Peter Bregman: An interview by Bob Morris

Peter Bregman

Peter Bregman is the author, most recently, of 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done.  He advises and consults with CEOs and their leadership teams in organizations ranging from Fortune 500 companies to start-ups to nonprofits. He speaks worldwide on how people can lead, work, and live more powerfully. He is a frequent guest on public radio, provides commentary for CNN, and writes for Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Forbes, and Psychology Today. He is also the author of Point B: A Short Guide to Leading a Big Change.

Peter began his career teaching leadership on wilderness and mountaineering expeditions with Outward Bound and the National Outdoor Leadership School. He moved into the consulting field with the Hay Group and Accenture and, in 1998, he founded Bregman Partners, a global management consulting firm.

Peter earned his B.A. from Princeton University and his M.B.A. from Columbia University. He lives in New York City with his wife and three children and can be reached at www.peterbregman.com, where you can subscribe to be notified when he writes a new article.

To read the complete interview, please click here.

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Morris: Before discussing 18 Minutes, a few general questions. First, who has had the greatest influence on your personal and professional growth? How so?

Bregman: There are so many people. I couldn’t reduce it to one person. I view life as an almost infinite number of small steps, experiences, learnings, and aha moments. Each one moves us in a certain direction. Sometimes it seems like it takes me 20 times making the same mistake before I learn to avoid it. And then I make new mistakes.  And each time, I have new teachers and people I admire who influence me and help me develop and grow.

Certainly my parents fit in the category of being important teachers. And Eleanor, my wife, has a great influence on me. Then there are friends of mine – some accomplished, like the late Dr. Alan Rosenfield who was the dean of the school of public health and a remarkable man, and some who are simply kind thoughtful intelligent people who live their lives in a way that I admire.  And then, of course, there are my children who, these days, may have the greatest influence on my growth because I feel such a need to be a better person in order to be a good Dad.

Morris: Was there a turning point (if not an epiphany) years ago that set you on the career course you continue to follow? Please explain.

Bregman: It was more of an experience. I went on a camping trip that was training me to lead camping trips and I fell in love with outdoor leadership. The people on the trip were generous and talented and simply good people and living in nature and leading people to work effectively with each other felt great. I just loved it. That trip set me on the course that I’m on today.

Morris: To what extent has your formal education proven invaluable to what you have accomplished thus far?

Bregman: It’s been helpful, to be sure. But it’s been one experience of many that move me – both emotionally and practically – toward my accomplishments. I loved going to school and I was fortunate enough to have terrific teachers – not just because they were talented and smart – but because they cared, we’re passionate about their subjects and about learning, and took an interest in me.  Also, my fellow students always taught me as much as my formal teachers. Learning really does happen in every moment if you are interested.

Morris: What specifically do you know now that you wish you knew when you began teaching leadership on wilderness and mountaineering expeditions with Outward Bound and then the National Outdoor Leadership School?

Bregman: Not much. I enjoy having life uncovered as I experience it. I’ve made mistakes for sure, but I don’t really regret any of them. Each of my mistakes has helped me become clear about what’s important to me and how I want to act in the future. Each mistake teaches me something. I’m pretty pleased with my decisions – good and not so good – and I’m happy with the way knowledge has unfolded for me in my life.

Morris: Opinions are divided (sometimes sharply divided) about the importance of charisma to effective leadership. What do you think?

Bregman: I believe that charisma is really important. I think people want to be inspired by their leaders. I know I do. But it can’t be all charisma – leaders need to create processes, organizations, and other leaders who can operate independently of them.

Morris: Although hardly an authority, I am a serious student of great leaders throughout history. However different they may be in most respects, all of them seem to have been great storytellers. Presumably you agree. How do you explain that?

Bregman: Great leaders engage the emotions of those around them. Great leaders help us feel passion and loyalty and courage and persistence and a million other things. Great leaders help us feel deeply. And stories are one of the best ways to help people connect to their feelings.

Morris: Most change initiatives either fail or fall far short of original expectations and much of the resistance is cultural in nature, the result of what James O’Toole so aptly characterizes as “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom.” Here’s my question: How best to avoid or overcome such resistance?

