Harvard Business Review on Succeeding as an Entrepreneur: A book review by Bob Morris

Harvard Business Review on Succeeding as an Entrepreneur
Various Contributors
Harvard Business Review Press (2011)

How to create new businesses and new markets by managing risks effectively

This is one of the volumes in a series of anthologies of articles that first appeared in Harvard Business Review. Having read all of them when they were published individually, I can personally attest to the high quality of their authors’ (or co-authors’) insights as well as the eloquence with which they are expressed. This collection has two substantial value-added benefits that should also be noted: If all of the articles were purchased separately as reprints, the total cost would be at least $60-75; also, they are now conveniently bound in a single volume for a fraction of that cost.

Those who need best practices and ideas for launching new ventures will find the material in this HBR book invaluable. It is one of the volumes in a series of anthologies of articles that first appeared in Harvard Business Review. Authors of the nine articles focus on one or more components of a process by which to zero in on the most promising prospects, set a clear direction for a start-up, test and revise assumptions along the way, tackle risks that could sabotage efforts, carve out opportunities in emerging markets, launch a start-up within an existent organization, and hand over the reins once the enterprise is established.

In several of the articles, the power and value of asking the right questions is stressed, occasionally demonstrated. I now provide two brief excerpts that are representative of the high quality of all nine articles. In both, asking the right questions is demonstrated:

In “Finding Competitive Advantage in Adversity,” Bhaskar Chakravorti suggests that these five questions be asked when the objective is to “unearth the competitive advantage that adversity can offer”:

1. What under lying needs in your market are being curtailed by adversity? Have new needs emerged because of the adverse circumstances?

2. Look broadly across your business and in completely unrelated areas. What resources – products, people, materials, technologies, or intellectual property – are being displaced or underutilized because of the adversity?

3. Can you see a way to use resources from your answers to question 2 to fulfill a need you identified in question 1?

4. What is the minimum change that customers or your value chain require to adopt your offering? Then, what subsequent changes are likely, and how far could the adoption spread?

5. Can you repeat you success with questions 1 to 4 in additional markets, such as new customers or new products?

In “The Questions Every Entrepreneur Must Answer,” Amar Bhidé notes that of the hundreds of thousands of business ventures launched each year, many never get off the ground. Others fizzle after spectacular rocket starts.

“Why such dismal odds? Entrepreneurs — with their bias for action – often ignore ingredients essential to business success. These include a clear strategy, the right workforce talent, and organizational controls that spur performance without stifling employees’ initiative.

“Moreover, no two ventures take the same path. Thus entrepreneurs can’t look to formulas to navigate the myriad choices arising as their enterprise evolves. A decision that’s right for one venture may prove disastrous for another.

How to chart a successful course for your venture? Bhidé recommends asking yourself these questions:

Where do I want to go?
How will I get there?
Can I do it?

Improvisation takes a venture only so far. Successful entrepreneurs keep asking tough questions about where they want to go – and whether the track they’re on will take them there.

Other articles in this anthology I especially enjoyed include: Noam Wasserman’s “The Founder’s Dilemma,” John Ham’s “Why Entrepreneurs Don’t Scale,” and David A. Garvin and Lynn C. Levesque’s “Meeting the Challenge of Corporate Entrepreneurship.”

SUGGESTED  READINGS

American Entrepreneur: The Fascinating Stories of the People Who Defined Business in the United States
Larry Schweikart and Lynne-Pierson-Doti

In Their Time: The Greatest Business Leaders Of The Twentieth Century
Anthony Mayo and Nitin Nohria

Paths to Power: How Insiders and Outsiders Shaped American Business Leadership
Anthony Mayo, Nitin Nohria, and Laura G. Singleton

Anthony J. Mayo: An interview by Bob Morris

Tony Mayo

Tony Mayo is the Thomas S. Murphy Senior Lecturer of Business Administration in the Organizational Behavior Unit of Harvard Business School (HBS).  He currently teaches FIELD, Field Immersion and Experiential Leadership Development, a new required experiential, field-based course in the first year of the MBA Program.  Previously, he co-created and taught the course, “Great Business Leaders:  The Importance of Contextual Intelligence.”  In addition, Tony teaches extensively in leadership-based executive education programs.  He is the co-author of In Their Time:  The Greatest Business Leaders of the 20th Century, which has been translated into five languages.  He is also the co-author of Paths to Power: How Insiders and Outsiders Shaped American Business Leadership and Entrepreneurs, Managers and Leaders:  What the Airline Industry Can Teach Us About Leadership.  These books have been derived from the development of the Great American Business Leaders database that Dean Nitin Nohria and Tony created. [Please click here to check it out.] As Director of the Leadership Initiative, Tony oversees several comprehensive research projects on leadership and manages a number of executive education programs on leadership development.  He was a co-creator of the High Potentials Leadership Development, Leadership for Senior Executives, and Leadership Best Practices programs.  He created and oversees the executive coaching component of Harvard Business School’s Program for Leadership Development.

