Is it Time to be Human Yet?

Ours is hardly the first generation to face disruptive change. The steam engine, the chronograph, the telegraph, the light bulb, the telephone, vulcanized rubber, the elevator, the steam train, pasteurization, the four-stroke gasoline engine, the airplane, the Internet—in their day, each of these technologies set in motion profound changes that effected how people worked and lived.

And while pundits, scholars, philosophers, and clerics have been railing against the hustle and bustle of modernity since way back when, we seem to be living in an era where “too much,” “too fast,” and “too soon” have truly inflected and infected both the rules of business and the rules of everyday living. At least that’s what we’ve been telling ourselves for the past ten years.

There are still places in this world where people don’t feel overwhelmed by modernity. I’ve even been to a few of them. For example, I recently spent a week with my wife hanging around a lovely place called the Kewarra Beach Resort just north of Cairns, Australia near the Great Barrier Reef. It’s true they did have a working phone and a pretty lame Internet connection, but I got the very distinct impression that nobody was all that concerned about the sorts of things I think about on a daily basis. For that matter, I wasn’t either.

But if you’re reading this missive, chances are you’re not living in one of those places and may not be one of those people. Nope, you’re probably one of the teaming throng I’ve taken to calling Customer 6.0: the cyber-mutated, attention deficit disordered, Internet-enabled, message-drenched, privacy-demanding, “inform me/leave me alone/lookey-what-I found”, stare at a CRT until you go blind, over-worked target of every database marketer’s fantasy, and the driver of the global economy.

It doesn’t sound very fun being us when you string all those words together. But what else would you call us? Consider the following statistics:

• In the great PX, more than half the households have Internet access. Half of Singapore’s households are tethered to the Internet. In the U.K., there are now over 14 million home Internet users. In total, nearly half a billion people around the globe access the Internet, which has about one billion discrete Web pages. Three million new pages are added daily.

• All those Internet users check roughly 600 million electronic mail boxes.

• E-mailers send approximately four trillion e-mails annually.

• At least one Internet music seller offers 500,000 items including CDs, movies and digital downloads. Another Web site offers 30,000 free radio stations, which is about the total number of terrestrial commercial radio stations out there.

• There are the 20,500 different periodical titles available in the U.S. and Canada.

• In the US, we run 15 trillion pieces of paper through copiers, printers and multi-function fax machines and the number will probably double in less than a decade.

• By 2000, the average worker in the U.S. toiled 1,978 hours per year, an increase of nearly one week over just a decade. The previous champions of overwork, the Japanese, only put in 1,842 hours per person in 2000—3.4 weeks less than workers in the U.S. Only workers in the Republic of Korea and the Czech Republic, among countries considered as “developing” or “in transition,” topped the United States in annual number of hours worked, clocking in almost 500 hours and 100 hours more, respectively, than their American counterparts.

• The average white collar worker does e-mail 130 minutes a day and sits in meetings another bottom-numbing120 minutes a day.

Indeed, 24x7x365 has progressed from shorthand for hours and days in a year to an anthem for a generation. Time is the single most important currency Customer 6.0 has to spend. The nine-to-five work week is dead. The standard days where employees counted on regular start-times, lunchtimes, and going-home times, have given way to nonstop work and non-stop overwhelm.

Meet the New Superman

What’s funny about all that attention draining froth is that we not only brought it on ourselves, we celebrated its creation and mutation every step of the way.

We celebrated it as we threw buckets of our hard earned cash (as well as the easy winnings of an overwrought stock market) at firms that offered products and services that contributed to the general sense of hyper-reality.

We celebrated it as we subscribed to piles of hip new magazines, e-zines, web-zines, newsletters, and all manner of new media that rushed to laud the limitless, recession proof, risk-free, victimless economic miracle that stretched unimpeded before us.

We celebrated it as we lionized the new titans of modernity: youngish, usually male, hard driving, obsessive creatures of the media age whose singular focus on amassing wealth through rocket-ride entrepreneurialism was forgiven because after all, we were in on the fun too. Weren’t we?

This last point is the one that leaves me most agog. In retrospect, we should all have had Charles Barkley’s immortal words tattooed on the back of our hands: “I am not a role model.”

Just because someone gets a lot of press, doesn’t mean they’re smart, or great, or even good. It just means someone needed something to write about.

Just because someone has an eight or nine digit net worth doesn’t make them a visionary. Turns out they might have simply gotten lucky . . . and gotten out before the rest of us did.

Just because someone is a senior manager at a famous company, that doesn’t mean that they’re not arrogant, mean spirited, manipulative, or greedy. Some are; many aren’t.

The truth is, one of the remarkable features of the past half-decade or so is that our collective “need to believe” led us to not only suspend any sense of macro-economic proportion any reasonable adult inherently posses (remember the one about “what goes up, must come down”), but to lionize a group of people—business leaders all—who were no better than any other random sampling of humanity. In fact, as a group, they may even have been far worse. We held them up as gods, only to find they had feet of clay, and in many cases, shrunken hearts of lead.

Lynn Has Left the Building

This will sound odd, but I was sitting with a group of senior managers at Wells Fargo Bank the other day wondering if the answer isn’t more women in senior positions. The past few years did feature a few memorable flameouts of women executives—Jill Barad at Mattel is one—but unless I missed something, the current rogues gallery at Andersen, Enron, Global Crossing, Tyco, and elsewhere seems to be overwhelmingly male.

