Business Opportunities From COVID-19

With the COVID 19 pandemic now affecting the entire world, we need to be prepared for the upcoming changes that it will bring to those who don't get sick. This implies huge shifts in the way we work and how we make a living.  Unfortunately, with businesses being closed down, many people are going to be without pay or worse without jobs.

The good news is that there are other jobs that are going to be created in other industries and will most likely thrive throughout this crisis. Here are a few things to watch out for.

Remote work will finally become more widespread.
In order to reduce the spread of COVID-19, many companies around the world have either had to close their doors, or have made it mandatory for their employees to do their work from home.

Businesses will realize after a couple of months of this that they can trust their office-dwelling employees to be just as productive when working from home.  The existing technologies for video conferencing, IP telephony, IT security and cloud computing will allow employees to do that.  So it's very likely that most companies will end up wanting to save on real estate costs, commute times, and absenteeism by no longer limiting "work from home" to specific roles (sales, consultants, virtual assistants, web developers, IT support, podcasting, etc.).

What might be interesting here is that many more jobs will be created by large businesses who won't need to hire locally because the job can be done using the right technology.

The rise of Virtual Training / Learning

This kinda relates to the point above about remote work, but with the same technologies being used for leisure. With gyms, yoga and dance studios, martial arts schools and other activities with big groups of people being shut down temporarily, it won't be long before virtual classes rise in popularity. Sure some people can follow YouTube videos for instruction, but having an instructor who can see you and correct what you're doing in real time without the risk of catching a virus is the next best thing.

The same goes for other education. With schools and universities closed down, lectures and homework are now being made available online. Again, with the technologies now available, expect to see more and more flexible, web-based, academic programs.

While these virtual classes might not replace the real person training when these locations are finally allowed to re-open, they will make for great supplementary material and additional income streams later on.

Delivery services will become more streamlined
The risks of spreading viruses by going into crowded spaces to shop will create new jobs in delivery services. Whether it's groceries, restaurant food, toilet paper, soap, alcohol, cannabis, or any other necessity, the fact that most people will need to stay home will create an even greater demand for delivery services. Yes, companies like Amazon, Uber, FedEx, UPS and of course the post office already have massive networks to deliver to your door.

However, with demand rapidly increasing, other companies will invest and innovate to further improve these delivery methods making it much easier for customers to get something sent to their door. With summer coming, we should also expect more and more local niche entrepreneurs offering delivery services that can promise faster delivery times than the logistical behemoths.

Streaming Services and Podcasts

Entertainment is going to be incredibly important with people staying indoors. Whether it's bored kids or adults needing escapist entertainment from the doom and gloom news stories, we're going to need something to distract us.

Getting easy access to Internet-based entertainment is going to be crucial.  We've already seen huge jumps in subscription numbers for Netflix, Amazon Prime video and Disney plus.  YouTube had to reduce their video quality to save bandwidth, expecting a higher volume of streaming.

So if you're a vlogger, a podcaster, a YouTuber or any kind of web content creator, the opportunities to build an audience and eventually monetize is bigger than ever.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

I am very thankful for being one of the lucky ones who has the ability to work from home. Yes the current pandemic has caused the loss of plenty of jobs. Instability and uncertainty seem to be the norm.  Despite all the economic doom and gloom news, there are going to be new opportunities for small businesses and entrepreneurs to pivot.  It's going to be possible for many of us to thrive during a crisis and come out of it stronger than before.

Develop credibility, humility, and a love of learning using a simple phrase

In the modern economy, expertise, skills and knowledge are some of the best measures of your competence. Many of us are afraid to admit whenever there's something we don't know. Despite that, one of the most important skills we need in the age of information is the ability to say "I don't know" both to ourselves and to others.

First, being able to admit that you don't know something forces you to stay humble. Being honest with yourself and others by saying "I don't know" means that you don't overstate your area(s) of expertise. This prevents you from receiving false recognition, which prevents arrogance and over-inflation of the ego.

Being able to say "I don't know" also keeps you curious and ready to learn. I'm not sure how most people are, but personally, if I'm asked a question and I don't know the answer, it bothers me. I want to find out the answer and look it up. That kind of behaviour develops curiosity and a love for learning new things. All because I admitted to myself and whoever is asking me a question that I don't know the answer.