Bregman: I don’t believe that people resist change. We all change, purposefully and intentionally every day. We get married, have babies, change jobs, move – and those are some of the big ones. We also change what we eat, how we travel, and places we visit on vacation.

People don’t resist change, they resist being changed. I don’t mind changing as long as it’s my choice. But I will resist when you try to change me. I don’t like to lose control.

So the way you avoid resistance to change is you don’t force it. This is what I wrote my first book about – Point B: A Short Guide to Leading A Big Change. The book includes 7 strategies for creating change without resistance. The strategies are counter-intuitive like “get the change half right.” We usually try to make change perfect but that leaves no room for people to write themselves into it.

Instead of shooting for perfect, we should be shooting for half finished and then let the people we want to buy in to the change finish it. It’s while they are perfecting the change themselves that they buy in to it.

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To read the complete interview, please click here.

Peter Bregman cordially invites you to check out the resources at www.peterbregman.com.

A Happy Place to Work? – Compare American Airlines to Pret a Manger

“We hire happy people and teach them to make sandwiches.”
Pret a Manger summarizes its personnel policies (from Demand, Adrian Slywotzky)

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So American Airlines has filed for bankruptcy (Chapter 11 – the kind that lets them keep flying).  Is anyone surprised?  The clues were always staring us in the face – at least,  in my experience.  The main clue?  When I flew American, the employees for American Airlines practically never looked happy.  Not the ticket agents.  Not the flight attendants. It’s not that they were rude, or unpleasant.  They just looked…unhappy.  And when work is an unhappy place, not a fun place, then you’ve got a morale problem.  And when morale is bad, things begin slipping badly.

Now, I’m not an expert on American Airlines, and I am sure there are big, economic problems that brought them to this step. And maybe you’ve not sensed the “unhappiness” that I always seemed to sense on an American Airlines flight.  But I think their morale has been low for quite a while.  (I really hope they bounce back – for their employees, and for our flight schedules out of DFW).

But I am becoming somewhat obsessed with this morale idea.  I think we’ve got a lot of places that are not much “fun” to work at these days.  And I think an unhappy place is a place that will slip badly in the customer service arena.  And once customer service slips…  well, you know the problems…

In the book Demand:  Creating What People Love Before They Know They Want It by Adrian J. Slywotzky, we learn about the restaurant Pret a Manger (Pret a Manger, from the French, “ready to eat”).  One particular location had been slipping.  There had been noticeable slippage in the delivery on the restaurant’s promises – it wasn’t as clean, the food wasn’t quite up to par, and customer service slipped.  And, the location was not making money.  The manager of that location noticed dust on a chandelier – this was his signal to get to work.  And he went to work on morale issues.

Employee morale suffered, and the perpetually cheery service for which Pret stores are famous became inconsistent. Sales declined further. Downward spirals start small, but they tend to keep going. After a while, they are very hard to reverse.
…entropy—the gradual dissipation of energy and loss of order that is the natural tendency of any system that is not constantly reinvigorated from outside.

He did turn it around.  With a lot of hard work, and some latitude from headquarters (along with a little money), the restaurant looked better, the food looked better, the people got better, and then the location started making money – pretty soon, lots of money.

And here’s the hiring philosophy of Pret a Manger in a sentence:  “We hire happy people and teach them to make sandwiches.”

Start with happy people; teach them the skill set needed for this particular job; keep them happy.  And then the customers will come.

I don’t know how to turn around the morale for a company like American Airlines.  I suspect they are in for some tough days.  But I certainly hope they can turn it around.

And, take a look at your place, your company, your folks.  Are they happy, glad to be at work?  If not, you’ve got some morale work to do.

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2 footnotes:

#1 – Demand is a really good book.  I am presenting it Friday at the First Friday Book Synopsis.  It is worth a careful read.  (Bob  Morris told me it was good.  He was right!)

