"Effective leadership is putting first things first.  Effective management is discipline, carrying it out."
                                                                                                     -Stephen Covey

Texas Hospitality at Its Best!

Wendell M. Pichon, CM
2005 NMA Chairman of the Board
Lockheed Martin Leadership Association
Fort Worth, TX 

In June, Pattie Boyd, NMA National Director from Lockheed Martin Aeronautics in Fort Worth, 2003 NMA Chairman of the Board Dan Robertson, CM, and 2005 NMA Chairman of the Board, Wendell M. Pichon, CM, were invited to participate in the monthly meeting at American Valve and Hydrant (AVH) to install the 2007 Chapter Leadership Team.  The following morning they were joined by Gary Waits, Southwest Area Chairman, for a New Chapter Development Breakfast hosted by Dalton Babineaux, President of American Valve and Hydrant , Beaumont, TX , Amy Dennison, AVH Chapter President, New Chapter Development Chair David Stephens, and members of their board.  Special guests to the breakfast included the Mayor, Guy N. Goodson, of the Great City of Beaumont and a number of business leaders that American Valve and Hydrant conduct business with in the Beaumont and surrounding areas. The purpose of this meeting as presented by Dalton Babineaux was to share with the leaders in the surrounding community the benefits that American Valve and Hydrant continues to find in its association with NMA…THE Leadership Development Organization.  This session was a perfect model for all of our chapters to follow.  This model presentation will assist chapter/council members to meet, greet, and inform potential members, or potential chapter leaders, with knowledgeable information about the benefits of NMA.

The handout and presentations used during this breakfast are available for your use in hosting a New Chapter Development Breakfast or Luncheon.  Check out the NMA website under, “Joining NMA” then “Marketing Materials.”

We can all make a difference in how our potential customers perceive NMA…THE Leadership Development Organization, by following the simple model demonstrated by our friends at American Valve and Hydrant in Beaumont, Texas. This need not be a lost art!  The importance of the first contact cannot be overstated.  

Several members of the AVH Chapter will be in attendance at the National Conference in Nashville, TN, and I encourage you to make a personal effort to contact them and find out more about the New Chapter Development Breakfast, and oh yes, ask them about their new awards, the SAP and PAL Awards, instituted by their chapter and how they were able to achieve 84% member participation during all of their 2005 monthly meetings.

Texas Hospitality is alive and well at American Valve and Hydrant and chapter member enthusiasm is overflowing!

Dalton Babineaux
President
American Valve & Hydrant

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Leadership is not magnetic personality—that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not "making friends and influencing people"—that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.
                                                                                                                                                                                   -Peter F. Drucker

The Business Case for Diversity

Susan Schubert

Diversity Matters

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Since the publication of the Workforce 2000 study, cost savings and winning the competition for talent are frequently cited as strong arguments for the pursuit of diversity initiatives. More recently, they have been supplemented with a third, even more forceful argument – the opportunity to drive business growth by leveraging the many facets of diversity.  All three reasons surfaced as significant in a recent survey of Fortune 100 company human resources executives.

Following are both negative and positive bottom-line impact reasons for embracing diversity:

Negative, especially related to cost savings:

• Higher Turnover Costs: Turnover among women and people of color is a significant and costly problem for many companies.

• Lawsuits on Sexual, Race and Age Discrimination: With employee sexual harassment complaints on the rise, the EEOC faces a backlog of 97,000 cases.

Positive:

• Winning the Competition for Talent means attracting, retaining, and promoting excellent employees from different demographic groups.

• Driving Business Growth: A powerful new impetus for managing diversity centers on driving business growth by leveraging opportunities associated with increased marketplace understanding, greater creativity, higher quality team problem-solving, improved leadership effectiveness, and better global relations.

• Increasing Creativity and Innovation

• Producing Higher Quality Problem-solving

Examples

“Why Grandma, What Grosses You Have.” This was the headline of an article in the New York Times Film section on July 2, 2006. As our weekly movie pick, we headed out to see the most recent movie geared to grandmas and grandpas, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont.  We loved it and so did all the other “seasoned citizens” in the theater.