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

*     *     *

Morris: Before discussing In Their Time, a few general questions. First, who has had the greatest influence on your professional development?

Mayo: Two individuals had a strong impact on my professional development – a senior manager at Epsilon, one of the firms that I worked at after graduating from Harvard Business School, and Nitin Nohria, my co-author and current Dean of Harvard Business School. Both allowed me to take a number of risks and both challenged me beyond what I thought I was capable of achieving.  I thrive in an environment that is highly challenging but supportive of learning and development.  Both individuals created the context in which I could stretch myself.

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

Mayo:  The turning point came when I approached a former professor at Boston College to write a letter of recommendation for me for an evening-based master’s in technology management program in the mid-1980s.  When I approached Professor Bowditch to write the letter of recommendation for me, he refused.  He told me to come back with a letter for Harvard or MIT or Dartmouth.  He saw something in me that I did not see in myself.   I was the first in my family to graduate from college and the thought of a top-tier graduate program was never something I even remotely considered.  Though I was disappointed and confused by his reaction, I researched different programs and returned to him with an application to Harvard Business School.  That one action changed the trajectory of my career.  It is something that I try to do myself when I work with young, promising students; I try to help them see their full potential.

Morris: What is the Leadership Initiative and what are its major objectives?

Mayo:  Chaired by Professor Linda Hill, the Harvard Business School Leadership Initiative was organized to be a catalyst for research on leaders and leadership and to design effective leadership development programs that are relevant for the 21st century.  The goal of the Initiative is to support Harvard Business School’s overarching mission to educate leaders who make a difference in the world.  To that end, we search for opportunities to contribute to the study of leadership and the development of content for the MBA Program and various executive education offerings.  Throughout our work, we seek to bridge the gap between the theory and practice of leadership.

Morris: To what extent (if any) has its mission changed since it was founded?

Mayo:  Our mission has been relatively consistent in the decade since the Leadership Initiative was founded.  If anything, the need for leadership at all levels in organizations has expanded and we need to find ways to tap into the leadership potential that exists in each individual.  The increasing globalization of the workforce and the pressures from the global economic crisis have only heightened the need for well-reasoned, thoughtful leadership.

Morris: In your opinion, what is the single greatest challenge that business leaders will face during (let’s say) the next 3-5 years? Any advice?

Mayo:  Leaders have always faced the challenge of inspiring others while making important strategic decisions for their organizations with limited, conflicting, and ambiguous information.  A leader’s success or failure is often dependent on his or her ability to accurately interpret, analyze, and process this information in a constrained time frame.  Today’s leaders are confronted with challenges and opportunities that are more dynamic and complex than ever before.  Leaders need to understand how to harness technological advances, manage and lead a dispersed and diverse workforce, anticipate and react to constant competitive and geopolitical change and uncertainty, compete on a global scale, and operate in a socially responsible and accountable manner.  Leadership is a team sport, and no one individual can do it all.  Effective leaders build their self-awareness and hire individuals who can complement their skills

Morris: In which specific area of M.B.A. programs now offered by the most prestigious business schools is there the greatest need for immediate improvement? Please explain.

Mayo:  When HBS celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2008, it was an opportune time to reassess our model of MBA education.  To that end, Professors Skrikant Datar and David Garvin embarked on a major review and evaluation of MBA programs.  Their book, Rethinking the MBA, highlighted three primary areas that leading MBA programs should address in helping their students prepare for leadership positions in the future.  The three areas include leadership, globalization, and integration.  HBS embraced their recommendations and has launched a new required course called FIELD, Field Immersion and Experiential Leadership Development, which encompasses these three areas with a primary focus on field-based experiential work.  For instance, all Harvard MBAs will be required to participate in a global immersion where they will work with a company in an emerging economy.  To truly develop as a leader, one must learn about the phenomenon (that is where cases and books do a great job), but it is even more important that one experiences being a leader (that is where experiential exercises come into play).  More and more, MBA programs are combining theoretical lessons with practical leadership experiences.

*     *     *

To read the complete interview, please click here.

Tony Mayo invites you to check out the resources at the HBS Leadership Initiative: by clicking here.

 

 

Paths to Power: A book review by Bob Morris

Paths to Power: How Insiders and Outsiders Shaped American Business Leadership Anthony J. Mayo, Nitin Nohria, and Laura G. Singleton Harvard Business Press (2007) I recently re-read In Their Time, co-authored by Anthony Mayo and Nitin Nohria, in combination with this book whose subtitle correctly indicates what Mayo, Nohria, and Laura Singleton set out to explain: how “insiders” and “outsiders” of big business (as Michael Useem explains in an insightful Foreword) presided “over our dominant organizations” and, in process, examine “which pathways lead to the apex – or which do not” for those who would also achieve such dominance.