#2 – The Pret a Manger story reminded me of my friend Cecil Eager.  He owns the Gruene Mansion Inn Bed & Breakfast in New Braunfels, TX, and he put it simply (and this is brilliant):  “You can teach someone how to check someone in; you can teach someone how to make a reservation – but you can’t teach friendly.”

how by Seidman – Calling for A Return to Values, and Responsibility

Gene Siskel used to say his favorite movies were about what people actually do all day. That’s what “Secretariat” is. It pays us the compliment of really caring about thoroughbred racing. In a low-key way, it conveys an enormous amount of information. And it creates characters who, because of spot-on casting, are vivid, human and complex.
Roger Ebert’s Review of Secretariat

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Call this some misc. observations…

Back on some best-seller lists is the excellent book, how:  Why HOW we Do Anything Means Everything…In Business (and in Life) by Dov Seidman.  The current version is a re-issue, with updates, of the 2007 book.  (I presented my synopsis of this book at the August, 2007 First Friday Book Synopsis).

 

Here are a few quotes from the book, revealing pieces of Seidman’s message.

Reciprocity – doing unto others as they do unto you – seems therefore to be a biological function; trust begets trust.  We feel in our guts that keeping promises and connecting with others are what gives our lives meaning, and most of us seek meaning in our lives…  If we live in a word more connected than ever before, shouldn’t we all find ways to connect better?

The key to long-term, sustained success does not lie in breaking all the rules; it lies in transcending the rules and harnessing the power of values.

To apologize is inherently a dangerous act, but one with latent power.  To apologize is to accept responsibility, this we all know, but it is also to cede power to the wronged party.  You place in their hands the decision to forgive you or not.  Apologizing requires willful vulnerability.  It is the ultimate act of transparency…

Culture is the way things really work, the way decisions are really made, e-mails really composed, promotions really earned and meted out, and people really treated every day.

You cannot do success…  Success is something you get when you pursue something greater than yourself, and the word I use to describe that something is significance.  Pursuing significance, in the end, is the ultimate HOW.

And here are some rather obvious observations.

First is that this book is about real life, the real day-to-day activities, of real people, especially at work.  That’s what made me think of Ebert’s reference to Siskel, at the top of this post.

Second, many seem so fixated on “success,” that they just leap over any values considerations.  (And, yes, that “many” just might include you and me).  But Seidman calls us back to the centrality of values.  It is a very good and worthy and noble call.

Third, we really are in this together.  Really.  Failure in Dallas might hurt someone in Europe.  And vice versa.  The Euro zone is so vary fragile, that the articles predicting this as their last hour are piling up.  And if the Euro Zone collapses, it will hurt us all.

Fourth, it really is somebody’s fault – or, many somebodies.  There have been some really, really big mistakes made in recent years.  But to find an actual “it’s partly my fault, and I apologize” messenger is practically impossible.  Consider again Seidman’s words:  “To apologize is inherently a dangerous act, but one with latent power.”  It might really do some good for some folks, somewhere, to apologize.  But there have been far too few apologies.  (And, maybe, far too few lessons learned from mistakes made).

I don’t know what will get us out of this big mess we all seem to be in.  But I think a new look at How by Dov Seidman would be a pretty good use of a few hours.

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You can purchase my synopsis of that first edition of How by Seidman, with audio + handout, at our companion web site, 15minutebusinessbooks.com.

Maybe We Have Enough Good Entrepreneurs Without Enough Good Managers

Get things done.

Through others.

Get folks organized — effectively.

This is the essence of leadership.  A good worker gets things done. A good leader gets things done through others.  And that kind of leadership requires some pretty good managerial skills.

There are people who are idea generators.  There are people who are almost natural entrepreneurs.  They come up with great new ideas.  Some of them create amazing companies.

But, ultimately, a company needs “worker bees” — you  know, people who actually get the work done.

These are the thoughts behind the simple, yet profound observation in the Slate.com article: The Real Job Creators:  America should glorify entrepreneurs less and managers more, by Esher Dyson.

