Rain: A book review by Bob Morris

Rain: What a Paperboy Learned About Business
Jeffrey J. Fox
Jossey-Bass (2009)

Note: I read and reviewed this book when it was published about four years ago and recently re-read it in combination with Secrets of Great Rainmakers as I now complete a revised marketing plan for the balance of this calendar year. Rain is my personal favorite among all of Fox’s books, although he published several other bestsellers after this one. I identify with the central character because I had two newspaper routes when I was Rain’s age. Also, I needed to reconnect with Fox’s unique insights on how to create rain, especially during a drought such as the current one that began years ago. If you need to generate some rain, check out this review I posted in 2005.

* * *

Portrait of a Young Entrepreneur

This is one of the most recent of ten books that Jeffrey Fox has written and is, in my opinion, his most entertaining. In the first part (Pages 1-128), Fox presents a business narrative in which a fictitious youth named Rain embarks on a brief but productive career as a newspaper boy. (Presumably Rain is Fox’s surrogate.) Like Forest Gump, he encounters a series of adventures but unlike Gump, he seems to have more “street smarts.” Fox cleverly introduces a number of challenges and opportunities to dramatize several basic business lessons. Then in the second part of the book (Pages 129-192), he shifts his attention to his reader whom he invites to compete “a series of analytical exercises anchored in each of Rain’s adventures. The exercises are designed to illuminate Rain’s entrepreneurial thinking and his rainmaking principles.” Actually, completing the 29 brief exercises does more than illuminate those principles: It also enables the reader to make direct application of most (if not all) of them to her or his own circumstances.

I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book because when doing so, I recalled many of my own experiences when I was Rain’s age and growing up on the South Side of Chicago. I had one paper route that I completed in the morning and later added another in the afternoon. After two years, I also began to work three days a week (4-8 PM) at a newsstand near my home. After about another year, when summer vacation began, I stopping delivering papers but continued to work at the newsstand Monday through Friday, 4-8 PM, and caddied at a local country club each weekend. I certainly did not have Rain’s entrepreneurial inclinations. I was simply determined to earn as much money as I could. I also encountered slow pays and no pays, hostile dogs, and customers impossible to please. I also hated getting up mornings when the temperature was near zero and the winds off Lake Michigan nearby were howling or when I was delivering papers afternoons when the heat and humidity were each 90º or more.

How many boys and girls today deliver newspapers? I have no idea. Most of the newspapers in Chicago when I was growing up no longer exist. It seems that in most other major metropolitan areas, there are no evening newspapers and only one morning newspaper. Presumably child labor laws now limit the employment opportunities for those in the 10-15 age range. So, where can they have the experiences and learn the lessons that Fox portrays in this book? I have no idea. However, although younger readers may not be able to identify with many of the situations in which Rain finds himself, I think that they will enjoy reading this book. I hope that many of them also get a clearer sense of the importance of meeting obligations (e.g. being on time, completing tasks), keeping promises to others, being alert to learning opportunities, and meanwhile making whatever personal sacrifices may be necessary.

As I read Fox’s book, I also recalled several life lessons that Robert Fulghum shares in his first book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Play fair, Don’t hit people, Put things back where you found them, Clean up your own mess, Don’t take things that aren’t yours, Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody, Wash your hands before you eat, When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together, and Be aware of wonder. Simple? Of course. Naïve? I don’t think so. Fox and Fulghum affirm many of the same values that can also be found in the world’s most venerated holy works. In my opinion, there is no other business principle that is more important than The Golden Rule. It is central to the culture of the world’s most highly admired companies. Moreover, it is no coincidence that – year after year — these same companies are also among the world’s most profitable and most valuable.

Those who share my high regard for Jeffrey Fox’s latest book are urged to check out several of his others, notably How to Get to the Top: Business Lessons Learned at the Dinner Table (2007). I also highly recommend his How to Become a Rainmaker (2000) and then Secrets of Great Rainmakers (2006) as well as Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, and Fulghum’s aforementioned book. To those in need of additional suggestions, I recommend these: David Whyte’s The Heart Aroused, Michael Ray’s The Highest Goal, James O’Toole’s The Moral Compass and then Creating the Good Life, and Bill George’s Authentic Leadership and then True North.

Erika Andersen: An interview by Bob Morris

Erika Andersen is the founding partner of Proteus, a coaching, consulting and training firm that focuses on leader readiness. She and her colleagues at Proteus support leaders at all levels to get ready and stay ready to meet whatever the future might bring.

