Great Leadership Read: Troublesome Young Men

May 1940; a time when a few young people really did change the world!

In the aftermath of the ill-fated "Munich Accord", and Neville Chamberlain's proclamation of "Peace in our Time;" and in the midst of widespread acclamation in Britain over the Prime Minister's "success" at avoiding war, the then-First Lord of the Admiralty, Duff Cooper, was the lone cabinet minister to resign from the Chamberlain government over his feelings of repugnance with the policy of appeasement. At the time, Cooper remarked: "I should never be able to hold up my head again [had I not resigned]. I have forfeited a great deal. I have given up an office that I loved, work in which I was deeply interested and a staff of which any man might be proud.... I have ruined, perhaps, my political career. But that is little matter. I have retained something which is of great value. I can still walk about the world with my head errect." Listen to these words: they are extraordinary! Where are such leaders today? Who amongst our contemporaries is putting all that matters on the line, when issues such as Iraq, Global Warming, 3rd World Poverty, and the like are crying out for leadership?

The value of Lynne Olson's new book Troublesome Young Men, which is a must-read for anyone interested in leadership, is that it is all about such throughtful and committed leaders. Also relevant for today's world, it is also about the abuse of power, and the ability of a small group of determined actors to change the world, against all odds. Rarely, have I been as enthusiastic over a book at this one!

Among the lessons that come tumbling out of this book that reads like a novel are:

• A small group of people really can change the world! We've argued this, of course, in
  Virtuoso Teams, but it is impressive to read about U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter telling Tory MP Dick Law: "the trouble with you people is that your acts don't line up with your convictions. You know that this is one of the turning points in history.... Thirty resolute men in your House of Commons could save the world. You won't convince the House by argument nor even by facts -- only by the strength of your own conviction." [p. 177]
• The immense importance of Winston Churchill's energy, imagination, and enthusiasm for moblizing and stretching the population. When you think about what it takes to establish the credibilty of real "stretch goals," you have to love Churchill's rebuff to the suggestion that he was exaggerating Britain's military accomplishments: "There are two people who sink U-boats in this war Talbot [director of antisubmarine warfare]. You sink them in the Atlantic, and I sink them in the House of Commons. The trouble is that you are sinking them at exactly half the rate I am." [pp. 264-5]
• The pathos of Sir Anthony Eden's leadership prospects. He was everybody's "natural" alternative to PM Neville Chamberlain; indeed, no one ever looked as much a leader as Eden -- his followers were characterized as "the glamour boys," yet he was unable to fit the bill. His style projected vacillation, hesitation, and caution. As one observer put it: "He gave an impression of superficiality, with no profound interest in the problems of the Commonwealth." While another described him as: "most charming, most intelligent, but as a future leader, quite pathetic. [He] has no independent point of view and clearly no intention of upsetting the existing political status quo.... Really, as I walked down Whitehall after leaving him, I was nearly in tears."
• Finding in Chamberlain the fatal flaw of so many leaders, then and today, of reframing issues of national importance into suggestions of personal attacks; distracting intelligent debate on major strategic questions by characterizing them as issues of "loyalty," and politics. Chamberlain comes across as a bully, who exploited others through the power of his position, and who led by fear, divisiveness, manipulation and obfuscation.
• Finally, who cannot help but be inspired by the rhetoric which marked the debates of the time; especially Leo Amery's great speech, which he prefaced by admitting "great reluctance, because I am speaking of those who are old friends and associates of mine," but who then went on to quote Oliver Cromwell: "You have sat too long here for any good that you have been doing! Depart, I say, and let us have done with you! In the name of God, go!" [pp. 294-5]

This is a great book about the many facets of leadership. About the abuse of leadership by insecure incumbents; about the inevitable inertia that resists great change, and the related uncertainty that attends all bold action; and about the power of a few if united in a great cause. It is truly a shining illustration of leadership at many levels.

Executives Sans Frontières

"More than a billion people live on less than a dollar a day, and most are likely never to have made a phone call or to have travelled beyond their place of birth" not to mention living in slums, the dispair of disease, or the lack of formal education in so many parts of the world. Simply put, there are way too many of our fellow human beings for whom there is little or no opportunity nor hope. It's hard to brag about the virtues of our present global economic economic system in the face of such sad realities, yet most of us go about our daily lives apparently as if we didn't care. Wealth is abundant in many regions in the 21st century. Business school classrooms spend little time on the perils of the really poor, and most businesses regard such unfortunates as "unattractive markets." CP Prahalad has tried to get our attention with his writing aboutThe Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, but we have short attention spans.

