and groups rather than collaborate

7 Board Member Types To Avoid!

I was very lucky as a CEO. Overall the 35 board of directors under which I served were excellent. But that experience and serving on more than 100 boards myself have identified 7 styles or types to avoid or confront and replace.

Creepers

Creepers can’t tell the difference between management and board governance, waste time second guessing, refuse to abide by job descriptions and try to dilute or hijack the organization’s mission and purpose.

Mad Hatters

Mad Hatters come into board meetings with the hats or responsibilities they have elsewhere. They forget or refuse to put their board member hat on as they enter the room. They typically hijack board meetings or agendas for unrelated or top-of-mind issues or controversies.

AD-Libbers

Ad-libbers refuse to read, especially preparation or background materials. They insist on being spoon-fed the information during meetings, often raise questions or proposals without any context and waste value time to deal with issues or worse taking discussions completely off topic or in a circle.

Water-Carriers

Water-carriers bring outside/hidden agendas into the board room. They are predisposed to cabals and conspiracies, disrespective of the organization’s mission and purpose and welfare. They give cover to dissidents trying to end-run decisions or refusing face to face discussion with management or the board as a whole.

Reinventors

Reinventors cycle the board back through old, unrelated or resolved issues over and over and over, often because they haven’t been reading prep or background materials and as a result eating up valuable time, hijacking agendas, disrespecting decisions and diverting energy, often with hopes of wearing others down.

Myopes

Myopes are myopic or near-sighted, tactical and “little picture.” They can’t see the big picture or beyond that day’s adrenaline rush. They distract boards from a primary duty to be far-sighted and strategic.

Selfers

Selfers go on boards hoping to represent or fulfill self-interests. They constantly try to guide or divert proposals or decisions to their own benefit or the benefit of other organizations and typically lack a moral or ethical compass.

If you find yourself with one of these conditions, do yourself, the organization and the community a favor. Resign or seek therapy. If you’re on a board and see these conditions in others, confront them as a group immediately and directly.

Attributes For Serving On Governing Boards

I became a CEO in my mid-20s, at a very young age, albeit for an organization still in start-up.

Friends have always kidded me that it must have been nice not having a boss for all but a handful of years during my long ago concluded four-decade career.

But I always had bosses.  They were governing boards of rotating directors to whom I was accountable that always included a member or two who didn’t understand or accept that a board only gives direction as a whole, not as individuals.

Even a chair person couldn’t give direction without direction provided by the board as a whole.  Often the most difficult transition for some board members is from the managerial or owner role in their own organizations to one of oversight as part of a group.

Unfortunately, few of us are vetted for even minimal attributes and skills, such as critical and strategic thinking or how to run a meeting before being appointed or elected to governing boards.

An article in the current issue of Harvard Business Review about where boards in general fall short, made me think back to how fortunate I was to have so many great board members given the agendas of some individuals and how and why they were appointed.

Only 16% of the directors surveyed thought the boards they served on understood the dynamics of the industries in which their organizations were involved and only 22% believed their boards knew how their organizations created value.

The community destination marketing organizations (DMOs) that I served were especially complex because they function as intermediaries between external stakeholders and internal stakeholders including a whole sector of different industries.

That a board member comes from one of the front line stakeholder industries is no guarantee they will understand the overall sector, let alone the transcendent purpose of visitor-centric economic and cultural development: to broaden the local tax base while guarding unique sense of place inherent to the communities they serve.

This is why being teachable is an important attribute for potential governing board members.

As the authors note, the two codified core aspects of fiduciary responsibilities of board members include loyalty to the organization, “placing the organization’s interest ahead of one’s own,” which includes outside special interests.

The other is prudence, ensuring that “the proper care, skill and diligence is applied to business decisions.”  The authors note that there is nothing to suggest that the “role of loyal and prudent directors” is to pressure management to maximize” short term interests.

Yet, in my experience, this is what special interests relentlessly seek.   Examples of this in community destination marketing organizations are when elected officials or facility managers try to pressure a DMO to substitute short term objectives such as subsidizing groups to use certain facilities or to fill hotel rooms or and seats near term.

The far more valuable strategic purpose of a DMO is to safeguard a communities indigenous sense of place and to fuel the overall local business climate so as to broaden the tax base.

This generates far greater overall revenues than if used instead to merely close the short term operating deficits of a few public or private facilities.

Organizations with self-appointed boards, unless the nomination process is truly democratic, as in the first two organizations I led, can still be rife with directors there to serve their own interests or those of cronies or cabals.

But publicly appointed boards, such as those I worked under the last half of my career, have their own set of challenges, especially as happened to several of the boards to which I answered, when an elected official or two deliberately pushed the appointment of a board member they hoped would undermine the organization from within.

What would lead a public official to do this?  Avarice.

Unfortunately, very little attention is paid in government to generating revenue, which many officials believe comes only by raising the rate of taxation.  Instead, they spend nearly all of their time focused on spending, or dividing up the pie or even worse shell games.

This is how elected officials or administrators can come to see the short term, such as eliminating the operating deficit on a facility that was always expected to run a deficit as more important than spending that amount on marketing the overall destination which would generate a return of six times that amount.

But short term thinking is not unique to elected governing boards.  It is the same strategic failure that forces many publicly traded companies to sacrifice long term value for short term payouts.