Much of Erika’s recent work has focused on organizational visioning and strategy, executive coaching, and management and leadership development. She serves as consultant and advisor to the CEOs and top executives of a number of corporations, including NBC Universal, Gannett Corporation, Rockwell Automation, Turner Broadcasting, GE, Union Square Hospitality Group, and PwC.

She also shares her insights about managing people and creating successful businesses by speaking to corporations, non-profit groups and national associations. Her books and learning guides have been translated into Spanish, Turkish, German, French, Russian and Chinese, and she has been quoted in such publications as the Wall Street Journal, Fortune and The New York Times. Erika is one of the most popular business bloggers at Forbes.com. She is the author of Leading So People Will Follow (Jossey-Bass, 2012),Being Strategic: Plan for Success; Outthink Your Competitors; Stay Ahead of Change (St. Martin’s Press, May 2009), and Growing Great Employees: Turning Ordinary People into Extraordinary Performers (Portfolio/The Penguin Group, 2006), and the author and host of Being Strategic with Erika Andersen on Public Television.

Here is an excerpt from my interview of her. To read the complete interview, please click here.

* * *

Morris: Who has had the greatest impact on your professional development? How so?

Andersen: I think my dad was and is my greatest professional influence. He was a lawyer – a labor negotiations counsel – and he loved it. He had wanted to be a lawyer since he was a young teenager; he went to law school on the GI bill after WWII, passed the bar, joined a firm and practiced till the day he died. I always knew he felt grateful and fortunate to do work he enjoyed and was good at doing. It was a great model for me – both about being able to accomplish your dreams and being able to find a career that’s satisfying and challenging.

Morris: Here are several of my favorite quotations to which I ask you to respond. First, from Lao-Tzu’s Tao Te Ching:

“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”

Andersen: I love the Tao Te Ching; it was my constant companion in college. I’ve always been especially fond of this particular quote – even as a teenager it resonated for me. And the core idea – that great leaders are deeply collaborative and empowering – has shown itself to be true again and again. The best leaders I know catalyze a sense of personal accomplishment in their folks.

Morris: And then, from Oscar Wilde: “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.”

Andersen: I’m a big fan of Oscar Wilde (anyone whose last words were supposedly “either that wallpaper goes or I go” has got my vote). And I agree 1000% with him: authenticity is the starting point of any kind of greatness. So many people spend huge amounts of time figuring out how to be what they think they should be, or what they think others want them to be…imagine what would happen if that energy was freed to figure out how to be the best possible version of themselves: their unique gifts and strengths taken to the highest potential.

Morris: In your opinion, why do so many C-level executives seem to have such a difficult time delegating work to others?

Andersen: I think it’s a combination skill and mindset problem. Many managers (C-level or otherwise) don’t have good delegation skills: they don’t know to consistently and effectively transfer a responsibility to another person. And some people have the skills but their mindset doesn’t support delegation: they assume they have the only right way to do things, or that no one will ever come up to their standards, or that if they delegate key responsibilities, they will no longer be indispensible. Quite often when we coach executives, we end up both teaching them delegation skills (using the model in Growing Great Employees) and helping them clear up their mindset.

Morris: The greatest leaders throughout history (with rare exception) were great storytellers. What do you make of that?

Andersen: Stories are central to our evolution as human beings. Think about it: until a couple of hundred years ago, very few people could read. All the information that needed to be passed along was passed along verbally. Stories are the easiest and best way to share important information: they’re memorable and replicable. So: we’ve been telling stories for tens of thousands of years, and the people who were best at telling stories about the most important things were valuable. Fast forward to today: we still find great story-telling valuable in our leaders!

* * *

To read the complete interview, please click here.

Erika cordially invites you to check out the resources at these websites:

Proteus International home page

Erika’s blog

Her Forbes blog

Her Amazon page

 

The Thought Leader Interview: Henry Chesbrough

 

Here is the introduction to an interview of Henry Chesbrough conducted by Ron Norton for strategy+business magazine, published by Booz & Company. To read the complete article, check out other sources, sign up for email alerts, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

Photograph courtesy of Henry Chesbrough

* * *

To escape the commodity trap — and to compete effectively in a knowledge-based economy — business leaders of all kinds need to reinvent themselves as innovators in services.

