Russ Pearlman's Blog

I just finished reading Walk the Walk by Alan Deutschman. It’s a good short read, but it does highlight a few important things that I think are absolutely true of leadership. First, keep it simple – let everyone know where you stand and where your first 2 or 3 priorities lay. Second, there is not such thing as a typical leader.

As for the first point, its not only important to focus on the key few things that drive you, but you have to be consistent and actually follow what you said. People rarely respond to words – they respond to actions. When you say one thing and do another, they lose faith in you as a leader. When they see you say something and actually do it – they are inspired. Recently, I was involved in a company internal meeting where we reviewed the fact that many of our delivery projects were under performing from a delivery perspective (financially mostly). What were the root causes? Well, for one, while we tell everyone that delivery is important to us, in reality, we are focused on sales and revenue as our KPIs. Given this emphasis (and clear demonstration on how important it is), our ‘walking the walk’ resulted in some very good sales – even in a poor economic climate. The down side, of course, is that we’ve let slip a few fundamentals of our delivery capability. To fix it, we can’t simply start communicating on how important delivery is (which is what I heard our leadership say was step #1). But, we have to start ‘walking the walk’ and show our teams that there is teeth behind this – by rewarding delivery, by emphasizing it more often and by judging our people based on it.

I think the second point is just as critical. Often, people see leaders that they respect and try to emulate them – often at their own peril. We all have natural abilities and ways of thinking. Trying to channel those based on successful role models is a good thing, but trying to dramatically change your persona based on what you “think” a good leader is will end up causing you to ‘talk the walk’ but ultimately end up in trouble. Is Bill Gates a successful leader? Yes. And Steve Jobs? Yes. Are they almost totally different people? Yes. A good lesson here is to be yourself, find your true principles and follow where they lead you.

And, one final note – the book decides to end with a case study on Barack Obama. Unfortunately, the book was published well in advance of his greatly declining public opinion polls. While Alan Deutschman appears to be a big fan of Obama (not sure if it’s his policies or leadership skills), he ultimately further underscores his own point. Obama has continued to be a model of “talking” not “walking.” When he promised transparency but didn’t deliver – he lost leadership credibility. When he promised the end to partisanship but didn’t deliver – he lost credibility. Barack Obama has a tremendous number of natural abilities that makes him a potentially transformative leader – but his inability to “walk the walk” is turning him into just another politician.

A posting by Eriq Gardner on Yahoo (Cute baby video wins battle against music label) provides a summary of a dispute between Stephanie Lenz and Universal Music Group. The case involves the posting of a video on YouTube by Stephanie Lenz back in 2007 of her toddle dancing to the Prince song “Let’s Go Crazy”. In response, Universal demanded removal of the clip since she did not pay for rights to use the song.

But, instead of just complying, Lenz decided to fight back working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Ultimately, a judge ruled that her video was a “fair use” of the song. She then sought damages against Universal for sending a merit-less take-down request. As it stands now, it looks like she may be successful against Universal - but it hasn’t entirely played out.

As digital media continues to expand, it’s worth reviewing what things like “fair use” really mean. United States copyright law is covered in title 17 of the U.S. code. Sections 107 through 118 highlight several limitations of a copyright owner about their ability to limit the reproduction and authorization of their property. One of the more significant areas is now known as “fair use” which has been progressively determined through a number of court rulings over the years. Section 107 specifically calls out the particulars of fair use which include: the purpose and character of the use (e.g., non-commercial use such as non-profit or educational purposes), that nature of the copyrighted work, the portion used in relation to the work as a whole and the effect of the use upon the potential market (or value) of the copyrighted work.

Now, I’m not a lawyer, and I certainly won’t pretend to be one here. But, this ruling does continue to push the envelope of what is allowable in terms of copyrighted materials. With the value of digital content declining (e.g., the revenue of a physical disc vs. a download) original content owners are trying to keep whatever control and revenue they can. But, as in Universal’s case here, I think many content companies are going about this the wrong way. For example, if I wanted to use music in a simple home video that I then posted to YouTube, it would be better if the right owner simply provided me with a portal where I could pay a small fee for use of the song. (People are already doing this – why not try to monetize that instead of spending money on lawyers to prevent it.) Perhaps I could even have a site that enables the download of these songs directly. This type of situation doesn’t really reduce the market for the materials, but it does enhance the enjoyment of the media itself. People are willing to pay for premium content. And, if they won’t, those companies won’t be in business for very long anyhow.