The authors of “Where Boards Fall Short” contend that board members must focus on long term strategy.  They further state that “what matters most is the quality and depth of the strategic conversations that take place.”

Unfortunately, being strategically inclined is rarely, if ever, given consideration when appointing members to governing boards probably because fewer than 14% of Americans are strategically inclined.

The word inclined is used because this is a talent, a propensity, more than a skill, making it difficult to learn or teach.  I suspect, when they are strategically inclined, CEOs spend far more than the 1% to 3% of the time most CEOs do on average with strategy.

Unfortunately, the same is probably true of many governing boards, where members arrive late, leave early and complain about prep time to read materials and reports prior to the meetings, let along delve into strategic conversations.

Appointing or electing governing board members is as great a responsibility as serving on one.  Here are a handful of important attributes to keep in mind:

• 30% of the entire workforce in America is truly engaged.  Half just show up and go through the motions.  Nearly 20% are troublemakers.

Rarely is someone who is disengaged in other areas of their life going to suddenly become engaged as a member of a governing board.  Make being engaged a pre-requisite to appointment.

Beware of organizations who seek benchwarmers.  Appoint board members who are strategically inclined and who will be eager students of the organization’s mission and environment.

• Recalibrate the size of governing boards.  Experts now believe the size of a non-profit board functions best with five members.  Poor governance increases with board size.
• Appoint board members who reflect the values of the organizations.  If that is fund-raising, appoint fund-raisers.  If that is volunteerism, appoint activists.  If that is being information driven, appoint members who understand and appreciate analytics.
• Appoint members who understand and embrace ethics and compliance not people who see ethics only as a boundary to be skirted.  There is a reason compliance is no longer housed in legal departments in corporations.

Most importantly, appoint people to governing boards who are or can be in synch with an organization’s culture, values and mission, who want to move it forward, not pull it back, and who know how to resist special interests including their own individual interests.

A Puzzling Resistance To Change

Dating to the late 1800s, communities began to use so-called non-traditional school years which varied from a tradition established to serve the lifestyles and seasons of the 43% Americans still involved back then in agriculture.

The so-called traditional school calendar is predominantly still in use today even though now only 2% of Americans live on the nation’s 2.2 million farms or ranches with 1% claiming it as an occupation.

Most are still family operations including 96% of crop farms, 700,000 cattle growers like as my parents were during my early years, and more than 80% of poultry growers.  Many of these operations are now part-time occupations and nearly all are much less reliant on the labor of children during summer.

Today, when polls show that the majority of Americans and businesses favor year-round schools, a tiny but extremely vocal minority in tourism stand out as the most outspoken in defense of the traditional school calendar.

This, even though the volume of domestic person-trips taken during June, July and August has fallen to only 17% of overall tourism and 22% of leisure tourism. It’s lower than the monthly average in the dominant spring and fall months.

I could never really understand why so many in tourism began to get so worked up about the length of the school year during the last decade of my career in community marketing. I’ve studied the realities involved more than most, including reading studies commissioned in support.

The arguments are clear enough.  But the downside risks to tourism in terms of lost political and social capital seem to far outweigh any benefits.  I lost that argument here in North Carolina where changes to the school year have been restricted by lawmakers.

Of far greater risk to tourism are threats to sense-of-place such as roadside billboard blight which some defend with similar rabidity even though few tourism businesses and and even fewer destinations still use them in what is now called “desecration marketing.” 

Of greater danger to tourism are small cabals that seem to exist in every community, usually limited to three or fewer individuals.  They typically seek to hijack funds meant for overall promotion to instead offset their own facility or event expenses even though these represent a tiny sliver of why people travel or what they do on trips.

Other than the tiny fraction of tourism businesses involved in purely seasonal tourism, most businesses now support longer and/or non-traditional school calendars because they make employing youth more practical.

Businesses also find longer school calendars are more convenient for the 40.4% households with school age children where women are the primary providers, including 63% headed by single moms for whom juggling day-care and camps during the long summer break a logistical challenge.

Many in tourism seem aloof to these issues or maybe are unaware that even year-round schools are not really year-around.  Families with student-age children still get 40% of the traditional summer free for vacations and travel.

While only 10% of students are in year-round schools, the number of these schools ranges from five in Durham, where I live all way up to 50 in Wake County, North Carolina’s largest system and the 16th largest in the U.S.  In Wake and other places, they have been used to relieve overcrowding.

Nearly 3,200 schools across America are now year-round. This is an increase of 544% since 1987 when measurement first began, following increased adoption by many cities 1970s.  They are typically in session the same number of days with shorter, more frequent breaks than just summer and usually the same number of holidays.

Overall though, according to the National Center on Time & Learning, there are another 1,000 districts in 36 states experimenting with expanding the traditional school day and year as a means of improving outcomes.

Nationwide, polls show that 3-in-4 Americans believe more learning time will better prepare students.  By nearly 3-to-1, Americans “strongly agree” this would be a benefit particularly in high-poverty schools.   The case for expanding the school year is pretty compelling.

There are good points on all sides but is this really where tourism wants to make a stand, rather than make adjustments?  To me, tourism has always been better off adjusting to societal norms rather than trying to obstruct them.

In my experience, far too many in tourism are predisposed to defensively “circle the wagons” over external issues anyway, when the far greater threats lie inside under its own tent or at least closer to home.

