What MBAs Want

In a recent survey of M.B.A. students at 15 major business schools, respondents listed the factors most important to them in choosing a job. The No. 1 factor was “challenging and diverse job responsibilities.” Compensation came in second, followed by work-life balance.

In keeping with not making money the be-all and end-all, the fourth-most-important factor in a job was “potential to make a contribution to society.” About a quarter of the respondents named this as a priority in 2007, compared with just 15 percent in 2002, the last time the survey was conducted.

Proctor & Gamble

A great Charlie Rose interview with A.G. Lafley, the CEO of P&G, the consumer products company.

He recently wrote a book entitled "The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation".

The principles of innovation include: motivating purpose and values; stretching goals; choiceful strategies; unique core strengths; enabling structures; consistent and reliable systems; a courageous and connected culture; and inspiring leadership.

A game-changer is a visionary strategist who alters the game his business plays or conceives an entirely new game; a creator who uses innovation as the basis for sustaining profitable organic growth and consistently improving margins; a leader who understands that the consumer or customer - not the CEO - is boss; a catalyst who uses innovation to drive every element of business from strategy to organization, and from budgeting and resource allocation to selecting, rewarding, and promoting people; an integrator who sees innovation as an integrated end-to-end process, not a series of discrete steps; a breaker of chains of commoditization who creates differentiated and value-added brands and businesses through innovation; and a hardheaded humanist who sees innovation as a social process and understands that human interaction - how people talk and work together - is the key to innovation, not just technology.

Can't be missed!

Government Credit Cards

Who knew that anyone could do this?

Lingerie, iPods on government credit cards

• GAO: Federal employees charged millions to government credit/debit cards
  
• The charges include: Internet dating services, iPods, expensive clothing, lingerie
  
• The audit also found agencies could not account for nearly $2 million worth of items
  
• Nearly half of transactions made in the 2006 fiscal year were improper
  

WASHINGTON Federal employees charged millions of dollars to government credit or debit cards, according to a Government Accountability Office study released Wednesday.

Those charges include Internet dating services, iPods, expensive clothing, a $13,500 dinner and lingerie to be worn during jungle training in Ecuador, the study said.

The audit also found that government agencies could not account for nearly $2 million worth of items, which included computer servers, laptop computers, iPods and digital cameras.

Nearly half of transactions made in the 2006 fiscal year with government credit or debit cards -- referred to as "purchase cards" -- were improper, the study found, and the audit condemned the government-wide "rate of failure" as "unacceptably high."

The improper purchases were either not authorized or did not meet the government's requirements for using purchase cards, the study said.

Sens. Norm Coleman, R-Minnesota, and Carl Levin, D-Michigan, initiated the investigation into the use of government cards.

"Too many government employees have viewed purchases cards as their personal line of credit. It's time to cut up their cards and start over," Coleman said in a news release about the GAO study.

"The basic rules for authorizing purchases and accounting for goods and services are not that difficult: Use the card for legitimate purchases, not to cover the costs of buying yourself an iPod," he added.

The study used scientific sampling to examine spending across federal agencies, and mined data from purchases made from July 1, 2005, through September 30, 2006. The study categorizes the inappropriate purchases as "fraudulent," "abusive," or "improper."

In the fraudulent category, the most egregious case involved a Forest Service employee writing about 180 credit-card-linked checks worth $642,000 to an individual with whom the employee shared living quarters and a bank account.

"All transactions were undetected by the agency," the report said.

After an investigation initiated by a tip from a whistle-blower, the employee was indicted and pleaded guilty in June 2007 to embezzlement and tax fraud, the study said.

The employee was sentenced to 21 months of prison and was required to pay over $642,000 in restitution.

In another fraudulent case, a postmaster used a government credit card to subscribe to two Internet dating sites, the study said, and the employee also used a government computer to access pornographic sites.

The postmaster racked up $1,100 in charges for the dating services, it said, and "the activity went unnoticed" by U.S. Postal Service for a full year.

After an investigation, the employee paid back the $1,100, the study said. He was also removed from his position.

In a case characterized as abusive, four Department of Defense employees purchased $77,000 in clothing and accessories for service members from high-end clothing and sporting goods stores, including stores such as Brooks Brothers, Talbots and Johnston Murphy, the study said.

The DOD purchased the items to provide service members with civilian clothing while they worked at American embassies, the cardholders said, according to the study.

However, the purchases far exceeded the maximum allowance of $860 per person for civilian attire, the study noted.

In another case, USPS spent $13,500 on a dinner at Ruth Chris Steakhouse for employees who were attending a national postal forum in Orlando, Florida.

