Creative Energy Options, Inc. (CEO) has been granted continuing education credit provider status by the prestigious Human Resource Certification Institute (HRCI), the certification board of the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM). As an HRCI continuing education provider, CEO, Inc. now can grant educational credit hours for certification renewal and recertification to program participants who hold a Professional Human Resource (PHR), a Senior Human Resources (SPHR), or a Global Human Resource (GPHR) certificate.

    Human Resource professionals impact everyone in their organizations because they are in management positions that integrate leadership principles through all levels of the business environment.

    CEO, Inc. president Sylvia Lafair, PhD said "We are very proud to offer the necessary CE hours to our HR participants. Our programs provide leadership skills that transform organizations, corporations, and businesses. HR leaders are essential to the transformation and growth of their companies. CEO, Inc. courses impart the leadership skills and vision needed to be effective members of the management team."

    All programs qualify for CE credit. For more information, please call (570)636-3858 or email maryjane@ceoptions.com

    As we go to press with this issue of PEPtalk, the new CEO Women Executive Leadership Learning (WELL) program "Inspired to Lead, Women are Winners: How women change the world of work and themselves" will be in full swing at The Country Place. Sylvia Lafair and senior facilitators Mary Jane Saras, Mary Wilson, and Nancy Pennebaker will spend two days delving into a leadership process that causes deep transformational change and creates the great leaders of today. Check the WELL website for future sessions of this compelling program at www.womenexecutiveleaders.com or call Shirley at (570)636-3858.

    Women make great leaders, not because they can be just like men but because they can be just like women! In the old leadership days women thought they needed to be tough, gruff, and aloof. But that didn't work then, it doesn't work now, and it really doesn't work for the men either.

    There is a new leadership style that has gained acceptance and it challenges the old way to lead.

    The old way was autocratic, top-down, commanding and controlling….more the persecutor approach, the parent-child approach, the Bitch or Donald Trump approach!

    The new way is collaborative, persuasive, empowering, and active….more the team approach, the working-together approach, the "no one wins unless we all win" approach!

    Carly Fiorina, Hewlett Packard's (HP) CEO for five and a half years during the early 2000's has written a memoir, Tough Choices. It is a fascinating read on many levels.

    The memoir is a very personal account of her public life from childhood to her termination by the HP's board of directors. During her tenure at HP, Fiorina "led the company through major internal changes, the worst technology slump in decades, and the most controversial merger in high-tech history." She had not publicly addressed the firing, the issues, or the controversy until the memoir was written.

    The book challenges the reader to decide whether Fiorina really was the wicked, ego-driven, controlling woman the media portrayed. Or was she the victim of misunderstandings, politics, and the unaccepted outsider who was not appreciative of the legacy-driven, family culture that is deeply embedded the HP company?

    However, that question is not the important one.

    There is no doubt Fiorina worked hard and was a dedicated, good leader faced with many tough choices. There is no doubt that the company thrived under her leadership. The really important question is "What is the difference between a good leader and a great leader today?" Sure a good "new style" leader is persuasive, empowering, and collaborative (she certainly had those skills wired). But a great leader also believes in and brings about a "nobody wins unless we all win." philosophy. Fiorina's failure to bridge the schism between the HP family founders and their friends and colleagues with her own strong and powerful supporters was the downfall for everyone.

    There is a Fiorina quote on the back cover of the book that says under the heading The legacy of Hewlett-Packard's founders "Bill and Dave had once been radicals and pioneers. Now, I'd seen too many instances where a new idea was quickly dismissed with the comment 'we don't do it that way. It's not the HP Way.' The HP Way was being used as a shield against change."

    Acquiring the skills to produce a "no one wins unless we all do" environment is based on the CEO tenants and principles of great leadership. Men and women leaders can gain these skills through all the CEO programs and workshops. Check the Upcoming Programs section of this newsletter, call (570)636-3858, or go to www.ceoptions.com.

    Many of you have already read, heard about or seen the attention grabbing orange and green cover of Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. I admit when I saw the word "economist" in the subtitle, I initially dismissed the book. After looking at a few reviews, however, I became curious.

    From page one, it was clear this was not "my father's economics". If Steven Levitt had been my college economics professor, I might have paid more attention. As Dubner says, Levitt has distilled economics "to its most primal aim: explaining how people get what they want". Now there's information I could have used years ago.

    Freakonomics takes a look at what is happening underneath the surface of modern life and comes up with conclusions based on data rather than on theories of how we might like the world to work. Levitt says the book is based on these ideas:

• “Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life”. If we understand how incentives work, we can solve most problems.
• “The conventional wisdom is often wrong.” What we believe or are led to believe by the media can often be disproved through an analysis of the data.
• “Dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle causes.” For example, the Roe vs. Wade decision impacted the drop in crime more than gun control and other forces.
• “Experts—from criminologists to real-estate agents—use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda.” However, this advantage is shrinking thanks to the Internet.
• “Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so.” Knowing how to look at the data can explain the seemingly inexplicable.

    Levitt reveals fascinating data on a variety of subjects including sumo wrestlers and teachers (they both cheat), the Ku Klux Klan and real estate agents (they both use information to their advantage), crack dealers who live with their mothers because they can't afford their own places, and parents whose children test well on standardized school exams (hint: if you've been restricting your child's TV watching to improve his or her test scores, you might want to read the book).

    So how can Freakonomics enlighten us about leadership? If we take a closer look at the authors, and the act of writing this book, I believe we can see a demonstration of the four aspects of the Total Leader: Visionary, Explorer, Integrator and Realizer. Levitt and Dubner are Visionaries who dare to dream a better way of looking at the world, and help the rest of us see possibilities we may have missed. They are certainly truth-tellers. Their assertion (backed by data) that abortion rights is the key factor in lower crime rates in America created a hailstorm of outrage on both sides of the abortion issue.

    The Explorer aspect of their work is perhaps the most obvious. Dubner says about Levitt that he "tends to see things differently than the average person" or even the average economist. Levitt's ability to see with new eyes and ask the right questions makes the book come alive. Although the situations in Freakonomics are familiar to most of us, we are asked to look at the conventional wisdom in a very different-and sometimes disturbing-way.

    As Integrators, Levitt and Dubner have pointed out the connectedness between many things that we would not normally see (or even want to see) as related. I had certainly never considered the connection between crack dealing and other professions in which a lot of people compete for few prizes. It appears that crack gang leaders have learned how to manage their people by watching the worst of corporate America. If we're all one and "no one wins unless we all do", then we need to understand this connection so we can begin to change the way we define success.

    Finally, the authors are Realizers who have moved the science of economics from abstraction to action. They have, in effect, made the invisible visible and knowable. I, for one, will be asking a lot more questions when presented with information that's considered "conventional wisdom". As Marcel Proust has said, "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but seeing with new eyes." Let's all vow to do that as we continue our individual leadership journeys.