Most importantly, in the long term, saying "I don't know" will keep you from losing credibility. There's always pressure to be a "subject matter expert", as well as the pressure to provide immediate answers without knowing what you're talking about. What will likely happen in this situation is that you'll give inaccurate information.  The person who receives that inaccurate information will make decisions, act on that information, and suffer the consequences.  When they do, you'll be blamed for their failure and be thought of as unreliable or worse, a liar.

Yes, it's important to be knowledgeable and skilled.  It's important to be able to answer questions about your field of expertise.  This is what competence in any field looks like. However, no matter how competent you are, there will always be something that you won't know. And that's all right. We're now in a world where almost all of human knowledge can be accessed almost instantaneously using a device in your pocket. You're better off saying "I don't know. I'll give you an answer as soon as I find out."

Are you a cheater? It's never so cut and dry.

"Cheaters never prosper".
"Cheaters never win.  Winners never cheat."

We've been told this since we were kids. Competition is important, but what's more important is to compete honestly and fairly.  We were taught that cheating is wrong and that even if we benefit in the short term, in the long run we lose.

That's debatable.

What's more fundamental really is defining what actually constitutes cheating?  Where do we draw the line between cheating and simply being creative within the confines of the rules?

Let's take sports as an example. In most high-level competitions, athletes are not allowed to take certain substances that modify their bodies' chemistry and allow them to enhance their performance. However, athletes are allowed to do resistance training and cardiovascular exercises.  Those activities will result in changes in their bodies' chemistry, composition, strength and endurance. This will eventually enhance their performance. The latter's not considered cheating, but the mechanism is pretty similar (albeit slower).

What if an athlete drinks a couple of cups of coffee or takes a "pre-workout supplement" filled with stimulants right before starting a resistance training work out?  Their body chemistry's changed.  They're more stimulated and able to lift more weight, for more repetitions, and for a longer period of time.  Being able to work out that way will of course have the result of enhancing future performance. Is that cheating?

Let's take it a step further.  When it was finally proven that Lance Armstrong was on PEDs when he won multiple back-to-back Tour de France races, they cycling association tried to award the win to the cyclist who came in second place.  Except that guy was also on PEDs.  So they tried to give it to guy in third place, who they found was also on PEDs.  They had to go all the way down to the person in 17th place or something similar to find someone who wasn't "cheating".  But in that case, if almost everyone is on PEDs, can we still say that it's cheating if someone gets caught using prohibited substances?

Or what about in business?  Sure, there are rules and laws to prevent quid pro quo practices and ensure that no bribery or corruption happens to ensure that competition between companies are fair when interacting with clients.  But ask anyone working in a sales job about "relationship building activities".

Can you consider having a meal or even a coffee with clients a quid pro quo practice?  What about organizing and sponsoring special events for clients?  Or inviting them to your company's special private box at major sporting events and concerts? Or how about paying for a round of golf with a client? Can we honestly say that businesses aren't engaging in these activities to get something in return from their clients?  If so, is that really cheating or just improving business relationships?

It is possible to set rules to ensure that specific behaviours are discouraged and cheating is well-defined. Sure, you could work perfectly by the book all the time to ensure that you're not cheating. The problem is, when you're trying to win at such a high level, no matter what the field, your competitors are going to be operating within the gray areas between the strict application of the rules and cheating. So if you decide to stay away from that area, you're putting yourself at a disadvantage.

Excellence Means You Can't Live a "Balanced Life"

In a previous post, I outlined the simple, 2-step formula to become good at anything:

1) Practice a lot
2) Put in a lot of conscious effort to what you're practicing

Here's a revised version of the formula, if you want to become THE BEST at anything:

1) Practice exponentially more than before
2) Practice with conscious effort and nearly singular focus

3) Be lucky

Assuming you have the luck required, you will also need to drastically increase the amount of practice you do.  Because of the increased amount of practice required, you'll have to sacrifice time for other things: social life, sleep, time with family, leisure activities, etc.  You are focused almost entirely on whatever it is you're trying to be the best at.

This is true no matter what profession or field you want to become the best at.  Whether you want to become the most renowned neurosurgeon, the funniest stand-up comedian, an Olympic gold medalist, the most successful CEO, an elite professional hockey player, the most published and cited academic, or a world-champion MMA fighter, you will have terrible "work-life balance".  You'll need to sacrifice a lot of time not only to reach the pinnacle of your field but also to stay at the elite level.

