Jim Clemmer's Leader Letter

April 2003, Issue 1 ~ Printer-Friendly Version ~ View PDF Version ~ www.clemmer.net

 
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Welcome to the Premiere Edition of Jim Clemmer's Leader Letter!
 

I am delighted to provide the Premier Edition of my first e-newsletter. Don't worry about keeping this electronic copy in pristine shape in its original cellophane wrapping; it likely won't become a collector's item! I will try to send you this e-newsletter once per month. But with an increasingly busy speaking and workshop schedule and my new book, The Leader's Digest: Timeless Principles for Team and Organization Success (see next story item), release this spring, I may slip a little on that goal. So I guess you could call this my Try Monthly e-newsletter!

The Leader Letter is a complimentary newsletter. My goal is to make it worth much more than you're paying for it. I'll try my best to make it a very good for nothing newsletter. I want to use the Leader Letter to stay in touch with readers of my five books (there are about 300,000 in print), visitors to our web site (we get over 35,000 visitors per month now), the people I speak to at conferences, participants in my workshops, the management teams I work with, and people I meet on airplanes, at meetings, or wherever. You are receiving this newsletter because you fit one of those categories. We expect this to be the only communication you'll receive from The CLEMMER Group from now on. If you consider this to be one more piece of junk mail that you'd rather not get, just hit reply and let me know in the subject line, and you'll never hear from us again.

 The Leader's Digest: Timeless Principles for Team and Organization Success - Just Published!!
 
Jim Clemmer signing The Leader's Digest
Over 1000 copies to go!
(click to enlarge)

At this point, copies of The Leader's Digest had just arrived and I have started signing over 1,000 copies of them in my office to fulfill our pre-publication special offer of two signed books for the price of one. I am excited and charged up.

How many more?!
(click to enlarge)
Jim Clemmer, after signing hundreds of The Leader's Digest

Later that day and especially the next, as my arm and shoulder began to throb, I wasn't grinning nearly as much.Those words on my favorite weekend sweatshirt (So Many Books, So Little Time) started to take on a whole new meaning.

Our two books for the price of one offer is still available for the next while (click for details www.clemmer.net/books/tld_241.shtml). However, these will be unsigned since my arm and shoulder do need a rest.

I have been asked if the arrival of my fifth book (technically this is my seventh since Firing on All Cylinders was expanded and totally rewritten for the second edition, and we produced an extensive workbook for The VIP Strategy: Leadership Skills for Exceptional Performance) starts to become routine and is less exciting. Like first love or a first child, a first book is charged with novelty and high excitement. But like the arrival of any child, each one is special. The fifth (or seventh) is no less a welcome addition to a growing family.

When we sent out the announcement about The Leader's Digest in February, I said that after months of hard labor it was a bit like giving birth. One woman gave me feedback objecting to a man making that comparison. Point taken. Obviously I have never personally gone through giving birth. I talked this feedback over with my wife, Heather, who has been deeply involved with the conception, labor, and delivery of all my books. The Leader's Digest was especially challenging for us because we ran into a big wall of new problems getting permission to use material from other sources. In all my past books, we never encountered any problems.

In the past few years, the publishing industry has changed and publishers have put huge restrictions on use of their material as well as charging, in some cases, astronomical fees. So we had to make numerous changes and revisions that we've never had to make before (with both Firing on all Cylinders and Pathways to Performance I used many times more material from other publishers with not one permission problem). After going through many weeks of huge amounts of extra work and major pain, Heather declared that giving birth to our three kids was easier!

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Jim Clemmer's Leadership WheelI am very excited about The Leader's Digest because it expands upon our Leadership Wheel model and the approach of Growing the Distance: Timeless Principles for Personal, Career, and Family Success. When we published Growing the Distance in 1999, I felt that this book was by far the most fun to write and most closely reflected my quirky humor (a few Dad Jokes did slip in), stories and experiences, and personal philosophies. It was a very personal book using our newly developed Leadership Wheel. There are now close 100,000 copies of Growing the Distance in print. In the last few years I have been gratified to get continuous feedback on how the book has helped so many people, across a wide range of ages and occupations (you can view some of the letters and messages I have received at www.clemmer.net/books/gtd_feedb.shtml). Most of my speaking engagements and workshops have built upon or used the book and the Leadership Wheel in some way with ever stronger results and feedback.

In addition to the content of Growing the Distance, I continually get very positive feedback on its magazine style format. I call it a browser's digest. Readers really like the short, modular sections with snappy headlines and introductory headings, story sidebars, pithy quotes, supported by the main text. This allows for "grazing" or in depth reading according to the interest areas, focus, or available time of each reader.