Here’s the conclusion to this article:

The real spur to job and value creation is not turning hundreds of college grads (or dropouts) into entrepreneurs, but hiring thousands—or hundreds of thousands—of people into growing companies that can organize and motivate them and make the best use of their talents. We can argue about the value of education, but large companies are good at offering practical business skills—turning college graduates into project managers, marketers, human-resources specialists, and the like. These jobs may not generate revenues directly, but they are part of the structure that enables people to run companies effectively and benefit from economies of scale.

In sum, we need to start glorifying something other than the idea — or the entrepreneur. We need to celebrate people who actually build companies, and all the people they organize to do it with them.

Good managers are critical to the success of any enterprise.  Because, the truth is, people need help, direction, encouragement, to do their best.  They are skills to be taught, targets to be set, teams to create and join.  We need an army of good managers — people who can get things done through other people.

This Thanksgiving, I’m Grateful for Dwight Eisenhower

You know the drill.  We answer this question:  “what are you most grateful for this Thanksgiving?”  And, in one way or another, people always answer “family,” – or, at least, the people who are “like family.”  I share that sentiment.  I am so very grateful for my family.

“The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.”

But this year, I add Dwight Eisenhower to my list.  Because he made sure that this nation has a true, comprehensive, highway system – what we call the “Interstate Highway System,” but is actually named “The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.”  It was his experience in Germany at the end of the Second World War that taught him the value of such a system, so it was a classic “I see it, I get it, let’s copy/adapt it, now let’s implement it” leadership initiative.

It was a costly project, and took 35 years to complete (and it is still being repaired, expanded)…  We forget just how big a role this played in the expansion and mobility of our nation.  When we lived in California, we made the drive back to Texas quite a few times, and our family drove to see us a number of times.  The Interstate Highway System absolutely made that more possible.

So, why I am so grateful for this on this Thanksgiving weekend?  Because, after Thanksgiving dinner today with part of our family, we will drive on one of these highways to see the rest of our family on this Thanksgiving weekend.  We leave for San Antonio to see our son, his wife, and their daughter (our granddaughter), and hopefully our drive will go smoothly, pretty quickly (they’ve even raised the speed limit on portions of the drive), giving us more time to spend with our family.

We really should remember the decisions made and the money and the hard work invested earlier in our lifetimes (or even before our lives began), that make so much possible in our lives today.  These were great gifts to generations to come.  And we are grateful.

I think the money and the effort were worth it — don’t you?

And, I wonder, what costly, bold decisions are we making today that will serve the generations to come?

Sorry, Strivers: Talent Matters

Illustration Credit: David Plunkert

Here is an article written by David Z. Hambrick and Elizabeth J. Meinz that was featured in the The New York Times (November 19, 2011). I urge you to click on the links to che vk oyt the sources to which the arricle refers. Also, I highky recommend a recently published book, The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else Does, written by George Anders and published by Portfolio/Penguin (2011). This is a “must read” book for anyone involved in — or at least interested in — talent recruitment and/or talent management. I also think Anders’ book could serve as the foundation of talent evaluation and performance review initiatives.

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HOW do people acquire high levels of skill in science, business, music, the arts and sports? This has long been a topic of intense debate in psychology.
Enlarge This Image

Research in recent decades has shown that a big part of the answer is simply practice — and a lot of it. In a pioneering study, the Florida State University psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues asked violin students at a music academy to estimate the amount of time they had devoted to practice since they started playing. By age 20, the students whom the faculty nominated as the “best” players had accumulated an average of over 10,000 hours, compared with just under 8,000 hours for the “good” players and not even 5,000 hours for the least skilled.

Those findings have been enthusiastically championed, perhaps because of their meritocratic appeal: what seems to separate the great from the merely good is hard work, not intellectual ability. Summing up Mr. Ericsson’s research in his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell observes that practice isn’t “the thing you do once you’re good” but “the thing you do that makes you good.” He adds that intellectual ability — the trait that an I.Q. score reflects — turns out not to be that important. “Once someone has reached an I.Q. of somewhere around 120,” he writes, “having additional I.Q. points doesn’t seem to translate into any measureable real-world advantage.”

