One of the first things Jack Welch did as a 24-year-old manager of a GE plant was blow up the part of the plant he was responsible for.
The head of the plant called him to his office to explain.
Welch, assuming this was the end of his managerial career, duly explained that he was experimenting with a different mixture from the standard one and it had caused an explosion. The plant boss probed further, asking him why and what he had hoped to achieve.
Satisfied that Welch had
a) learnt a lesson from the experiment and
b) had practised sound thinking, just needed to adjust his risk analysis, the plant head protected Welch and he kept his job.
Welch says that act of leadership had a profound effect on him for the rest of his life. As head of GE, Welch championed experimentation, learning from mistakes and not blaming people if an attempt at something new went wrong…unless they repeated the same mistake more than once, that is.
Source for this story: My notes from a conversation between Jack Welch and the journalist Kirsty Wark. She had spotted the story in his book Jack, Straight From The Gut and so asked him about it. A secondary learning point: he tells that story to make it clear that leaders are not infallible and need to admit to their own mistakes - admit their own fallibility - if they are to create a culture in which others are honest and admit to mistakes, too. Otherwise you get the myth that the leader can’t be wrong and everyone covers up evidence to the contrary, and also never admit that they themselves are wrong.
You can learn, live by satellite, from Jack Welch, ‘the world’s greatest living CEO’ at Leaders in London 2008.
This is the first of six book recommendations from Luke Johnson, who multiplied PizzaExpress’s share price by twenty-fold before selling that company, who started his first company at the age of 18 and has been growing and selling them ever since, and who is coming to Leaders in London 2008 to tell us how to lead for business growth.
“There are huge numbers of business books published, but most are unreadable and written by non-entities. That does not apply to my magic half-dozen.
“The first choice is a sort of cheat, in that it is an anthology of essays and articles by legendary figures in commerce and industry. It is called The Book of Business Wisdom, edited by Peter Krass. It includes incisive and revealing pieces by pioneers such as Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron, and Thomas Alva Edison, the inventor and entrepreneur, as well as Sam Walton’s rules for success and Thomas J Watson, who built IBM, on selling with sincerity. There is David Ogilvy on leadership, Intel’s Andrew Grove on time management and Benjamin Franklin on the ‘way to wealth’.
Here, for example, is Franklin on laziness and industry: ‘Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears, while the used key is always bright. Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of’.
Or Sam Walton 250 years later recommending his 10 rules for building a business but also pointing out: ‘They are some rules that worked for me. But I always prided myself on breaking everybody else’s rules, and I always favoured the mavericks who challenged my rules. In the end I listened to them a lot more closely than I did the pack who always agreed with everything I said’.
All in all, The Book of Business Wisdom is a classic collection of brilliant business minds…”
The Book of Business Wisdom
Classic Writings by
The Legends of Commerce and Industry
Edited by Peter Krass
Recommended by: Luke Johnson, Chairman of Channel 4 and Capital Risk Partners, who will be presenting at Leaders in London 2008 .
More like this? Luke Johnson’s recommended reads is a regular item in the Leaders in London monthly tips and insights email, called Taking The Lead, which you can sign up to for free. There’s a link over on the right, near the top of this page, where you can sign up for the free email newsletter if you want.
An interesting little story on Reuter’s ‘Oddly Enough’ news site: Though Vladimir Putin is no longer officially President of Russia, he kept his chair at the first Kremlin meeting in which his protoge, Medvedev, replaced him as President. Putin went to sit in the presidential chair, paused, and said to Medvedev, “This is your place, now”. Medvedev refused to sit in it, sitting as usual on Putin’s right hand side and saying “Oh, what’s the difference.” Interesting…
Reminds me of a story about Mikhail Gorbachev and Stalin’s chair that Gorbachev told the Sunday Times when he came to talk at Leaders in London a few years ago. When Gorbachev took over the Kremlin, he was faced with the prospect of sitting in Stalin’s chair. He replaced it with another one. “I preferred to have a different perspective,” he said.
A final thought on chairs and leadership and the importance of where you sit (this is a mix of the metaphorical and the literal). I heard the Managing Director of National Express Coaches explain once how he was leading a workshop on change. All the managers in the workshop had spent the morning focussing on how the biggest enemy of change is habit, and how we need to become conscious of our habits if we are to be able to break the ones we need to break, to make space to bring in new ones.
The MD noticed, during the coffee break, that the participants had done what people usually do at conferences and workshops - hang their jackets and bags on the back of their chair, surround it with their paperwork and bottled water and so on, to mark out their territory. When they came back after the coffee break, as an experiment, he suggested they change seats to get a different perspective. No-one took him up on the suggestion. They had, in just an hour, already created a comfort zone, defensible territory, and they didn’t want to change to somewhere unfamiliar.
He then had to point out the irony of it to them, that they had just displayed resistance to change in a workshop meant to help them identify and remove (where necessary) resistance to change in themselves and others.
