Lawrence Cunningham: Part 1 of an interview by Bob Morris
Lawrence Cunningham is the Henry St. George Tucker III Research Professor at George Washington University Law School and Director of GW’s Center for Law, Economics and Finance (C-LEAF) in New York. He is the author of numerous books including three editions of The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America (Third Edition, March 8, 2013), The AIG Story (written with Hank Greenberg) and Contracts in the Real World: Stories of Popular Contracts and Why They Matter. His research appears in leading university journals, including those published by Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Michigan, Vanderbilt and Virginia; his Op-Eds have run in the Baltimore Sun, the Financial Times, the National Law Journal, the New York Daily News and the New York Times. On Amazon, Cunningham has been ranked one of the top 100 authors in the category of business and investing.
Here is an excerpt from Part 1 of my interview of him. To read all of it, please click here.
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Morris: To what extent has your formal education been invaluable to what you have accomplished in life thus far?
Cunningham: As a university professor, it would be blasphemous but to declare my formal education invaluable and there’s also a lot of truth in it. I learned some of the most important things I know from classroom work in economics in college and in law and business in law school. I’ve learned a great many things in the decades since, of course, but those days trained me to think, encouraged me to be curious, taught me how to interact with others, and nurtured countless other traits.
Morris: What do you know now about the business world that you wish you knew when you went to work full-time for the first time? Why?
Cunningham: The importance of relationships to opening doors and keeping them open. Merit seemed as important as anything else when I began my career as a corporate lawyer in 1988. And while merit matters, what’s more important over the longer term is the quality of the network of friends, colleagues, mentors, and fans that you develop and maintain at each phase of your life and career. There is a lot of truth in the old saying: “It’s not what you know but who you know.”
Morris: Of all the films that you have seen, which – in your opinion – best dramatizes important business principles? Please explain.
Cunningham: Other People’s Money. Hollywood has always had a bit of a hate affair with American business in portraying corporations and capitalists in negative lights. The exception is Other People’s Money, as it presents both sides of the story in a difficult circumstance of a company in decline: whether to stick it out or close it down. (Incidentally, it is akin to the angst portrayed in The Essays of Warren Buffett concerning a struggling New England textile company that Buffett eventually shut down.)
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Morris: Here are several of my favorite quotations to which I ask you to respond. First from Voltaire: “Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it.”
Cunningham: Truth is elusive. Searching for it is indeed noble. But be skeptical of anyone who claims to have found it.
Morris: From Albert Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Cunningham: Reminds of a quip, attributed to Will Rogers, quoted in The Essays of Warren Buffett: “When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” It also reminds me of another Einstein quip: “Everything should be as simple as possible, but not more so.”
Morris: Finally, from Peter Drucker: “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”
Cunningham: I wish such wisdom had been taken to heart by the financial engineers whose derivative products fueled the mortgages behind the housing boom that collapsed so catastrophically in 2008.
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Morris: In Tom Davenport’s latest book, Judgment Calls, he and co-author Brooke Manville offer “an antidote for the Great Man theory of decision making and organizational performance”: organizational judgment. That is, “the collective capacity to make good calls and wise moves when the need for them exceeds the scope of any single leader’s direct control.” What do you think?
Cunningham: The wisdom of crowds and the power of markets are real. But within an organization it can be difficult to maintain a “collective capacity” for decision making, which would resemble a democratic vote. Shareholders do a little of that when electing directors and voting in annual meetings when no single person is entitled to make such extraordinary decisions. But with such choices made, directors and the senior executives they appoint cannot discharge their duties by referendum.
True, within boards of directors, corporations have always drawn on a fundamental notion of organizational judgment. A team rather than an individual speaks for and binds the corporation. Law even gives such board decisions reverence, under the “business judgment rule,” which keeps judges out of second-guessing.
The danger to watch for in any move to such organizational judgment is the risk of authority without accountability, which I know we will discuss a bit more later.
Morris: Here’s a brief excerpt from Paul Schoemaker’s latest book, Brilliant Mistakes: “The key question companies need to address is not ‘Should we make mistakes?’ but rather ‘which mistakes should we make in order to test our deeply held assumptions?’” Your response?
Cunningham: I am not sure about the notion of having an appetite for mistakes, even as a way to test assumptions. There are other less costly ways to test assumptions, such as by logical critique, contained experiments and consulting analogical experience. The wisdom I see in this quotation might be flipped around, to say there are a class of mistakes we should avoid absolutely. Foremost among these would be any decisions that impair a company’s reputation, for instance, another point I know we’ll discuss more later.
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To read all of Part 1, please click here.
Larry cordially invites you to check out the resources at these websites:
The publisher’s page for The Essays
Amazon’s page for The Essays
Cynthia A. Montgomery : An interview by Bob Morris
Cynthia A. Montgomery is the Timken Professor of Business Administration and immediate past chair of the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School, where she’s been on the faculty for 20 years.
One of her recent assignments has been working with owner managers in the School’s flagship Owner/President Management program, an experience that changed her view of strategy, and the distinctive role leaders play in the process. Her latest book, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs, grew out of that experience and was published by HarperBusiness (May, 2012).
