Leaders In London

I like this, from smith+co’s Customer Experience blog (declaration of interest: I work with Shaun Smith and his team quite regularly):

“Richard Branson has a new book out – Business Stripped Bare, Adventures of a Global Entrepreneur.

A while ago. Branson was asked about strategy and said that he didn’t run his businesses by strategies. Instead, he keeps a ‘to do’ list, that he writes at the beginning of each day. Working his way through his ‘to do’ lists, cumulatively, pushes Virgin as a group in the direction he instinctively feels it should be taking.

If you open the hardback version of his book, there’s one of his to do lists, in his handwriting, photocopied into the inside cover of the book. It goes like this:

Things To Do

1. Ring Steve Fossett*
2. Letter for Airline Staff
3. Letter for Retail Staff
4. Book – Autobiog – see photos
5. Pictures from Zambia – show mum
6. Ring S. Africa re. Lottery
7. Job swaps. Unpaid leave. Do more for staff.
8. Rail and others. Write letters.
9. Rail. On-time figures last month. Get adverts prepared.
10. Virgin America – Ring David

And so it goes on, 22 items in all.

I love the way showing his mum his holiday pictures and ringing South Africa to see if he can run a national Lottery for them nestle next to each other.

Of his top three things to do that day, two were to do with communicating with his staff. The remains of Steve Fossett’s crashed airplane were found a week or so ago, so Branson’s number 1 to do for that day is poignant.”

Branson has taken steps to define a strategy for the Virgin Group in recent years - Branded Venture Capitalism was what his strategy advisor called it, and when Branson talked to us at Leaders in London from his island home on Necker, that’s the phrase that was being used to describe Virgin strategy.

But, old habits die hard. And I wouldn’t be surprised if those daily ‘to do’ lists and Branson’s gut feel are what is driving Virgin strategy, such as it is. That’s not a criticism - those words ’such as it is’. Heretical as it may sound, I think strategy, as practised by most large organizations, that is, is over-rated. Branson became a billionaire and his companies became icons over the course of more than a decade during which, when asked “What’s your strategy?” he happily replied, “I don’t have one.” Good for him.

Our Leaders in London 2007 speaker, Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP, the marketing, advertising and media group, is profiled in the new book by our 2008 Leaders in London speaker Steve Tappin, author of The Secrets of CEOs, which was reviewed in the FT last week.

Martin Sorrell told Tappin and his co-author Andrew Cave:

“No-one has any magic formula” for leadership.

“Everyone obfuscates and makes it too sophisticated. Having a clear purpose, vison and strategy, having the right team and having them aligned to what’s important,” is the closest you can get to a formula for a successful leader, particularly a successful CEO, says Sorrell.

Richard Donkin of the FT says that although Sorrell says there is no magic formula, his (Sorrell’s) own formula for corporate leadership is still important. Sorrell likens himself “to a referee, a sort of consolidator or co-operator” who can bring all the parts of the company to work together,” says Donkin.

Tappin argues that the “idea of the solitary figure who tries to think through everything is no longer appropriate for complex international business.” Absolutely.

I also like this, from Steve Tappin’s book, where he quotes Archie Norman who, along with Allan Leighton and a close knit leadership team, turned around ASDA’s fortunes to move up from the bottom of the big four supermarkets in the UK to replace Sainsbury’s in coming (at the time - Sainsbury’s have since fought back, with the help of CEO Justin King, who was part of Norman’s ASDA leadership team) as second in the UK supermarket league table:

“I like businesses where people feel able

to shout at each other, in a professional way, of course.”

- Archie Norman

If your relationships with other leaders and the rest of the organization are strong enough to have ‘fierce conversations’ (see the book of the same name), based on passion for the business (not on ego and trying to get your own way) then you have a robust, healthy corporate climate that’s well-placed to make the right decisions in the current tough trading environment.

See a few posts ago for more on Steve Tappin and his core idea of the need to ‘build a fellowship’ of leaders. And you can learn from Steve direct at Leaders in London 2008.

Leadership lessons from Richard Branson

Not surprisingly he’s one of our most popular ever presenters at Leaders in London. Richard Branson has just published a new book, Business Stripped Bare. Hot off the press, here are a couple of insights from it:

“Inspire people to think like entrepreneurs, and whatever you do, treat them like adults. The hardest taskmaster of all is a person’s own conscience, so the more responsibility you give people, the better they will work for you.”

“One thing is certain in business. You and everyone around you will make mistakes. When you are pushing the boundaries this is inevitable—and it’s important to realize this. Even when things are running well, there is always the prospect of a new reality around the corner. Suddenly, all the good decisions you made last week are doing you untold damage. … Failure usually occurs when leaders avoid the reality of business. You have to trust the people around you to learn from their mistakes. Blame and recriminations are pointless.”

