Here are some words from Professor James Harvey Robinson’s essay 'The Mind In The Making’

 

Link: The Mind In The Making

 

William James said,

 

 

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Carnegie

 

Both of those quotes were used by Dale Carnegie. The William James quote appears in Carnegie’s 1936 classic, ‘How To Win Friends & Influence People’. [The title says it all.]

 

The key Dale Carnegie message is – Every human being wants to feel important.

 

Carnegie teaches we should not criticize because it will be received as an attack on the person’s need to feel important. And, that need to feel important is a huge, consuming need.

 

Some argue that same need is the thing that causes people to criticize. That is, we act like a mirror perceiving in others the faults that actually are our own faults.

 

Perhaps it is as difficult to refrain from criticizing others as it is to accept criticism from others.

 

I have a saying…work at having thick skin and a thin skull. To the extent we can thicken our skin we can tolerate criticism. Thick skin allows us to contain in safety our self-image and our self-esteem. It protects ‘our importance’. To the extent we can have a thin skull we can be open-minded. We can, as Stephen Covey recommends, “seek first to understand then to be understood”. A thin skull allows us to be tolerant and to appreciate the differences in people.

 

Link to Stephen Covey: https://www.stephencovey.com/7habits/7habits-habit5.php

 

Considering all of this, is there no such thing as constructive criticism?

 

My next blog will be a sample from a series of Sales Lessons, written a few years ago.

Here’s a quote from an article titled ‘Does Corporate Culture Matter? The Case of Enron’, written by A.J. Schuler, Psy.D.

 

“Enron’s corporate culture best exemplified values of risk taking, aggressive growth and entrepreneurial creativity.  These are all positive values. But these values were not balanced by genuine attention to corporate integrity and the creation of customer - and not just shareholder - value.  Because the Enron corporate culture was not well grounded, a single scorecard - maximized price per share of common stock - became its reason for being, and even its positive values became liabilities.”

 

Why was I reading about Enron?

 

2 reasons…

1. We were having a discussion about corporate values and culture.
2. During my energy career we worked with many Enron and ex-Enron people: many personal experiences are still vivid in my memory.

Here’s the gist of our discussion…our conclusion.

 

We agreed, over our business careers many of our failures were consequences of opposed values. We had one set of values. The other folks had a different set of values. And the two sets of values were in [unspoken] conflict.

 

Expanding on A.J. Schuler’s point, the corporate values reported by Enron appear to be positive. The fact is to those values are only positive when they are guided and bounded by certain attributes of character.

 

What attributes of character?

 

A.J. Schuler used the words ‘genuine attention to corporate integrity’.

 

That captures it…as long as we have a common definition of ‘corporate integrity’, we have a common description of ‘genuine attention’, and we communicate our views about integrity accurately.

 

That’s where the devil really does hide in the details.

 

A few years ago, we did a real-life, SouthWestern-Ontario-CEO study of Integrity. If you would like to know the results of our study…email me and I will send a little report to you. Contact Rick

 

My next blog will be titled To agree or not to agree, that is the question.