Montgomery’s work has appeared in nearly a dozen top-tier managerial and academic outlets, including Harvard Business Review, Financial Times, American Economic Review, Rand Journal of Economics, Strategic Management Journal, Management Science, and others. She is the co-author of Corporate Strategy: Resources and the Scope of the Firm (with David J. Collis), the editor of Resource-Based and Evolutionary Theories of the Firm, and the co-editor of Strategy: Seeking and Securing Competitive Advantage (with Michael E. Porter).
Montgomery has served on the boards of two Fortune 500 companies, a number of mutual funds managed by BlackRock, Inc., and several non-profits.
Here is an excerpt from my interview of her. To read the complete interview, please click here.
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Morris: Before discussing The Strategist, a few general questions. Years ago, was there a turning point (if not an epiphany) that set you on the career course you continue to follow? Please explain.
Montgomery: When I finished my early education, I did a big round of interviews for a wide variety of jobs ranging from marketing tires to writing communications pieces for a liquid metal fast breeder reactor business. They all had their merits but when all the hoopla was over, I asked myself: Do I want to spend the majority of my waking hours doing this, even for a few years? Ultimately, I decided “no” and went with my gut. I went to graduate school, got a PhD, and became a researcher and educator. It has suited me well. I’m glad I had the courage to walk away from attractive jobs that “weren’t me.”
Morris: To what extent has your formal education been invaluable to what you have accomplished in life thus far?
Montgomery: I did my graduate work at Purdue University, where they had state-of-the-art courses in empirical methods that are vital to strategy research. It was a very challenging program—not a lot of fun, especially for someone who had been a philosophy major as an undergraduate—but the run room from that investment set up the rest of my career.
Morris: What do you know now about business world that you wish you knew when you went to work full-time for the first time?
Montgomery: I wish I’d known more – not about the ideas side of business — but about the human side: What’s involved in building a reputation, inspiring people, and working effectively in organizations. I learned that incrementally over many years.
Morris: From which non-business book have you learned the most valuable lessons about business? Please explain.
Montgomery: One of my favorite books is The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s about a butler and the choices he makes about who he is and what matters to him. It’s also about how the goodness of the people/organizations we work for inevitably impacts the meaning of our own contributions. I read it years ago, but it still haunts me.
Morris: Tell me about the owner-manager program you’ve been teaching in.
Montgomery: The participants come from all over the world and from almost every industry — aerospace, refuse collection, health and beauty, financial services, education, fashion, biotech—everything. So, there’s enormous variety in the program; at the same time, what everyone has in common is that they’re leading an organization wherein they have a significant ownership stake. It gave me a great opportunity to think about the distinctive contributions leaders can make to a business –one of those, the one I’ve thought about most is the opportunity to define what a business will be and why it will matter. It’s the most fundamental question facing a business, the one from which everything else begins.
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To read the complete interview, please click here.
Cynthia cordially invites you to visit this website
http://cynthiamontgomery.com/books/the-strategist/overview/
where you can download an excerpt from her book, The Strategist: Be the Leader your Business Needs.
Blogging on Business Update from Bob Morris: 11/5/12
I hope that at least a few of these recent posts will be of interest to you:
BOOK REVIEWS
The Pumpkin Plan: A Simple Strategy to Grow a Remarkable Business in Any Field
Mike Michalowicz
HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations
Nancy Duarte
Freedom, Inc.: Free Your Employees and Let Them Lead Your Business to Higher Productivity, Profits, and Growth
Brian Carney and Isaac Getz
The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing
Michael Mauboussin
The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products That Win
Steven Gary BlanK
Enterprise Games: Using Game Mechanics to Build a Better Business
Michael Hugos
The Leader’s Pocket Guide: 101 Indispensable Tools, Tips, and Techniques for Any Situation
John Baldoni
The Clash of the Cultures: Investment vs. Speculation
John C. Bogle
INTERVIEWS
Linda Sharkey
Blogging on Business
Peter B. Vaill
Conducted by Kerry A. Bunker and Laura Curnutt Santana
Extraordinary Leadership: Addressing the Gaps in Senior Executive Development
Jeff Weiner (LinkedIn) in “The Corner Office”
Conducted by Adam Bryant
The New York Times
COMMENTARIES
“Accelerate!”
John P. Kotter
HBR
“On cleaning up messes”
Russell L. Ackoff
From Redesigning the Future: Systems Approach to Societal Problems
“And the winner of the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award 2012 is….”
Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Press Release
“It Don’t Cost Nuthin’ to be Nice”
Paul (Bear) Bryant
“Designing Products for Value”
Ananth Narayanan, Asutosh Padhi, and Jim Williams
The McKinsey Quarterly
“How To Apply the 80/20 Rule At Work”
Nate Steere
mint.com
“What Women Know about Leadership that Men Don’t”
Tony Schwartz
HBR
“How to Build a Better Innovation Team”
Management Tip of the Day
HBR
“The True Measures of Success”
Michael J. Mauboussin on
HBR
“Business Leadership Lessons from the Military”
Editors of Harvard Business Review
“Ten Ways to Get People to Change”
Morten T. Hansen
HBR
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To check out these resources and other content, please click here.
To subscribe via RSS Reader, please click here.
