However, in troubled times there's one type of interaction that seems to rise like a kid's lost balloon, especially in team meetings: The 'strongly held opinion' - one (vocal) person's simplistic, dramatic or counter-intuitive proposal for resolving a painful issue:

- "It's vital to our survival that we slash our prices by 20%."

- "We need to raise our prices across the board by 20% - today!"

- "Shut down all our overseas offices."

- "Open a new division delivering more environmentally-friendly products."

You know the type of thing - you've seen it before, and you're sure seeing it now...

The important thing to remember about SHO's is that there's nothing inherently wrong with them - but there's nothing inherently right about them either. A strongly held opinion is (in it's first appearance) just that - someone's strongly held opinion. It might be their mantra, a flight of fantasy, a genuine flash of insight (these are rarer than all those books would have us believe), something they read on some geezer's blog over the weekend, or a revelation from God his/herself. Often (though not always), they're delivered by executives with CADD - Corporate Attention Deficit Disorder: people who find it really painful to grind through the detail involved in most decision making.

The problem for most teams is that unless it is outstandingly goofy, upon first declaration, they can't tell which of these many version's of a SHO this particular one is. And as a result, it gains traction, and before you know it, the SHO has become the benchmark for the entire discussion - should we do this thing or not, and if so, how do we make it work?

The Predictable Success rule for SHO's is simple: don't lob them into meetings without warning, like a hand grenade. If you have a serious proposal for resolving a painful issue, do us all the favor of thinking about it before hand, and commit at least the bones of an outline to paper - just a bullet list of the pros and cons will give us a start.

And if you don't feel like doing so, and instead insist in using your SHO as a club to hijack the discussion on the run, then we'll table the item, excuse you to let you work on the bones of it for half an hour (while we sort out something equally pressing), then you can come back in and lead a though-through, planned discussion of your idea.

Managing a business in times like these is in itself a serious business - it's not helped by allowing highly vocal mavericks to short-circuit the process just because they can't stand the pain of detail.

The concept is simple, and self-explanatory: seek to be constructive and positive in all your interactions, but do it without fear or favor, and always for the better good of the organization as a whole, not for your personal benefit, or that of your project, or you team, department or division.

Easily said, but tough in practice. Being ruthlessly constructive is particularly difficult for passive-aggressives, emotional manipulators and bullies (and is one of the reasons it is so powerful - it shows them up and if practiced consistently by others, eventually calls them on their behavioral dysfunctions).

In the last few weeks I've been thinking a lot about the power of being ruthlessly constructive. Why? Because about 80% of the leaders I work with - CEO's, presidents, VP's, owners, founders, general managers - have asked versions of the same two questions:

"How do I and my team do any sort of realistic planning in the current climate - short and long term?", and

"How do I keep the morale of my team high right now?"

Now both questions deserve longer treatment than a blog entry will allow, but it has struck me how often the importance of being ruthlessly constructive comes up in answering both questions.

Let there be no misunderstanding - times are tough, and for many of us, they're going to get tougher before they get better. But when it comes to importance of good planning and high morale (two interconnected drivers of Predictable Success), there's no point wallowing in negativity, and there's certainly no point in throwing in the towel.

Dwell a while on the importance of being ruthlessly constructive, and how you might incorporate it more in your organization's interactions. You will find it a powerful tool in these difficult days.

After about 6 weeks of Early Struggle (is it this plan or that plan? Does the government invest or lend? Is this socialism? What will our constituents think? Is this working? ...and the classic Early Struggle question: Do we have enough cash?), we're now (believe it or not) in the 'Fun' part of the cycle - "Whoo-hoo - we've got money to spend, and it's gonna fix this mess!" - hence the current revival in stock markets world-wide.

In a very short period of time - a few more weeks at best, we'll see the 'Whitewater' hit as processes, policies and systems become vital to the smooth running of the bailout (they're already there in very basic form, but the outcry about possible abuse and 'fairness' hasn't started yet. When it does, watch Whitewater hit with a bang).

As the bailout is by and large being managed by governments at federal levels, the move from Whitewater into Predictable Success will be shortlived - so short as to be unobservable.

The enormous pressure to over-regulate (particularly given the roots of the economic problems, which largely arose because of lax regulation) means that pretty much immediately, the bailout will move into Treadmill, then quickly into Bureaucracy, where it will stay for many decades - a gargantuan paper-pushing exercise providing safe and secure employment for hundreds, probably thousands, of people engaged in what will be essentially compliance functions.

Finally, in the distant future some new administration will ask if the Bailout program has run its course, and the Death Rattle will be heard - congressional / parliamentary debates about the program's value and relevance, rearguard action by the program's bureaucracy to protect their jobs, and at the end, the legislation to shut down the program and redirect its people, assets and activities elsewhere.

(The above is not intended as a political comment - just a reflection of the how the Predictable Success lifecycle applies to massive government intervention.)

The key problem is the same in both cases - confusing 'reaction to a crisis' with a strategy.