There is a popular view of Jack Welch as a domineering, strong-willed leader who imposed himself on GE and shaped it in his often ruthless image, with a ’shape up or ship out’ culture. “Well, up to a point, Lord Copper”, as the lead character in the book Scoop always says to his boss when he’s afraid to contradict him.
There are different incarnations of Welch, depending on which period of his 20 year career at the top of GE you look at. For much of the last fifteen, he championed ‘unmanagement’ of a sort, spending his time trying to get his managers off their employees’ backs so that they could perform.
This book is an abridged version of Robert Slaters previous Welch book, Get Better or Get Beaten . This abridged version is far more useful: tight, sharp, full of transferable learning points and only 134 pages long. I turned down the corner of almost every page - a bad habit of mine. Here’s an excerpt so you can get a sense of the book:
Excerpt: Manage less
“Welch made it very clear that he wanted his mangers to manage less. He wanted them to do less monitoring and less supervision and to give their employees more latitude. Conversely, he wanted far more decisions made at the lower levels of the company. Obviously, he wasn’t suggesting that managers should knock off at noon every day and head for the golf course. Far from it. But, he didn’t want his managers interfering with their employees at every turn. Instead, he wanted them to concentrate on creating a vision for their employees and making sure that the vision was always on the mark and was being acted upon.
This is counterintuitive right? Aren’t managers supposed to manage? If they manage less, won’t the overall performance of the business suffer? Who will make sure employees are working as hard as they can? Who will monitor inventory levels? Who will worry about maintaining the quality of the product?
In addition, managers want to manage. They want to keep their fingers on the pulse of the business and keep close tabs on their employees.
Welch responded with one word: Relax.
Stop getting in people’s way. Cut them some slack. Stop looking over their shoulders. Stop bogging them down in bureaucracy. Let them perform.
Behind this prescription lies a key idea: Your employees deserve respect. You hired the best people and trained them well, right?
So treat them with respect. Show them you understand that they are doing something important for the company. Build their confidence – in you, in the company and in themselves.
And then get the hell out of their way.
One welcome by-product of this approach is an increased management focus on the big issues. For Welch ‘managing less’ at GE meant that his leaders had more time to think big thoughts and be more creative. They gained time to look beyond their own fiefdoms and think about how they might help other GE businesses.
As the years wore on, Welch felt that his senior managers were getting better and better at helping each other out. Had these leaders spent large amounts of time firing off memos to their subordinates, checking up on them or worrying about fine grain issues, they wouldn’t have had the time to devote to the bigger-picture opportunities.”
29 Leadership Secrets From Jack Welch
by Robert Slater
available from Amazon and all good book stores
Not to be confused with: The Welch Way: 24 Lessons From The World’s Greatest CEO, by Jeffrey Krames, which is not as good as this one (if you have to choose between the two).
A little reminder of the learning from Leaders in London 2007 - a clip of former Disney and Paramount supremo Michael Eisner on how punishing mistakes will lead to mediocrity. There are more clips from some of last year’s speakers, including Steve Levitt, Andrew Zolli and Marcus Buckingham here
Tom Peters, the business guru, says this promo for Dan Pink’s new book is one of the coolest you’ll ever see. In the 2000s, the animating question at work, says Pink, is WTF? What is work for? What is the new workplace contract that will engage people? The author of A Whole New Mind is coming to Leaders in London to run a one day masterclass on ‘whole brain’ thinking.
A lot of leadership lessons have come out of NASA over the years.
Teamwork and innovation
Leadership and innovation consultants often remind their clients that NASA would get two teams to compete on coming up with an innovative solution to a problem and that the competitive element accelerated the innovation process, for example.
Connecting everybody’s job with the overall mission, vision and purpose
And then there’s the probably apocryphal story of JFK visiting NASA HQ at Houston and stopping to talk to a man with a mop in the corridor and asking “And what do you do at NASA?” to be answered by the janitor with “I’m helping put a man on the moon sir” - often used as an example of connecting people’s everyday jobs with the overall purpose of the organization and how critical it is for leaders to do that.
Set the vision even if you don’t have all the answers already
And, of course, there’s the famous promise by President Kennedy to ‘put a man on the moon before the end of the decade’ when the technology didn’t exist to do that.
I heard once from Mike Harris, who was founding CEO of the UK bank First Direct, and who was originally a scientist specialising in boron chemistry (and who is a brilliant organizational leader in the mould of Jim Collins’ Level 5 leadership) that Kennedy’s scientists said, among other things “But, we don’t even have a fuel that can take us to the moon and back!” And the answer was “Go and invent one, then”, which led to the creation of a whole new field of chemistry - boron chemistry - which led to the creation of the right fuel. Now, I’m not a scientist so I hope I’ve remembered that right and not garbled the science.