Economists debate whether a service-based economy can be truly robust — or whether prosperity depends on having enough of a manufacturing base to support service businesses. But what if this turned out to be a false dichotomy? That’s the question raised by innovation expert Henry Chesbrough. All successful manufacturers, in Chesbrough’s view, need to come to terms with a fundamental change: the accelerating flows of knowledge and information that are shortening product cycles and commoditizing their products. They can do this, he says, only by reinventing themselves, not as pure manufacturers or service providers, but as hybrid product–service companies that design their business models around creating more meaningful experiences for their customers.

Of course, many manufacturers are already doing this. General Motors does it with its OnStar system; General Electric does it with its infrastructure financing; Ikea, Apple, Inditex (Zara), and many others do it with their own retail outlets; and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company does it with its co-creation model for helping customers design computer chips, which it then manufactures to order. On the other side, service companies such as Barnes & Noble, Starbucks, and (most famously, with its Kindle) Amazon have found that they must enter the realm of manufacturing to thrive. Chesbrough goes one step further. He argues that successful product–service hybrids embrace a new kind of innovation, combining “open innovation” (moving outside the organization’s own boundaries) and services. Hence the title of his latest book: Open Services Innovation: Rethinking Your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era (Jossey-Bass, 2011).

Chesbrough, professor and executive director of the Program for Open Innovation at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, established himself as a leading voice with an earlier book, Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology (Harvard Business School Press, 2003). He was the first major academic champion of the open innovation idea, which has made a great difference at Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and many other companies. Open innovation can be defined as revitalizing a company’s future by tearing down the walls between its R&D organization and outside companies and innovators. Chesbrough recalls that when he first considered the book title in 2003, he Googled the phrase and got only a couple of hundred links, most of them to articles on topics such as the opening of new innovation facilities. “There was no real usage of the term open innovation at that time,” he says. “When I did that same search last summer, I got 13 million responses, and most of them were really about this new model of innovation.”

Now Chesbrough argues that the fortunes of advanced companies — and of economies as a whole — will depend on how well they rethink services. His analysis began several years ago as he considered the fact that service-based industries were rapidly supplanting manufacturing-based industries — in developed economies in general, and in the U.S. economy in particular. Today, he points out, services account for roughly 60 percent of economic activity in the top 40 world economies, and fully 80 percent in the United States.

Services, in this context, doesn’t mean such small-scale activities as providing haircuts or washing cars — or even conventional large-scale services such as accounting and retail businesses. Instead, Chesbrough has a vision of knowledge-intensive infrastructure and product lines that evolve into “the engine of growth for the entire developed world.” Breaking out of the old manufacturing-based, product-centric mold, Chesbrough says, will be challenging for business leaders, because it requires them to think of their customers not as purchasers of goods, but as co-creating partners in an evolving relationship. Companies that master new service innovation models and build or add the requisite new capabilities, he promises, will be able “to reach levels of success they have never before experienced in their market or their industry.”

* * *

To read the complete interview, please click here.

Henry Chesbrough is best known as the “father of open innovation” according to Wikipedia. He authored the book Open Innovation back in 2003, before that term came into general use. Today, there are more than 13 million entries for “open innovation”, documenting the rapid rise of this new model of industrial innovation. Open Services Innovation is his latest book, which extends the idea of open innovation into the services sector. Whether you make a product or a service, open innovation can accelerate your time to market, share risks, and boost growth for your business.

Chesbrough teaches at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, and runs the Center for Open Innovation there. You can find out the latest information about open innovation at www.openinnovation.net. You can find out more about Professor Chesbrough at http://www2.haas.berkeley.edu/Faculty/chesbrough_henry.aspx.

To read my first interview of him, please click here.

To read my second interview of him, please click here.

Rob Norton is executive editor of strategy+business.

The Thought Leader Interview: Henry Chesbrough

Here is the introduction to an interview of Henry Chesbrough conducted by Ron Norton for strategy+business magazine, published by Booz & Company. To read the complete article, check out other sources, sign up for email alerts, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

Photograph courtesy of Henry Chesbrough

* * *

To escape the commodity trap — and to compete effectively in a knowledge-based economy — business leaders of all kinds need to reinvent themselves as innovators in services.

