GreatRidge Station

A Cassette Study(TM) is a minimal approach to a case study. We do not know all of the details–and likely no one can–but we know enough to draw some leadership lessons from the facts available.
Cassette Study is a trademark of Great Ridge Group, Inc.

Recently, two large, highly visible organizations in the Twin Cities metro area selected new CEOs. Both organizations are in the same industry, facing the same economic, social, and regulative pressures. The cultures of the two organizations have been remarkably similar over the past several years.

With all of that similarity, the new CEO for each organization, selected by each organization’s board of directors, is very different from the other.

One is a charismatic, people person. The other is an introvert. One is pursuing a flatter organizational structure with higher levels of responsibility spread throughout the organization; the other has increased the hierarchy, even to the point of putting executive offices on a higher level, where they can only be accessed via a highly visible staircase. One is a dynamic, successful leader; the other is an accountant. One generates enthusiasm; one generates fear.

This likely sounds like a “Goofus and Gallant” cartoon from the kid’s magazine our daughter got when she was young. You remember the one: “Goofus cuts his cheese in the living room. Gallant cuts his cheese in the breeze.”

There is no way to tell which of these leaders will be successful, whether they will both succeed, or both fail. What is known is that the boards of these two organizations chose these leaders for very specific reasons, and their choice reflects the values those two boards hold most dear.

It will be interesting to check back on the health of these two organizations in five years or so.

But I think I know what to expect.

I’m in one of those educational slack times. Since I teach adult students, there’s no summer break, per se, but I have a lull in my schedule until the first week of August. I hate it.

While I never perceived myself as a teacher, God’s great mercy and incredible sense of humor have put me in the classroom, but now, on the wrong side of the desk.  I often equate being a teacher to adults as equal parts of the following:

• Pastor
• Counselor
• Sage
• Old Testament Prophet
• Coach
• Mediator
• Stand-up Comic

I have learned that it is no small feat to keep a class engaged in the material for 4-hours at a time. Do that for the five to seven weeks of the course, assign meaningful papers, give feedback promptly, and learn to critique in a constructive, redemptive way, and you get some idea of what it means to lead a classroom full of adult students. At this point in my life, it is my most difficult leadership challenge.
Hard work? Oh, yes. But I love it.

I can hardly wait until August.

While e-mailing myself something (it’s a long, convoluted story), I was running into problems. I simply wanted to save a file on an e-mail server as a backup: Technology is not always trustworthy.

In an odd twist of fate, Microsoft lists its own Visio files on its server blacklists. Ah, that’s comforting thought. Along the way, I also learned that Microsoft has listed Adobe PDF files as “unsafe.” Yes–unsafe for Microsoft. Adobe has been supporting this product for aeons–so long, in-fact, that it confounds some new-earth creationists . The truth is, I trust Adobe much more than I trust the folks in Redmond, Washington.

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