Ethical Leadership - Start With Gut Instinct.

This is Part One of a multi-part series on Ethical Leadership. "I rely far more on gut instinct than researching huge amounts of statistics." - Richard Branson

I thought I would start with the most apparent way to lead ethically - by your gut. Why? Because I feel that most people are good and try to live their lives from a position of doing good for others. I know — there are some horrible people out there — but overall, I believe that the majority of executives are guided by good rather than evil. Unfortunately, some are pulled to the dark side by a number of different reasons (found in my last post).

Leading with Gut Instinct means that you listen to an inner voice — what scientists call 'your intuition'. Intuition is a feeling within your body that something is right or just not right. Did you catch that I said "within your body" and not just "within your mind"? We've all had moments of intuition - a certain colleague or a business deal. Sometimes we listen and sometimes we don't —intuition is the signpost pointing us to the right way — unfortunately, we sometimes take the wrong way.

"Trust your hunches. They're usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level." – Dr. Joyce Brothers This is why I believe my gut. Our brain is made up of billions of neurons firing many times during the day. Thoughts, emotions, facts, knowledge, etc. all are accessible at one time or another. If you have a highly structured and organized mind, you probably don't use your intuition as much as the next person. You just go to the library, choose your book from the shelves, and access the info that you need.

Everyone else's brain uses a more complex system — intuition — to unconsciously make their way through that ball of wire we call the brain and access that one (or more) tidbit of information needed to make the right decision.

The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself. – Alan Alda "Be yourself" — (how I love that term) — intuition allows you to make decisions from where you stand, not from anyone else's perspective. This is a sign of a true leader - one that makes the hard decisions, efficiently and effectively.

So next time you need to make the right decision — use your gut. It will keep you on the right track.

I Cried Last Night And Learned A Powerful Lesson.

I saw one of the most touching and inspiring movies of my life last night. Sitting in the movie theater with my family wearing 3D glasses, I was actually tearing up during many scenes of Pixar's new movie UP (by the way . . . don't walk - run out to see it TODAY. It will change your life and the way you look at life).

I'm a softie, but I NEVER cry at movies. And let me also state that I religiously see every Pixar movie. I will argue to my dying day that Pixar puts out the best movies for any age in theaters today.

But the best part - UP has a number of powerful messages. My favorite, and the one that should stick with you forever is: You are never too old to start your second adventure.

Many people go through life thinking that they only have one good 'adventure' in them. It might be their career, their marriage, their kids, college, etc. But let me say this - your life can be full of MANY new adventures! And here's the best part - they could get better and better!

So just when you thought it couldn't get better - go out there - grab life by the collar and make a new adventure for yourself. Take a risk, step out of your comfort zone, and push yourself to new heights. You can plan - or don't plan - just do. You might just surprise someone that is never surprised . . . YOU!

P.S. In posting this story, I just saw that I have no tags for the words "Adventure" or "Fun". Time to rectify that! More "Adventure" & "Fun" for Rich Gee!

The Future of Work: Yes, We'll Still Make Stuff.

Presenting Part Nine of a Ten-Part Series on The Future of Work from Time Magazine. By David Von Drehle at Time.

The death of American manufacturing has been greatly exaggerated. According to U.N. statistics, the U.S. remains by far the world's largest manufacturer, producing nearly twice as much value as No. 2 China. Since 1990, U.S. manufacturing output has grown by nearly $800 billion — an amount larger than the entire manufacturing economy of Germany, a global powerhouse.

But growth does not mean jobs. While sales soared (at least until the recession), manufacturing employment sank. Using constantly improving technology to make more-valuable goods, American workers doubled their productivity in less than a generation — which, paradoxically, rendered millions of them obsolete. (See pictures of retailers which have gone out of business.)

This new manufacturing workforce can be seen in the gleaming and antiseptic room in Southern California where Edwards Lifesciences produces artificial-heart valves. You could say the small group of workers at the Edwards plant, most of them Asian women, are seamstresses. Unlike the thousands of U.S. textile workers whose jobs have migrated to low-wage countries, however, these highly skilled women occupy a niche in which U.S. firms are dominant and growing. Each replacement valve requires eight to 12 hours of meticulous hand-sewing — some 1,800 stitches so tiny that the work is done under a microscope. Up to a year of training goes into preparing a new hire to join the operation.

Highly skilled workers creating high-value products in high-stakes industries — that's the sweet spot for manufacturing workers in coming years. After an initial surge of enthusiasm for shipping jobs of all kinds to low-wage countries, many U.S. companies are making a distinction between exportable jobs and jobs that should stay home. Edwards, for example, has moved its rote assembly work — building electronic monitoring machines — to such lower-wage and -tax locales as Puerto Rico. But when quality is a matter of life or death and production processes involve trade secrets worth billions, the U.S. wins, says the company's head of global operations, Corinne Lyle. "We like to keep close tabs on our processes."

Recent corner-cutting scandals in China — lead-paint-tainted children's toys, melamine-laced milk — have underlined the advantages of manufacturing at home. A botched toy is one thing; a botched batch of heparin or a faulty aircraft component is quite another. According to Clemson University's Aleda Roth, who studies quality control in global supply chains, the successful companies of coming years will be the ones that make product safety — not just price — a "big factor in their decisions about where to locate jobs."

Innovative companies will also stay home thanks to America's superior network of universities and its relatively stringent intellectual-property laws. Consider, for instance, the secretive and successful South Carolina textilemaker Milliken & Co. While the rest of the region's low-tech, backward-looking textile industry was fading away, Milliken pushed ahead, investing heavily in research and becoming a hive of new patents.

U.S. manufacturing will also be buoyed by a third source of power: the American consumer. Even in our current battered condition, the U.S. is the world's most prosperous marketplace. As global economic activity rebounds, so will energy prices. The cost of shipping foreign-made goods to the U.S. market will begin to offset overseas wage advantages. We saw that last year when oil prices zoomed toward $200 per barrel.

Thus, even if fewer cars are built by America's wounded automakers, there will still be plenty of car factories in the U.S. They will be owned by Japanese and Chinese and Korean and German and Italian firms, but they will employ American workers. It just makes sense to build the cars near the people you expect to buy them.

Raised on images of Carnegie and Ford, we rue the loss of once smoky, now silent megaplants but are blind to the small and midsize companies replacing them. Ultimately, what's endangered is not U.S. manufacturing. It is our deeply ingrained cultural image of the factory and its workers.