10 business and leadership lessons from Niccolo Machiavelli

Here is an article written by Steve Tobak for BNET (February 10, 2011), The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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Few historical figures are as divisive and polarizing as Niccolo Machiavelli.

The fact that this Renaissance philosophers works date back 500 years hasn’t blunted its impact or controversy one bit.
Some view him as the father of modern materialism, inspiring people to do or say anything to achieve personal gain, i.e. the ends justify the means.

Indeed, the word Machiavellian – derived from his most famous work, The Prince – has come to mean cunning, deceit, and manipulation.
Others, however, see him as the world’s first great realist and a positive influence on modern politics and capitalism. Some even think Machiavelli was the first to apply empirical scientific methods to human behavior by making innovative generalizations based on experience, observation, and history.

Being a realist – much like Machiavelli – I’m not inclined to weigh in on the man’s overall affect on the world, good or bad. Regardless, many of his ideas for achieving long-term political success and power translate extraordinarily well into the current business climate of intense global competition.

Moreover, I never realized how closely my own ideas on business, leadership, and entrepreneurial culture resonated with his until I read this post by author Mark Harrison.

It turns out that I’ve more or less been quoting the guy for years without even realizing it. Coincidence? Hmm.

In any case, he predates us all by a few centuries, which makes these 10 Business and Leadership Lessons from Machiavelli remarkable, to say the least.

[Actually, here are five of the ten. To read the complete article, please click here.]

1. “Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times.” As I wrote just the other day, “Leaders must learn to adapt in a fast-changing world to avoid corporate or political disaster.” That is, after all, why most companies fail.

2. “Entrepreneurs are simply those who understand that there is little difference between obstacle and opportunity and are able to turn both to their advantage.” An entrepreneur’s first and most important goal is to find a unique and innovative solution that solves a big customer or market problem. Without obstacles, there are no opportunities. And those same obstacles provide barriers to competitors, down the road.

3. “Never was anything great achieved without danger.” I’ve often said that willingness to take risks is a critical success factor. In Irreverent Career Advice for Up-and-Comers, I encourage young folks to, “Take big risks … now!” since, “It gets much harder as you get older and begin to ‘acquire’ things you don’t want to risk losing.”

4. “Where the willingness is great, the difficulties cannot be great.” Finding your passion is not only the key to happiness, but also the key to business success. As Apple CEO Steve Jobs once said, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” Amen.

5. “I’m not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.” Most of you know that I abhor the status quo. In Why Skeptics Make Great Leaders, I wrote, “Cynics question common wisdom and those in authority. [They] aren’t just okay with the status quo. [They] seek a better way to do things. [They] break rules and break molds.”

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Steve Tobak is a consultant, writer, and former senior executive with more than 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He’s the managing partner of Invisor Consulting, a Silicon Valley-based firm that provides strategic consulting, executive coaching, and speaking services to CEOs and management teams of small-to-mid-sized companies. Find out more at www.invisor.net and follow Steve on Twitter or Facebook.

The State of Strategy Consulting, 2011

 

Walter Kiechel

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Walter Kiechel for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

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Like Satan in the book of Job, I’ve been going to and fro in the earth over the past few months, in my case talking to corporate executives, consultants, and former consultants. Among my questions to them: How are you thinking about strategy these days? Is the highest of managerial arts — or sciences, if you prefer — dead, as some allege? And what’s hot on the corporate rialto by way of consulting work?

Some tentative conclusions:

There is not much of a market for stand-alone strategy studies any more. Or, put another way, trying to base a consulting business on same is a mug’s game. The days when you could make a living responding to companies’ discovery of strategy, as in “Gosh, we gotta get ourselves one of those,” are gone with the 1970s (or maybe the 1990s in the “developing world”). Strategy has triumphed, the installed base is huge, no self-respecting company would be without one.