David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, restates this idea in his book “The Social Animal,” while Geoff Colvin, in his book Talent Is Overrated, adds that “I.Q. is a decent predictor of performance on an unfamiliar task, but once a person has been at a job for a few years, I.Q. predicts little or nothing about performance.”

But this isn’t quite the story that science tells. Research has shown that intellectual ability matters for success in many fields — and not just up to a point.

Exhibit A is a landmark study of intellectually precocious youths directed by the Vanderbilt University researchers David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow. They and their colleagues tracked the educational and occupational accomplishments of more than 2,000 people who as part of a youth talent search scored in the top 1 percent on the SAT by the age of 13. (Scores on the SAT correlate so highly with I.Q. that the psychologist Howard Gardner described it as a “thinly disguised” intelligence test.) The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were “only” in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile — the profoundly gifted — were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work. A high level of intellectual ability gives you an enormous real-world advantage.

In our own recent research, we have discovered that “working memory capacity,” a core component of intellectual ability, predicts success in a wide variety of complex activities. In one study, we assessed the practice habits of pianists and then gauged their working memory capacity, which is measured by having a person try to remember information (like a list of random digits) while performing another task. We then had the pianists sight read pieces of music without preparation.

Not surprisingly, there was a strong positive correlation between practice habits and sight-reading performance. In fact, the total amount of practice the pianists had accumulated in their piano careers accounted for nearly half of the performance differences across participants. But working memory capacity made a statistically significant contribution as well (about 7 percent, a medium-size effect). In other words, if you took two pianists with the same amount of practice, but different levels of working memory capacity, it’s likely that the one higher in working memory capacity would have performed considerably better on the sight-reading task.

It would be nice if intellectual ability and the capacities that underlie it were important for success only up to a point. In fact, it would be nice if they weren’t important at all, because research shows that those factors are highly stable across an individual’s life span. But wishing doesn’t make it so.

None of this is to deny the power of practice. Nor is it to say that it’s impossible for a person with an average I.Q. to, say, earn a Ph.D. in physics. It’s just unlikely, relatively speaking. Sometimes the story that science tells us isn’t the story we want to hear.

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David Z. Hambrick and Elizabeth J. Meinz are associate professors of psychology at Michigan State University and Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, respectively.

Maybe We’re Too Enamored with the New – What Can We Learn from the Old, the Enduring?

This is the text I wrote for an announcement e-mail for the next Urban Engagement Book Club, which meets on December 1, here in Dallas (at the Highland Park Methodist Church, next door to SMU).  I decided to share it here.

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We are enamored with the new.  We want the new, new thing.  We want the new product, the new approach, the new company.  We want to be “hip,” “with it,” “up-to-date.”  We want to be “new” ourselves.

But sometimes the old is worth a more careful look.  In fact, any organization that truly endures is deserving of a very careful look.  What can we learn from the not-so-new – the old, the enduring?

Thus, our book selection for the December 1 Urban Engagement Book Club.  Heroic Leadership: Best Practices from a 450-Year-Old Company That Changed the World by Chris Lowney.

Form the page on Amazon:
What can a 16th-century priest tell a 21st-century business executive about leadership? Plenty, believes this author, who points out that from a 10-man “company” founded by St. Ignatius Loyola in 1540, the Jesuits are now the world’s largest religious order, with 21,000 professionals. In this absorbing, lucid book, Lowney, who left a seven-year stint as a Jesuit seminarian to become a managing director at J.P. Morgan, explores how the Jesuits have successfully grappled with challenges that test great companies-forging seamless multinational teams, motivating performance, being open to change and staying adaptable. As he takes the reader on an engaging romp through slices of Jesuit history, Lowney references four Jesuit pillars of success: self-awareness (reflection), ingenuity (embracing change), love (positive attitudes toward others) and heroism (energizing ambitions).
Leaders make great companies, but few of us truly understand how to turn ourselves and others into great leaders. The Jesuits pioneered a unique formula for molding leaders. In the process, the Jesuits built one of history’s most successful companies.
To put it simply, the Urban Engagement Book Club is trying to change the conversation a little in Dallas.  We are what we think about, and we think about what we talk about.  This book will help us look past our current fixation on the new, new thing, and learn a little from a truly enduring serving organization.  It is a conversation worth having.