Erik Qualman: An interview by Bob Morris
Erik Qualman
Called a “Digital Dale Carnegie,” Erik Qualman is the author of Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business and, more recently, Digital Leader: 5 Simple Keys to Success and Influence. Socialnomics made Amazon’s #1 Best Selling List for the US, Japan, UK, Canada, Portugal, Italy, China, Korea and Germany. Socialnomics was a finalist for the “2010 Book of the Year” awarded by the American Marketing Association. Fast Company magazine listed him as a Top 100 Digital Influencer. He also has one of 2010′s most viral videos on YouTube in “Social Media Revolution.” Qualman is a frequently requested international speaker and has been highlighted in numerous media outlets including: BusinessWeek, The New York Times, WSJ, Mashable, USA Today, Financial Times, Forbes, Fortune, CBS Nightly News, and The Huffington Post. He has been fortunate to share the stage with Alan Mulally (Ford CEO), Lee Scott (CEO/Chairman Walmart), Jose Socrates (Prime Minister of Portugal), Lutz Bethge (Montblanc CEO), Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (Nokia CEO), Julie Andrews, Al Gore, Tony Hawk, and Sarah Palin.
Qualman is an MBA Professor at the Hult International Business School. For the past 16 years he has helped grow the digital capabilities of many companies including Cadillac, EarthLink, EF Education, Yahoo, Travelzoo and AT&T. He is the founder and owner of socialnomics.com which PC Magazine ranked as a Top 10 Social Media Blog. He sits on the Advisory Boards of Manumatix and Bazaarvoice Inc. With regard to his formal education, he holds a BA from Michigan State University and an MBA from The University of Texas. He was Academic All-Big Ten in basketball at Michigan State University and still finds time to follow his beloved Spartans while living in Boston with his wife and daughter.
Here is an excerpt from my interview of him. To read the complete interview, please click here.
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Morris: Before discussing Digital Leadership, a few general questions. First, who has had the greatest influence on your personal growth? How so?
Qualman: My parents. They instilled in me the belief that if I wanted anything bad enough that I could achieve it.
Morris: The greatest impact on your professional development? How so?
Qualman: Ralph Bartel, CEO of Travelzoo, taught me the art of simplification and also the art of doing what you are passionate about.
Morris: Years ago, was there a turning point (if not an epiphany) that set you on the career course you continue to follow? Please explain.
Qualman: Yes, I realize that I had a lot of great ideas, but so does everyone else. The way to separate yourself is to stop dreaming your ideas, and making them happen. That was an epiphany for me.
Morris: To what extent has your formal education been invaluable to what you have accomplished in life thus far?
Qualman: The networks of friends and learning I developed outside of the classroom have been invaluable in my success.
Morris: To what extent (if any) have reactions to your book, Socialnomics, surprised you?
Qualman: Becoming the #1 marketing book in 7 different languages/countries really floored me. Also that it was a finalist for the American Marketing Association’s Book of the Year (2010).
Morris: Robin Dunbar has suggested that roughly 150 is the “cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships.” What do you think?
Qualman: I believe that is true in an analog world, but can be expanded in today’s digital world. That being said I do believe you are best off going deep with a few people rather than wide with many.
Morris: Although the term “social media” is relatively new, people have been gathering in groups since fire was first used for domestic purposes. Here’s my question: What are the most common misconceptions about the nature, benefits, and limitations of social media? What in fact is true?
Qualman: Social Media is simply Word of Mouth on Digital Steroids
Morris: In your opinion, what is the single greatest challenge that CEOs will face during (let’s say) the next 3-5 years? Why? Any advice for them?
Qualman: CEO’s need to learn that in order to learn in this digital world they need to increase their rate of failure. This is difficult for publicly traded companies.
Morris: If there were another monument comparable with the one on Mt. Rushmore for social media entrepreneurs, who would be your four choices? Please explain your reasons for each selection.
Qualman: Guy Kawasaki, Chris Brogan, Gary Vaynerchuk, Mari Smith
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To read the complete interview, please click here.
Erik cordially invites you to check out this website (http://www.socialnomics.com) follow him on Twitter @equalman.
Do you dare to fail?
istockphoto.com
Here is an article written by Margaret Heffernan for CBS MoneyWatch, the CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the website’s newsletters, please click here.
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(MoneyWatch) Everyone knows that to succeed business needs to innovate. Those who’ve thought a little more deeply about the subject also understand that anything new is inherently risky – it might work, it might not. People could love it or hate it. So innovation has to accept and embrace risktaking and risktakers.
I’ve worked with numerous companies who understand this and even go as far as recruiting people with a distinctly high tolerance for risk. They don’t want want weekend golfers, but avidely search out rock climbers, extreme athletes and adventure travelers. And sometimes they even hire them.
But then something strange happens. The risk-loving employee suddenly goes quiet and isn’t the daring character everyone had imagined. Instead these new minted employees become model citizens. What’s happened?
The usual scapegoat is culture. Everyone shakes their heads, talks about how hard that is to change – and then moves on. The harder truth is that innovation doesn’t just require risk-taking. It requires failure. But how many companies reward that?
The other day I ran into the head of a fantastic school that, every year, runs a Failure Week. The point of the exercise is to encourage the students to dare to fail. Every afternoon, students stand up and discuss – proudly – what they tried, how it failed and what they learned from the experience. The bigger the failure, the bigger the learning, the the greater the kudos. The point of the exercise is to accustom the students to the idea that failure = learning.