And my favourite one…

“There are many ways to run a successful company. What works once may never work again. What everyone tells you never to do may just work, once. There are no rules. You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over, and it’s because you fall over that you learn to save yourself from falling over. It’s the greatest thrill in the world and it runs away screaming at the first sight of bullet points.”

Hat tip: Michael McKinney’s Leading Blog

Tim Clark sent me his book, Epic Change: How to Lead Change in the Global Age. I like it a lot. He points out what a lot of leaders and commentators fail to notice: that the leaders’ (plural on purpose) ability to draw out people’s discretionary efforts is more important in success than strategy or other issues that are usually assumed to be primary success factors.

I also like his other central point - that the role of leader(s) is largely one of energy management within an organization; generating, releasing and channeling people’s energy.

This brief extract is particularly relevant to leadership today:

Great results over time isn’t a mark of a great leader, it’s often a sign of a ‘Teflon’ leader

“I was more than a bit startled to hear a quartet of prominent leadership scholars recently declare that ’superior results over a sustained period of time is the ultimate mark of an authentic leader.’ My own research comes to a very different conclusion. What I find instead is a pattern in which capable leaders at every level are struggling with unremarkable results and are often checkered with failure. The leader who is able to move through a career with sustained results and uninterrupted success is the rare exception indeed.

“Often these are the leaders who are either not playing hard enough or gaming the system to select low-risk opportunities that are likely to return professional success. So-called Teflon leaders are more often those who have ridden market waves but successfully avoided down cycles.”

I guess now’s the time we find out.

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Allan Leighton on Theory E and Theory O

Some sectors of the economy have been hit harder by the downturn than others. This is always the way. Leaders in those sectors are possibly, for the first time in their career, looking at how to avoid failure big time. It’s easy to ride the wave of a buoyant economy and look successful. It’s only when the tide goes out, as Warren Buffett likes to say, that you find out who’s swimming naked.Also, to be fair, you can be a very good leader and also fail. Failure isn’t a sign of bad leadership. A long, glittering, successful career, likewise, can just be a sign of adeptness at avoiding trouble rather than brilliance as a leader. But, that’s for another post.

So, if you are looking to make big change in response to changed economic conditions, what framework of change to choose? Past Leaders in London speaker Allan Leighton tells us you have two paths to choose:

Failure, he says, comes to CEOs who rely almost exclusively on Theory E. Here’s how it works:

“CEOs who believe in Theory E (the Economic theory of firms) focus their energies on achieving economic value through restructuring. They believe that change should be driven from the top and that people, culture and organizational arrangements are not a priority.

“CEOs who employ Theory O (Organizational) strategies for change, on the other hand, believe in the development of the organization’s human potential. Rather than change driven from the top, Theory O strategies for change involve employees in identifying barriers and creating better ways to run the business.”

Source: Allan Leighton, explaining Harvard Professor Michael Beer’s theory of the need for balance between the two theories, and how Leighton uses this approach in his companies, from his book Allan Leighton on Leadership. You can watch clips of Allan Leighton and other 2007 speakers, to give you a taste of what to expect from Jack Welch, Carly Fiorina, Daniel Goleman and our other 2008 speakers, on Leaders in London TV.

More on John Kotter’s new book

Over in Leadership Now’s Leading Blog, Michael McKinney summarizes the four essential things you need to do to inject urgency into the organization, according to Professor John Kotter’s new book, which we previewed below. Michael says:

1. Bring The Outside In
“Kotter offers four tactics to establish a sense of urgency in any environment:

First, bring the outside in. A “we know best” culture reduces urgency. “When people do not see external opportunities or hazards, complacency grows…. With an insufficient sense of urgency, people don’t tend to look hard enough or can’t seem to find the time to look hard enough. Or they look and do not believe their eyes, or do not wish to believe their eyes. Even if seen correctly, and in time, external change demands internal change.”

2. Model it every day
The second tactic is to behave with urgency every day. “Increasingly changing environments create a need for alertness and agility, which demands a sense of urgency that must be modeled by the boss all the time.” A few of the behaviors he details: purge and delegate, speak with passion, walk the talk.

3. Find opportunity in crisis
Third, find opportunity in crises. A problem with a damage control mind-set is often eliminates an opportunity. A properly leveraged crisis can be a valuable tool to break through complacency.

4. Deal with the ‘NoNos’
And fourth, deal with the NoNos – those people that are “always ready with ten reasons why the current situation is fine, why the problems and challenges others see don’t exist, or why you need more data before acting.”

I think 4. is the same as 1. and can be summarized as ‘Challenge denial’. What’s the most powerful force in the Universe? I once heard James Taylor say (no, not THAT James Taylor. This one’s the former CEO of Gateway and co-author, with Watts Wacker of the Five Hundred Year Delta).