Economists debate whether a service-based economy can be truly robust — or whether prosperity depends on having enough of a manufacturing base to support service businesses. But what if this turned out to be a false dichotomy? That’s the question raised by innovation expert Henry Chesbrough. All successful manufacturers, in Chesbrough’s view, need to come to terms with a fundamental change: the accelerating flows of knowledge and information that are shortening product cycles and commoditizing their products. They can do this, he says, only by reinventing themselves, not as pure manufacturers or service providers, but as hybrid product–service companies that design their business models around creating more meaningful experiences for their customers.

Of course, many manufacturers are already doing this. General Motors does it with its OnStar system; General Electric does it with its infrastructure financing; Ikea, Apple, Inditex (Zara), and many others do it with their own retail outlets; and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company does it with its co-creation model for helping customers design computer chips, which it then manufactures to order. On the other side, service companies such as Barnes & Noble, Starbucks, and (most famously, with its Kindle) Amazon have found that they must enter the realm of manufacturing to thrive. Chesbrough goes one step further. He argues that successful product–service hybrids embrace a new kind of innovation, combining “open innovation” (moving outside the organization’s own boundaries) and services. Hence the title of his latest book: Open Services Innovation: Rethinking Your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era (Jossey-Bass, 2011).

Chesbrough, professor and executive director of the Program for Open Innovation at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, established himself as a leading voice with an earlier book, Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology (Harvard Business School Press, 2003). He was the first major academic champion of the open innovation idea, which has made a great difference at Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and many other companies. Open innovation can be defined as revitalizing a company’s future by tearing down the walls between its R&D organization and outside companies and innovators. Chesbrough recalls that when he first considered the book title in 2003, he Googled the phrase and got only a couple of hundred links, most of them to articles on topics such as the opening of new innovation facilities. “There was no real usage of the term open innovation at that time,” he says. “When I did that same search last summer, I got 13 million responses, and most of them were really about this new model of innovation.”

Now Chesbrough argues that the fortunes of advanced companies — and of economies as a whole — will depend on how well they rethink services. His analysis began several years ago as he considered the fact that service-based industries were rapidly supplanting manufacturing-based industries — in developed economies in general, and in the U.S. economy in particular. Today, he points out, services account for roughly 60 percent of economic activity in the top 40 world economies, and fully 80 percent in the United States.

Services, in this context, doesn’t mean such small-scale activities as providing haircuts or washing cars — or even conventional large-scale services such as accounting and retail businesses. Instead, Chesbrough has a vision of knowledge-intensive infrastructure and product lines that evolve into “the engine of growth for the entire developed world.” Breaking out of the old manufacturing-based, product-centric mold, Chesbrough says, will be challenging for business leaders, because it requires them to think of their customers not as purchasers of goods, but as co-creating partners in an evolving relationship. Companies that master new service innovation models and build or add the requisite new capabilities, he promises, will be able “to reach levels of success they have never before experienced in their market or their industry.”

* * *

To read the complete article, please click here.

Henry Chesbrough is best known as the “father of open innovation” according to Wikipedia. He authored the book Open Innovation back in 2003, before that term came into general use. Today, there are more than 13 million entries for “open innovation”, documenting the rapid rise of this new model of industrial innovation. In Open Services Innovation, his latest book, he extends the idea of open innovation into the services sector. Whether you make a product or a service, open innovation can accelerate your time to market, share risks, and boost growth for your business.

Chesbrough teaches at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, and runs the Center for Open Innovation there. You can find out the latest information about open innovation at www.openinnovation.net. You can find out more about Professor Chesbrough at http://www2.haas.berkeley.edu/Faculty/chesbrough_henry.aspx.

To read my first interview of him, please click here.

To read my second interview of him, please click here.

Rob Norton is executive editor of strategy+business.

Vital Voices: A book review by Bob Morris

Vital Voices: The Power of Women Leading Change Around the World
Alyse Nelson
Jossey-Bass (2012)

 How and why “women’s rights are human rights” and “women’s progress is global progress” for everyone

Alyze Nelson wrote the Introduction and then devotes a separate chapter to each of five “common threads” from which the “fabric” of great leadership within the Vital Voices Global Partnership has been “woven” for almost two decades. They are:

o  A driving force or sense of mission
o  Strong roots in the community
o  An ability to connect across lines that divide
o  Bold ideas and bold action
o  A resolve to pay it forward

According to the Foreword provided by Honorable Hillary Rodham Clinton  and its Founder, the Vital Voices global movement can be traced back to the United Nations’ Beijing women’s conference in 1995 when delegates from 189 nations met to discuss various issues.  Since then, hundreds of thousands of women have helped to build an increasingly stronger, more influential global organization that continues to support as well as stand both with and behind women around the world. During the past seventeen years, much of great value has been learned. As Nelson explains, “Our goal, with this book, is to share those lessons as widely as we can in the hopes that other women — and all individuals — who aspire to make a difference can draw inspiration, guidance, and hope from these voices, their stories, and their successes.”