Now, Jonathan Ledgard, of The Economist, has written, in the most recent edition of Strategy+Business, a call for a business equivalent to the Nobel-winning Médecins Sans Frontières; literally: an Executives Sans Frontières. While not entirely a novel idea, it's still a great idea, and one that would be quite feasible for companies around the world to participate in.

Increasingly, it is neither defensible, nor desirable, to consign so many of our contemporaries to an existence that we, ourselves, would find intolerable, simply because we're either not sufficiently interested to help them, or else we simply can't think of a way. Legard's ESF is a great solution for addressing one of the most pressing problems of our species, and is not at all impossible. What it needs are champions in businesses to initiate the actions that can really help so many people.

Scoring the Game

In the sprit of prototyping, and failing often to succeed sooner [thank you IDEO!], indulge me on this one….. I recently bought a book on baseball scoring [The Joy of Keeping Score by Paul Dickson]
for a friend, and was reminiscing on how satisfying it is to score a game, how it keeps me focused in what can otherwise be distracting conditions, and how it’s actually possible to review a scorecard years after the event [I once scored a game that Roger Clemens pitched for the Yanks a few years back, and can recreate some of the drama of the game by re-reading the scorecard even now] and virtually re-experience the action. Wouldn’t it be great if we had something like this in our executive development classrooms?

Like any athletic event, an executive education encounter [a few days, maybe a week, probably more than a single session, should add some value to the client, or else it’s a holiday] should all be about pushing the boundaries of what we’re capable of accomplishing. We do that by putting ideas into play and seeing where we can take them. It can be hard, however, in the midst of the action, for a participant or a facilitator to see where particular conversations are taking us, or how specific sessions add value. “Scoring the game” could change that.

I believe that participants should enter any executive development encounter with specific objectives in mind – issues to think through, problems to solve, skills to apply, etc.; they should show-up prepared, in other words. The encounter, itself, is, on the other hand, playing according to a different agenda…. that of the facilitator [professor]. There’s nothing wrong with either of these starting points, unless that’s where they also end-up. To make an encounter value-adding for both parties, there needs to be a convergence between what the participant is looking for, and what the instructor is “pitching.” Both sides have to change: the participant has to take ownership of the ideas, and put them to work in at least a prototype fashion, and the facilitator/instructor has to vary his/her “delivery” to make their materials more relevant and applicable, and hopefully also learn themselves in the process. All too often, neither party is even aware of this partnership, and the encounter ends with the participant being “entertained” or maybe even “excited”, but without actually engaging a useful idea; and the facilitator leaves with some vague sense of the session having gone well, or not. This would never happen in a baseball game, where the scorers would have a well-informed view of what made scores possible, or where opportunities were missed.

Of course, I’m talking nonsense here, but what if each participant scored ideas as they were “pitched.” In a normal session, there might be one or two “ideas” that are served up to the group. [Here, I'm somewhat mixing metaphors. Unlike a baseball came which is competitive, in Executive Education the ideas are "pitched" in the hopes that they will be "hits."] Most will not be homeruns; homeruns, which bring real immediate value to the individual or firm, are rare; just like in baseball. But what we should expect from a decent session is that we get somewhere with at least one idea… we get on base, at least. Then, over the course of the encounter; in subsequent sessions, and activities, we should be thinking about whether or not that idea is advanced; and why or why not? What are the additional things that help move that idea from “first base” to eventually scoring – being able to actually own and apply the idea when I get back to work, and make a difference as a result? Who is responsible for moving the ball? Who “enters the game” without result? Who makes the “errors”? Also, by comparison of participants or instructors, “who is least prepared”? Who should be sent down to the “minor leagues” for further conditioning?

I see scoring as a metaphor for adding focus, recognition and accountability to both sides of the game of executive development. Scorecards which focus on idea-advancement, rather than merely session entertainment quality, speak to the very mission of Executive Development. In addition, if we could review these scorecards after an encounter, my sense is that both participant and facilitator would be better prepared for the next event, and would be committed to making a difference through their encounters in the future.