So it was a no-brainer to write The Leader's Digest in the same format again using the Leadership Wheel as the supporting structure for the book. Where Growing the Distance is about personal leadership, The Leader's Digest is for leading others. I hope readers find them to be the dynamic duo of leadership development. I have tried to fill The Leader's Digest with similar humor, stories and experiences, and personal philosophies. I sure would like readers to enjoy reading the book as much I enjoyed writing it. The one difference with The Leader's Digest from its older twin, Growing the Distance, is that this book has more research and contemporary material supporting the leadership approaches outlined there.

To get an overview of The Leader's Digest, see the pages of the Introduction and Chapter One, look at the Table of Contents, review feedback on it, or get further information on our introductory 'two for one' offer (which will end soon), go to www.clemmer.net/books/tld.shtml.

I have been very gratified by the early feedback I have had on the book. I sent review copies of the emerging book to a number of people. I was especially delighted to get a very positive comment from the grand sage of leadership, Warren Bennis. I have long learned from his dozens of leadership books and pioneering work as Distinguished Professor of Business at University of Southern California. After reviewing The Leader's Digest, he said, "If you're looking for a book that illuminates the topic of leadership in a useful, readable and lively way, this is it."

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 Our Web Site Has Been Totally Renovated
 

Our New Web Site
Hands full with the web site and trusty assistants,
Oscar and Willie!

Our Digital Diva, Julie Gil, has once again worked her magic (and burned some midnight oil) with a complete makeover of our web site. If you haven't been there lately, check out Julie's wizardry at www.clemmer.net. Julie is one of those unbelievably valuable management team members that exemplifies leadership, continuous growth, creativity, and high technical competence. For the past six years, Heather and I continually put her near the top of our CLEMMER Group blessings list! We try hard to treat her very well and want to keep her around for a long time to come!

The revamp of our web site coincides with the launch of the Leader Letter. Both share a desire to provide less of a corporate look and more of a personal touch to our work. My main area of expertise and deep interest is leadership. Leadership is about stories, personalities, characters and characteristics, feelings, and personal connections. That's what we want to much better reflect with our website and the Leader Letter.

Our redesign is also aimed at streamlining what's become a huge site. We have grown to over 1,000 pages of information. We hope the new web site layout, new content, and navigation bars will more clearly help our growing number of visitors find what they are interested in quickly. My goal continues to be creating a destination site that is packed with information and inspiration. We hope people will stay and have a good browse around, learn, grow, be inspired, keep coming back, and recommend the site to many friends and colleagues. We hope that lots of other high value sites on the Internet continue finding us and connecting to our growing content. We also want all the newsletters, e-zines, print magazines, newspapers, and other media continue to reproducing my work in their publications.

We've debated long and hard about whether we should charge for some parts of the site (especially the 250 columns, articles, and excerpts), our Improvement Points subscription service, and now this newsletter. Creating and maintaining all this is very costly. At this point, visitors are buying enough books and booking me or our associates through the site to fund our fully free model. Please do your part by buying books, booking me, or referring others! I'll stop now before this turns into a public television pledge drive...

Send Julie your feedback and suggestions on our new web site at [email protected].

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 Key Notes from My Keynotes
 

Keynote speaking is in the midst of a major transition reflecting the larger customer-is-in-control forces at work in our society. Not too many years ago, a well known keynote speaker proudly declared, "I don't change my speech, I just change my audiences." Old fashioned shades of Henry Ford's often quoted comment that his customers could have any color Model T they wanted as long as it was black. Just as customers today demand "just in time, just for me," audiences are losing patience with speakers obviously taking a "if this is Tuesday this must be Calgary" approach to "the gig" (a term I detest). The most powerful keynote presentations today are well researched, relevant, and tailored to the audience's industry, organization, or profession.

I have been delivering paid keynote presentations at association or industry conferences and organizational meetings since 1985. I have been a member of the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers for the past few years and just recently joined the national Board of Directors. This membership has led me to attend National Speakers Association conferences and workshops throughout the U.S. and the CAPS conferences in Canada. A topic of many workshops and discussion groups is the need to tailor presentations to our audiences. One size or one or two speeches no longer fit all.

The struggle this creates for speakers is how to clearly explain our topic areas, and the value a highly experienced and well prepared professional speaker can add to a meeting or conference. Effective professional speakers can bring an outside expertise to reinforce and inspire the changes needed inside the organization. I speak, train, or facilitate about 100 times per year. I have rarely given the same presentation, workshop, or retreat twice. Recently I took a look back through hundreds of my engagements and developed a long sample list of ways I have tailored 60 – 90 minutes presentations, half and one-day workshops, and two-day management retreats. It fascinated me to reflect on the wide variety of applications, but then I am a little biased and emotionally invested in this discussion. If you're interested, click here to see the sample list.