But, we also learnt from NASA about crisis leadership
If you’ve seen the film/movie Apollo 13, you know what I mean. If we leave aside for the moment the tragic subsequent deaths in the space shuttle years later, the way that the NASA team at Houston was led to save the lives of the astronauts in Apollo 13 after an explosion in the oxygen tank - using duct tape, plastic hose and cardboard to rig up a contraption to increase the oxygen (or decrease the carbon dioxide - can’t remember) in the Lunar module so they didn’t run out before landing - was inspiring crisis leadership at its best - with everyone in the project team taking the lead at different times under the guidance of the overall team leaders to do what seemed impossible.
It was April 17th 1970 - 38 years ago today - that the Apollo 13 lunar module splashed down safely.
We spend so much time planning, writing procedures, training people in competencies and so on for leadership. We forget how leadership in the field, in real life, often comes down to improvising with the resources you have available. And we forget just how powerful the ability to improvise can be in leaders at all levels during a crisis.
I was just thinking about this, this morning: There’s a scene in the movie Casablanca that is an example of Jim Collins’ Level 5 leadership (modest, unassuming, ego-lite leadership that tends to go unsung and unnoticed, but has deep effects in creating longterm success).
The movie is set in French-controlled North Africa (Vichy, hence German-controlled really) during World War II. When a group of German soldiers start singing about the Fatherland in Rick’s nightclub, around the piano, the French people in the club, their homeland occupied, look downcast.
The resistance leader husband (Paul Heinreid?) of Ingrid Bergman walks up to the band and tells them to play the Marseillaise. The band leader glances across at Humphrey Bogart (Rick), sitting at a corner table. Bogart nods imperceptibly (well, it’s perceptible to the band leader; stop being so picky).
It’s his nightclub. This is a big risk for him to take. It’s a hidden act of leadership. The band starts playing the Marseillaise, gradually drowning out the German soldiers as, led by the resistance leader, the audience stand up one by one and noisily sing along. The German soldiers give up. For now.
This has always been one of my favourite scenes in a movie and I have always thought that the grandstanding leadership of the resistance leader - admirable though it was - inspired me less than the little nod given by the hidden leader in the corner, who let it all happen, taking on a risk to himself and his livelihood, and took none of the credit for it.
That’s just one kind of leadership. As Rene Carayol taught us at last year’s Leaders in London, there is no leadership template to aim for, no set of competencies to learn to become the perfect leader. As the marketplace teaches us, he said, uniqueness and difference work. Sameness (as in the identikit leadership development courses people are put through) won’t make you an inspirational, stand-out leader. Being yourself, however, will. See the post about Bill George’s latest book, below, on ‘authentic ledership’. And come to Leaders in London this year to learn how to…be more yourself, I guess.
60 Second summary of Bill George’s latest book on how to be an authentic leader:
1. Leadership is about what makes you different; there is no perfect model of a leader
2. Stop trying to act like a leader; think ‘leadership’ not ‘leader’
3. There are five dimensions of authentic leadership: Purpose; Practising solid values; Heart; Relationships; Self-discipline
4. Engage people’s hearts and minds behind the organization’s purpose, rather than behind an individual leader
5. You can use authentic leadership to become a market leading organization; it’s about high performance, not about being ‘nice’ for the sake of it
Just a reminder that it was 40 years ago today that the world lost a great leader, at just 39 years old, in Martin Luther King. If you haven’t yet viewed the moving and inspirational speech Robert Kennedy made on that night, it’s below.
A little story I heard our Leaders in London conference chair Rene Carayol tell, he having heard it from Rudy Giuliani, two-time Mayor of New York, who is coming to speak to us at this year’s summit: Giuliani’s father took him to see Dr. King speak, saying in advance something like “I want you to see what a dangerous man sounds like. America has to be careful of people like this.” After they’d both listened to Dr. King speak for a little while, Giuliani’s father leant down to him and said something like “Forget what I said. You are listening to a great, great man.” Giuliani says there were tears in his father’s eyes. Just to remind us that the best leadership moves and inspires us.
Here’s Robert Kennedy on that night forty years ago. Professor John Kotter showed us this speech at Leaders in London 2006 and told us a story of the hidden acts of leadership behind this public face of leadership that night. Over 100 American cities saw riots that night in outrage and grief at Dr. King’s death. But not Indianapolis, thanks to this speech and the other acts of leadership orchestrated by Kennedy in the background, involving 100 young campaign supporters of his who went out into the city after this speech as peace emissaries, with the job, Kennedy told them, of looking for trouble spots, and comforting and consoling people who were fiercely angry, and reminding them of what Dr. King stood for. The screen is dark for thirty seconds as the cameraman was taken by surprise:
This is the first of six book recommendations from Luke Johnson, who multiplied PizzaExpress’s share price by twenty-fold before selling that company, who started his first company at the age of 18 and has been growing and selling them ever since, and who is coming to Leaders in London 2008 to tell us how to lead for business growth.
I was just thinking about this, this morning: There’s a scene in the movie Casablanca that is an example of Jim Collins’ Level 5 leadership (modest, unassuming, ego-lite leadership that tends to go unsung and unnoticed, but has deep effects in creating longterm success).
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