Statistics compiled by the Motion Picture Association of America show that moviegoers 50 and older accounted for 23.9 percent of the total audience last year, up slightly from 21.3 percent in 2001.

However, when Hollywood tallies box office receipts, they focus on moviegoers over and under the age of 25. “But where does that leave truly older audiences, fossils over 50 or 60 or even 70?  To Hollywood these have been the perennially invisible men and women. Yet change is afoot. Some filmmakers and smaller distributors have discovered a secret society of mature moviegoers, and they have decided that this audience may actually be worth courting.”

“Reinventing the Luxury Department Store,” a recent business report, reflects changes in the high-end retail formula for the first time in decades based on a survey conducted by The Wall Street Journal (see July 15-16, 2006).

Demographics are the biggest driver behind many of these changes. “Like so many other industries, luxury retailers are struggling with the aging of baby boomers and the movement of money into the hands of the younger generations. Children of the wealthiest generation in American history, the echo-boomers (teens through early 20s) and Gen –Xers (30 somethings) have grown up bombarded by designer brands since they were toddlers.”

What are the implications of these demographics?  Are retailers prepared to preserve their older customers while serving their children and grandchildren?  Changes are being tested in stores like Barney New York, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, and Saks Fifth Avenue – some are successful and others need to be tested.  “Still, the new ventures will need to win over a generation of shoppers like the 33-year-old lawyer who is wary about department stores in general.”

Who are the buyers? At department stores, customers are forced to make their choices which have been selected by buyers from a different generation.

Grandparents and great grandparents are still consuming!  “Jeff Taylor, founder of Monster.com, is spending $10 million to build an online social network.  But he couldn’t care less about teenagers, college students and 20-somethings, the biggest users of such Web sites.  Instead, he wants their parents and grandparents.” Excerpts from The Wall Street Journal, July 25, 2006.

Our “seasoned citizens” live longer, are more physically active, have $2 trillion in annual spending power. They’re not simply interested in insurance policies, healthcare, nursing homes, assisted living and vitamins.  This demographic of boomers plus are traveling, reading magazines, communicating with their families cross country, buying gifts for their progeny, and working past age 65.

Mr. Taylor thinks marketers will have a use for these consumers when they 64 plus. “A lot of corporations have openly embraced [the idea] that most of their customers are over 50, but they’ve never said that publicly… there’s been this sensitivity to not wanting to skew too old.”

Is this a profitable future trend? Take a look at these examples: GRAND: The Official Magazine of Grandparents; Retirement Living TV set to hit cable screens in September; Geezer-Jock Media.

“Buenos Dias, Shopper” ~ Latino spending power changes the face of Desert Sky Mall in Phoenix. Excerpts from The Wall Street Journal, July 19, 2006.

Opened in 1981 in suburban west Phoenix, Desert Sky Mall may be on the leading edge as it experiments with an array of Latino stores, bilingual signage, celebrating Mexican Independence Day with strolling mariachis. The challenge facing vanguard shopping malls is the risk of alienating longtime white and black shoppers who will make up a substantial portion of their customers.

Friday’s Restaurants are committed to diversity. Click on this website:  http://www.tgifridays.com/News/diversity.htm

NOTE: This is neither a paid advertisement nor an endorsement by Diversity Matters.  It is simply an example.

The Numbers Matter

The corporate world is acutely aware of the rapidly evolving U.S. demographics because business leaders increasingly understand that the prevalence of immigrants, people of color and non-traditional families represents an economic opportunity that will dominate their agendas for at least the next decade. Within their organizations, these leaders are spearheading mandates for multicultural workforces and emerging-markets strategies.

v    Decisions to emphasize diversity is based on the numbers, which paint a clear picture of a country with increasingly lucrative ethnic and multicultural populaces, each with its own set of cultural nuances.

v    The U.S. Census Bureau has been issuing a barrage of reports documenting the shifting demographics, highlighted by the fact that Latinos have increased their U.S presence by 58 percent over the last decade, now rivaling African Americans as the dominant minority population. In 2005, the Hispanic population was over 40 million (approximately 1/7th of the US population). By 2050, at the present population growth rates, they will be 40 to 50% of the US population. Whites are a majority in only 52 of the 100 biggest cities in the country today, and their number is decreasing quickly.