Take for example the summer staple of “going to the beach.”  While 39% of the U.S. population lives along coastal shorelines, only 26% of Americans visit a beach in a given year with only 2.4% doing so once a month.  This means they aren’t even drawing from close in.

The length of the school year is certainly not to blame for this under-tapped potential for beach excursions.  But the answer can be found in the fact that a similar percentage of Americans bake food in a given year or frequent a theater to see a concert as go to the beach.

For some time now leisure pursuits, with no thought to over-supply, have been cannibalizing one another, which is a far greater threat than school start dates.

The obstacle that restricts leisure activity participation either at home or on holiday is not some public policy or a failure to make converts but simply competition for time from other leisure activities.  Participation also declines in proportion to what behavioral researchers and economists call increased “access to opportunity.”

This is all to say that the more access people have to an activity, the less urgency they feel to partake.  Beaches and theaters face competition not just from other beaches and theaters but from activities like baking and reading a book.

The time and effort that some in tourism place on telling school districts what they can and cannot do, would in my opinion, be far better spent on innovation, more research and better customer service.

The time would also be better spent on ferreting out those “wolves” within who seek to cannibalize promotional resources and sense-of-place to merely benefit their own narrow interests.

The Essential Life Skills So Many Fail To Learn

Anyone who does hiring should be aware of the book, Mind In The Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs by Ellen Galinsky.

As president of the Families and Work Institute, she also co-directs the now decades long trend analyses entitled, the National Study of the Changing Workforce and the National Study of Employers.

I first came across her work when Ms. Galinsky’s research think tank administered the rigorous national Sloan Awards for Business Excellence and Workplace Flexibility when I worked at the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau, now a five-time awardee.

Her research and analysis of other research reveals that the most important skills employers seek have little or nothing to do with course work, degrees and specialized knowledge.

They are the skills needed to solve problems:

• Focus and Self Control,
• Perspective Taking,
• Communicating,
• Making Connections,
• Critical Thinking,
• Taking on Challenges, and
• Self-Directed Engaged Learning.

At their core, they are all related to what are called “executive functions” skills that we should all begin to learn when we are very young children, such as the skills to “manage our attention, our emotions, our intellect, and our behavior…”

According to resources on “executive functions” at Harvard, in the brain these skills work as an “air traffic control mechanism” that “helps us focus on multiple streams of information at the same time, and revise plans if necessary.”

They begin with learning focus, working memory, cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control.  Galinsky explains that “as we grow older…these skills include reflecting, analyzing, planning and evaluating….” Sound familiar?

These are also the skill sets most crucial to strategy-making.

Researchers believe their development is also key to goals such as reducing drop-out rates and closing various achievement gaps. 

I listened to a program recently and then re-read the transcript that took me back to my childhood and the hours my parents would take to repeatedly go through several big albums of family photos with me.

The time they spent was crucial beyond the photographs.  They were weaving stories and narratives around each image, exercising my working memory and giving me a sense of self and inheritance.

They were also exercising executive function skills such as focus and working memory.  The point the expert made in the interview was it is the weaving of narrative that transcends image volume, a lesson lost in the age of smartphone apps.

I found ironic during my career that far too many reach executive levels or political office lacking “executive function” skills.  So they fall back on narcissistic traits instead.

Everyone who aspires to leadership has a healthy dose of narcissism but most are not narcissists.

True narcissists, by definition, are easy to spot.  They think they are special, act grandiose at times and manifest a sense of entitlement.  Their thirst for power and lack of empathy leads them to play games with relationships ranging from manipulation to exploitation.

Overly narcissistic leaders, and elected officials in particular, struggle with what researchers call “organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB),” the discretionary behaviors such as “civic virtue” and “altruism” that above and beyond reward systems make people stand out within communities, partnerships and organizations.

OCBs were first studied in depth beginning in 1970 by Dr. Dennis Organ who earned his Ph.D. in organizational behavior at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, a few miles from Durham, North Carolina where I live and finished my career.

He then taught and continued his research for nearly four decades at Indiana University and was already garnering attention when I was taking classes in 1972 on organizational behavior from another pioneer, Dr, BilL Dyer at BYU.

Organ’s 2005 book entitled, Organizational Citizenship Behavior: Its Nature, Antecedents and Consequences, was co-written with two other Indiana business school researchers.  It is a classic.

But overly narcissistic individuals find it difficult to grasp or exhibit OCBs, and they turn instead to counterproductive behaviors such as intrigue, forming cabals, blackballing, fronting for special interests, and playing other games.

They are primarily one-way street people.  They get things done by “my way or the highway.”  You’re either on their team or you’re not.

In researcher parlance, “narcissism is negatively related [not linked]
to (a) agreeableness, (b) the willingness to alter self-enhancing behaviors in close relationships, (c) commitment, and related
positively [linked] to interpersonal exploitativeness.”

Studies of “organizational citizenship behaviors” also find that when overly narcissistic individuals do try to exhibit them, usually with a false sense of humility, it is intended for the purpose of managing impressions.

Oh boy!

Overly narcissistic individuals take a huge toll on productivity within organizations and communities by starting fires, creating drama, reinventing the wheel, back-stabbing, second-guessing, foot-dragging, festering conflict and confrontation and meddling with decision-makers and governing boards.

