Dealing with Difficult People

We all, at some point, have to deal with difficult people. When I was the President/Dean at CEIBS, I used to marvel at how difficult some people could be; frequently, although not exclusively, they were faculty with an inflated sense of self-importance. Frankly, some of these people were difficult and not worth it! Those people received very little, if any, of my attention, and ultimately were separated from the school. Others were difficult and, yet, still worth having on-board, despite how unpleasant it was to be around them. In most cases, I could never succeed in reducing the inherent difficulty in working with them... I used to wonder if they woke up angry?... but we managed to maintain an acceptable working arrangement. It led me to believe that there is a 2x2 matrix around difficulty and value. Those individuals that are both difficult and low in value are unnecessary; those who are valuable and not difficult are great; those who are not valuable but also not difficult should be eased out; and those who are difficult, yet valuable, kept on despite their difficulty. I was reminded of this by reading the comment of baseball manager Joe McCarthy, faced, in 1948 with managing the notoriously difficult, but all-time great Ted Williams: "If I can't get along with a .400 hitter, it will be my fault." Amen!

Bernstein's Leadership Legacy

What will your leadership legacy be? How will you be remembered by those who were fortunate or unfortunate enough to have passed through your orbit as they followed their own career paths? This is a question worth pondering, as just this week I had a conversation with a colleague who was suggesting that they would "not even be remembered within a year of their leaving their present place of employment." It doesn't have to be that way, of course, and, in fact, there was recentlly an amazingly powerful and moving demonstration of leadership legacy in a most unlikely place. I'm referring to the February concert of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, in Pyongyang, when music director Loren Maazel, himself a long-standing superstar, stepped off of the stage, at a moment of immense personal achievement, when the whole world was watching, and invited Leonard Bernstein, dead for 19 years, to "conduct" the piece. Here is how the Financial Times reported it ["Ovation in Pyongyang is music to US ears"Anna Fifield in Pyongyang, FT.com sitePublished: Feb 26, 2008] :

For the encore, the orchestra played Leonard Bernstein's Candide, after which Mr. Maazel explained the orchestra's special attachment to its former conductor. "Imagine Maestro Bernstein coming back and conducting once more," Mr. Maazel almost whispered. "Maestro, do me a favour," he said in Korean, backing off the stage to leave the orchestra to play Bizet's Farandole without him. The sight of the empty green dais was spine-tingling....


I have thought about this moment for quite a while, now, and I believe it must be one of the most moving and powerful expressions of gratitude, from one leader to his/her mentor, imaginable. As leaders, we can only admire, and envy, Bernstein's legacy, for Maazel to honor him in this way. It proves, that strong and effective leaders can generate admiration and affection that lasts for decades.

The Eyes Have It: Continuous Learning

I've recently had the privilege of sitting at the "sushi bar" at Nobu's Tokyo restaraunt, and have been able to watch the sushi chefs, up-close. What is so striking is that they are always watching each other work, in a way that suggests appreciation, admiration and a willingness to learn. The chief chef has been a sushi chef for 18 years, 8 of them with Nobu; his associate has worked at Nobu for five years, and next to him is a young man in his first year. Yet, no matter how long they've been in the game, if you watch their eyes, they're always learning.

I believe that it is this willingness -- really hunger or habit -- to learn, that typifies great sustained performance. It is all about pride, professionalism, and a belief that one can always get better at your craft. It was Miles Davis who said: "I'm happy if I can play one new idea each night. .... I try to learn something new every night: the songs I played at the beginning of the year are often unrecognizable by the end of the year.” This is exactly the same sort of learning-ethic that I saw in the eyes of Nobu's sushi chefs.

Leadership as a Contact Sport

From bankers to resources guys, from IT service-providers to CTOs, over the past several weeks one of the persistent refrains that I've been listening to is the need for leadership to be "in touch," even with the highest levels of executives; and the all-too-familiar failure of senior management to actually fulfill this need. As my good friend and co-author Andy Boynton, Dean of the Carroll School at Boston College, is so fond of saying: "Leadership is a contact sport." Yet, more often than not, leaders are not to be seen; too busy, too distant: conspicuous by their absence.