This poses a dilemma for consulting firms. On the one hand, membership in the top bracket — the lofty heights occupied by the likes of McKinsey & Co. and the Boston Consulting Group — still seems to require a strong strategy credential. Which is why you hear outfits such as Oliver Wyman and Booz Allen & Hamilton advertising themselves on the radio (public, of course) as strategy consultants.

But consultancies clinging too long to a specialization in strategy at the expense of other practice areas now find themselves in trouble. They may have done a swell $2 million strategy study for a client, but then have to watch from the sidelines as a more broadly based firm swoops in to do the $15 million project — a total systems redesign, say, or a corporate reorganization — entailed in implementing the strategy. Marakon, which put value-based management at the core of its strategy concentration, is essentially defunct. Monitor & Co., co-founded by Michael Porter back in the early 1980s, has seen better days.

Meanwhile behemoths such as McKinsey and BCG, to maintain their above-industry-average growth rates and keep their global office networks humming, have broadened what they do and moved down the food chain. McKinsey teams are beavering away in places like the United Arab Emirates and the ‘Stans — Turkmenistan, say, or Tajikistan — but they’re as likely to be doing operations projects as pure strategy work.

The most intense competition between consulting firms is for “whale” engagements. Undertakings with $20 million price tags such as the post-merger integration of a giant pharmaceutical client and its equally humongous acquisition. Or redesigning a company’s entire store system and approach to customers. While BCG or McKinsey will still proudly help a client devise a corporate strategy, in the eyes of many in the industry such projects have become what retailers call “loss leaders” — products you have to offer to get the customer in the door, but not where you make the real money.

Ultimately what the consultancies are competing for are semi-permanent, year-in, year-out relationships with companies rich enough to pay scores of millions annually for help and advice. In this context, as the Olympian firms broaden their offerings, their challenge becomes maintaining their pricing power, their ability to charge strategy-level rates for types of work that consultants from Deloitte or Ernst & Young will offer to do for a lot less.
At real live companies, strategy isn’t dead; it’s embedded in other initiatives. To be sure, you can still occasionally find a company buying a whole-hog, build-me-a-strategy-from-the-ground-up project. Typically such purchasers are emerging from some sort of major corporate unpleasantness — a near bankruptcy, say, or having missed out, Nokia-like, on a ground-shaking technological shift. Or, sometimes related, they have a new CEO with a mandate to shake things up and make her mark.

At most companies, though, the strategy has been established, even institutionalized. One CEO I talked with rattled off a list of undertakings for which he had enlisted consulting help. None sounded to me like company-defining strategic. But when I asked if, for him, strategy was dead, he was close to being offended. “Of course not,” he replied. “For us, our strategy informs every big decision we make — what markets to enter or exit, what acquisitions to make, what products to introduce.” (The very issues he had consultants gathering facts on.)

Foolish me, I came away thinking, underestimating the ubiquity, and triumph, of corporate strategy.

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Walter Kiechel III is the former Editorial Director of Harvard Business Publishing, former Managing Editor at Fortune magazine, and author of The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World.  He is based in New York City and Boston. I urge you to check out the book’s website.

Overcome Resistance by Building Bridges

 

 

 

 

 

Here is another valuable Management Tip of the Day from Harvard Business Review. To sign up for a free subscription, to any/all HBR newsletters, please click here.

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When your good idea meets resistance, you may be tempted to push your agenda harder, convinced you can enlighten your ignorant audience.

But, telling everyone you have the perfect answer rarely makes believers out of them. Don’t despair. Instead, ask people to participate in shaping your idea, rather than expecting their unconditional buy in. Connect with them on their terms.

Tell them what your vision is and then invite them to critique and add to it. You’ll need to be open to other solutions and let go of your certainty that you’ve got it right.

Chances are it will become a better idea and you’ll have more people on board to help you make it a reality.

Today’s Management Tip was adapted from “The Leadership Learning Moment That Wasn’t” by Linda Hill & Kent Lineback. They are co-authors of recently published Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader.

To read the full post and join the discussion, please click here.