In his book, ADAPT, Tim Harford articulates this beautifully, telling story after story about great successes which were the eventual finale to a long series of failures. He argues that we don’t want random failure but well-conceived bold experiments designed to elicit clear learning but not guaranteed to solve a problem overnight.
You don’t have to look far to find fantastic failures. After all, that’s how Twitter started: It emerged after the initial idea – audio blogging – proved too difficult and unappealing. Or look at Change.org, the campaigning platform that galvanized public support for the parents of Trayvon Martin and public anger about pink slime in school meals. It may look an obvious success story now, but only if you ignore the first three-and-a-half years when it wasn’t.
“There was a massive amount of failure,” Ben Rattray, founder of Change.org, recalled.
You can’t celebrate success only – because when you do, it sends a signal: We want no failure here. And no failure, no learning, no real innovation. So hiring risk lovers won’t save you because most risk lovers only enjoy calculated risks, not stupid ones. In a success-driven company, they quickly see that daring isn’t valued as learning, they go quiet and often go completely.
I’m not surprised companies find this hard to understand and embrace. It’s highly counter-intuitive. Why celebrate failure? Unless you can see the learning implicit in it, it feels wasteful. But the best boss I ever worked for failed all the time. He also won numerous international prizes for his work. Yes, there was a connection between the two. And he was lucky to work in an organization that understood that.
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Margaret Heffernan has been CEO of five businesses in the United States and United Kingdom. A speaker and writer, her most recent book Willful Blindness was shortlisted for the Financial Times Best Business Book 2011. Visit her on www.MHeffernan.com.
To read my interview of her, please click here.
To read my review of Willful Blindness, please click here.
Margaret Heffernan : An interview by Bob Morris
Margaret Heffernan
Margaret Heffernan is an entrepreneur, Chief Executive and author. She was born in Texas, raised in Holland and educated at Cambridge University. She worked in BBC Radio and television for 13 years. She was one of the producers of Out of the Doll’s House, the prize-winning documentary series about the history of women in the twentieth century. She designed and executive produced a thirteen part series on The French Revolution for the BBC and A&E, featuring Alan Rickman, Alfred Molina, Janet Suzman, Simon Callow and Jim Broadbent and introduced both historian Simon Schama and playwright Peter Barnes to British television.
Leaving the BBC, she ran the trade association IPPA, which was once described by the Financial Times as “the most formidable lobbying organization in England.”
In 1994, she returned to the United States where she developed interactive multimedia products with Peter Lynch, Tom Peters, Standard & Poors and The Learning Company.
She then joined CMGI where she ran, bought and sold leading Internet businesses, serving as Chief Executive Officer for InfoMation Corporation, ZineZone Corporation and iCAST Corporation. She was named one of the Internet’s Top 100 by Silicon Alley Reporter in 1999, one of the Top 25 by Streaming Media magazine and one of the Top 100 Media Executives by The Hollywood Reporter.
2011 saw the publication of her third book, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril, (published by Simon & Schuster in the UK, Bloomsbury in the US and Doubleday in Canada) which was shortlisted for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Best Business Book award. Margaret blogs for the Huffington Post in the US and the UK, and for CBS MoneyWatch (formerly BNET)
Here is an excerpt from my interview of Margaret. To read the complete interview, please click here.
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Morris: Before discussing Willful Blindness, a few general questions. Which person has had the great influence on your personal growth?
Heffernan: Hard to choose one. My parents gave me a great work ethic; he also taught me that it is often the most junior people who know best what is going on in an organisation.
My employees showed me that, in the end, we don’t work for ourselves but for others.
Morris: The greatest impact on your professional development?
Heffernan: Probably a BBC producer Piers Plowright. He was a bold experimenter and developed terrific levels of artistry through his willingness to try things that sometimes failed.
Morris: Was there a turning point (if not an epiphany) in the past that set you on the career course since then? Please explain.
Heffernan: No epiphanies, more of a continuous development. I think I’d always wanted to write but, until I’d lived a lot, had nothing to write about. After running 5 businesses, I think I felt I’d found a subject. I’ve always gone through life – and business – asking questions.
Morris: To what extent has your formal education proven invaluable to what you have achieved thus far?
Heffernan: My formal education gave me, I think, a pretty intense habit of rigorous scrutiny. It taught me to ask questions and challenge answers. I think that all walks of life require critical thinking and that that is what my formal education taught me.
Morris: In recent years, which aspect of the business world have you found most difficult to understand? Why?
Heffernan: Increasingly I think I’m baffled by the bifurcation of business and society. The more remote these become to each other, the more dangerous and unstable the world becomes. Many people understand this on an individual basis but are not prepared to act collectively to change it. Some of this is short term thinking, and I guess I’m always baffled by the degree to which we choose short term comfort at the price of long term risk.
Morris: To what extent do you agree with Thomas Friedman’s assertion that the world today is “hot, flat, and crowded”?
Heffernan: I agree with his assertions though I’m often less persuaded by Friedman’s proposed solutions.
Morris: In your opinion, are business opportunities better, worse, or about the same today as they were (let’s say) 3-5 years ago? Please explain.
