Jack Welch on Leadership

From It’s Not About You, Stanford Graduate School of Business:

“The day you become a leader, it becomes about them,” Welch said. “Your job is to walk around with a can of water in one hand and a can of fertilizer in the other hand. Think of your team as seeds and try to build a garden. It’s about building these people,” he insisted. “Only you will know the team.”

That’s right. The minute you move from being a task-oriented professional to being a manager of people, it stops being about your individual talents, your successes, and starts being all about coaching, motivating, teaching, supporting, removing roadblocks, and finding resources for your employees. Leadership is about celebrating their victories and rewarding them; helping them analyze when things don’t go to plan.”

This summarizes one of the key takeaways for me from this class. This class has broadened my horizons and provided a great background in the theory, practice, simulations of ethical leadership. It has been a great 16 weeks and this class has been worth the time and effort it required to do the leadership worksheets and the assignments. Provided great opportunities for self-reflection.

e.g.Apollo 13 ‘s signature line, “Failure is not an option,” has worked its way into at least half the mission statements in corporate America. And why not? The astronauts and ground personnel in Ron Howard’s space opera provide levelheaded, creative leadership during a harrowing crisis. And if there’s a better example out there of managing a far-flung organization (Texas, Florida, outer space), we haven’t found it.

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
Beneath all its Currier & Ives iconography — the Christmas tree, the skating pond, the dance in the high school gym — the Yuletide perennial It’s a Wonderful Life is a tribute to principles-based management. George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart at his good-man-with-dark-underbelly best) epitomizes the socially conscious entrepreneur. He keeps his savings and loan company alive during the depression by reaching out to the tired, poor, and huddled masses spurned by his fat-cat competitor. No matter how big the business gets — and it never gets very big — you sense that he’ll always treat employees with consideration and respect and always address every customer by name. So humble is this company owner that he rolls up his own sleeves when it’s time to help those customers move into their new homes.

Level 5 leadership in action ………….

Enjoy.

Favorite Leadership Quotes #1

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

Peter F. Drucker

Favorite Leadership Quotes #2

Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.

George S. Patton

Favorite Leadership Quotes #3

Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.

Dwight Eisenhower

Favorite Leadership Quotes #4

A leader is a dealer in hope.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Favorite Leadership Quotes #5

I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?

Benjamin Disraeli

Blue Ocean Strategy is a business strategy book written by Professors W Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne of INSEAD, a leading global business school, that promotes creating new market space or “Blue Ocean” rather than competing in an existing industry. It contains retrospective case studies of business success stories the authors claim were Blue Ocean Strategies. The book has sold more than a million copies in its first year of publication and is being published in 41 languages.

Red Oceans are all the industries in existence today—the known market space. In the red oceans, industry boundaries are defined and accepted, and the competitive rules of the game are known. Here companies try to outperform their rivals to grab a greater share of product or service demand. As the market space gets crowded, prospects for profits and growth are reduced. Products become commodities or niche, and cutthroat competition turns the ocean bloody. Hence, the term red oceans.

Blue oceans, in contrast, denote all the industries not in existence today—the unknown market space, untainted by competition. In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over. There is ample opportunity for growth that is both profitable and rapid. In blue oceans, competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are waiting to be set. Blue ocean is an analogy to describe the wider, deeper potential of market space that is not yet explored.

Just thought this is an interesting concept. Would be interested in what Prof. Todd Saxton might have to say regarding this.

Leadership Strategies and Tactics

Here are six leadership strategies and tactics to sum it all up:

1. Don’t be afraid to set ambitious goals for your work and life, as long as you can build a specific, credible, multidimensional plan to achieve them.

2. The more your goals are directed at benefiting people beyond yourself, the more likely you’ll be to achieve success by inspiring others to support you along the way.

3. Good questions make a good leader. Focus on the quality of your questions to stimulate the most compelling feedback and answers. Experiment, collect questions from people such as colleagues or newscasters, and see what works.

4. To lead people in uncertain times, project a sense of continuity, of having managed through similarly difficult predicaments. Just as panic is contagious, so too is a feeling of calm, which, when it kicks in, can settle the frayed nerves of those around you.

5. Beyond market-leading performance, the greatest source of long-term job security isn’t a pre-negotiated employment contract with a golden parachute and rich severance package. Rather, it is to maintain your reputation and integrity at all costs, and be able to articulate what you’ve done, why you did it, and what the outcomes and lessons learned were.

6. The two most important characteristics of world-class performance are the ability to develop mental toughness and the power of deliberate practice. Mental toughness — the ability to come through and deliver in the moment of truth — is the key characteristic that distinguishes the greatest performers from everyone else. And, contrary to what most people believe, this is actually a learnable skill.

The very best performers are distinguished less by talents that they inherited than by their ability to continue improving for years, even decades, until they become great. Expert performance is the end result of prolonged effort to improve through a regimen of deliberate, targeted activities specifically designed to optimize improvement in carefully selected areas. The top performers in the world not only work harder than everyone else in their field — they also work smarter.