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Permission to Reprint: You may reprint any items from the Leader Letter in your own print publication or e-newsletter as long as you include this paragraph:

"Reprinted with permission from the Leader Letter, Jim Clemmer's free e-newsletter. Jim Clemmer is a bestselling author and internationally acclaimed keynote speaker, workshop/ retreat leader, and management team developer on leadership, change, customer focus, culture, and personal growth. His web site is www.clemmer.net."

 Worth Reading: Two Book Reviews
 

There really are so many books and so little time. I have long been an avid reader. I usually have about four books on the go. These generally include a book for bedtime pleasure reading (usually historical novels or spiritual fiction), a browsing book on Canadian or local Waterloo County history, morning spiritual or meditation reading, and a book on leadership, personal growth, or organization change.

Two recent reads that stand out in that last category are Primal Leadership and The Heart of Change. Both fit my criteria on providing strong research or particular illumination that strongly supports my own work. To see my book selection criteria go to www.clemmer.net/reading/criteria.shtml.

Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA, 2002) is Daniel Goleman's third book on this exciting topic. While I think this book is neck in neck with his second book, Working with Emotional Intelligence, I would have to give this one the nod as his best yet. I love the burgeoning field of emotional intelligence. No doubt it's because the explosion in EI research is providing extremely convincing empirical research showing the immense value of the "soft" leadership areas I have made my life work.

Primal Leadership provides the simplest framework yet for defining Emotional Intelligence. I know my bias for this book really shows through when I say that the framework fits perfectly with my leadership twins, Growing the Distance and The Leader's Digest. In what Goleman and his colleagues call "Emotional Intelligence Domains and Associated Competencies," they outline a clear EI framework with two major components broken into four subsets that then define a series of supporting criteria within each subset.

The first major component they call "Personal Competence: These capabilities determine how we manage ourselves." The two major subsets here are Self-Awareness and Self-Management. This is a perfect fit with the self-leadership messages of Growing the Distance. The second major component they define as "Social Competence: These capabilities determine how we manage relationships." These two major subsets are Social Awareness and Relationship Management. These are exactly what The Leader's Digest focuses on.

I have filed many passages and research from this landmark personal growth and leadership book. Here are two:

"...now we have results from a range of industries that link leadership to climate and to business performance, making it possible to quantify the hard difference for business performance made by something as soft as the "feel" of a company." (Page 17)

"Having a larger repertoire of emotional intelligence strengths can make a leader more effective because it means that leader is flexible enough to handle the wide-ranging demands of running an organization. Each style draws on different emotional intelligence abilities; the best leaders are able to use the right approach in the right moment, and flip from one to another as needed. People who lack the underlying abilities have a narrowed leadership repertoire, and so are too often stuck relying on a style that's ill matched to the challenge of the moment." (Page 84)

The Heart of Change: Real Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations, (John P. Kotter and Dan S. Cohen, The Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 2002) is a powerful follow up to Harvard Business School professor, John Kotter's, excellent previous book, Leading Change. As the subtitle of this book describes, it's a collection of stories about how people throughout their organizations (most are not senior managers) bring about change by connecting with others emotionally. The stories show, once again, that we're creatures of emotion and not logic. We make decisions based on our feelings and then look for the evidence to support that.

Building on his well-known distinctions between management and leadership, John Kotter and his co-author Dan Cohen show that strong change leaders skip the PowerPoint presentations full of logical analysis, measurements, and bullet points. Rather they appeal to feelings with stories, metaphors, demonstrations, experiences, pilots, and the like to change behavior. The authors explain,

"Our main finding, put simply, is that the central issue is never strategy, structure, culture, or systems. All those elements, and others, are important. But the core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people, and behavior change happens in highly successful situations mostly by speaking to people's feelings. This is true even in organizations that are very focused on analysis and quantitative measurement, even among people who think of themselves as smart in an M.B.A sense. In highly successful change efforts, people find ways to help others see the problems or solutions in ways that influence emotions, not just thought. Feelings then alter behavior sufficiently to overcome all the many barriers to sensible large-scale change. Conversely, in less successful cases, the seeing-feeling-changing pattern is found less often, if at all." (Page x).