v    More Latinos, African Americans and Asians are living and working in most major cities while the suburbs increasingly are becoming enclaves of affluent ethnic and immigrant groups. Simultaneously, the buying power of African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and gays and lesbians is increasing, dominating some markets and becoming the critical growth sector in many others.

v    Above all else, corporations look for business competencies - strategies that bring in increased profits and metrics that prove the necessity to expand the emphasis on multiculturalism.

v    Those strategies start in the workforce, with the recruitment and retention of diverse employees. Women and people of color will represent approximately 70 percent of new entrants to the U.S. workforce by 2008, but who will get the best and the brightest of them? Recruiting experts say the top candidates will work for companies that aggressively recruit now – through programs for multiethnic students, affiliations with multicultural organizations, and active campaigns on job sites aimed at diverse candidates.

v    The retention of multicultural employees is another vital strategy, one of increasing concern to the nation’s corporate leaders. Losing an employee costs about four times that worker’s salary; losing a worker with ties to a multicultural community costs even more in terms of missed opportunity. Affinity groups, mentoring programs and work/life policies build employee loyalty and a growing commitment to the company’s business goals.

v    Corporate relationships with multicultural communities are strengthened through supplier-diversity contracts. Companies with diverse supplier bases gain access to multicultural markets, leverage the flexibility of the small business, and often realize significant cost savings. Again, the numbers bring home the reason for this business imperative. Companies owned by people of color and women are the fastest growing small-business segment, increasing 150 percent between 1992 and 1997, representing $495 billion in revenue.

v    The multiethnic consumer pool, like the supplier-diversity sector, is expanding dramatically. Consumer-buying power among people of color nearly doubled over the last decade, rising at a much faster rate than overall U.S. buying power, according to the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia. The collective buying power of African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos and American Indians is expected to reach $1.3 trillion by 2001 - up from $647 billion in 1990 and significantly outpacing white buying power.

v    The Business Case for Diversity presents the numbers. They tell the story of corporate America’s biggest opportunity. The influence of multicultural consumers is expanding in every industry. Automakers, retailers, banks, media and entertainment companies reach out to these customers more each day. Their bottom line increasingly reflects the success of those efforts.

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Susan Schubert is a partner with Diversity Matters a consulting firm specializing in diversity and inclusion. Their services include diversity training, organizational development, and resources. The benefits they bring to their clients include highly qualified, personally experienced and interesting speakers who share their expertise as well as their personal histories from other cultures and countries. www.diversity-matters.net

Helping you prepare for America’s Changing Demographics

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Safety Today

Pool Safety

Michael G. Woolley
NMA National Director
Boeing Space Coast Leadership Association
Kennedy Space Center, FL
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Safety tip: Follow the rules to ensure pool safety and enjoyment.  Disregard for and lack of knowledge of good safety practices is one of the major causes of drowning. Regardless of your swimming ability, you must follow personal safety practices to be safe in the aquatic environment. 

Safety at Home Pools  

1. Never permit anyone to swim alone. Constant and responsible supervision is a must.
2. Never leave a child unattended in the pool area, even for the length of time it takes to answer the phone or the front door.
3. See that the pool has adequate fencing and a gate with a lock to prevent children from unauthorized entry.
4. Keep basic rescue and lifesaving equipment readily available.
5. Post emergency instructions and emergency telephone numbers in a conspicuous place.
6. Have an adequate first-aid kit available.
7. Enforce common-sense safety rules at all times.
8. Make sure at least one responsible person knows how to administer artificial respiration and give proper first aid. Do not allow anyone to swim unless this person is there.
9. Clearly mark the deep and shallow sections.
10. Mark the separation of deep and shallow water by use of a buoyed line whenever weak swimmers or non-swimmers are using the pool.
11. Do not allow running, pushing, or boisterous play on the deck.
12. Encourage responsible parents or other adults to give water safety and swimming instruction to youngsters.
13. Make sure there is adequate filtration to maintain good clarity of the water.
14. Consult the local health department for regulations on pool sanitation.
15. Do not allow pool users to bring bottles, glasses, or sharp objects to the pool area.
16. Observe applicable personal safety rules.
17. Always keep gates locked and small children out of the pool area when an adult cannot be present.