This goes beyond the level of a hobby. You can't clock out at 5pm. Having the goal of being the best at something for a certain amount of time will come at the expense of other things in your life. If the concept of "work-life balance" is important to you, you will never become part of the elite in your field.  The truth is, at one point or another, we all wanted to be excellent something.  Becoming excellent requires an unbalanced lifestyle. For most of us, living that way for a long time is unsustainable.

Time is Money? Nope

"Time is money."  It's an old, false adage that many people in business just perpetuated.  The truth is that if you spend money, you can still make it back later on by trading your time.  When it comes to time, there's no amount of money that will allow you to get back time that you lost.  It's gone. If you're fortunate enough you'll be able to pay someone to do things you don't want so you can have more time for the things you want to do.

 

Learning how to spend our hard-earned money is incredibly important. Learning how to spend your time is even more so.  Most of us need to be smarter when choosing which activities to engage in when offered money in exchange for your time.  On the flip side, it's just as crucial to respect other peoples' time by providing them value when they've made a decision to give any amount of it to you.

We Are NOT Created Equal

This is a follow up on the previous piece on how to get good at anything.

The premise of practicing with full conscious effort will definitely get you as far as you potentially can in any given field. However, there are limitations to how far each individual can get because we are not born with the same genetic potential and predispositions.

Some people have the genetic predisposition to have more fast-twitch muscle. Some are more likely to have certain types of addictions. Other individuals are more likely to get certain kinds of cancer. Some will be born with missing limbs. Some have genes that cause them to have osteoporosis and arthritis before the age of 40. Others will be predisposed to have higher muscular endurance and a higher pain threshold. Some people will be born to be potentially 7 feet tall while others won't grow taller than 4 feet.

I could quit my day job, train for 8 hours a day and try to get faster at sprinting for the next 4 years. Despite the 10,000 hours of dedicated training I will never even come close to catching a retired, "out-of-shape" Usain Bolt in a 100 meter dash. Although I might be able to outdo him in other things (here's hoping any way).

 

Bottom line: constant practice with conscious effort will make you better at any skill. However, there is an upper limit that we can get to for each field, be it sports, intellectual pursuits, martial arts, music, or entrepreneurship.

Guess what! Life isn't fair. Every individual will have certain biological advantages over other people in certain fields while having disadvantages in others. Despite what any idealist with their heart in the right place will tell you, we are not all created equal. What's important is that we give everyone the equal opportunity to find, acquire and develop the skills that best fit with their strengths.

How to Get Good at Anything

It's a very simple formula.  Simple, but not easy.

To gain skills, be it playing a musical instrument, sports, stand-up comedy, acting, martial arts, math, languages, computer programming, public speaking, video editing, or even entrepreneurship, there is a very simple formula if you want to get better at any skill:

1) Practice a lot
2) Put in a lot of conscious effort to what you're practicing

The first point, you've heard before.  The "magic number" of 10,000 hours has been thrown around as the minimum needed to master a skill.  While it's been argued that this magic number is more or less legit, the point is, to get somewhat good at a skill, you need to have a lot of repetitions.  Without the practice, you won't get better.

What's more important though is the second point. You can "practice" something for 16 hours a day. If you are not consciously making the effort to practice whatever you're doing without trying to do it correctly, you're wasting your time. By practicing something without effort or without thinking for long periods of time, you'll just end up making yourself worse at that skill and develop bad habits. Instead, you need to go through the correct progressions, acknowledge that you made mistakes during practice and learn how to avoid them in the future.

Really you're just trying to find ways to be better than you were since the last time you practiced.



That's it.  No special shortcuts, no simple hacks.  Just put in time and conscious effort.

If Your Boss is an A**hole, Then We're All to Blame (Indirectly)

The same can also be said about your a**hole co-workers

It's almost stereotypical.  Some of you have even seen it in person: the executive or even a middle manager of an organization losing their temper.  There have been CEOs yelling, bullying, berating and being overall jerks to their employees.

A former, now deceased, CEO of one of the largest tech companies in the world (company name rhymes with "grapple") was notoriously aggressive at publicly berating employees who didn't "live up to his standards of quality".

You've also got managers who expect you to be constantly connected on weekends and holidays. They end up shaming you if front of your peers if you decide that you'd rather spend time with your family instead of answering the email they sent at 11:45pm.

Another famous CEO who runs the largest online store in the world (no, it's not Amazon) is making it a requirement for his employees to work from 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week. Anything less will get you shamed and fired, despite how well you perform while working less hours.

Yes, it's abusive behaviour.  Yes it creates a hostile work environment and a bullying company culture. It causes stress and burn out.

