About: Bob Herbold

Today, I have a guest post at thoughtLEADERS. Thanks to Mike Figliuolo for featuring me on his outstanding blog. The stories we’ve been reading these past few weeks about Kazuo Hirai, Sony’s new CEO, and the challenges of reversing a 10+ year slide are downright sad – but not entirely surprising. For a long time [...]

The business world is full of similar examples of company’s unwilling to face reality and get out ahead of a trend. Why? It is human nature. Once a person gets settled in a rhythm, they have a very difficult time convincing themselves that there is a better way to do things.

Courageous leaders know that companies exist to serve shareholders while also being good corporate citizens. They don’t allow social responsibility projects to get out of control and punish shareholders, but they also don’t allow social responsibility to be ignored.

The most fundamental rule of business is to appropriately support and grow the going business, while you independently pursue new initiatives to drive the business further. The second activity should not get in the way of the first. Pepsi violated this rule big time by massively under-supporting it’s beverage business over the past few years. It is reported that PepsiCo needs to spend $580 million more on beverage marketing support in 2012 to be competitive.

There is nothing a leader should fear more than not being trusted. Lack of trust makes leading impossible. How do you lose people’s trust? Easy…you lie, exaggerate the positive and downplay the negative, blame others when problems are your responsibility, and most importantly, you don’t deliver what you promise. Given that list, it is easy to see why Washington DC is not trusted.