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So, in the next two weeks, I will finish preparing three new book synopsis presentations:

For the Urban Engagement Book Club:
Heroic Leadership: Best Practices from a 450-Year-Old Company That Changed the World by Chris Lowney.

For the First Friday Book Synopsis:
Blah Blah Blah: What To Do When Words Don’t Work by Dan Roam.
and
Demand: Creating What People Love Before They Know They Want It by Adrian Slywotzky and Karl Weber.

If you are in the DFW area, come join us at these gatherings.  Just follow the links for details/more information.

Thanksgiving: Did you already know?

Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson is one of my favorite writers. He is the author of at least 20 books, including international bestsellers that include

The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (1989)
Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe (1991)
The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words (1984)
The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way (1990)
A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)
Shakespeare: The World as Stage (2007)
On the Shoulders of Giants, Editor (2009)
Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery, and the Genius of the Royal Society (2010)

Here is a brief excerpt from Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States (1998).

“When a celebration was deemed in order, the Puritans were delighted to let their hair down. The first Thanksgiving feast went on for three full days and involved, in addition to copious eating and drinking, such diversions as stoneball, a game similar to croquet, and competitions of running, jumping, arm wrestling, shooting, and throwing. No one knows quite when the first Thanksgiving took place, other than it was sometime between the beginning of October and the first week of November 1621. Nor was it regarded as the start of an annual tradition.

“No Thanksgiving appears to have been held the following year, and the Plymouth colony would not begin regular celebrations until almost the end of the century. For the rest of New England, Thanksgiving didn’t become an annual tradition until about the 1780s. For the nation as a whole, Thanksgiving wasn’t fixed as a holiday until President Lincoln so decreed it in 1863. The date he chose was August 6.

“The following year, it was moved, arbitrarily, to the last Thursday in November, where it has remained ever since, apart from a brief period during the Depression when it was brought forward several days to give stores an extra week of potential Christmas shopping.”

The 50 Most Influential Management Gurus

Every two years, the Thinkers50 publishes their definitive list of management thinkers. Below are the results for 2011. For classic HBR content from this year’s winners, please click here.

Clayton Christensen #1

Clayton M. Christensen is the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost experts on innovation and growth.

Christensen is the bestselling author of a number of books including his seminal work, The Innovator’s Dilemma  (1997) which received the Global Business Book Award for the best business book of the year; The Innovator’s Solution (2003); Seeing What’s Next (2004); Disrupting Class (2008), which looks at the root causes of why schools struggle and offers solutions; The Innovator’s Prescription (2009), which examines how to fix the US healthcare system; The Innovators’ DNA  (2011); and The Innovative University (2011).

Christensen and his writings have won a number of awards, including five McKinsey Awards for articles published in the Harvard Business Review.

In 2000, Christensen founded Innosight, a consulting firm that uses his theories to help companies create new growth businesses. Christensen is also the founder of Innosight Institute, a non-profit think tank whose mission is to apply his theories to vexing societal problems such as healthcare and education.

Please click here to listen to him explain disruptive innovation.

To read his McKinsey Award-winning article, “How Will You Measure Your Life?,” please click here.

 

 

Kathleen L. Flanagan (Abt Associates) in “The Corner Office”

Kathleen L. Flanagan (Photo Credit: Earl Wilson/The New York Times)

Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Kathleen L. Flanagan, president and C.E.O. of the consulting firm Abt Associates, who says another executive once taught her to “always want to have butterflies in your stomach,” but to also have the confidence to “go with your gut.”

To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.

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Want to Lead? Learn to Nurture Your Butterflies

Bryant: Do you remember the first time you were somebody’s boss?

Flanagan: The first time I was really a big boss was in 1989. I was 29, and I had been at Abt for about seven years. The new executive vice president called me and said: “Can you fly up to Boston tomorrow? I need you to take over this business unit. Take the challenge.”