Guess what: we are all to blame for these terrible work environments. Here's why.

Admiration for "Getting Sh*t Done"

One of the problems is that humans as a society seem to have evolved to want to follow the alpha monkey as our leader. 

We end up admiring the conqueror (unless you're the one being conquered), the assertive/aggressive boss who won't let "useless processes" become roadblocks to their goals.  We like the person who isn't necessarily worried about hurting feelings or being a bully to "get the job done".  We see their seemingly demanding traits and interpret that as a leader having a high standard that we should all strive for.  

At the same time, we are captivated by a confident, charismatic public speaker who will be falsely self-deprecating to make themselves seem relatable and authentic. They make mild jokes in an attempt to get their employees to see how likeable they are when they're not being bullies.

To us, these characteristics are signs of the strong leader.   Incidentally, these are also some of the main characteristics found in clinical narcissists and sociopaths.  In any case, these are the kinds of traits that we like to see in our leaders.  

Because we, as a collective society and culture like those traits, people like that end up getting hired in those positions of power in the companies we work for.

The"Hustle Culture" Fetish

 
If you spend enough time following "entrepreneur", "motivational" and "influencer" accounts on social media, you'll see that a lot of them are posting about hustling and "rising and grinding".  It's not unusual to see these highly successful people showing videos and pictures of themselves getting up at 4:30am so that they can start lifting heavy kettlebells and running hill sprints.

Sure, there's nothing wrong with having goals and working hard to reach them.  I'm all for people wanting to work as hard as they want, as many hours as they need to feel great about themselves and to make their business successful.

The problem is that the constant stream of these social media posts has led to the creation of "hustle porn".  Hard work has become so fetishistic on social media that we as a society have come to admire the business leaders who get up early, work so hard late into the night on a daily basis to the point of burn out while wearing stress as a badge of honor.

The narcissist/sociopath business leader then sees this as an example to emulate, you know, because the Instagram post is getting so many likes.  And of course, if they're doing that, then they expect all of their employees to be "hustlers" as well.  It becomes inexcusable for employees to be unreachable on evenings and weekends because they want to spend time with their kids. In their minds, there's no excuse for being sick in bed not working because you can have a laptop or a smartphone with you on your bedside table.
Doing less is just being a lazy employee.

Overly Coddling Customers

In the end, all of these bullying behaviors stem from every businesses' fear of losing clients to the competition. As consumers, we've been spoiled to want every thing yesterday. If the toilet paper ordered online doesn't come within 24 hours, negative reviews get written and complaints are sent to customer service.

We as a society are all customers with these "immediate gratification" expectations at the lowest possible price from the businesses we patronize. Is it really a wonder that businesses then need to transfer that kind of pressure on business managers who in turn put pressure on their employees to deliver?  

In short, our attitudes as demanding, spoiled consumers who won't do anything inconvenient are partially to blame for our abusive bosses.  Instead of immediately writing a bad review or complaining to a manager because you received your double-shot grande caramel macchiato with soy milk 37 seconds longer than you expected, we need to take a step back and have a bit of perspective on how easy it is for us now to get whatever product product we want in the first place.

How to Keep Your Staff from Quitting

---

One of the most difficult things about being a business owner or manager is hiring and retaining the right people. Your staff can make the difference between profitability and bankruptcy. So how can you hire and retain for success?

Here are a few tips that might help you.

Make the hiring requirements challenging

All right, if the applicant is young, tell him he’s too young. Old, too old. Fat, too fat. If the applicant then waits for three days without food, shelter, or encouragement he may then enter and begin his training.

That might have sounded a bit over-the-top, but there is something to it. This is a simple concept you’ll find in any social psychology textbook. The more difficult it is for people to join a group, the more positively they will view that group if they are accepted into it. Think of hazing rituals done in military organizations world wide, or even in college fraternities.

To relieve their cognitive dissonance, they will rationalize that the group must be worth joining after they got burned several times while they were jumping through all flaming hoops to get accepted. Because they’ve made that rationalization in their minds, these new hires are going to be more likely to overlook any negative aspects of your organization. Or at least it will take them longer to realize that the group they joined isn’t that special and they would be better off leaving for greener pastures.

The other principle is a very common cognitive bias called the “sunk cost” fallacy. Basically, the more you invest in something, the less likely you are to divest. Being forced to go through a rigorous interview process, your new hire will feel that they’ve spent so much mental energy just to get in, that they would feel that it would be a waste if they ended up quitting.