These are behaviors that, as a result, drive up the cost doing business while putting an un-estimable drag on the productivity, time and attention of others especially when they ally with others who fall well up the narcissism spectrum.

By definition, overly narcissistic individuals have little or no regard for how their actions impact other people, which is why their ethical boundaries seem so often in flux.

Without this drag created by the handful that I came across in each of the communities where I did marketing, some of whom I considered friends, who knows?  I might have been able to accomplish twice as much in half the time.

Probing the Pluralistic Small Business Views

Having spent the better part of four decades working with local businesses, one thing I know is that they have always exhibited far more diversity of opinion than represented by the news media or associations portending to represent them.

State and national associations often give a distorted impression to policy makers and news media by disguising that their misuse of the term small business is dominated by the concerns of companies with hundred of employees and tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

Further distorting the views of small business, association legislative committees and related PACs are often hijacked by cabals of narrow viewpoints of formulaic-type businesses unrepresentative of the either the membership or businesses of that type in general.

A quick check of their membership lists or board members, which reporters and elected official seem to rarely do before giving credence to their claims, reveals that most are using the term small business only as a disguise.

What most of us think of as small businesses are now called micro businesses.  These have around 5 or fewer employees.  The majority have annual revenues of $100,000 or less and most never want to grow beyond 10 employees.

They are primarily sole proprietorships, far more likely than other businesses to be locally based with owners living in the same community as their business.  About half depend at first, on another job.  Half are based outside the home as they grow.

About a third of microbusinesses depend primarily on locals for their business but 4-on-10 rely on a mix of locals and visitors including day-trippers from surrounding areas and clients outside the community.

Micro businesses are the backbone and true drivers of local economies.

In North Carolina where I live, micro businesses represent nearly 60% of all business establishments and more than 60% of those considered small businesses overall.

Rarely are they members of local chambers of commerce which today are dominated by much larger concerns many with mid-level executives who are paid to attend meetings, many watching out for special interests.

Chambers often complain that the threshold small and micro businesses can pay to be members is too low to provide the services they need.  In desperate need of membership revenues they turn to larger businesses instead.

Truly small or micro businesses rarely find time away from the cash register for meetings of any type, let alone getting involved in the push and shove of politics.

Their voice is also not found in the positions taken by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (no relation to local chambers) or most state chambers.

Without typically charging a fee, community marketing organizations, most of which are apolitical, usually incorporate all businesses regardless of size under their promotional umbrella.

The handful that still firewall benefits behind outdated membership models continues to shrivel.

Guess which approach is more customer-driven?  These are also the DMOs that are far more effective on behalf of the communities they serve.  Of course, most community marketing organization migrated to or were founded with self-funding models years ago.

That community marketing organizations incorporate small and micro businesses under their tent is significant because surveys show that to grow and thrive, their greatest need, outside of capital, is marketing.

Showing the diversity of opinion among small and micro businesses are two Gallup tracking polls, one with Wells Fargo as a partner which uses a cut off of $20 million in revenues and a new one focused on truly small or micro businesses with Sam’s Club as a partner.

The Wells Fargo definition captures 80% of all business establishments with employees, small to the size of a mega-bank maybe.

The definition for Sam’s Club’s new tracker captures micro business owners which, according to Gallup, represents 80% of business owners overall including the 44% that do not employ anyone other than themselves.  This excludes hobbyists or paper only businesses.

Micro business is now far more representative of the definition of small business.

Showing the pluralism of views among small business owners under either definition is a comparison of views regarding an increase to the minimum wage.

The Wells Fargo index found that nearly half of those surveyed had no problem with raising the minimum wage.  More than 4-in-10 felt it would help most small business employees and another quarter felt it would have little effect.

A similar proportion believed it would have no effect on small business or might actually help them.

Of course these findings escape those in Congress pushed to block the increase by those lobbyists who feign to represent small business there.

Another more recent poll probed much deeper down into truly small businesses, including micro businesses in the state of New York, and found that 74% support raising the minimum wage and indexing it to rise with the cost of living.

A similar percentage agreed that cities and towns should be able to set the minimum wage even higher.

By political affiliation 45% identified themselves as Republicans, 40% as Democrats and 15% as independent or other.

Republicans and Independents who lean Republican may claim they represent business but over time their numbers have included only about 4-in-10 small business owners, just a notch or two different than the ratio of those who identify themselves as Democrats.

Survey findings by associations of the political affiliations of small business members often skew differently depending on the ideology the association uses to recruit members.

But even polls of those that skew right show, for instance, that only 1-in-3 members express concern to elected officials with hopes of reducing and reforming government regulation.

This hardly makes it the hot button issue that legislators in states such as North Carolina claim to justify gutting state and local regulations.

Even polls by those in sympathy show that a far greater proportion of members just want existing regulations to be actively, fairly and evenly administered.

Polls by less ideological associations including pioneers of the micro business definition show that more than 3-in-4 members felt regulations on the books should be enforced, especially those that an even larger ratio felt were important to protect business.

While special interest “whiners” are using pretense to undermine the North Carolina Environmental Bill of Rights that voters embedded in the constitution by a vote of 7-to-1, it is clear they are not representative of North Carolinians in general or those who own small or micro businesses.

Serious members on both sides of the aisle know that any concern about regulations is only solved by energetic, passionate, fair and even enforcement by the executive branch, unfettered by interference by special interests or legislative allies.