One moment's forgetfulness -- such as forgetting to lock the gate leading to the pool area--can cause a lifetime of regret.

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4.0 Recognition Dinner

Brad Jackson
Lockheed Martin Leadership Association
Executive Secretary and SCVC Contest Director
Palmdale, CA
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The 2006 Antelope Valley Athletic Club (AVAC) and Mojave 4.0 Recognition Dinners were outstanding. The two events recognized 273 students from 13 local high schools.

The Mojave Dinner honors local high school students who have achieved a 4.0, or better, G.P.A.  It was held at the Mariah Inn and recognized 25 students from Boron, Rosamond, Desert, and Mojave High Schools. Their guest speaker, Burt Rutan, inspired those in attendance to keep their minds open to new ideas and not be afraid, because often times we learn more from failure than from success.

The AVAC Dinner was held at the Antelope Valley Fairgrounds, and recognized 248 students from Acton, Desert Christian, Paraclete, and the Antelope Valley Union High School District schools, which include Antelope Valley, Highland, Lancaster, Littlerock, Palmdale, and Quartz Hill. The guest speaker, Mike Melvill (Pilot of Space Ship One), inspired the students by sharing his experience in space. He spoke of the engineering challenges Scaled Composites had to overcome to make his space flight possible. The students were spellbound and extremely interested in his speech.

 All the students received a nice plaque and several certificates from our local State Senator, Assemblywoman and County Supervisor. The dinner is sponsored by local businesses (LM Aero-Palmdale being a major sponsor) that sponsor tables and then are given two seats at those tables and invited to come out and enjoy the evening by networking with these outstanding students. It turns out to be a wonderful evening for the sponsors, the parents and of course for the students.

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 ADP, exemplifies great leadership and developing personnel as he mentors and leads the front end of ADP and as such, LM Aero. Bill Thacker, Manager of the F-117 Systems Engineering group, demonstrates and exemplifies great skill at leadership supporting the F-117 program in the great Skunk Works traditions. Dave Thies is ADP’s Senior Manager of Cost Management and Integration. In this role, he is developing and supporting the ADP programs and developing the cost analyst personnel that support the ADP Programs. Congratulation to these nominated leaders.

Bob Raffaele was selected as the 2006 Manager of the Year.  Bob is an outstanding leader and manager that everyone looks up to.  He has efficiently and effectively provided the leadership to execute the complex modifications and maintenance of the U-2 program.  His rapport with our customer, program management and associate contractors is exceptional.  He continually achieves customer satisfaction while meeting financial objectives. His personal involvement with his employees and acceptance of the daily decision making process has made him admired by all. He is not only a team player; he is definitely captain of a quality team that strives to provide a quality product for Lockheed Martin and our customer.  He has provided technical excellence and strong leadership skills that have created an outstanding teamwork atmosphere with his exceptional service. Congratulations Bob!  These four leaders are recognized by their direct reports and supervisors for the superior development and leadership skills they have and use in their respective roles supporting LM Aero.

LMLA President, Kent Burns (right) presents the Manager of the Year Award to Bob Raffaele.

LMLA President, Kent Burns (right), presents the Member of the Year Award to Dotti Meyer.

Much thought and discussion went into the selection of this year's LMLA Member of the Year.  In the final tally, Dotti Meyer was the outstanding choice.  Dotti definitely demonstrated leadership for the LMLA by meeting and exceeding her goals as Vice President of Communications this year.  She was instrumental in the testing and debugging of the new LMLA Database that is now used by all three Lockheed Martin Aeronautics companies.

The StarDust newsletters have consistently been outstanding in quality and have been awarded recognition at the NMA national level. She has improved communications to our members by making it possible for the LMLA to be announced to everyone at LM Aero-Palmdale via the InSite homepage, and through an LMLA membership distribution list in which she can link flyers to each booster representative.  Thanks Dotti for the outstanding support!