Information
Communication
Speaks to the Head Engages the Heart
Monolog Dialog
Facts and Results Stories and Values
Mostly Written Mostly Verbal
Quantity Quality
Provides Updates Builds Communion

I read The Heart of Change after I had written The Leader's Digest. One of the reasons I liked the book so much was because I had just constructed and started using the chart to the right to illustrate the central management versus leadership theme of The Leader's Digest. The differences between information and communication sharply contrast managers and leaders. Managers push, leaders pull. Manager try to light a fire under people, leaders stoke the fire within. Managers focus on facts, leaders focus on feelings. Management is intellectual, leadership is emotional. Managers inform, leaders communicate.

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 Site Seeing
 

With my wireless high speed Internet connection at home (my best new technology investment of the last two years), I take my notebook computer and browse the Internet all over our house and backyard. Given my intense interest in the rapidly growing Emotional Intelligence research, one of my favorite reference sites is run by Daniel Goleman and his associates at The Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations. Their web site is www.eiconsortium.org.

 Improvement Points Subscribers' Top Picks for March
 

Improvement Points are short quotes from one of the articles on our web site that are sent by e-mail three times per week. Each quote comes with a heading that corresponds with my core models and frameworks (click here to view those). Subscribers have the opportunity to click on the title of the article that the quote was taken from and go read the entire piece. One way we can gauge the popularity of each quote and its mother article is to see what the click-through rate is. Of the 13 quotes/articles sent out in March, the three most popular were (you can click on the article title to read it):

Improvement Points is a free subscription service. We've been quite pleased and gratified to watch the steady growth in subscribers over the past few years (especially with the volume of e-mails filling all our inboxes). To check out the service and look at signing up for it, go to www.clemmer.net/improvement.shtml.

 Thoughts That Make You Go Hmmm...
 

"If you're under control, you're not going fast enough!"
- Mario Andretti, race car driver

"A (cynic) is a man who discovers unpleasant things about himself and then says them about other people."
- Peter McArthur

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
- Oscar Wilde

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Permission to Reprint: You may reprint any items from the Leader Letter in your own print publication or e-newsletter as long as you include this paragraph:

"Reprinted with permission from the Leader Letter, Jim Clemmer's free e-newsletter. Jim Clemmer is a bestselling author and internationally acclaimed keynote speaker, workshop/ retreat leader, and management team developer on leadership, change, customer focus, culture, and personal growth. His web site is www.clemmer.net."

 New Columns and Articles
 

I write a wide range of columns and articles adapted from my books or research. Here are two that ran recently:

From the "Careers" section of The Globe & Mail: This column is based on the research and writing I did for the Responsibility for Choices chapter of The Leader's Digest
"Stop Whining and Start Leading" at www.clemmer.net/excerpts/stop_whining.shtml

From So to Speak (newsletter of the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers): This article was adapted from the Introduction and Chapter One of The Leader's Digest
"Are you a Leader on the Grow?" at www.clemmer.net/excerpts/sts0303.pdf

Over 250 of my columns and articles are available for reprint on our web site. Click here to view the index at www.clemmer.net/articles.shtml.

 Coming Events
 

Our Last Public Workshop (May 28 and 29)

In May, we are running our final public Leadership @ the Speed of Change workshop. With so many things happening across our business these days, we find that we need to take some of our own advice (a radical thought) and set clearer priorities. Our workshop administration and delivery support people need to focus on our core business – customized in-house workshops, retreats, and keynote speaking. This last public session will run on May 28 and 29 in London, Ontario. Click here for details.

Click here if you'd like to check out my customized in-house Leadership @ the Speed of Change workshops or management team retreats. Heather would be happy to explore dates and potential applications with you. You can e-mail her at [email protected] or have the pleasure of chatting with her at (519) 748-6561.

Lessons in Leadership (June 10)

I am delighted to be part of such an impressive line up of Canada's top professional speakers, all in one day. I'll be joining Warren Evans CSP (Certified Speaking Professional), Donald Cooper CSP, Peter Urs Bender CSP, Kit Grant CSP, and Dave Bradfoot CSP. The big bonus is that most of your registration fee will be going to a very worthy cause, the Laura's Hope research fund for Huntington's Disease. This entire line up of high powered and high priced speakers are donating their time to benefit Laura's Hope. Buy a corporate table and bring your Clients, team members, or colleagues. Be inspired and help make a big difference to pushing this research over the top. Click here for details: www.laurashope.com/lil/.

More Power to the People (June 16-19)

HR.com is running their Power of People Series June 16-19 in Toronto. They have lined up an impressive slate of speakers and workshop leaders. Check it out at www.thepowerofpeople.com.

 
 

I hope to connect with you again next month!

Visit www.clemmer.netAll the best,

Jim

 
 
 
 

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Phone: (519) 748-1044 ~ Fax: (519) 748-5813 ~ E-mail: [email protected]
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Copyright 2003, Jim Clemmer, The CLEMMER Group