Each of the five chapters is introduced by a “vital voice” among the extraordinary women who, in the words of the Honorable Hilary Rodham Clinton (VVGP founder), “are on the front lines across the world who make each of us dare a little more, risk a little more, do a little more.” Specifically, these are the leaders who introduce the first five chapters:

One:  “A driving force or sense of mission ,” The Honorable Michelle Bachelet (Under-Secretary General and Executive Director, UN Women)
Two:  “Strong roots in the community,” Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iwseala (Coordinating Minister of the Economy and Minister of Finance, Nigeria)
Three:  “An ability to connect across lines that divide,” Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (Honorary Co-Chair, Vital Voices)
Four:  “Bold ideas and bold action,” Diane Von Furstenberg (Designer, and Vital Voices Board Member)
Five: “A resolve to pay it forward ,” Melanne Verveer (Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, U.S. Department of State, and Vital Voices Co-Founder and Chair Emeritus)
The Conclusion, “Leadership Is a Journey, Not a Destination,” is introduced  by Sally Field (Actress, Activist, and Vital Forces Board Member). Then Susan Anne Davis and Bobbie Greene McCarthy (Chair and Vice-Chair, Board of Directors, Vital voices) provide an Afterword.

I was tempted by but resisted the temptation to provide a number of brief excerpts from various contributors. Suffice to say that Alyze Nelson has assembled and then brilliantly edited a wealth of material from 40 global leaders who demonstrate “the power of women leading change around the world,” to be sure, but their insights and experiences also help us to understand that how and why “women’s rights are human rights” and “women’s progress is global progress” for everyone.

 

Harvard Business Review: Cultural Change That Sticks

Most change initiatives either fail or fall far short of original expectations. Reasons vary but, more often than not, those who lead the initiatives are unable to avoid or overcome cultural resistance, the result of what James O’Toole so aptly characterizes as “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of customer.”

In the July/August 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review, Jon Katzenbach, Ilona Steffen, and Caroline Kronley share their thoughts about how to complete a “culture change that sticks.” Here is a brief introduction to this brilliant article.

*     *     *

When properly harnessed, an organization’s culture can be a true differentiator that no competitor can duplicate. However, as pressures on companies build, leaders often become frustrated with the comparatively slow pace of culture evolution. In the rush to implement new strategies and make performance improvements, the legacy culture—employees’ ingrained ways of doing things—can seem like the greatest barrier to change. Unfortunately, most well-intended efforts to “change the culture” fizzle out, fail, or backfire.

Here’s the good news: There is an alternative.

Drawing on recent research and real examples, the article’s authors present a new approach that leverages what is strongest in an organization’s existing culture, providing a practical road map for real, substantive evolution in employees’ ways of behaving by focusing on a few critical shifts. This approach has been tested and proven in client engagements across a range of regions and industries.

*     *     *

To download the pdf and read the complete article, please click here.

Jon R. Katzenbach is a senior vice president in the New York office of Booz & Company and the leader of the Katzenbach Center, which focuses on the development and application of innovative ideas for organizational culture and change. He is the co-author, with Douglas K. Smith, of The Wisdom of Teams (Harvard Business School Press, 1993) and, more recently, Leading Outside the Lines: How to Mobilize the Informal Organization, Energize Your Team, and Get Better Results (Jossey-Bass, 2010), co-authored with Zia Khan. Ilona Steffen is a director in the Zurich office of Booz & Company, and Caroline Kronley is a former senior associate in the firm’s New York office.

The Truth About Leadership: A book review by Bob Morris

The Truth About Leadership: The No-Fads, Heart-of-the-Matter Facts You Need to Know
James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner
Jossey-Bass (2010)

What Kouzes and Posner learned about what leadership is and does after three decades of rigorous study

I have read and reviewed most of the books on which Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner have collaborated and consider this one, their latest, the most valuable contribution they have made thus far to our understanding of what leadership is and does. The title is clever in that it tees up a major misconception that a complicated subject such as leadership offers only one “truth” when in fact it offers dozens (if not hundreds or thousands) of truths. Kouzes and Posner focus on ten that they consider most important, devoting a separate chapter to each.