Love? Hate? Gravity? Compound interest, as Einstein is supposed to have said? Nope. The most powerful force in the Universe is denial. When I say that in workshops I always expect someone at the back to stick their hand up and say “Oh no, it’s not…” (Think about it).

Posted by
Phil Dourado
on behalf of
Leaders in London

These are from the book The Leadership Secrets of Colin Powell, by Oren Harari, who is the source of a lot of material on Colin Powell’s leadership that people often assume comes direct from Powell himself. A lot of it does; the rest is Oren Harari’s interpretation of General Powell’s leadership. The next post down contains a video clip: 13 Rules for Leadership that do indeed come from General Powell himself.

1. Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.
2. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.
3. Don’t be buffaloed by experts and elites. Experts often possess more data than judgment. Elites can become so inbred that they produce hemophiliacs who bleed to death as soon as they are nicked by the real world.
4. Don’t be afraid to challenge the pros, even in their own backyard.
5. Never neglect details. When everyone’s mind is dulled or distracted the leader must be doubly vigilant.
6. You don’t know what you can get away with until you try.
7. Keep looking below surface appearances. Don’t shrink from doing so (just) because you might not like what you find.
8. Organization doesn’t really accomplish anything. Plans don’t accomplish anything, either. Theories of management don’t much matter. Endeavors succeed or fall because of the people involved. Only by attracting the best people will you accomplish great deeds.
9. Organization charts and fancy titles count for next to nothing.
10. Never let your ego get so close to your position that when your position goes, your ego goes with it.
11. Fit no stereotypes. Don’t chase the latest management fads. The situation dictates which approach best accomplishes the team’s mission.
12. Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.
13. Powell’s Rules for Picking People: Look for intelligence and judgment, and most critically, a capacity to anticipate, to see around corners. Also look for loyalty, integrity, a high energy drive, a balanced ego, and the drive to get things done.
14. Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.
15. Part I: Use the formula P=40 to 70, in which P stands for the probability of success and the numbers indicate the percentage of information acquired. Part II: “Once the information is in the 40 to 70 range, go with your gut.
16. The commander in the field is always right and the rear echelon is wrong, unless proved otherwise.
17. Have fun in your command. Don’t always run at a breakneck pace. Take leave when you’ve earned it: Spend time with your families. Corollary: surround yourself with people who take their work seriously, but not themselves, those who work hard and play hard.
18. Command is lonely.

General Powell is a past Leaders in London speaker.

Leadership is a hard-nosed thing, right? Especially in a downturn. If you’re too soft, people will take advantage, won’t strive to hit their targets (aka to please you, in these days of evaporating bonuses) and you won’t be a strong leader, right? Well, it’s not really as simple as that, is it.

Being a ‘hard but fair’ leader, a disciplinarian who keeps on top of people to ensure they do what they are supposed to do, and that they constantly report back to you for a pat on the head and try hard to avoid your temper if they did wrong…It’s all a bit old-fashioned and uninspiring, isn’t it; both for you and the people you lead. Yes, you need some of the elements of a ‘hard but fair leader’ - setting expectations for yourselves and others and ensuring you and others strive for high performance - but all the baggage that goes with it is increasingly outmoded.

If you’re anything like me, you want people to perform to a high level and do the right thing regardless of whether you are there or not, whether you will know about it or not, whether you will shout about it or not. You want them to do it because they are inspired to do it, not because they are afraid of the boss if they don’t do it.

Over on his Leadership Now blog, Michael McKinney re-visits this whole ‘tough leader or kind leader’ thing and says it’s not a case of opposites, not a case of hard or soft leadership. Michael looks at the book LEading With Kindness, to ask if it’s possible and to break the idea that tough/hard/demanding leadership is the opposite of kind/soft/undemanding leadership. Michael says:

Bill Baker and Michael O’Malley have done a service with their book, Leading With Kindness. As awkward as that title might seem at first blush, the authors aren’t suggesting that kind leaders have a soft personality, or are sissies, or are well liked at all times. (“You can be hard-nosed and kind.”) Leading with kindness is not a hot-tub leadership where the participants pass the torch singing Kumbaya. In fact they write, “They muddle through life much like the rest of us, mostly unnoticed except by those around them who are keenly aware that they are in the presence of someone special.”

(That last sentence reminds me that great leaders are not great because they are super-human. Instead, they are ordinary but growth-oriented people with character that have chosen to make a commitment to a bold course of action that is in the best interest of those they serve despite the odds.)

Gets my vote. Click on the blog link, above, to read more. Just because trading conditions get hard, doesn’t mean your leadership style has to.