Leaders In London

“Excellence wasn’t one of our values. What the hell is that?” says Jack Welch in this one minute clip. Focus on behaviours - like ‘make bureaucracy the enemy’ and you get excellence. As he’s one of the presenters at Leaders in London 2008, I thought you might like this sneak preview of ‘the world’s most admired CEO’ sharing one of his leadership tips. He has laryngitis here, BTW.

Phil Dourado

Abraham Lincoln was once asked how long it took him to write the Gettysburg Address, the speech that defined a nation. He replied, “All my life.”

All leadership is autobiography. As we enter a period of tougher trading conditions, it’s worth remembering that leadership is an agreement and that retrenching back to a ‘Just do what I say, as it’s no longer the good times and it’s up to me to steer us out and up to you to shut up and do what you’re told’ is a false option. In fact, you need to communicate even more with people in tough times. And this is the time when people will see the authentic you: the authentic ‘us’ emerges from cover when faced with tough times. And that acknowledgement of who you are will stay with them once you are back in the good times.

So, this is where every good leader rises to the challenge: will the people you lead be disappointed and disillusioned as you retrench to a command and control leadership? Or will they see that even under tough conditions you stick to your values and your integrity.

It’s about authenticity (see the Bill George material, below).

Posted on behalf of
Leaders in London
by
Phil Dourado of
The Leadership Hub

I’ve been reading Bill George’s book, True North, his follow-up to Authentic Leadership. George is the ex-CEO of Medtronic, inventor of the pacemaker, which he grew in ten years from a $1.1 billion to a $40 billion company.

We tend to have an archetype in our head of leaders as infallible, certain of where they are going, moving from success to success. Even George’s phrase ‘True North’ reinforces that image. But, great leaders – authentic leaders – often don’t feel that way when they are in the middle of achieving great things.

Anne Mulcahy, the CEO credited with rescuing Xerox from its downward spiral, is a case in point. The emotional roller coaster of trying to keep people at Xerox motivated and pull the company back from the brink was so draining that, at one point, Mulcahy described to George, she was on the way home, drained, and had to pull over to the side of the road. She sat there, temporarily unable to move, and said to herself, “I don’t know where to go. I don’t want to go home. There’s just no place to go.”

The boxer Jack Dempsey once supposedly said champions get up when they can’t. Dempsey would have said Mulcahey ‘got up when she couldn’t’. And she is now widely praised as the woman who saved Xerox (a claim she would herself deny, as she credits a lot of people at Xerox with saving the company). That’s the test of an authentic leader, says George.

It occurs to me, then, that great leadership doesn’t always feel like that when you are in the middle of it. Mulcahey knew Xerox could go either way - off the edge of the cliff to bankruptcy or be pulled up out of its long dive just in time. You don’t know if you are going to win when you are in the middle of it. And you often doubt yourself. It’s only in retrospect you realize that whatever you did was the right thing to do and the best you could do. When it works, you become a hero. When it doesn’t, if you can get up and learn from it and go again, you’re still a great leader. Worse, when it works, but you are ousted or not given the credit anyway (think Carly Fiorina) you have to realize that doing the right thing doesn’t always mean career advancement.

Both Bill George and Carly Fiorina are coming to Leaders in London 2008 to share their recipes for great leadership, and for leading through and after adversity. George is now an academic at Harvard, running the MBA he created in ‘Authentic Leadership’. Fiorina, famously ousted from the HP CEO position by a boardroom coup, has since watched HP follow her strategy to become the world’s first $100 billion tech company, passing IBM to the number 1 slot in the process. She’ll be talking about sticking to the vision and taking the long view…and the tough decisions that get you there.

Posted on behalf of
Leaders in London
by
Phil Dourado of
The Leadership Hub

Leading innovation is one of the most challenging areas of leadership. Here’s a little light inspiration to help you.