They also provide what they characterize as “The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership.” There are no head-snapping revelations among them, nor among the ten “truths,” and Kouzes and Posner would be among the first to point that out. Anyone can easily formulate a list of leadership attributes, defining characteristics, core competencies, etc. The challenge is to demonstrate them with one’s behavior.

Kouzes and Posner’s purpose in the book to identify and examine several basic truths about great leadership that have endured throughout human history.  After I read the first three chapters, I paused to compile a list of those I consider to be the greatest leaders. When the totals reached 25, I reviewed the Kouzes-Posner list of ten truths. However different the leaders on my list are in most respects, all of them

1. Made a positive difference both during and beyond their lives
2. Were credible
3. Values-driven
4. Focused on what could, indeed should be done
5. Attracted followers who shared their vision
6. Were trusted
7. Were strengthened by severe challenges
8, Led by example
9. Were voracious learners with insatiable curiosity, and
10. Cared deeply, passionately

Compile your own list and I’ll bet that these ten also describe them. With regard to other attributes of great leaders, I would include storytelling skills, grace under duress, and what Roger Martin characterizes as “integrative thinking.”

All human communities (including companies, yes, but also cities and even countries) need effective leadership at all levels and in all areas. That is to say, people who are passionately committed to principled, collaborative, results-driven initiatives…people who say “Yes!” amidst negativity, who say “Yes we can!” amidst doubt and despair. To me, the single most compelling point that Kouzes and Posner reaffirm in this book is their belief that literally anyone can embrace and serve the same truths in all areas of their lives.

Why Are We Bad at Picking Good Leaders? A book review by Bob Morris

Why Are We Bad at Picking Good Leaders? A Better Way to Evaluate Leadership Poitential
Jeffrey Cohn and Jay Moran
Jossey-Bass (2011)

How and why to cope with a leadership evaluation and development crisis to produce more effective leaders

As Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis suggest in Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls, leaders define themselves by their choices. They assert that what really matters “is not how many calls a leader gets right, or even what percentage of calls a leader gets right. Rather it is important how many of the important ones he or she gets right.” They go on to suggest that effective leaders “not only make better calls, but they are able to discern the really important ones and get a higher percentage of them right. They are better at a whole process that runs from seeing the need for a call, to framing issues, to figuring out what is critical, to mobilizing and energizing the troops.”

Jeffrey Cohn and Jay Moran suggest that many (if not most) organizations define themselves (for better or more often worse) by their evaluation and development of effective leaders, by how many of the important calls their leaders get right when deciding whom to hire, whom to promote, and whom to support. As they explain in the Introduction, they devoted decades of research to develop a model for effective leadership. They share in this book their response to the question posed by the title. More specifically, they identify and then rigorously examine seven leadership attributes that are the most vital: integrity, empathy, emotional intelligence, vision, judgment, courage, and passion. No news there. What caught my eye and what, I think, will be of greatest interest to other readers is what Cohn and Moran offer when explaining “how to decode and connect these attributes…how they fit together. Our breakthrough insight is an overall framework for making leadership selection decisions.” These are among the “smart calls” to which Tichy and Bennis also refer.

Think of the challenge as a “puzzle” and the attributes among the most important “pieces.” How to put all the pieces together? Cohn and Moran devote a separate chapter to each of what they characterize as the seven “building blocks,” then reveal in Chapter 8 “A Better Way to Choose Leaders.” The information, insights, and recommendations provided within the book’s narrative are research-driven, primarily by interviews of more than 100 CEOs and other leaders. For example, those among the “A-C group” include Lance Armstrong, Jeff Bezos, Bono, Richard Branson, Michael Capellas, Richard Clarke, Jerry Colangelo, and Delos (“Toby”) Cosgrove.

Other resources include decades of research conducted by James Kouzes and Barry Posner;also, various leadership development programs (e.g. AT&T, Allianz SE, McKinsey & Company, “New CEO Workshop” at Harvard Business School, Harvard’s Kennedy School, and Team USA). They also picked the brains of thought leaders such as the aforementioned Tichy and Bennis as well as James MacGregor Burns, Daniel Goleman, K. Anders Ericsson, and Roger Martin.