One obvious explanation is that males are disproportionately represented in senior management and leadership positions in most large companies. There are at least five other explanations you might offer to mitigate my observation, but I am nevertheless left with a nagging sense that testosterone, greed, and hubris make comfortable traveling companions, and we investors have been super-complicit in promoting and celebrating that unholy union.

I was further reminded of this point by an example of its exact opposite this week as I witnessed the outpouring of grief at Wells Fargo that accompanied the last few days that Lynn Pike worked for Wells prior to taking up her new job as Managing Director of Consumer Banking and Distribution for FleetBoston.

To digress, FleetBoston is one of a half dozen large stews of previously independent financial services brands that were poured together over the latest round of buying and merging binges. I don’t think it unfair to say that it has not been an unbridled success. In fact, most people would say that in particular, the retail bank is a mess. Enter Lynn Pike.

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 25, 2002--Lynn Pike, most recently an executive vice president responsible for Wells Fargo's Metropolitan Banking Region in the Los Angeles area, has been named Managing Director of Fleet's Consumer Banking and Distribution Group, a newly created role within Fleet's Personal Financial Services Division.

In her new role, to begin May 20, Pike will have overall management responsibility for FleetBoston's 1,500 branches, its call centers and telephone banking operations, and its 3,700 ATMs. She will also oversee branch planning and construction functions, as well as retail sales management and training activities. Approximately 15,000 employees serve these areas and the 5.5 million consumer households currently banking with Fleet. She will report to Brad Warner, Vice Chairman and head of Fleet's Consumer Financial Services Group.

"Lynn Pike joins Fleet at an exciting time. Her talents will help us to further galvanize the momentum we have begun to establish in our many new customer service initiatives. Her extensive background in retail banking and her experience in cross-sell and service development programs are timely assets to the strategic challenges we have set for ourselves," said Warner.

In her position at Wells Fargo, Pike was responsible for retail banking in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Ventura, and parts of San Bernardino and Orange Counties, where she managed 300 branch offices and 4,800 employees.

"We will benefit not only from Lynn Pike's extensive and deep banking background, but from her intimate knowledge of our markets, as well. Both strategically and operationally, she will hit the ground running with a focused, results-driven mission to make us the bank of choice in the diverse and demanding markets we serve," said Warner.

The press release goes on to describe the various initiatives the bank has undertaken to improve the customer experience, many of which have something to do with technology.

Brad Warner is not wrong when he talks about Lynn’s “extensive and deep banking background.” What he probably knows but didn’t say in a missive designed to impress the analysts, is that Lynn succeeds—and make no mistake about it, she completely transformed Wells Fargo’s notoriously weak presence in the LA area—because she’s all that and one thing more. She’s a decent human being.

Actually decent doesn’t even begin to describe her (understand I’m biased; she’s been a client and friend for several years now). Ask the people that work for her and they are uniform in their praise, using words like: Listens, Cares, Trust, Fair, Compassionate, Pushes me to be better, Develops me as a person/leader, Diversity, Team, Service to others, service to community, Humility, Genuine, and Courage.

In one of the most complicated businesses going (I can’t think of a tougher business than banking), in one of the toughest markets in the country (LA has more crime, more diversity, more languages, more sprawl, and more of just about everything than anywhere in the US other than NYC), in an era and an arena where producing real earnings is what matters, Lynn built a $20 billion banking presence out of a mishmash of merged entities, moved significant market share, and did it all with style, grace, and heart.

Her going away party was nothing if not a testimony to her ability to bridge the seeming paradox of decency and business efficacy. John Mack, arguably one of the most powerful and influential African Americans in the US made a point to come by and laud Lynn for her leadership and what she had done to make Wells Fargo a powerful force for good in LA. Hard-boiled Wells Fargo executives who are better known for their steely-eyed deal doing and lending prowess stood up to lay bare their strong feelings for Lynn and their grief that she was leaving.

The fact that there was a going away party at all for someone leaving to take a senior position at another bank is nothing short of remarkable.

The Time for Humanity Has Come Again

Through all the emotion that accompanied Lynn’s last week, I was also struck by another thought. The leadership team that Lynn leaves behind is a credit to her values and her commitment to developing a strong team. They are an awesome group—men and women both—and fully up to the task of continuing to drive through the poles of the modern business paradox: to build real business value and do it with humanity, decency, and heart.

Humanity, decency, and heart. Those are words that have been strangers to the halls, offices, and meeting rooms of corporate America. Somehow we’ve talked ourselves into believing that there is no place for meaning or real values in an environment that demands unremitting quarter after quarter growth. Maybe it’s time to rethink that assumption.

Add up the collective implosion of wealth, bank loans, and human costs wrought by Andersen, Enron, Tyco, and Global Crossing. Throw in Long Term Capital Management just to show off your sense of recent history. You’ve just accounted for a very, very big number. You’ve just wiped out all the quarterly earnings and stock market gains to last an otherwise normal year. For that matter, you’ve just wiped out the entire size of the NYSE thirty years ago.

These aren’t examples of companies that got dragged down by the deflation of an overheated economy. These are companies that turned out to be the poisonous poster children of what happens when we forsake humanity, decency, and heart—not to mention lack of ethics, lack of morals, and lack of any sense of proportion—on the alter of becoming masters of the universe.

As the story of Lynn Pike shows—and we’re all pulling for her at FleetBoston—it's possible to be a good business person and a good person at the same time and in the same place. It’s not just possible, it’s necessary. It’s what real leadership is all about. It’s what organizations everywhere need more of.