Executives need to bring a wider array of skills and backgrounds to the table. Companies are testing fresh methods to develop global leaders while tapping innovative collaboration tools and social networks to speed up productivity and decision making. Cisco as part of the move to Democratize managment has setup a new hierarchy within the company. “Councils” are teams of executives who make decisions on $10 billion opportunities. “Boards” make calls on $1 billion bets. John Chambers the CEO who typically isnt involved in the decisions – believes that this approach is a path others will need to follow. “When you have command and control by top 10 people, you can only do one or two things at a time” he says. “The future is about collaboration and teamwork and making decisions with a replicable process that offers scale, speed and flexibility.”

Sir Edmund Percival Hillary KG, ONZ, KBE (20 July 1919 – 11 January 2008) was a New Zealand mountaineer and explorer. On 29 May 1953 at the age of 33, he and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers known to have reached the summit of Mount Everest.

Sir Edmund hillary till a year before his death never revealed whether it was him or his Sherpa who had reached the top first. He wanted to share his success with his Sherpa who accompanied him.

It was only a year before he died that he confirmed that he was the first person to climb to the top with the sherpa following him.

He did not reveal who reached the summit as he wanted to share the success.

Following his ascent of Everest Sir Edmund Hillary devoted much of his life to helping the Sherpa people of Nepal through the Himalayan Trust, which he founded. Through his efforts many schools and hospitals were built in this remote region of Nepal.

Are there true leaders now who are willing to share the spotlight of the success with their team members.

This is as good an example of authentic leadership as any.

- It is necessary to initially investigate and plan what needs to be done

-Next, the right people/teams are brought onboard

-Finally, Communicate—Communicate–Communicate.

An interesting observation that was observed: Some of the tactical tasks that had a very low cost ($500 or so) had as great a return in terms of buy-in as much higher priced tasks.

This in my opinion has a large management implication : Some tasks that can be are relatively inexpensive can have an outsized benefit for morale and process improvement as compared to their more expensive counterpart tasks.

So, managements need to look at all the tasks critically and not worry just about the cost of the tasks. These easy simple tasks that have outsized benefits should not be ignored during process improvement activities.

Apple – Steve Jobs – stock  4.6 points worse than the market during his absence

Sony – Akio Morita – stock 6.3 points worse than the market since his resignation

Dell  – Michael Dell  – stock 24 points a year behind the market while the other CEO Kevin Rollins was in charge

Charles Schwab – Charles Schwab – stock 15 points ahead of the market with the founder in charge and 14 points behind with the CEO.

While these few examples do not make a trend and maybe outliers – it does provide another perspective  to the reading from Good to Great that talks about Level 5 leadership. I agree with the concepts of Level 5 level leadership and Servant leadership and think that celebrity CEO model cannot be generalized and is applicable only to a few companies.

The first stage of the transformation from Good to Great is : Disciplined People.

The two key concepts of this stage of “Disciplined People” are:
Level 5 Leadership and First Who…Then What.

The Key points of Level 5 Leadership are :
-Level 5 leaders embody a mix of personal humility and professional will
-Level 5 leaders set up their successors for even greater success in the next generation
-Level 5 leaders are resolved to do whatever it takes to make the company great, no matter how big or hard the decisions
-An unexpected finding: Larger than life, celebrity leaders who ride in from the outside are negatively correlated with going from good to great.

The key points of First Who…Then What are :
-The good to great leaders began the transformation by first getting the right people on the bus,wrong people off the bus and then figured out where to drive it.
-The good to great leaders were rigorous, not ruthless, in people decisions.
-The “who” questions come before the “what” questions
-An unexpected finding: There is no systematic pattern linking executive compensation to the shift from good to great.
The purpose of compensation is not to “motivate” the right behaviors from the wrong people, but to get and keep the
right people in the first place.

And isn’t this finding of no pattern linking compensation to the shift in good to great in Jim Collins research
relevant today when executive compensation is far outpacing the growth in the average employees salary.
The boards of companies are led to believe that the CEO’s need to be paid an exorbitant amount. The Boards will be well advised to read the results of Jim Collins research and keep the executive compensation levels under check.

Businessweek in the Jan issue has a list of “Best Managers of 2008″. These executives did a remarkable job of navigationg stormy waters.
Some have posted stellar results. Some of them have some traits of Level 5 leaders and in the short run seem to embody the strong ethical leaders who are setting their companies for a good performance in this challenging business environment.
Some of these best managers as per BusinessWeek are :
- Frank Blake, CEO , Home Deport – he has simplified the company and boosted morale in the tough housing market
-Larry Ellision, CEO, Oracle – He has bulked up on business software companies with 25 acquisitions over the past 3 years giving the company a breadth few rivals can match.
-Satoru Iwata, CEO, Nintendo, Japan – proved that people will still spend money on what they love
-Irene Rosenfeld, CEO, Kraft Foods- She kept profits high by raising prices while spending more on advertising.

Businessweek also has the list of “Worst Managers of 2008″. The names are those of CEOs we would expect from the CEOs of Bears Sterns, Societe Generale, Lehaman Brothers, Circuit City, Nortel, Washington Mutual etc.

Seeing Circuit City being Liquidated is sad as it one of the companies Jim Collins considers in his good to great companies.
This only proves that past performance is no indicator of future results.