Lee McEwan in his Serendipity Book spots an interesting approach to innovating for customers based on adding something. I think Vijay Govindarajan at Tuck Business School, currently seconded to help GE with their innovation, calls this ‘adjacency innovation’ - Take two unrelated things and stick them together to produce a novelty.

“Turn your favourite office tool from your desk into common cutlery…this is din-ink. A set of pen caps, including a fork-cap, a knife-cap and a spoon-cap, that replaces the normal pen cap during lunch time! All caps are made by annually renewable resources, like natural starch and fibres, to be 100% biodegradable and atoxic, warranting the best alimentary use. Dispensing each set in a compostable packaging the whole set is designed to respect the environment. Now give your office ballpoint pen a good excuse to be gnawed by your teeth: use them for din-ink.”

Leading innovation will be one of the key themes at Leaders in London 2008. Click on the link to see the newly-announced speakers, including Prof. Govindarajan (of ‘adjacency innovation’ fame, see above), from Tuck Business School at Dartmouth, currently spending a year as GE’s Innovation Professor in Residence to help General Electric improve at innnovation.

Professor Gary Hamel will be telling us how to innovate in management and Jack Welch sharing with us how he increased the ‘innovation index’ at GE.

Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina, Emotional Intelligence expert Daniel Goleman, former Medtronics’ CEO (author of True North and now a Harvard Professor) Bill George, two-term Mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani, and Nobel prizewinner Muhammad Yunus (who grew GrameenBank from nothing to a $5 billion enterprise) are among the confirmed speakers. More detail on the ‘Leaders in London’ link below or above.

Posted on behalf of
Leaders in London
by
Phil Dourado of
The Leadership Hub

The greatest CEO of modern times? A lot of credible people say so. I’ve scraped together ten tips from the former CEO of GE for you, the man who turned Edison’s company, during his twenty years at the helm, from a $13 billion turnover company to a $400+ billion dollar company:

1. WHAT TO MEASURE?
“If I had to run a company on three measures, those measures would be customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and cash flow.”

2. BUILD CONFIDENCE. THAT’S YOUR JOB DESCRIPTION.
“If you’re not simple, you can’t be fast. And, if you’re not fast, you’re dead. So, everything we do (at GE) focuses on building self-confidence in people so they can be simple.”

3. SET YOUR PEOPLE FREE
“You’ve got to balance freedom with some control, but you’ve got to have more freedom than you’ve ever dreamed of.”

4. SHOUT WHEN YOU WIN
“People feel guilty about stopping to celebrate a little victory … but it lets people know they’ve won. It’s so critical to an institution. It brings it alive, gives it character.”

5. NUMBERS AREN’T ENOUGH
“Numbers aren’t the vision. Numbers are the product. I never talk about numbers.”

6. SPEND MORE TIME ON TALENT DEVELOPMENT
“In most companies, the talent review process is a farce. At GE, Jack Welch and his top two Human Resources people visited each division for a day. They reviewed the top 20 to 50 people by name. The talent review process…at GE…has the intensity and importance of the budget process at most companies.”
McKinsey’s Ed Michaels, in his book The War For Talent.

7. FAIR DOESN’T MEAN ‘THE SAME’
“Every person should be treated fairly in an organization, but every person should be treated differently in an organization.”

8. MAKE PEOPLE SHARE GOOD IDEAS
“What makes a company flourish is transferring ideas.” At quarterly meetings, Welch insisted that GE bring together the leaders of all of its businesses to share best practice ideas. “We take the best of diversity and use it,” said Welch.

9. MEET CUSTOMERS MORE OFTEN
Welch made a point of personally meeting GE’s major customers in the spring and fall of every year. He put much of his and GE’s customer insights down to these twice-a-year reality checks with customers.

10 DON’T DITHER. JUMP.
“I’ve learned in a hundred ways that I rarely regretted acting but often regretted NOT acting fast enough.”

Posted on behalf of
Leaders in London
by
Phil Dourado of
The Leadership Hub