It wasn’t until after I agreed that he looked up my age in the personnel files and said, “Whoa.” But the advice he gave me for my new job was: “You’ll always want to have butterflies in your stomach. Plan for success. Create your goals and your strategy, and go with your gut. Have confidence in yourself. You’re good at what you do.”

So I went in front of 35 people who were now my direct reports to talk to them about my vision, and most of them were older than me. I remember wondering whether they were going to take orders from this young whippersnapper. And a couple of them had pretty much determined that there was no way I was going to be able to pull this job off, and they said that to me.

So, the first year, I constantly had butterflies in my stomach, but I realized that you have to go with your gut. You’ve got to respect people. You’ve got to listen. You have to be willing to get input from everybody.

At the end of the first year, one person actually said: “O.K. You’ve proved me wrong.” I felt pretty good about that, but I realized quickly that there’s no blueprint for this. There’s no recipe for it. You have to make a plan and be goal-oriented. Be flexible along the way, but listen to people. I give them the opportunity to give me feedback, tell me what worries them, what they are thinking about, what part of the strategy they think is risky.

It’s not about being smarter than anybody else. It’s about being able to connect the dots and being the glue for a business. I’m constantly saying to my colleagues: “Let’s put the puzzle together. Let’s use people with varied experiences who are wired differently to get the job done.” I believe in asking people at every level of the organization for their input. It’s amazing, this new generation, what makes them tick and how they think about things, and I always learn something very interesting when I ask for their input.

Bryant: Can you elaborate on that point?

Flanagan: I think the younger generation obviously wants to move a lot more quickly in positions than maybe the more senior folks like me. They’re constantly curious about what they can do next. They’re almost impatient about sitting in a job for any length of time, and they always wonder about the next opportunity.

When I became the C.E.O. a couple years ago, they said, “You’ve got to have a blog, Kathleen.” And so I had 5 or 10 fairly junior employees giving me advice on how to blog, and now I use Twitter. And that younger group is likely to go on my blog and write back to me to ask: “What about this? What about that?”

Bryant: And what are your thoughts about people being impatient in their careers?

Flanagan: There’s obviously tension there. You want somebody to commit for 6 or 12 months to something, but my objective is to build a culture that allows people to move when it’s right, or at least to have those discussions. So the coaching has to be there. The managerial talent has to be there so that they can have that discussion with somebody and say, “Here are the pros and cons of this,” and then allow them to move quickly, as opposed to just saying, “You should stay in that job for three to five years.”

This generation isn’t going to do that. They’ll go somewhere else. So keeping talent at our company is a real priority right now. It’s very competitive so we’ve got to think about ways to keep that next generation growing, learning, excited.

Bryant: When you first got that big management job, were you told why you were getting the job?

Flanagan: I think it was my ability to work in teams, my ability to collaborate. I was actually in a different business unit altogether, so I demonstrated an understanding of how to connect business units, leverage all the capabilities of the company, not be turf-conscious, and listen to people.

Bryant: As your company has grown, have you noticed a change in culture?

Flanagan: We’ve grown from $180 million in annual revenue a few years ago to $425 million today. As the company grew, more business units were created, and so we had more silos in the organization. My objective two years ago in coming into this job was to take down the silos. So I reorganized the company. It used to be organized around lines of business — international, U.S.-based, data collection — and there used to be senior vice presidents who led each of those big businesses. I took those senior V.P. positions away and hired one executive vice president for global business who shared my vision for what I call One Global Abt.

At the heart of that is taking down the walls so people can collaborate more freely, so that we can leverage all of Abt. We now ask people to pick their heads up out of their project work or their division focus and look across the whole company. So I now ask my managers to wear two hats. Everybody’s got their job in the big picture of the company, but they all have to wear an Abt hat. It’s really easy, given the time pressures and the pace of our work, to put blinders on and be very project-focused. It’s harder to take a step back and ask, “How does this apply to the whole company?”

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Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times‘ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. In his new book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews with more than 70 leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.