Only 20% of micro businesses worry about regulations, a percentage similar to those who worry about taxes.  Of more concern is consumer demand and the rising cost of supplies and materials. 

It is clear that a recent op-ed by a small business owner advocating for a more livable minimum wage is representative of the majority of small and micro businesses.

More certain is that the viewpoints of small and micro businesses are far more pluralistic than the impression we're given.

There is always a tiny nugget to be gleaned. Then go shower.

Before I touch on new research supporting the importance of authentic sense of place, let me touch on one of the ironies from my four decade career as a guardian of sense of place.

It is how much time is required in that profession to defend communities from mainstream tourism interests.

Those drawn to the appeal of sense of place but then from  overbuilding and lack of differentiation brought on by ubiquity, soon begin to cannibalize it instead.

Desperately demanding more and more promotional oxygen to subsidize their responsibility to fill beds and seats, they instead begin sucking away at what is meant to promote the community at large and fuel overall visitation.

During the 1970s and 1980s, it was from convention-related hotels, and meeting or event planners demanding kick-backs or subsidies or facility-driven public officials desperate to obscure deficits when public facilities were no longer warranted.

In the 1990s, it was from mega-event “big-game hunters” intent on subsidies to secure events far too large to fit or held only at times that displaced as much or more demand than they generated.

In the 2000s, my final decade, it was from mainstream events and performing arts facilities which, desperate from overbuilding hundred more than warranted, sought to monopolize attention far disproportional to their percentage of visitor potential, at the risk to less pretentious forms.

If that isn’t enough, there are always one of two elected officials impatient for returns from leveraged visitor spending, who seek to drain away promotional resources.

So why did I love my career so much?

Because communities worth loving as places to live are places people find worthy of visiting.  They are the reason the vast majority of people travel away from their homes at all.

That “authenticity” must be protected and carefully nurtured even during the process of creating awareness and appeal.

Because guarding and leveraging sense of place is also incredibly worthwhile and rewarding.

But I still took time to listen very carefully to those who sought to undermine sense of place, even if intentionally.

Not only was there always a fragment of value to be gleaned but it made me think and reflect more deeply about my own assumptions and the data behind them.

As Dr. Robert Reich recently commented, “there is no better way to learn than to talk to someone who disagrees with you.”

The annual study of leisure travelers who now make up 3-in-4 visitor stays includes indices of areas of importance as well as travel style broken down by generation.

“Nature” scores above 50%, and nearly 65% for “boomers” such as me.

But “authenticity,” the desire for real destinations vs. commercial or mainstream tourism product, is more important across all generations but even more so among Millennials as is “culinary interests,”  engaging in a destination’s arts and cultural assets, and “exploration.”

“Activities,” are among the least important across all generations.

For many communities, this awareness is far too late.  Their sense of place and authenticity has already been hollowed out by preoccupation with mega-facilities and events, mainstream culture and arts, cookie-cutter lodging, formula stores and chain restaurants.

For communities still clinging desperately to their sense of place against the forces of homogenization, the lessons from this report and many others I’ve linked to in essays key-worded as “authenticity,” are clear:

• Focus marketing efforts on unique sense of place assets such as indigenous art and festivals, green infrastructure, historic preservation, organically evolved districts, and locally-owned stores and restaurants.
• Keep mainstream elements in their place while teaching them how to embrace the authentic characteristics of a community.
• Be ever vigilant of the dangers that come with success such as “fear of saying no,” “churn,” “unholy alliances between policy makers and powerful special interests,” and “envy.”
• Forsake those who claim “special knowledge” and relentlessly pursue critical and strategic thinking, differentiation, data and information-driven decision-making.
• Beware of the incestuous deadly sins of complacency and envy of other places.
• Eschew desecration marketing, including billboards, as well as other “yelling” forms of advertising.  Generously invest in the sharing of valuable content, earned attention and respect is the most valuable.
• Religiously foster and protect distinctiveness and carefully guard against decisions that glitter but merely make a community one of many.

And always strive to listen, especially in the face of spittle, condescension, disrespect, anger, drama, exile, character assassinations, bribes, end-runs, betrayals, sycophants, demands and cabals.

There is always a tiny nugget to be gleaned.  Then go shower.

Be fearless.  Communities still worthy of love, still worthy of visitation, and still having a soul will always be worth fighting for.

The Mutterings of A Mixed-Lefty-Omnivert!

As if being left handed weren’t enough to set me apart, I’m also an introvert.  But actually I score as “mixed left handed” in a world that is either 90% right or mixed right handed.  I’m also what organizational psychologists used to call a “high-functioning” introvert in as world that is 60-70% extrovert.  A less pejorative-sounding term is a hybrid or omnivert.

Both attributes crossed my mind frequently in recent weeks. The beginning of baseball spring training, which actually starts in early February each year, is always a reminder that while being mixed handed made it easier to learn to bat equally well from either side of plate, I couldn’t hit a curve ball either way.

Take the test at this link to see where you fall in the population when it comes to handedness. You might be surprised.

Strongly left handed people make up only 2-3% of the population while mixed left handers like me are more common at 7-8% of the overall population. Lefties and left-leaners such as me show up as a slightly higher percentage among school-age children.