China's Growth

China growing at only 4.5%-6%? Don’t believe it! Yet, this past weekend, MIT professor and former Dean, Lester Thurow made just such a claim in the Sunday New York Times. I’ve long been a fan of Thurow’s work, including some very insightful approaches to thinking about the global economy, but in this case I’m not buying. Instead, in response to his statistical gymnastics, I’d like to counter with the adage popularized by Deng Xiaoping: “learn truth from facts!” Walk the streets of even modest Chinese cities, not to mention Shanghai, Beijing, Dalian and even Chengdu, and you can see that China is experiencing something closer to“explosive,” rather than “modest” growth. Sure it’s possible to be taken-in by Potemkin villages, but these are real villages, with real people!

Thurow suggests that the Chinese themselves believe that the rural areas are “not growing.” Could this be true? Of course, there must be places in the interior of China which growth has not yet touched, but again, the reality of actually being in the countryside, where everything from product availability to housing is changing – be it in Anhui or Tibet -- on an enormous scale, suggests that real growth is occurring; maybe not at 10%, but strong growth, nonetheless. He then compares Hong Kong’s growth with that of Guangdong, ignoring completely that the one of the world’s financial capitals may have different economic patterns than that of “the world’s factory.” Finally, on the basis of electricity consumption statistics -- numbers that have always given China-watchers fits -- and per-capita macro-economic comparisons, he deems the 21st Century to not be the Chinese century!

Professor Thurow, you’ve missed the entire point! Over the past thirty years, China has moved roughly 20% of the world’s population from the 19th century to at least the late 20th; and in some places the 21st. Chinese people are better fed, better read, and better off than possibly at any point in the 7000+ years of Chinese civilization. Chinese workers take holidays! Chinese basketball players play in the NBA. Chinese peasants take foreign tours! A Chinese automobile manufacturer has reached 1 million units, while a Chinese computer company now bears the “think-pad” brand. Chinese cosomonauts are planning to walk on the moon. Chinese movies are in our theatres. And, China is no longer irrelevant to the global economy, as it was just three decades ago.

Will the 21st Century be the Chinese century? Who cares? In fact, we should all care because such labelling does no one any good. It portrays the global marketplace as a zero-sum game. If the 21st century is Chinese, whose isn’t it? What we should be hoping for, instead, is that China continues to grow, and comes through this period without any serious disruptions. That the possible speed-bumps along the way – inequality, infectious disease, trade-barriers, bachelors – don’t divert China from its growth trajectory. A strong, economically-healthy China is in all of our interests. Wouldn’t it be great if the 21st century was the “World” Century!

Virtues of Broken [Dinosaur] Lenses

We all look at the world through lenses, which are typically fashioned in the course of our educations. While such lenses allow us to efficiently access the prior experience which has evolved in our professional community, there are also unfortunate consequences that go along with this. Think about MBA education, or any professional training, for that matter. We all pretty much study the same curricula, from the same texts, and apply the lessons in the same way. We are taught by faculty who attend similar schools, publish in a limited number of journals led by editorial boards from the same small set of schools, and who compete in a global job-market that values conformity rather than independence. That's why a front page Wall Street Journal story on hunting dinosaur DNA in the 21st century is so relevant to the readers of this blog.

In what sounds like something directly out of Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger, the August 24th's Wall Street Journal [North American edition] has a front-page story about Jack Horner, who it describes as: "... dyslexic, a former Special Forces operative of the Vietnam War era, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" fellow, and a chaired professor of Montana State University who never finished a formal college degree," and who has not only changed the way we think about dinosaurs over the past several decades, but is most decidedly in the hunt for the code of dinosaur life.

All of us who love dinosaurs are in Jack Horner's debt; he has opened-up our eyes to new learnings and even greater possibilities, and it is probably his non-traditional background which has given him an edge in this respect. A colleague of his is quoted in the Journal as saying: "The lenses that people normally use to look at stuff are broken in Jack. That's what makes Jack such a good scientist. Every now and then, every field should get a renegade weirdo in it who challenges assumptions."