Heffernan: There are always huge business opportunities for those with the courage and expertise to seize them. That’s no different now than it was 3,5,10 years ago. Businesses spring from problems -and we always have plenty of those.
Morris: In your opinion, are business opportunities better, worse, or about the same today for women as they were (let’s say) 3-5 years ago? Please explain.
Heffernan: Business opportunities for women are abundant but so too are the obstacles that women face. We are still a minority in most organizations even though a lot of lip service is paid to diversity. After 50 years of concerted effort to be treated as equals, women are still marginalized and trivialized, very much to the detriment of the organizations they attempt to serve. That there are so few women on corporate boards shows the degree to which equality may be accepted intellectually but not in real life. There’s really no excuse for this any more: the talent pipeline is bulging. What women confront is entrenched bias and I think we have consistently underestimated how hard it is to eliminate that.
Morris: Now please shift your attention to Willful Blindness. When and why did you decide to write it?
Heffernan: I decided to write it after I’d finished writing 2 plays for the BBC about the collapse of Enron. The judge in the trial of the Enron CEO and Chairman referred to the legal concept of willful blindness. At the time that I was writing the plays, the banks were imploding and a lot of pundits were running around saying this was a ‘black swan’ event, that no one could have seen it coming. This was willful blindness on an epic scale and it made me want to understand how we make such colossal errors.
Morris: Were there any head-snapping revelations while writing it?
Heffernan: I don’t think I’d understood before quite how different our individual selves are from our social selves – that we have at least 2 identities that see and do quite different things. Nor had I fully appreciated the degree to which we will reconfigure reality in order to preserve and protect our self-regard.
Morris: To what extent (if any) does it differ significantly from the book you originally envisioned?
Heffernan: When I write a book, I outline it extensively; this is so that, when I’m embroiled in the detail, I don’t lose sight of where I’m going. So to that extent, the finished book was exactly as I envisaged it. On the other hand, the sheer emotional distress implicit in willful blindness was something I learned as I went along. But it is very hard, now I’ve written the book, to remember what I didn’t know when I started!
Morris: Are you suggesting that the blindness you discuss is intentional and if so, can be avoided? Please explain.
Heffernan: It can, I believe, be reduced but not eliminated. In part this is because some forms of willful blindness are quite useful – after all, if we confronted our own mortality each morning, we might not get up in the morning; denying it – and getting out of bed! – is quite creative. Nevertheless, I think there are things, as individuals, we can do to protect ourselves against the dangerous aspects of willful blindness. And I feel highly committed to the idea that organizations can do a very great deal to avoid being blindsided.
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To read the complete interview, please click here.
Margaret Heffernan cordially invites you to check out the resources at these websites: www.mheffernan.com.
William C. Taylor: An interview by Bob Morris
Bill Taylor
Bill Taylor is a writer, a speaker, and entrepreneur who has shaped the global conversation about the best ways to compete, innovate, and succeed. As a cofounder and founding editor of Fast Company, he launched a magazine that won countless awards, and earned a passionate following among executives and entrepreneurs around the world. Taylor wrote a regular business column for The New York Times as well as a monthly column for London’s Guardian newspaper. He now writes a popular management blog for Harvard Business Review. His previous book, Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win, was a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, and was named a “Business Book of the Year” by The Economist and Financial Times. His new book, Practically Radical: Not-So-Crazy Ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Company, and Challenge Yourself, was published on January 4, 2011 by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. A graduate of Princeton University and the MIT Sloan School of Management, Taylor lives in Wellesley, Massachusetts with his wife and two daughters.
Morris: Before discussing any of your specific books, a few general questions. First, when and why did you decide to commit yourself to a career in business journalism?
Taylor: I’ve never thought of myself as a “journalist” per se. I am someone who loves the power of new ideas, loves to find people and organizations who are having an impact on the world around them, loves to bring those ideas to life by telling the stories of these innovators in ways that other people find inspiring and instructive. Short answer: I think I am in the “thought leadership” business rather than the “journalism” business.
Morris: Please explain the founding of Fast Company. What was its original mission? To what extent (if any) has that mission since changed?
Taylor: My cofounder Alan Webber and I were at the Harvard Business Review when we had the idea to start Fast Company. We didn’t have a plan for a “business” as much as we had a set of ideas about the future of work, leadership, and progress—ideas about which we were passionate and that we wanted to share with others.
I’ve always thought of Fast Company as a magazine about ambition and success–in the best sense of both those words. Not money and power, but meaning and impact. Fast Company is a magazine for leaders at every level and in any field who want to think big about their work–the kind of organization they want to build, the kind of impact they want to have, the kinds of products and services they want to launch. It’s also a magazine for people who are extremely competitive, but who don’t use money as the only measure of whether they win or lose. They worry more about the contribution they make, the legacy they leave, the impact they have.
Way back at the outset of the magazine, we convened a small gathering of Fast Company allies called the “Fast Pack.” Harriet Rubin, who was the founder of Doubleday Currency, the game-changing book imprint, said something that has stuck with me: “Freedom is a bigger game than power. Power is about what you can control. Freedom is about what you can unleash.” Fast Company has been and will always be a magazine for leaders who worry more about what they can unleash rather than what they can control.