Anyone who has taken a Meyers-Briggs evaluation to help identify dominant traits may recall that one of the primary outcomes is to discover where individuals fall on a scale from introvert to extrovert to a mix.  A simple way to remember the difference is:

• Extroverts feed off interactions with other people for energy, including group activities, but feel the most drained when they are alone or doing something solitary.

 

• Introverts (no, most are not shy) prefer interactions with smaller groups of people.  They get drained by enforced social groups.  Either way they need time to recharge with solitary activities.

I’m not sure what percentage of the population is mixed left handed and omnivert, but even before throwing in essential tremor which I have experienced since I was a teenager, I suspect the slice is pretty thin.

I do know for certain though that in retirement, it is clear I am indulging my introvert-leaning trait for the first time since early childhood and loving every minute of it.

Think of my passions such as motorcycling, cross-country travels with Mugsy, learning to fly, walks, reading, drinks or dinners with individuals or small groups of friends and of course researching and writing this blog.

More than 40% of executives are introverts or omnivert hybrids such as me,  but almost any group, including work teams or collaborations outside the office will include a mix and, therefore extroverts and introverts alike would find a new book well worth the read.

Released just before spring training, it was written by Susan Cain and entitled Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking .

Cain notes that “our lives are shaped as profoundly by personality as by gender or race.  And the single most important aspect of personality – the ‘north and south of temperament’ as one scientist puts it – is where we fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum.”

She continues “our place on this continuum influences our choice of friends and mates, (unfortunately, far too often, opposites tragically attract) and how we make conversation, resolve differences and show love…it affects the careers we choose and whether or not we succeed at them…”

For those who don’t or won’t read, and that includes a huge proportion of extroverts, because it is “too solitary and draining,” a TED talk by the author was posted a few weeks ago.  I have worked with folks who are extremely one way or the other over the years.

I have worked with folks who are extremely one way or the other over the years.  I remember one highly effective former co-worker who was so introverted it seemed he could enter or leave a room without even disturbing the air and conversed only to answer questions or say hello.

I have another friend with whom I worked inter-organizationally who, emblematic of many others, would rarely read and couldn’t or wouldn’t use email.  He always used called by telephone and leave voice mails to ask the simplest questions.

When texted or emailed a quick reply, he would still call back to get the answer in person.  He hated data-driven decision making.  He was also a master at misleading others who also didn’t read or retain information to inform decision-making, just as he was often mislead in return.

Lost on him and others like him is the fact that for 30-50% of the population, using email and other forms of written communication permits a person to better form and articulate positions and responses as well as to provide more substantiation for decisions and opinions beyond “whose asking” or the bump and shove of politics including cabals.

Carl Jung, who initiated our understanding of introversion and extroversion in the 1920s, understood that no one is purely one or the other but we have dominant traits and preferences.  He also witnessed the almost tyrannical domination of our culture by extroverts that began during the 20th Century with the rise of the cult of the salesman.

The Internet is changing all of that along with more solid research on creativity and how groups work and don’t work and the origin of ideas, especially as collaborations are less and less reliant on being in the same physical location.

Even Facebook and Twitter, which seem at first glance to be 24/7 platforms for extroverts, may actually be equalizers for introverts because the interactions are so much less draining.

As Cain quips, “there is absolutely zero correlation between the best talkers and the best ideas,” and there never has been. Researchers at the University of Iowa and University of Texas, Drs. Debra Johnson and John Weibe, found that introverts and extroverts show clear differences in brain activity.

Findings, as reported by Molly Mann, show introverts working more from “frontal lobes, the anterior thalamus, and other structures associated with memory, planning and problem solving, whereas extroverts had more activity in their posterior thalamus and posterior insula, which we use to interpret sensory data.”

This is why many extroverts began to struggle or fall behind or out of step when some organizations, such as one I managed adopted internal email nearly a quarter of a century ago before the internet made it ubiquitous.

You could see these folks prairie-dogging or moving from work station to work station delivering “verbal emails” in a desperate attempt to get a face-to-face fix while at the same time creating a burden on other employees who were more rapidly adapting to online collaboration.

Today’s workplace needs a blend of both introverts and extroverts an especially hybrids who are aware of their needs for high levels of social interaction or time to recharge and don’t make those needs a problem in the workplace.

Even in social settings it is just as important for introverts to learn to speak up as it is for extroverts to beware of the propensity to need to be the center of every group’s attention.

Oh, and as far as lefty, righty, just remember that half of the Presidents of the United States since WWII have been left handed and lefty Apollo Astronauts were 250% greater than the overall population.

Either way, it is a good exercise for everyone to switch sides with their computer or tablet “mouse” every year or so just to keep both sides of the brain active!

Betrayal And Resilience

During my long concluded, nearly four-decade career as a community destination marketing exec I made it a practice to organize strategic partnerships, especially during the latter half.

This was both as a means of sharing the experience of the organizations I led with others, but also to leverage synergy that was mutually beneficial to the partnerships and the three communities I represented.

Some were one-off projects with another organization, some involved as many as twenty different intra-community organizations which met monthly and worked to execute strategic initiatives.  Some involved peer organizations in other communities with common values.

But overall, the average partnership involved about four or five organizations.  In common was that all participants were involved with the community I represented as a place or among similar communities.

Also in common is that they were intended to be gatherings of equals, although often as the convener, my organization facilitated.  Frankly, an underlying objective was to preempt predatory organizational behavior.