In many ways, the Virtuoso Teams book was all about "Virtuoso Leaders," who were always, always, in the center of things; fingers on the pulse of the team, well-aware of what and who was going on. This may be considerably more difficult in complex organizations, especially when they are geographically dispersed, but it does not excuse the absence of leadership presence that I am daily hearing about, almost everywhere I go.

The Demise of Polaroid Film

The recent announcement of Polaroid's decision to cease producing "instant film" is a stark reminder of the power of disruptive innovation. Digital photography is, of course, the ultimate "instant photography," but it is still somewhat sobering to see an icon such as Polaroid depart this market space. No matter that Tom Beaudoin, Polaroid's President, COO and CFO [& obviously a pretty busy guy], has said about the move that: "We're trying to reinvent Polaroid so it lives on for the next 30 to 40 years," it still is the demise of an innovation that we've always taken for granted that is a sobering wakeup call for the need to attend to innovation, and strategic revitalization.

The Growing Dominance of Teams

There should be no doubt that teams are the dominant form of organizing knowledge work in the 21st century. We all know that the era of the "lone inventor," which may actually never have existed, is certainly no longer in fashion. Now comes a 2007 review of millions of bibliographic records in the Institute for Scientific Information's [ISI] data base which provides strong evidence for both a growing preference for knowlege-professionals to work in teams, and for those teams to outperform individual performers in terms of influence.

Published in the highly-respected journal "Science," the study entitled "The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge," by Wuchty, Jones & Uzzi ["Science," May 18, 2007], the study reviewed five decades of patent data and publications and concluded that "...preeminent work ... never appeared to be the domain of solo authors [or patenters]..., [and] the mantle of extraordinarily cited work has passed to teams by 2000."

The Mindless Pursuit of Customer Indifference

Everybody loves the customer! At least, that's what I'm consistently told. Why, then, does it not feel that way to me, when I'm a customer? Why are my customer experiences a seemingly endless stream of mediocre performances? My hunch is that it is attributable to the difficulties involved in moving managerial conversations beyond desired outcomes.

How many times have you heard senior-level managers proclaim that their ambition is to be: "number 1;" "the provider of choice;" "the preferred partner;" etc., etc.? It goes on all the time, but what do these slogans really mean? Nothing, in and of themselves. They are dreams, but more important they are the outcomes of more fundamental managerial actions that must be taken and coordinated if these outcomes are to be achieved. Without taking the conversation to the next, deeper, level, and specifying those other actions more precisely, it is left unsaid how, exactly, we are going to reach these dreams. If the hows are not specified, the paths to achieving our dreams remain abstract and implicit; and, all too often, unfulfilled. Achievement of organizational dreams -- the fulfillment of corporate strategy -- requires the leader to go beyond clichés and address the real nuts & bolts details of which managerial choices are going to change, and how we're going to change them, in order to achieve the desired outcomes. Don't settle for mere outcomes in managerial conversations!! Always drill down deeper to find the hows that will make these outcomes achieveable. Good intentions are not enough; as George Bernard Shaw so famously observed, "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions."

What I believe is needed is an understanding of the "deep competencies," or deep masteries, that are necessary if the desired outcomes are ever to be achieved. Takahiro Fujimoto talks about this in his recent book Competing to Be Really, Really Good, which explains Japan's successes in automobile competition, as a function of such deep competencies. One of the most useful ways of addressing this issue, and in my experience the one absolutely vital tool in forcing conversations to go beyond mere outcomes, is Jay Galbraith's "star", which ties managerial choices regarding: strategy, people & skills, organization, processes, and measures and rewards, together. I find this an absolutely essential part of a managerial "toolkit."