Morris: As I survey the current state of the magazine world, I am reminded of the first line in Charles Dickens’ novel, A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Do you agree?
Taylor: With respect to the magazine world, I’d say it’s much more the worst of times than the best of times. The business model for print magazines really is broken. Fast Company continues to do great relative to the competition. In fact, we just learned that our 2010 increase in ad pages (26.5 percent) was greater than any other business magazine in the country. So that’s great!
But we started Fast Company 15 years ago, and it’s hard to capture just how different the economic environment is today. Costs are going up so fast—paper, postage, all that boring stuff that adds real dollars—and the advertising environment is just so tough on the print side.
Readers still love it—we literally have more subscribers than at any time in our history, and the energy on the Web is amazing. But magazines are no different from any other business. The “mainstream” part of the business is getting tougher much more quickly than the “up-and-coming” part of the business is getting easier.
Morris: I have read several dozen of your articles for various publications. You discuss perspectives on subjects that most other journalists either neglect or ignore. For example, you seem to be intrigued by counterintuitive thinking, presumably because you are a counterintuitive thinker. Is that a fair assessment?
Taylor: I love people and organizations that win big because they think different. That’s what gets me pumped up, that’s what gets my creative and competitive juices flowing. There’s just something exhilarating about getting to know a company that’s rewriting the rules of competition in its industry, a public official who has reimagined how to deliver a product or service to his or her constituents, a change agent inside a big organization that is trying to transform how that organization works.
That sense of not just out-hustling the competition but out-thinking the competition—that’s the fuel behind Fast Company, Mavericks at Work, and now Practically Radical. The settings and mood of the times for each of these projects may be different, but the spirit is the same.
Morris: Most change initiatives either fail or fall far short of original expectations. Why?
Taylor: As the cofounder of Fast Company, I’ve always been struck by the slow-going rate of change inside most organizations. In the earliest days of the magazine, after we had a business plan but before we published the premiere issue, we convened a conference around the theme, “How Do You Overthrow a Successful Company?” It wasn’t a gathering of hotshots eager to take on the corporate establishment. It was a gathering of big-picture thinkers and change agents from illustrious big companies who sensed that there were massive shifts on the horizon, but that there wasn’t a commitment among their colleagues to reckon with what was coming.
It was a great conversation, ahead of its time in many ways (this was 1995), and the outlook was grim. Roger Martin, now dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, warned that “the role of big companies is to turn great people into mediocre organizations.” Mort Meyerson, the much-admired CEO and philanthropist, then at the helm of Perot Systems, compared leading an organization in fast-changing times to “floating in lava in a wooden boat.” His plea to the group: “We need a new model to reach the future.”
What a difference 15 years don’t make. Are those misgivings any less relevant today than they were back then—or the prospects for genuine transformation any less bleak? This is the hardest work there is.
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To read the complete interview, please click here.
Bill Taylor cordially invites to visit these websites:
http://www.practicallyradical.com
http://blogs.hbr.org/taylor/
http://www.bnet.com/blog/innovator
2010: When Leadership Hit the Rapids
Gail Corkindale
Here is an excerpt from an article written by Gail Corkindale 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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As the year draws to a close, I’m reflecting on what I have learned about leadership from my clients. It has been a year of challenges for most: relentless business demands, continuing change, and higher expectations from them as leaders. For me, 2010 was the year when I let go of theories and focused on realities, most notably the real challenges of leading in the 21st century.
I changed my game. No longer do I need to explain how globalization drives change and that leaders must adapt to a fast-changing world: the economic crisis brought this home decisively. Nor do I have to convince leaders to develop new competencies: experience taught them that self-awareness, being able to deal with ambiguity, manage continual change, devolve leadership, and coach their people and are critical to their survival.
Over the last twelve months, I have seen the best and worst in leadership. One of the most memorable moments was listening to an executive of a British bank rescued by the government, who told his audience that the economic crisis had been a breakthrough moment in his career. “What we are learning is priceless,” he said. “One day, it will form the basis of a masters in finance, and you should all grasp this opportunity to learn with open hands.” His words lifted the spirits of his audience and threw a fresh and different light on their situation
Another leader, a retailing executive in Dubai, told me how he’d coached his young and inexperienced team in 2010: “They were used to the easy wins and rapid growth of an emerging market, but they had to learn that life isn’t always like that — hard work, focus and drive gets results over the longer term.” Another executive from South Korea spoke forcefully about how he would leave his highly-paid job in an instant to join 1.6 million soldiers massed along Korea’s borders should war break out.
Most impressive and humbling of all, though, was the leader I coached from Bethlehem, who faced challenges every day that are unthinkable to leaders elsewhere in the world. Against all the odds, he ran a successful business in a failing state, on the brink of war, under stringent and punitive regulations and with little support or recognition from the head office. Yet year after year, he delivered results, brought valuable goods and services to his region and still managed to coach and inspire generations of young executives. If anyone deserves a global platform to speak about leadership, he does.
Of course, there are also less positive stories to recount. I was shocked to witness an investment banker recoiling in fury minutes after he had been told he wouldn’t be getting his bonus: no rational arguments about the good work he had done with his team, the collective failure of leadership in his bank nor the market conditions could quell his rage. And it was chilling to observe the steely determination of many leaders in the financial services industry to take us right back to the status quo ante, ignoring the lessons of the economic crisis. This was a brutal reminder that not everyone saw the past as a dark place.
