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Today’s investment bankers are known mostly for their greed and excess (with a few exceptions), but has the profession always been that way?

Meet James Truslow Adams, whose take on life is vastly different.

“There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live.”

“The greatest discovery of my generation is that man can alter his life simply by altering his attitude of mind.”

“The great use of life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.”

What unexpected source do you like?

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A week ago I brought IBM’s The Enterprise of the Future to your attention and said I’d be discussing it in the future, but there’s so much material in the three studies that I decided to make it a Saturday staple for awhile.

Additionally, if you or someone you know, would like to provide a guest post based on or related to any of the three IBM studies (CEO, CFO and HR) I would love to have them.

In the Global CEO Study five critical traits needed for success were identified through conversations with more than 1000 CEOs around the world.

The first is that to be a powerhouse, no matter your size, you must be “hungry for change,” not scared, tolerant or even willing, but hungry for it.

You must see “change within the organization as a permanent state” and build your culture accordingly.

According to Masao Yamazaki, President and CEO, West Japan Railway Company, “The key to successful transformation is changing our mind-set…it is easy to be complacent…company culture must have a built-in change mechanism.”

While corporate culture is the reason that “employees are comfortable with unpredictability. In an environment in which products, markets, operations and business models are always in flux, values and goals provide alignment and cohesion,” it’s MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy) that provides the underpinnings for it all.

And it’s not just organizational change that’s moving so quickly, but positions, including CXOs, are, too.

In an insightful article in MIS Asia, Chris Potts says, “In less than five years’ time, the CIO role, according to CIOs themselves, is destined to become either an executive leader of business change or absorbed into another role,” and walks you through the reasoning and the changes that need to happen.

“There is a pressing need for integrated leadership of business and technology change. With enterprise architecture and investment portfolio management, CIOs have the two strategic tools onto which that leadership depends. The CIO’s cultural challenge is to explain that these tools are primarily about people and collaboration, not technology.”

Change requires talent and a paucity of talent was rated as the greatest barrier to growth, more so than even regulatory and budgetary considerations.

Moreover, the kind of talent needed has changed radically from the descriptions so often heard as has the ways to remunerate them. Now, it’s “people who question assumptions and suggest radical, and what some might initially consider impractical, alternatives” with the potential for “differentiated rewards, such as a stake in the business they helped create.”

Managing this kind of talent takes more than good people skills or charisma, it requires MAP that’s secure and willing to hire people smarter than itself, share a vision of the needed results, turn them loose and trust them to accomplish it.

Do you know many managers with this kind of MAP?

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Leadership is an industry. In the name of leadership over the last 4000 years at least a million trees have gone to make the leadership library’s books and magazines; more recently thousands of computers serve up terabytes of digital commentary, discussion and rants about leadership; and the thousands of people in the leadership industry pay mortgages, raise families and send their kids to college.

I’m not saying it’s all bad. Industries have coalesced around stranger, more ephemeral, more esoteric topics and people have benefitedor not.

But I often wonder if there is truly anything new under the leadership sun or if it’s all been said already, and with more beauty, by the earliest pundits, such as my own favorite Lao Tzu.

That’s not to say we can’t learn from more recent writings.

To learn, we each must find that which resonates best within usnot in someone else, but in our own most vulnerable self. That’s the most fertile soilwhere seeds planted can truly flourish.

Richard Stengel has written another thoughtful and moving article about Mandela and leadership, “I’ve always thought of what you are about to read as Madiba’s Rules (Madiba, his clan name, is what everyone close to him calls him), and they are cobbled together from our conversations old and new and from observing him up close and from afar. They are mostly practical. Many of them stem directly from his personal experience. All of them are calibrated to cause the best kind of trouble: the trouble that forces us to ask how we can make the world a better place.”

1. Courage is not the absence of fearit’s inspiring others to move beyond it
2. Lead from the frontbut don’t leave your base behind
3. Lead from the back and let others believe they are in front
4. Know your enemyand learn about his favorite sport
5. Keep your friends closeand your rivals even closer
6. Appearances matterand remember to smile
7. Nothing is black or white
8. Quitting is leading too

I’ve listed just the headings and although you may think that it’s the same stuff you’ve seen before if you don’t take time to click and read the entire text you’ll be doing yourself and those around you a major disservice.

This may be the onethe one that resonates, takes root and changes your life.

What resonates most for you?

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CandidProf is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at a state university. Hell be sharing his thoughts and experience teaching todays students anonymously every Thursdayanonymously because thats the only way he can write really candid posts.

What I do is not just a job. I know a few college professors, and several pre-college teachers who see what they do as just a job. They are not very good at what they do, though. Sometimes, you have to do more than just stand in front of a class and talk.

Good instruction means taking time to prepare what you are going to say. Yes, Ive taught for enough years that I can just walk into a classroom, with no notes and no preparation, and start lecturing. And, my students would learn something. But they would not learn as much as if I had actually prepared. Now, I dont often follow my notes. I have gone over what Ive got to say before I say it, and Ive taught this material for so long that I am quite familiar with it. Still, I prepare.

That preparation also means that I have to keep current in the field. What new developments have there been? What new discoveries supersede what the textbook says? It is my job to know my field. That means spending many, many hours reading journals. It means going to conferences. It means keeping up with my own research.

And, of course, I need to grade student papers. I want to give reasonable feedback so that they can learn from their mistakes. But that takes extra time. I dont have to do that. I know several faculty who dont give students any feedback. But for my class practically every thing in the class is a learning experience. There is a reason that I have certain students go out of their way to take my class.

I am not the easiest professor around. That is clear from the internet sites where students evaluate their professors. However, I am thorough, fair and my students learn. So, those students that want an easy A take someone elses class and those who want to learn take my class.

How tough are your kids teachers?

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Check out my other WW: changing corporate culture

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