Of course, it remains for each reader to determine what is most relevant among the abundance of material provided by Cohn and Moran in their book. The same is true of another recently published book that I also hold in very high regard, The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else, in which George Anders focuses on expert talent spotters in three broad sets: the public performance worlds (e.g. sports, arts, and entertainment), high stakes aspects of business (especially finance and the information economy), and “heroic professionals” of public service (e.g. teaching, government, and medicine). “It’s easy to see how they operated, but it took a while to understand why.” What he learned is shared in this book. For example, with people as with organizations, “the gap between good and great turns out to be huge,” perhaps as much as a 500% difference. The financial implications are vast and substantial.

All organizations needed leadership at all levels and in all areas. Although the two books take different approaches to an immensely complicated and critically important subject, executive talent evaluation, each can be of incalculable value to those who are guided and informed by the material provided. In fact, I highly recommend that both be read and (preferably) re-read, then frequently consulted by every one involved in an organization’s recruitment, hiring, onboarding, and leadership development initiatives.

Amy Schulman (Pfizer) in “The Corner Office”

Amy Schulman ( (Photo Credit: Librado Romero/NYT )

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 Amy Schulman, executive vice president and general counsel at Pfizer. She says that just as good writers learn to “show, don’t tell” in their essays, she has learned to use real-life anecdotes about herself to convey her style to employees.

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

http://projects.nytimes.com/corner-office

*     *     *

A Blueprint for Leadership: Show, Don’t Tell

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

Schulman: Well, I’ve been a baby sitter, and a camp counselor and a teacher. And in all of those jobs, you’ve got to get people to do what you want them to do, and not just by bossing them around.

Bryant: I’ve lost count of the number of executives I’ve interviewed who, it turns out, have teaching backgrounds.

Schulman: Actually, I think that’s not surprising. People who are drawn to teaching really like to help people. I think of teaching as teasing out what’s already inside of people, and helping them to get better. Teaching has a lot to do with getting other people enthusiastic about something, and feeling that you want to create that spark. When I was a little kid, about 7 or so, the first present I remember asking for was a blackboard — not the kind of easel kids have for painting and drawing, but a big teacher’s blackboard. I would actually make up assignments, hand them out to imaginary students, grade them and teach classes.

Bryant: What are some of the biggest leadership lessons you’ve learned?

Schulman: One of the biggest lessons I’m learning now is having a better feel for when to step out of a situation and when to step in. I do think that is actually one of the hardest things to balance correctly. People want to hear from you. They want your opinion. And if you don’t ever speak up and weigh in, then I think the people you lead will feel frustrated, wondering why you’re hanging back and not saying what you think. But if you’re constantly giving direction and speaking, then you’re really not encouraging conversation. And no matter how democratic you’d like to think you are as a boss, you learn that your voice is louder than others’. I respond best to people who challenge me, and I like being challenged, and I tend to reward people who are appropriately challenging. I think learning to refrain from speaking — without making people feel that you’re trying to frustrate them by being opaque — has been an inflection point for me. Q. How did you learn that?

Bryant: It was just watching the room, and being puzzled if I thought there should be conversation, and wondering why there wasn’t more conversation. I also saw how quickly people tended to agree with me, so I thought, it can’t be that I’m right all this time. And so I learned to really try to deliberately reward people in a conversation for challenging me. I don’t mean being insubordinate. I mean really following up on other people’s ideas. One of the marks of a good speaker is actually being a great listener.

So I remind myself that no matter how quick I think I am, that I have to show that I’m listening, and show people how I’ve gotten to the endpoint, or else I run the risk of squelching conversation. So I will deliberately slow myself down so that the room catches up to where I am. I know how I feel when I get cut off, and so shame on me if I do that to other people.

Bryant: What else?

Schulman: Another thing is realizing that people impute motives to you if you’re not clear. It’s important not to be ambiguous or vague about what you want, because then people waste a lot of energy trying to figure out, well, what is she thinking? What does she want? Why is she reacting this way? And so there is a certain kind of clarity and an absence of ambiguity about goals that I think is critical. And I think one of the marks of being a more mature boss is finding that perfect balance between clarity about goals and purpose, so that people aren’t wasting time trying to sense what’s in the ether, and not being so direct that you’ve cut off conversation prematurely and your voice is the only voice in the room. How do you get that magic right? I don’t know. But when it happens, that’s a great meeting.