While 2010 brought opportunities for some — promotions, unexpected opportunities, and new possibilities — for others, life took a downturn. One senior oil executive, who had delivered results year after year, found that his track record had evaporated from sight when his sponsors were fired. Left vulnerable and exposed, he was the next to go.
His only mistake had been a failure to network and build a wide range of supporters.
Disappointing news, too, for the tireless French executive who dedicated two long years to building a successful new business in Russia, only to be told there was “no longer a role” for him under a new regional boss. He had done everything right, from managing his team, boss and peers, networking and delivering outstanding results: politics and a change of leadership marked the end of his career.
On a more general note, it has been interesting this year to watch clients respond to the things they once disdained or viewed as peripheral to their development, such as defining their roles, developing their presence, showing courage, developing political antennae, and finding time to reflect. I notice that they listen more attentively than before and are quick to put their learning into action.
Occasionally, I do find myself referring to one writer who presciently declared that leaders needed to get used to “permanent white water,” a reference to the dangerous rapids he saw ahead for leaders. In his 1996 book, Learning as a Way of Being: Strategies for Survival in a World of Permanent White Water, Peter Vaill said leaders had to learn to navigate these rapids — surprising, unusual events and challenges that are often outside the bounds of experience. And even though many of these challenges are one-offs, leaders cannot brush them aside as they will return in a different form to test them. In order to cope with this, leaders must have strong values and become resilient, not collapse at the first hurdle.
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In the coming weeks, I am looking for stories of leaders who have made a difference, whose values and beliefs have visibly driven a different kind of leadership. You may wish to look back at HBR.org’s conversation earlier this year on Imagining the Future of Leadership, which showed that we are at a critical stage in our thinking about leadership for the 21st century. Your views, as always, shape, inform and challenge our thinking, so please let us hear them.
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Gill Corkindale is an executive coach and writer based in London, focusing on global management and leadership. She was formerly management editor of the Financial Times.
Mary C. Gentile: An interview by Bob Morris
Mary C. Gentile
Mary C. Gentile is Senior Research Scholar at Babson College; Senior Advisor, Aspen Institute Business & Society Program; and consultant. Previously Gentile was faculty member and case development manager at Harvard Business School. She is author of Giving Voice To Values: How To Speak Your Mind When You Know What’s Right (Yale University Press 2010, http://www.MaryGentile.com. Gentile is Director of Giving Voice to Values (GVV), a business curriculum launched by Aspen Institute and Yale SOM, now based at Babson College. This pioneering approach to values-driven leadership has been featured in Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, strategy+business, Stanford Social Innovation Review, McKinsey Quarterly, BizEd, etc. and has been piloted in over 100 business schools and organizations globally. Gentile consults with corporations, non-profits and schools on leadership development, ethics and education. At Harvard Business School (1985-95), Gentile helped integrate ethics into the MBA. Gentile co-authored Can Ethics Be Taught? Perspectives, Challenges, and Approaches at Harvard Business School (with Thomas Piper, Sharon Parks, HBS Press, 1993). Other publications appear in Harvard Business Review, Risk Management, CFO, Academy of Management Learning and Education, BizEd, Strategy+Business, etc. Gentile holds a B.A. from College of William and Mary and Ph.D. from State University of New York-Buffalo.
Morris: Before discussing your brilliant book, Giving Voice to Values, a few general questions. First, as the titles of your various books and articles suggest, you have an especially strong interest in diversity. Why?
Gentile: First, thank you for the opportunity to talk about these topics that I believe are so important. As for my interest in diversity, I believe it is closely aligned with my work on the project, Giving Voice To Values. That is, there are often times when we may witness (or personally experience) situations where some individuals are not treated with the same respect or care as others, precisely due to some difference in their identities, their styles, their experiences, or their perspectives. Often it is difficult to speak up in such a situation, for ourselves or for others. What’s more, when we do speak up, sometimes it is with the kind of emotion or judgment that can lead our audiences to become defensive and to freeze in their positions.
While at Harvard Business School, I developed a set of pedagogical materials and designed and taught the first course there on Managing Diversity, precisely because I wanted to better understand this phenomenon and to find ways to enable future managers and leaders to talk about and address these kinds of inequities constructively. I believed that we would all come to better decisions and we would create more humane and ultimately more livable and more sustainably productive workplaces if we knew how to speak to each other about difficult issues and if we were more able to listen to and learn from diverse points of view.
Doesn’t that sound a lot like Giving Voice To Values?
Morris: It certainly does. Here’s my favorite passage in Lao-Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. Please share your own opinion of it, especially in terms of its relevance to effective leadership.
“Learn from the people
Plan with the people
Begin with what they have
Build on what they know
Of the best leaders
When the task is accomplished
The people will remark
We have done it ourselves.”
Gentile: Well, this is a wonderfully succinct expression of participative and empowering leadership. It reflects an approach that is both respectful and pragmatic. In this way, it is quite akin to the Giving Voice To Values (GVV) approach to values-driven leadership.