The dinner included more than 200 appetizers and the agency paid for about $3,000 of alcoholic drinks, including more than 40 bottles of wine and top-shelf liquor, the study said. It deemed the dinner as an "excessive cost."

Another case, described as a "questionable government need," involved a State Department employee who spent $360 on women's underwear and lingerie to wear during jungle training by "trainees of a drug enforcement program in Ecuador."

A State Department official agreed that the charge, for items purchased from Seduccion Boutique, was "questionable" and said it should not have been approved.

About 300,000 government employees use purchase cards, the study said. The purchase card system, which was established in the late 1980s, was designed to streamline federal purchasing, and the cards are typically are intended for purchases of $2,500 or less.

All purchases are to follow federal guidelines, which include proper authorization and independent receipt and acceptance.

The Scattered Mind

From...

Founders: Overcome ‘The tyranny of the scattered mind’!

from Found+READ by Carleen Hawn

New York Times columnist David Brooks is one of my favorites. Without fail, Brooks’ weekly observations on human behavior transcend his mandate as a political and economics commentator, delivering lessons on leadership, ambition, strategy and failure relevant to anyone — especially founders. (See our post on Brook’s recent column about behavioral breakdown among high-achievers called The Rank-Link Imbalance.)

Yesterday’s column, “Pitching With Purpose” has particular value. It’s about prioritizing task-oriented discipline — above even courage or creativity — to affect change in your work. In Brooks’ demonstration, ‘the work’ happens to be Major League pitching, but as he writes, “it’s easiest to change the mind by changing behavior, and that’s probably as true in the office as on the pitching mound.”

We all have a success dogma that pays mental homage (or at least lip service!) to discipline. Brooks’ writes that this isn’t good enough:

you can’t just urge someone to be disciplined; you have to build a structure of behavior and attitude. Behavior shapes thought. If a player disciplines his behavior, then he will also discipline his mind.

Discipline your behavior. Affect the mind. Affect change. Sounds easy enough…

Brooks refers to the book “The Mental ABC’s of Pitching” by sports psychologist H.A. Dorfman, who forced behavioral regimens on his clients, including “rituals” and “repetition,” to cure pitchers who suffered for “thinking about a thousand and one things up on the mound.” Low and behold, by freeing pitchers of their “mental tyranny,” Dorfman improved their performance, too.

Being consummate multi-taskers, founders no doubt suffer the “mental tyranny” of thinking about 1,001 things, when what you really should be thinking about is only the task at hand (strike zone!).

Happily, there are several tips in Brooks’ essay to help you “free your mind”:

1) Repetition isn’t enough. Sometimes you gotta pretend.

Just as a bike is better balanced when it is going forward, a pitcher’s mind is better balanced when it is unceasingly aggressive. If a pitcher doesn’t actually feel this way when he enters a game, Dorfman asks him to pretend. If your body impersonates an attitude long enough, then the mind begins to adopt it.

2) Re-examine the geography of your workplace.

There are two locales in a pitcher’s universe — on the mound and off the mound. Off the mound is for thinking about the past and future, on the mound is for thinking about the present. When a pitcher is on the pitching rubber, Dorfman writes, he should only think about three things: pitch selection, pitch location and the catcher’s glove, his target. If he finds himself thinking about something else, he should step off the rubber.

While at work, think about nothing but your business-task at hand, or “step off the rubber.”

3) Focus more on your task-effort (which you control), less on responses to it (which you don’t).

A pitcher shouldn’t judge himself by how the batters hit his pitches, but instead by whether he threw the pitch he wanted to throw.

4) Focusing on the (comparatively) small task at hand will arrest diverted thinking about the (comparatively large) ego involved.

A baseball game is a spectacle, with a thousand points of interest. But Dorfman reduces it all to a series of simple tasks. The pitcher’s personality isn’t at the center. His talent isn’t at the center. The task is at the center.

Dorfman’s discipline theory is rooted in his original belief that “it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master any craft — three hours of practice every day for 10 years.” Have you mastered your craft? By his measure, I’m not close to mastering mine, but after reading Brooks’ column, I’m only too eager to “free my mind” and get more disciplined about it.

China on My Mind

Here are a few recently published books about doing business in China... for your reading pleasure and serious professional consideration....


Operation China: From Strategy to Execution, by Jimmy Hexter and Jonathan Woezel

A "how to" manual.


Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India Are Reshaping Their Futures and Yours, by Tarun Khanna

A "compare and contrast" look at the region.


In the Jaws of the Dragon: America's fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony, by Eamonn Fingleton

China has a long term strategy and the US doesn't.


The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash, by Charles Morris

Not about China per se, but about the coming economic meltdown in the US.