Bryant: What are some other lessons you’ve learned?

Schulman: One of the things that I’ve really come to respect is that everybody who works for me needs something different in terms of how I tease out what’s really on their mind. Are you somebody who is going to get anxious if you haven’t heard from me in a few weeks and therefore you’re going to start sending me a lot of self-serving e-mails telling me every great thing you’ve done? Are you somebody who I have to invite in because otherwise I’m going to miss half of what you’re doing, and could do? And so I think recognizing and deliberately responding to the different things that people need has been something that I’ve learned over time.

Bryant: Do you have the equivalent of a first-day speech you use in new jobs — in effect, these are the rules of the road if you’re going to work with Amy Schulman?

Schulman: I do give people the rules of the road for working with me. But I think one of the things we all have to recognize is that on the first day of any job you can say to people, “Here’s who I am and here’s what I like,” and nobody will absolutely believe you. Have you ever met a leader who doesn’t say, “I want to hear feedback openly. I tend to be very straightforward. I know how to laugh at myself. I’m not afraid of criticism. My door is always open.”

Bryant: Good point.

Schulman: It would almost be funny to say, “Look, my door is closed, don’t bother me.” And so you can say all these things, but the proof is in the pudding. So what I try and do is tell real-world stories about my family, my background. After all, how many times did your English teacher write on your paper, “Show, don’t tell?” And so I always think about that — show, don’t tell.

Bryant: Can you give me an example of one of those stories?

Schulman: A story I often tell is about the first time I took a deposition. I got there early, and I thought that the most important thing was to control the witness. I didn’t realize the first time around that the way you control somebody is not by intimidating them. But I adjusted the chair that I was sitting on so that I’d be really tall, and could look down imposingly on the witness. But I raised it so high that as soon as I sat down, I toppled over and fell backward. I tell that story for a few reasons. I want people to know I’m not afraid to laugh at myself. And the best way to show people that you’re not afraid to laugh at yourself is to actually laugh at yourself and tell a story of a time that you’ve been embarrassed.

Bryant: What else?

Schulman: I think it’s very important as a new leader not to claim things that people might have a reason to believe are not true. There’s nothing worse than a first-day speech that sounds like every other speech that came before it. So I think less is more as a new leader. People are going to hear the content. But what they’re really doing is reading the person. Is she comfortable? Is she having fun? Does she seem like somebody who I want to follow? Is she going to be fair to me? When somebody asks her a question, is she flustered? Does she seem curious? I think those are the things that people take away from a first-day speech.

*     *     *

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 brilliant 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.

Those who read Bryant’s interview of Amy Schulman and wish to develop or improve their storytelling skills are urged to check out these outstanding books:

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Random House (2007)

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience
Carmine Gallo
McGraw-Hill (2009)

Blah Blah Blah: What To Do When Words Don’t Work
Dan Roam
Portfolio/Penguin (2011)

The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative  (Revised and Updated)
Stephen Denning
Jossey-Bass (2011)

What Executives Really Need to Know about Employee Engagement

In their employee engagement study, Elizabeth Craig of the Accenture Institute for High Performance and Lauren DeSimone of the International Consortium for Executive Development Research, explore this topic in depth. Based on research, they identify the key drivers of engagement, revealing how companies can create it in their organizations and, more importantly, sustain high levels of engagement over time.

The research surveyed 1,367 employees in large US companies across a range of industries. It helps companies understand what employee engagement is, and identifying the catalysts of high employee engagement. Among the most important are:

• Jobs that are varied and provide motivation.
• A compelling future.
• A safe environment.
• Dependable colleagues.
• Sane expectations.

The stakes are high: a workforce that is highly engaged is the engine driving the gains in profitability and productivity that are critical to business success in a competitive global environment.

To download a PDF of the report, please click here:

RECOMMENDED READINGS:

The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today
Jeanne C. Meister and Karie Willyerd
HarperBusiness (2010)

The Great Workplace: How to Build It, How to Keep It, and Why It Matters
Michael Burchell and Jennifer Robin
Jossey-Bass (2011)

The Enemy of Engagement: Put an End to Workplace Frustration – and Get the Most from Your Employees
Mark Royal and Tom Agnew
AMACOM (2012)