Structure the business to keep employees motivated

Employee: The thing is, it’s not that I’m lazy, it’s that I just don’t care.
Consultant 1: Don’t… don’t care?
Employee: It’s a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and the company ships a few extra units, I don’t see another dime; so where’s the motivation? And here’s something else: I have eight different bosses right now.
Consultant 2: I beg your pardon?
Employee: Eight bosses.
Consultant 2: Eight?
Employee: Eight. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That’s my only real motivation is not to be hassled; that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.

This is a no-brainer. If your employees only want to avoid getting fired or avoid getting hassled, you’ll eventually lose them to a company that incentivizes them properly for their work. If you’re hiring sales people, the base + commission model works pretty well.

Of course, employees who aren’t in sales roles need to be incentivized as well. Even if they aren’t directly getting financial compensation, at the very least, communicate to your employees that their contributions will help the growth of the company and the eventual increases in their pay. If your employees feel like they’re just another small cog in the larger machine (especially if it is true), you’re going to lose them. You have to at least make them feel like what they’re doing matters.

The other point about structure has to do with many large organizations having seemingly too many managers overseeing the work of one person. To justify their existence (especially when it comes to highly-paid executives), a lot of micromanagement happens, which causes them to hassle the sole employee doing the actual work.

Reinforce the fear and uncertainty of leaving your company

So if you fail to structure for motivation this is a last-ditch, Machiavellian alternative. If you’re willing to go to great lengths to keep your employees from going to the competition, it might be necessary.

Admit to your employees that they’re not in a perfect company. Of course, you can still point out that they’ve got a sure thing as to where their company is going as opposed to leaving for another company. If they leave, there are no guarantees that the new job will be better. Will they really get paid better? How secure will their potentially new job be “in this economy”? What if their new boss is an ever worse a-hole than the one they have now?

This process should be done in a very implicit way. Little hints should be dropped to cast doubt at what going elsewhere would be like.

At the same time semi-random acts of kindness and generosity on behalf of the company should be done for employees. 

The result is essentially the same as what happens in an abusive relationship where the abused party just can’t bring themselves to leave. The rare acts of kindness combined with the fear of the unknown is just enough for them to rationalize staying.

---

Inevitably, you will eventually lose employees no matter how well you treat them or how much you try to manipulate them. The modern worker has a tendency to job hop after a couple of years in any particular role. Since modern business has historically shown that their employees are expendable, employees don’t have the incentive to act loyally towards their employers. 

However, at the end of the day, without your staff your business can’t function. Hiring new people, training them, only to have them leave when they finally have a productive grasp of your business is not only frustrating. It’s very costly. Unfortunately you will need to resort to some tricks to keep them.

An Executive’s Guide to Looking Effective (Without necessarily being effective)

Originally published on Medium:

The cool thing about getting a job as an executive is that because it can pay so well, you can leave a company or a department after a couple years with a lot of money in your pocket. In all likelihood, the long-term consequences of your short-term decisions won’t be too apparent. This is especially true if you’re in a publicly traded company where “performance” is measured every 3 months instead of years or decades.

If you’re an executive, your ability to make effective strategic decisions is secondary. Actually having knowledge of how the business works is tertiary. After all, you don’t really need to stay there that long if you’re good at negotiating salaries and bonuses and you’re smart with your money.

To show your value to shareholders and investors what’s more important are the optics. What you actually accomplish isn’t necessarily as important as what it looks like you’re doing to improve the business on a quarterly basis.

Here are a few tips to help you look like you’re worth the large amount of money they’re paying you.

 

Adopt an “executive persona”

Think of the most iconic, charismatic leaders in the business world. They’ve all got a persona (whether it’s real or not):

• You can be the tough, all-nighter-pulling, Alpha executive in a well-tailored power suit.
• The supermom exec who successfully finds the balance between crushing board meetings and coaching her kids’ hockey team
• You can be the quirky, hoodie-wearing Silicon Valley CEO.
• An executive who wears the same outfit on a daily basis to “save their mental energy” for more important decisions.
• You can pretend that you’re the rebellious, “think-outside-the-box”, jet-setting, risk-taking, jeans-wearing, entrepreneurial exec.

Here’s a persona that many an executive in the financial industry has adopted almost too well.