For our purposes as knowledge professionals, the real question is: "where do you, or your organization, get your renegade ideas from? Who is the "weirdo" that you can rely on? And, equally important, is there ever a chance that you can get to look through "broken lenses" of your own?" We're all looking for an edge, and as Horner puts it: "As long as you are not bound by preconceived ideas of what you can find, thre are an awful lot of things you can discover."

The Role of Emotion in a World of Professionals

The obituary of Philip Masters, in today's New York Times, is a good reminder that there is still room for "amateurs" -- those drawn to a field by a passion for learning, despite a lack of what might be considered "acceptable" formal training -- in many fields that have become almost totally professionalized. Philip Masters, who was, among other things, a jewelry salesman and cabdriver, was excited by tales of piracy and independently pursued research and underwater exploration techniques that eventually led to the discovery of the Queen Anne's Revenge, the 18th century sailing ship of the notorious pirate Blackbeard.

What I find striking about Mr. Masters is not only the lengths that he went to acquire the variety of knowledge necessary [history, language, diving, etc.] to make his find, but, perhaps more importantly, that his passion and commitment to learning led him to such success in a field that had previously been well-trod by many other, "better educated," but less daring, scholars. I think that it is a refreshing lesson that "emotion" still plays an extremely important role in the fortunes of knowledge professionals.

Lessons from an Old War: the Battle of Leyte Gulf

Few things could be finer, than to be at the beach in Carolina, sitting by the surf and reading sea-books. Maybe it’s because I come from a Naval family [father, uncle, cousins – while I, ironically, wound-up in the Army], but I think that Evan Thomas’ new book Sea of Thunder, about the [23-26 October 1944] battle of Leyte Gulf, Philippines, is both a great read, and instructive about the art of leadership. At the core of much of the book is the amazing paradigm shift that was inherent in moving from naval warfare dominated by ever-larger battleships, to the domination by air-power, and those ships that were able to deploy them. Among the lessons I though worth noting were:

• The inability of so many bright and accomplished leaders, on both sides, to recognize that times had changed, and that new technologies, and new ways of employing them would have to be mastered.
• The clash between “hundreds of years of naval tradition that commanders at sea in the midst of battle must be allowed to decide for themselves what to do, without meddling from the admiralty on land,” (p. 297) and the dawning confluence of complex air and sea operations over multiple fronts, complimented by nearly instantaneous communications linkages. This is exactly the same situation as classical entrepreneurship and local market knowledge, being challenged by globalization and 21st century communications technology.
• The struggle over the value of assets in the Japanese Navy was an intriguing one. Admiral Yamamoto believed that the big battleships were to be used, while the preponderance of his colleagues, at least the beginning of the war, were hesitant to expose such prized assets to enemy fire, for fear of damaging or losing them. As a result, early in the war, Japan had the assets, but not the results that they promised.
• Admiral “Bull” Halsey, one of the great heroes of the U.S. Navy, created a group around him, called “the Department of Dirty Tricks,” which comes directly out of the Virtuoso Team themes, and which gave him the opportunity to be challenged in a way that more conventional leaders, both American and Japanese, were not. It is telling that Halsey’s big failure at Leyte Gulf came when the Dirty Tricks mechanism was not working, due to his and their fatigue.
• To compensate for the draining fatigue that his commanders were falling victim to, Admiral Nimitz, the most senior of U.S. Naval leader instituted a “two-platoon” system for the South Pacific, where Admiral Raymond Spruance, a disciplined, cautious leader, traded-off fleet command, every six months, with Bull Halsey, who was aggressive and “everybody’s friend.” This not only rewarded Halsey’s earlier loyalty to Nimitz when times were tough, but interposed Halsey’s ambition with Spruance’s complexity.
• The impulsiveness of Halsey’s leadership stands in stark contrast to other situations of leadership hesitancy that I’ve spoken in earlier reviews. Not surprisingly, while there were benefits from such inclination to action, there were also some very heavy costs, as well. Overall, however, my take is that the bias for action paid off more than did cautious hesitancy. Again!
• Finally, most of the leaders were in their early 60's. This was not easy duty; it was exhausting in the most severe physical and emotional terms, and the living and working accommodations were fairly primitive by today’s standards. Nonetheless, a group of leaders, who would have been deemed at “retirement age” today, led complex organizations through some of the greatest strategic tests of all time, despite their age.