Initially, the partnerships were organized as a tactical sideline to my job as a CEO, but seeing the results, during the final decade of my career my governing board incorporated it as one of my five weighted overarching performance objectives.

I recall many years ago, a friend and I walked to our cars after a particularly difficult meeting involving a handful of partner organizations.  We had been friends a long time but rarely shared anything as personal as he was about to tell me.

He started by giving me the compliment that I was the most resilient person he had ever known.  Then he said that he didn’t know how I stayed that way when it seemed so frequent that one or more partners who had agreed to align would then betray that agreement.

I hadn’t thought about it, but as I drove away his comment caused me to reflect on how often I had experienced betrayal over the course of my career representing three different cities.  Inside, I felt anything but stoic during those occasions.

Each betrayal marked a momentary low but I realized that by resilient, he meant that I not only bounced back quickly but never retaliated.  Working on mutually beneficial solutions I suppose requires a suspension of disbelief similar to anything reliant on trust.

But I also believe my resilience steadily grew more muscular over the arc of my career.  At least in part, it is a learned trait and I got a lot of practice.

I realized during my reflection that day and periodically since then, that in nearly every instance of betrayal from a strategic partner during my four-decade career, I liked and often admired the people involved.  In some instances they were friends.

In fact, perhaps due to my resilience, after the betrayal they often continued to act as though we were still friends, at least to my face, although rarely did we ever actually clear the air.

A condition of betrayal requires a good dose of denial.

Over the years, I came to learn not to take offense.  In the larger sense, partnership betrayal by others isn’t in any way about you.  It is about them.  More on how later.

Maybe experiencing betrayal is common for anyone trying to achieve objectives through coalitions or partnerships, but this aspect sure wasn’t a topic ever raised that I can recall in management courses, books, conferences or workshops I attended.

Even in studies, euphemisms such as “defection” are used.  Maybe it should be taught and discussed more overtly, and not just in the context of ethics.

Below I’ll get into some things I wish I had known or better understood earlier in my career.

But first, here are some traits of proven and loyal collaborators that I gleaned early in my career from the classic book by noted ethologist Dr. Richard Dawkins entitled The Selfish Gene, followed in 1986 by the related documentary entitled from the last chapter as Nice Guys Finish First:

• They are never the first to defect, if ever.
• They are not envious.
• They are forgiving, not retaliating.
• They have a clear cut understanding of win-win.

I would add after re-reading the book recently, that reliable partners are also able to dissent openly and resolve conflict not only with other partners but with people in their respective organizations who may push them to defect on partners.

Now, in no particular order, based on my reflection and a handful of other studies, here are ten ways to detect those prone to betray alignments and collaborations.

I never became very good as using these observations strategically or to preempt defection.  In my field, you didn’t get to be very selective about strategic partners.

• People who defect see the world through a lens where everything is either their way or your way. To make things happen they believe someone else always has to lose.  They despise tables of equals unless they can dominate.
• Defectors are easily bored, in the negative sense of that term.  They agree to alignments when the stakes are low and only when things are certain.
• They are deeply discomforted by uncertainty about the future.  To relieve this, their goals become their identity which blinds them to any new information or a better or even third way
• They are generalists, prone to perpetual mission creep.  Success at one thing makes them feel entitled to feel expert at everything and to dabble where others do have expertise, again as a means to avoid uncertainty.
• They are narcissistic, not just at the place on the continuum where nearly all leaders emerge but to the extreme, beyond any link to effectiveness leaving a need to constantly self report their own.  
• They have trouble listening unless they are seeking something. They have trouble maintaining eye contact unless they are talking or there is an agenda.
• Uncomfortable with the uncertainty of exchange, they respond to questions with a monologue and often limit social interaction for its own sake unless they can dominate.
• They are prone to cronyism and cabals and often make decisions based on “who’s asking.”  They thrive on the push and shove of lobbying.
• They are prone to “goalodicy,” a type of obsessive groupthink where individuals and groups become so wedded to a goal that they succumb to zero sum, and pursue any means to reach the end as long it is not at their expense.
• In general, this means they are restless, dislike informing discussion with ideas and concepts, because they are obsessed with having certainty or avoiding uncertainly at any cost to others.

During my career, I often used the true story of the Christmas Truce between two opposing units in 1915 during World War I to illustrate that even under extreme conditions, people can work together to mutual benefit.

Small area truces such as this occurred throughout the war when opposing soldiers learned to send and interpret unofficial signals.

But it is unrealistic to assume the same of strategic partners.  During those moments during World War I, many other units intensified the carnage even at the expense of their own troops.

There are definitely parts of my career that I don’t miss.

Finding Myself Still Alive At 30 - Part 1 of 2

When I landed in Anchorage, Alaska thirty-six years ago this summer, I knew what I was in for.  I also knew the reason I had been recruited to complete its fledgling DMO startup.

Still facing my 30th birthday, I had cut my teeth as a DMO exec in Spokane, where business executives had tasked me with separating that startup from the Chamber of Commerce then under a very powerful executive who took it personally and made it personal.

I jumped at the opportunity when Anchorage made the offer for many reasons.

As a good friend put it once regarding something similar that happened to him - once a struggle like that is concluded it is very complicated for anyone in the room who has “blood splattered all over them.”

