• Hi, I’m Brad Abare

  I'm a make-it-happen guy working with big idea people. I design teams and orchestrate strategy so that great ideas I believe in get done.
  
  I am Jamaica's husband, Foursquare's comm director, Personality's founder, and a catalyst for CFCC.
  
  
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“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” —Ghandi

For several years now, I’ve been contemplating the pursuit of an MBA. As much as I love learning, I don’t do very well with formal education. It’s just not my thing. I need that real-world, school-of-hard-knocks kind of experience. I’d rather fail frequently than navigate my way through classrooms and case studies that teach me to minimize risk. In the words of one MBA grad who had prior real-world experience, “sitting through each session of [this class] was like hearing virgins talking about sex.”

However, there is still this intriguing urge to pursue more “formal” education because of the doors it opens up. It’s not about a new career or better pay as much as it’s about a calling card of sorts for where my life is headed. It’s another tool in my tool belt. Like speaking a second language or playing an instrument.

This past weekend I read Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School by Philip Delves Broughton. It’s an insider’s guide to arguably the most prestigious business school in the world. A former bureau chief for The Daily Telegraph, Broughton left his advancing career in journalism to start fresh at Harvard Business School (HBS) in 2004.

The mission of HBS is “to educate leaders who make a difference in the world.” Broughton would continually wrestle with this mission during his two years at HBS, and ultimately suggest a revision. He wondered if leadership could be taught and if business was the right medium through which to teach it. He wondered if business leaders could achieve balance between reason and emotion. “This is why people hated MBAs. Too much cost-benefit analysis, too little humanity.”

It’s clear that Broughton is a great journalist. He knows how to tell a story. The jury is still out on whether Broughton is a “businessman.” He was one of a handful who did not have a job upon graduation and, from what I can gather, he’s still trying to find his stride.

I applaud Broughton for his “capitalist skeptic” approach. He knows there is more to life than money. The work/life balance conversation would pop-up again and again, and Broughton could never quite get his head around it. It was more myth than method in his mind. Late into the book, a familiar classmate summarized Broughton’s dilemma this way:

Your problem is this: You wanted to make all this [money] and you went to Harvard Business School so you’d have the opportunity. But all the time, you couldn’t quiet the voice inside your head telling you that just making money is a ridiculous way to spend your life. I know this is your problem, because I suffered from the same thing, before I got over it.

Broughton does a great job sprinkling in some things he learned at HBS. “To most companies, the idea of people as individuals is terrifying.” “Be a principal or a decision maker, not a service provider.” HBS definition of entrepreneurship: “the relentless pursuit of opportunity beyond resources currently controlled.” He’s packed it with stories from classes, guest speakers and complex business terms he converts to language anyone can understand.

Overall, I was not more or less interested in an MBA after reading Ahead of the Curve. This was extremely frustrating because I had hoped this book would have swayed me in either direction.

My contemplation continues.

Fortune senior writer Jennifer Reingold has a great interview with Jim Collins on how companies can turn crisis into opportunity.

When asked how companies who are built to last get through tough times, Collins says “you have to have moorings.” In other words, your stability and security is directly related to “an incredible fabric of values, of underlying ideals or principles.”

Collins goes on to suggest that in times of crisis, it’s the caliber of your people that will get you through. The question isn’t how can we afford to attain or retain the best, it’s how can we afford not to?

When asked how to distinguish truly great talent, Collins says, “The right people don’t need to be managed. The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you’ve made a hiring mistake.”

The right people don’t think they have a job: They have responsibilities. If I’m a climber, my job is not [just] to belay. My responsibility is that if we get in trouble, I don’t let my partner down. The right people do what they say they will do, which means being really careful about what they say they will do. It’s key in difficult times. In difficult environments our results are our responsibility. People who take credit in good times and blame external forces in bad times do not deserve to lead. End of story.

The full interview is a quick read and full of good to great wisdom.

After reading Jeffrey M. O’Brien’s Fortune story about Zappos, you’d think the company and its quirky-brilliant CEO, Tony Hsieh, were near perfect. I was drawn to so many insights in this article, a nod to Zappos being No. 23 on Fortune’s 2009 list of Best Companies to Work For.

From the full time life coach and 10 Commandments, to their high octane culture, Zappos is doing a lot of things right.

The Zappos HR team uses offbeat, cartoony applications and wacky interview questions (How weird are you? What’s your theme song? What two people would you most like to invite to dinner?) to screen for creativity and individuality while filtering out egomaniacs and wallflowers.

All new hires complete four weeks of training, including two weeks on the phones, beginning every day at 7 a.m. They can’t be late or call in sick. Anyone too good to work the phones during a holiday rush isn’t Zappos material. New recruits are even offered a $2,000 bribe to leave the company during training, one final effort to weed out the half-hearted (only three people accepted last year).

Zappos encourages managers “to spend 10% to 20% of their time with team members outside the office, and any employee can give any other employee a $50 bonus for a job well done.”