That is, GVV does not dictate that there is one way to voice and enact our values. Rather we do well to examine our own strengths, style and preferences, and then to frame our values conflicts in ways that draw on our best. So if I am most comfortable in a “learner” role, I may raise my values-related concerns by asking the well-crafted and well-timed question, rather than by strenuously arguing a particular point of view. Or if I am a risk-taking, aggressive manager, I may frame the values conflict as just one more challenge that I want to take on, as opposed to a “constraint” on my action choices.
Much like the leaders in the Lao-Tzu quotation above, GVV ‘begins with what we have and builds on what we know,’ but GVV is as much about leading and enabling ourselves – to be more of who we want to be and to do so more effectively – as is about leading others.
Morris:Whenever I hear the phrase “shoot the messenger,” I think of corporate whistle-blowers. In your opinion, why are so many of them reviled and punished rather than praised and rewarded?
Gentile: Well, of course, there are many answers to that question. Whistle-blowers may be punished because they are seen as disloyal, as stepping outside of the organizational circle and exposing their own colleagues to negative consequences. They may be seen as somehow uncommitted, lacking in the strength or commitment that is needed to “get the job done.” And at the most basic level, they may be seen as “spoilers” who ruin the boss’s or their organization’s or their colleagues’ plan. At a deeper level, they may be reviled because they make visible to the rest of us the very things we don’t want to look at, about our own choices and our own failures to take a values-driven stand.
However, the Giving Voice To Values approach was designed precisely because the costs of whistle-blowing are often so high – not only to the whistle-blower and his or her family, but also to the organization itself, the whistle-blower’s colleagues, and so on. The thinking was that, in many of these whistle-blowing scenarios, there are likely other individuals, earlier on in the process, who also saw the problems but who did not feel that they had an option to speak or act. We wondered whether there was a way to better prepare and equip organizational participants to speak and act constructively, possibly collectively and early on, so as to avoid having to get to the point of costly and often devastating whistle-blowing scenarios.
Morris:After I read several of your articles, including those published by Harvard Business Review, here’s a question that occurred to me: What specifically can be done to establish and then sustain a culture within which everyone feels “safe” (if that’s the word) to express their thoughts and feelings without fear of rejection, ridicule, perhaps even abuse and punishment?
Gentile: I am so glad you asked that question. Often when people are introduced to the GVV approach to values-driven leadership development, they make the assumption that it is focused only on the individual. However, by more fully understanding how and why we can, as individuals, be more empowered and more skillful at voicing our values, we also are identifying a set of conditions that make it more likely that we will do so. These conditions become a sort of checklist for our own career choices – that is, they become a list of cultural characteristics we will look for in any potential employer. But these “enabling” conditions also become a sort of “recipe” for the kind of organizational culture and context that we will want to develop in the organizations that we lead.
Interestingly, many of the organizational characteristics that have been identified as conducive to effectively managing diversity and as conducive to fostering innovation and creativity in the workplace are also important for enabling employees to voice their values. Some examples include:
• Invite alternate viewpoints. By creating explicit occasions to invite dissenting viewpoints on a new project, strategy or policy, leaders enable employees to feel that their questions are welcomed and appreciated.
• Create “islands of time.” Although time pressures are a reality of business life that cannot be eliminated entirely and that even can create a beneficial focus at times, it can be powerful to set aside discrete occasions where individuals are invited to step back, to look at their projects from different vantages, to consider input not usually examined, and so on. This again encourages folks to express alternative points of view.
• Share your own thought process – and of times you changed your mind because of your values. When leaders are willing to talk through their own decision-making process, making visible that values are an important consideration, this sends a powerful signal to employees.
• Share stories of values-based choices. Communicating and celebrating the times when individuals have made values-based decisions is, of course, empowering and can provide role models. But perhaps more importantly, it removes the sense of futility that often prevents employees from speaking up.
• Provide opportunities to pre-script typical responses to values conflicts. GVV is premised on the idea that both anticipating the kinds of values conflicts we are likely to encounter in a particular industry or firm or profession, and literally practicing responses to them, out loud, is hugely important.
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To read the complete interview, please click here.
You are cordially invited to check out the resources at
Business Book of the Year
Here is one list of top books: the finalists for the “Business Book of the Year.” The Financial Times and Goldman Sachs oversee this particular award. Read about it here. This is from the Financial Times article:
Books that investigate and explain the financial crisis dominate the shortlist for the 2010 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.
The finalists are:
The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar
The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick
The Big Short by Michael Lewis
More Money than God by Sebastian Mallaby
Fault Lines by Raghuram Rajan
Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross SorkinAll but the first two tackle, directly or indirectly, some aspect of the crisis that hit the financial world in 2007-08 and whose impact is still being absorbed by global businesses and economies.
The Business Book of the Year will be announced on October 27 in New York.
Here are prior winners:
2009 - Liaquat Ahamed for The Lords of Finance
2008 – Mohamed El-Erian for When Markets Collide
2007 - William D. Cohan for The Last Tycoons
2006 - James Kynge for China Shakes the World
2005 - Thomas Friedman for The World is Flat
Read more about each of this year’s finalists here.
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Note: I have presented synopsis of two of the book listed: The World is Flat and The Big Short. It looks like I have more reading to do!
Thanks to First Friday Book Synopsis participant Leslie Garner for alerting me to this.
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