Possibly this is also what led a later successor to apparently whitewash the history of that organization leaving himself at the center or possibly I failed to leave a folklorist in place (smile.)

But I had already exceeded the average tenure nationwide for DMO execs surprised to find myself still alive at 30 five years seemed like an eternity.

Anchorage found me appealing that due to my Expo ‘74 experience I had a grasp of the far greater potential of tourism beyond just conventions, rare at the time for peers in that profession.

The governing board in Anchorage also knew I had proven to have grit and they tasked me with something even more difficult.  They wanted me to pursue Anchorage’s full share of tourism economy.

That meant gently weaning it out from under the control of then interlocking tourism interests in Seattle and Southeast Alaska but without taking anything away from what had long been the Alaska tourism “establishment.”

As we left the room after our first meeting, I remember telling a member of our governing board who happened to head a major Seattle-based Alaska-focused tour company (who became a good friend,) that to achieve that end, it would take between two and five years, but I might not survive that long.

The easy part was exceeding Anchorage’s fair market share for regional and national conventions.  But even adding in state meetings that segment would be but a small fraction of Anchorage’s visitor potential.

Even back then, the convention and meetings segment was showing some signs of losing steam, what we know today was in fact a long, slow decline as a proportion of overall travel.

The real potential for visitation to Anchorage would be doing something Alaska had never done.

We strategized that the real potential was going after travelers who, with only a few days to visit, wanted to experience the full breadth of what Alaska had to offer without spending two or three weeks jumping all over the state as had been customary.

This was an untapped segment focused on minimizing costs and logistics in what would be the equivalent of a long weekend’s stay but it meant breaking with the tradition.

Instead of the way each community had traditionally been identified for tourism with a particular feature to maximize tourist frequent movement and stay, we would reveal to this untapped segment that all of these could be done in day trips around Anchorage.

Analysis showed if carefully communicated to target markets, this new segment would be value-added to Alaska, and Anchorage could still serve its assigned role as an overnight stop for escorted tours or as a jump-off point for expensive fishing and hunting lodges.

The strategy also included tapping into visitation from Asia and Europe, working to develop stopover visits from air passengers refueling during flights over the pole and opening up winter tourism.

We also sought to persuade cruise companies to add itineraries that came all the way from Seattle and Vancouver into the Port of Anchorage without sacrificing their traditional itineraries limited to Southeast Alaska.

The reason I told our governing board I probably wouldn’t last very long is that back then Alaska tourism was very incestuous and heavily under the influence if not the thumb in some ways of a few Seattle-based businesses.

Alaska tourism had always been primarily about Southeast Alaska because this historically originated with cruise excursions to Glacier Bay organized by naturalist John Muir in the late 1800s.

We knew that when Anchorage ventured outside its designated role as an overnight, it might set off alarms in other parts of the state which would cause some to appeal for protection to powerful allies further south.

We had to try even more than Anchorage already had to simultaneously fulfill our role in traditional Alaska tourism promotion while repeatedly making the case that what we were doing differently was a win/win for Alaska.

Many understood, but suspicions of Anchorage motives ran deep, some with good reason, thus the pejorative at the time that its best attribute was that it was 10 minutes from Alaska (insinuating it wasn’t really Alaska.) 

To build good will, I spent a lot of time on projects that, while they didn’t benefit Anchorage that much, they did other parts of the state.

I tried to make friends and alliances all over Alaska and took time to call and meet with them frequently to allay any concerns burning up the grapevine.

But I also made more than my share of mistakes, many of them really stupid.

“Suffering fools gladly” is not my default, and I made a mortal enemy one day when I told a senior Alaska tourism operative in front of his friends that I didn’t appreciate his off-color jokes, especially those denigrating people of color.

Telling or listening to these jokes back then was a sign of fraternity, at least for the “good ‘ole boys.”  Regardless of how offensive it was, I could have handled that much more smoothly and without humiliating him.

Twice the age I was then, I know now that people can often read what I’m thinking on my face anyway.

But it also didn’t take long for us to begin tapping into Anchorage’s fair share of tourism which we confirmed with research.  The findings contradicted long established “conventional wisdom,” unavoidably stepping on some toes.

The more we tapped into a fuller share of visitor-centric economic and cultural development, the more the Anchorage community wanted us to do even more.

It was difficult not to cross the line, even in a state as gracious and accepting as Alaska.

So sure enough, in my fifth year, right on schedule, cabals of Alaska and Seattle interests began cornering me in private to press for us to step back.  Way back.

Often they would drop the name of a local constituent intimating it was someone over which they felt they had influence or insinuating the threat of losing lucrative contracts.

In hindsight, I should have raised an alarm more vigorously with my board as a whole, but instead, my low key summaries were designed to reassure them I had it under control.

That was a mistake.  Never underestimated the power of gridlock on personal relationships as a trump logic and metrics.

I went to great lengths each time one of these sessions took place, to review the data and how what we were doing was both/and, and not a threat to Alaska’s traditional tourism infrastructure.

But it was compliance not reassurance they wanted.  It only further alienated me from them.  Fueled by success and feeling threatened, looking back I’m sure my intensity and frustration came across with more than a little hubris.

Within little more than a year, a handful formally threatened my board with resignations of membership support (a small part of our funding) if I wasn’t fired and a course change made.

If not they would smear us in the news media.

To be continued…