Love it.

Because my wife is an adjunct philosophy professor, I may have a particular appreciation for the subject of “wisdom.” The word “philosophy” means the love of wisdom, so it was no surprise that we enjoyed Barry Schwartz’s TED talk from earlier this month. Wow.

Schwartz studies the relationship between economics and psychology, and his topic at TED was on the loss of wisdom. In this 20-minute talk, he opens with the lack of humanity found in a job description for a hospital janitor. He quickly moves into the inherent conflict of responsibility and incentive, and how both are at war, in the words of Aristotle, with our moral and social will.

A wise person:

• Knows when and how to make the exception to every rule.
• Knows when and how to improvise
• Knows how to use these more skills in pursuit of the right aims.
• Is made and not born.

Experience the talk now.

I’ve had the privilege of building and leading several teams in my short life thus far. From staff and volunteer teams, to project-specific and virtual teams, I’m a lifelong learner of what it means to build and become a remarkable team.

One of the dilemmas I find myself in when building a team is answering the question about what comes first. Does the cause come before the team or does the team come before the cause? My experience has taught me that either can be done. I’ve built teams that figure out the cause, and I’ve identified causes that need a team to accomplish. Jim Collins would argue that building the team should come before figuring out where to go.

I tend to agree with Jim and I’ve been heeding his advice ever since I read it in Good to Great. But I’m not convinced this always works.

One of the teams I lead now was built on Collins’ premise of getting the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus), and then figuring out where to go. So far so good. But the problem we’re experiencing is that where we’re headed might not be in sync with where the overall organization is headed. It’s not that we’re going in different directions, it’s that we’re taking different paths to get there. I’m not sure if this is good or bad.

I do know that it’s causing some consternation on the team because although everyone shares the same corporate purpose, our team is climbing a different side of the mountain to get there. That can be fun for some and frightening for others.

What do you think?

It was eight years ago today that I asked Jamaica to marry me. Seems like just yesterday. I’m sure glad she said yes!

With love in the air this week, I’ve been thinking about our relationship a little. Jamaica has been feeling sick the past several days so the whole “in sickness and in health” comment has been lovingly exchanged several times.

I’ve always thought of this particular marital vow applying to the person who is not sick. In other words, the spouse who is not sick is saying that I am going to love you, I’m going to serve you, I’m going to be faithful to you in the midst of your sickness. Whether it’s a cold or cancer. A broken hand or a broken heart. The healthy spouse is vowing to the “unhealthy” spouse.

However, the more I ponder this oft-repeated vow, I’m convinced it applies to both people and with equal resolve. The “unhealthy” spouse is also committing to love, faithfulness and fidelity in the midst of their sickness.

So when Jamaica is sick and I am the one being selfish, impatient or unloving, she has vowed to love me “in sickness and in health.”

That’s pretty powerful.

One of the things people notice when they come into my office is the absence of chairs. I do have a conference table six feet away from my desk that is surrounded by a few chairs, but there is no place to sit in front of my desk. Many find this rude because it appears as though I am not very inviting or social. Although I’m in counseling dealing with such issues, I learned many years ago how much more efficient I can be simply by getting rid of chairs.

The logic of my lunacy goes a little something like this:
When there is no place to sit, people must stand.
When people stand, meetings are usually shorter.
When meetings are shorter, more work gets done.
When more work gets done, everyone wins.

I read somewhere that when you hold a pencil in your hand—not a pen—when standing and talking, people are more likely to finish the conversation early because it appears you are busy. I’m not so convinced this works. However, I have noticed that if I stand when someone comes in, the conversation does usually go shorter than if I am sitting.

Conversations may also be shorter because I walk toward people and back them out of the door.

Only joking.

Now that I’ve publicly clued my team to this “secret,” I’m sure they’ll collaborate a rebellion. In the meantime, I’ll enjoy the pace of productivity.

I’ve been thinking about the idea of ownership. I own a lot of things:

• My house and its contents
• My stocks and mutual funds
• My car
• My computer and cell phone
• My land/property
• My business

But what does it mean to own this stuff? Do we really ever own anything?

Technically, the bank owns my home until it’s paid off. I can’t take anything I own with me when I die. And the value of anything I own is only as good as the value others ascribe to it.

What would happen if I started looking at things, not as stuff to own, but stuff to steward?

Humor me for a moment and think about the implications of this. If we stopped thinking “ownership” and instead thought “stewardship,” would I…

• Cling less tightly to things?
• Begin to think about who else can benefit from this stuff?
• Think more about people?
• Consider future generations and their benefit?

Vaclav Havel, in a New York Times op-ed suggests a similar posture:

“Maybe we should start considering our sojourn on earth as a loan. There can be no doubt that for the past hundred years as least, Europe and the United States have been running up a debt, and now other parts of the world are following their example. Nature is issuing warnings [in the form of climate changes] that we must not only stop the debt from growing but start to pay it back.”