A 'reaction' is just that - something which will right the ship, possibly only temporarily. A 'reaction' is at best a tactic to get through current circumstances, and is best hammered out with your hands still on the wheel.

A strategy is much more than a reaction - it's a thought-through, weighed, deliberated plan to take you to the next level (not just to battle on at the current level) in the medium and long term.

Don't turn this year's strategic planning into a 'recession-reaction session'. Get your recession-reaction agreed now (if you haven't already - most of my Predictable Success clients made their recession plans in April or May), and use your strategic planning time wisely.

Four tips:

1. Get up to 15,000 feet at least - if not 30,000. This is probably the only opportunity you'll have for at least six months to take a bird's-eye view of how your business is doing at the macro level, rather than at the departmental or transactional level.

2. Bring an outside facilitator in to help you stress test your underlying assumptions about the medium and long term (particularly growth and hiring forecasts, customer expectations and behavior, and your operating cost base). Don't think you have any? Not likely - you simply haven't sat down and written them out. Time you did.

3. Build on your strengths. Too many management teams get bogged down in negativism - focussing too much on their perceived weaknesses, 'threats', 'opportunities' or whatever verbiage is used to describe them. You won't win by focussing on your weaknesses. You'll win by building on your strengths.

4. Celebrate this year's victories. Again, too many management teams walk into strategic planning sessions and begin by flagellating themselves with an autopsy of what went wrong (or wasn't as good as it should have been) in the preceding period. Winning organizations don't do that. 'What went wrong' should be dealt with as a matter of course in your monthly departmental review meetings (you do have those, right? And you do attend and participate, right?). Strategic planning sessions fail - badly - when they're used as the burning ground to air suppressed frustrations about past failures. They succeed - spectacularly - when they're used to envision success and plan its achievement.

I can't take credit for this saying (it appears to have been coined by a chap called Frank Kostonis), but it is a phrase that succinctly captures the problem most management teams face in the boardroom when dealing with 'Whitewater'.

When I coach management teams on how to make the most of their boardroom sessions, almost always the single biggest issue is in preventing anecdotal experience from hijacking the process.

You know the drill - someone arrives at the meeting with a bee in their bonnet about something that just happened (or an issue is raised that triggers in someone a painful memory of something that happened). Ok so far - but then someone else chimes in with a similar anecdote, and before you know it, the anecdote becomes data, and we're off and running with analysis, prognosis and solutions...whether or not that particular topic / event / issue is truly central, strategic, or even valid.

And a month later, when the next meeting rolls round, guess what has happened to our hot button anecdotal topic? Ninety-nine percent of the time, it's lost. Gone. Forgotten...only to be replaced by a new anecdote...

All this may be fun to watch, but it's highly destructive to achieving Predictable Success. The time, energy and wasted resources invested in 'chasing the anecdote' simply keeps the organization off track and shifts focus from what is really important.

Why does this happen? Two reasons:

1. It's work avoidance.

Simply put, it's easier to sit around talking 'anecdote' than doing the hard work of concentrating on real issues and analyzing real data.

2. It feeds the ego.

We all like talking about ourselves, and anecdotes usually insert the speaker into the discussion in some shape or form.

Eradicating anecdote-base discussions takes discipline, but will reward the organization (and the management team) with a highly accelerated path to Predictable Success.

Try these two simple rules:

1. Appoint an anecdote-buster. Someone whose specific job it is to monitor your management meetings and be alert for when anecdote is threatening to derail the discussion. [Hint: Processors are great for this.]

2. If one or more of the management team are adamant that a particular group of anecdotes are indeed indicators of a real problem, schedule it for detailed discussion at the next meeting, and task them to come armed with real statistics and factual evidence to support their anecdotal concerns - often, you'll find that the issue goes away in between.

Here's the result. You'll need to turn your speakers up (the sound's a little low, and the video is a teeny bit choppy in one section).

Enjoy!

As it slides inexorably into Treadmill, watch for increasingly bureaucratic hoops in dealing with JetBlue, a gradual erosion of comfort and inflight options (probably accompanied by an attention-diverting rebranding exercise), and possibly a 'merger' with one or more of the other, more traditional low-cost airlines.

My money is on an acquisition by Southwest, and a return by Neeleman to some role in the combined organization. Watch this space.

In Predictable Success® terms, Starbucks has hit Treadmill.

To succeed in pulling Starbucks back to Predictable Success®, Schultz' return must accomplish six goals that most returning leaders overlook.

Click here to read the full text of our press release on this topic.

Are they different from their predecessors (GenX and the Baby Boomers), or are people just...well, ...people?

I contributed to an online debate on the subject. Here's the link to the resulting article.

That led me to think about the decision-making 'energy conversion ratio' in the organizations I work with: Do you have a manager, a peer, a team member who's decision-making 'energy conversion ratio' is higher than 1:1?

Someone, in other words, in whom you have to invest five, seven, ten times more energy in managing them, than the organization gets back in return?

If so, what are you going to do about it?