It doesn’t matter which persona you pick. You just have to make sure that the persona you pick follows these two criteria:

1. It just has to be different enough from the person you replaced. This will give both employees and shareholders the impression that you’re there to shake things up and make some sweeping changes for the better of the company.
2. It has to be believable enough to show off your authenticity. For this, I would do what the most successful WWE professional wrestlers do. They take a real quirk in their personality and just exaggerate it to a point that it becomes a new character.

WWE Hall of Famer Donald Trump using his created “executive persona” in the ring alongside Stone Cold Steve Austin, Vince McMahon and Bobby Lashley.

Be “helpful”

Always present yourself to your employees (preferably when in a group setting) as someone who is willing to provide executive help for any “roadblocks” they might face in their day-to-day. Don’t actually help them, though. You’re busy. Actually helping takes time and effort that you don’t necessarily want to get mixed up in. We’re talking optics here. You need to project an image that you’re willing to help.

Remember, you must only ask how you can help when you’re in a public setting. That way, whoever actually wants to ask for help will have to do so in front of the entire company. Putting people on the spot like that will reduce the likelihood of them asking for anything for fear of looking foolish, weak or incompetent in front of the rest of the company. At the extreme, they risk asking something inappropriate from the high-level executive and get themselves fired.

Either way, the result is that you look like the benevolent leader with an “open door” policy, but because everyone’s so scared, you won’t actually have to do the work of making any changes.

Make your micro-management and bullying tactics look like you’re just “hands-on” and “getting shit done”

Yes, we all teach our kids that bullying is wrong. In this case, since you’re the boss, it’s not really bullying. No, not really. You’re simply showing employees that you’re forcefully getting things done. You’re not ineffectual like the last exec. As the new leader, you don’t want to get bogged down by useless processes. You are simply “passionate” and can get emotional when it comes to making sure that the business succeeds under your tenure.

To make it look like you’re getting things done, make sure that all emails you send to your middle-managers get marked as “Important” or “Urgent” or “Priority”. Ensure that cons

equences for employees who don’t respond to these emails on time are made clear.

You might be seen as micro-managing, but really, you simply want to make sure that your employees are staying focused on the strategic tasks at hand. You’re simply showing that you’re “hands on” and interested in how the business functions. It’s part of “being helpful”.

Of course, the most important thing if you get called out on your aggressive behaviour is to never apologize. Employees should just be grateful that you are sharing your wisdom and helping them succeed in their day-to-day.

Offer your employees “training opportunities”

Offering skills training to employees looking for both lateral and upward moves in the company is necessary. That should be standard in any good company.

However, if you want to look like you’re a great executive going above and beyond, you need to sponsor mandatory training programs that will make your company look like it’s also socially conscious and woke.

Here are some examples, in no particular order:

• Diversity training courses
• Anti-bullying classes
• Mindfulness training
• Anti-harassment training
• Business ethics
• Environmental consciousness training
• Employee engagement initiatives
• Et cetera…

Sure, those types of training programs can have some inherent value, especially if your company has a history of harassment, bullying or even employee burn-outs. However, the biggest value that they bring is really how good it makes the executive (and the company) look to employees, shareholders, the media and even the general public.

Let’s face it. The courses themselves can be empty or simply lip service. But for a relatively low investment, an executive can now have a great PR talking point. Now, his HR minions can brag about the company’s commitment to “preventing harassment in the workplace”, for example. Whether this actually stops sexual harassment in the company is irrelevant. The executive can now wash his or her hands when wrongdoing is reported because current employees have already received the training. If future harassment happens, the exec can always point to this training and say that the company isn’t to blame for the inappropriate behaviour of a few “bad apples”.

---

Being an executive can be a great, but difficult job opportunity. Latest studies of the S&P 500 companies show that the median tenure of a CEO for example is about 5 years. In that short a time, could you really make a huge difference to justify the bonuses and salary that you negotiated so well? If you’re exceptional, sure. If you’re able to ride an upward trend and make it look like it was your leadership instead of luck, maybe. If you can turn a company around from the brink of bankruptcy, of course.

The truth is, making a difference in a company is difficult. Sure you can make strategic decisions, but for the most part, results of those will take a lot of time to actually show. You can only be shown to be effective by what you look like you’re doing during the quarter, not by what you’ve done. So instead doing the actual heavy lifting with results that won’t be seen until after you leave, just do the noisy, but ineffectual things that everyone will see. If you’re good, you can sell them on the value that you added to the company as you leave laughing to the bank and on to a new executive job at a different company to start the process over again.