Rather than limiting their attention to a set number of exemplary leaders – in chronological order — and then devoting a separate chapter to each, taking a linear approach to the material, the co-authors chose to examine the evolution of 20th century business leadership in terms of the ten decades, assigning to each following the first chapter an appropriate component (birthplace, nationality, religion, education, class, gender and race, etc.) while frequently cross-referencing throughout the entire century. For example, they juxtapose comparable individuals such as James Stillman’s presidency of National City Bank (1891-1909) and Sanford “Sandy” Weill’s of Citigroup (that National City Bank eventually became) a century later.

Mayo, Nohria, and Singleton’s role in Paths to Power is more that of cultural anthropologists than as biographers or even business historians. They create a rich and nuanced social and economic context within a 100-year framework as they examine what separated outsiders from insiders in business leadership in the 20th century. In the city where I live, we have a number of outdoor markets at which slices of fresh fruit are offered as samples of the produce available. In that same spirit, I frequently include brief excerpts from a book to help those who red my review to get a “taste.” Here is a representative selection from the material that Mayo, Nohria, and Singleton provide.

On birthplace: “As a starting point in our examination of twentieth-century leader backgrounds, we thus come away with the decisive conclusion that even in the United States, the great land of opportunity, not every birthplace was created equal…While mobility between regions tended to increase later in the century, people with more prosperous family origins – origins that typically stemmed from birth in a similarly prosperous region of the country -retained an advantage when entering business in a new area. The distinguishing features of each of the country’s major regions, both as sources of and sites for leaders, will constitute an important backdrop for further discussions about leader characteristics.” (Page 54)

On education: “Yale’s popularity among business leaders like the Weyerhaeusers vaulted it to a preeminent position in the early part of the century: it was the most popular school for all of our leaders prior to 1950, educating thirty-two of them (about 15 percent of all that era’s college graduates). With twenty-seven leaders, Harvard came next, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ranked a distant third with fourteen graduates. Yale was a perfect fit for the era of the dominant Protestant establishment, to which the Weyerhaeusers, steadfast Presbyterians, belonged. Yale was seen as a bastion of conservative, faith-oriented values during this period, in contrast to the more intellectual and individualistic attitudes at Harvard. (Page 124)

On class: “With nearly 30 percent of the leaders consistently coming from relatively poor backgrounds and, because of their success, passing on wealthy or at least quite comfortably middle-class upbringings to their own children, genuine upward mobility is undoubtedly represented by almost one in three of these leaders. Still, countermeasures such as the GI Bill and trends toward professional management, rather than improving the chances of those from poorer backgrounds, appear to have only held the line against an inexorable advantage of those with advantages.” (Page 184)

In his Foreword, Useem explains this book’s unique importance. “Studies of the social origins of America’s business elite have been a long-standing research tradition, dating to such classics as W. Lloyd Warner and James Abegglen’s Big Business Leaders in America and Mabel Newcomer’s The Big Business Executive, both published in 1955. We have not had the benefit of a truly comprehensive portrait since those works of more than fifty years ago; now Mayo, Nohria, and Singleton have not only updated the picture but also produced the definitive portrait of our time.”

Those who share my high regard for this brilliant book are urged to check out the aforementioned In Their Time as well as Stuart Crainer’s The Management Century and Stewart H. Holbrook’s The Age of the Moguls: The Story of the Robber Barons and the Great Tycoons. (Obtaining a copy of it is well worth the effort.) In it, Holbrook examines a number of “lords of capital” who, in his words, “made `deals’ purchased immunity, and did other things which in 1860, or 1880, or even 1900, were considered no more than `smart’ by their fellow Americans, but which today would give pause to the most conscientiously dishonest promoter….They were a motley crew, yet taken together they fashioned a savage and gaudy age as distinctively purple as that of imperial Rome, and infinitely more entertaining.” Holbrook’s account of 19th century robber barons and great tycoons “sets the table” for the “feast” of information and analysis that Anthony Mayo and Nitin Nohria with Laura Singleton so skillfully provide.

In Their Time: A book review by Bob Morris

In Their Time: The Greatest Business Leaders Of The Twentieth Century
Anthony J. Mayo and Nitin Nohria
Harvard Business Press (2005)

How great business leaders “seized the zeitgeist of their times”

I recently re-read Paths to Power, co-authored by Anthony Mayo and Nitin Nohria with Laura G. Singleton, as well as this book in which Mayo and Nohria also focus on some of the greatest business leaders of the twentieth century. As in Paths to Power, rather than limiting their attention to a set number of exemplary leaders – in chronological order — and then devoting a separate chapter to each, Mayo and Nohria chose instead to examine the evolution of 20th century business leadership in terms of the ten decades, assigning to each an appropriate theme while frequently cross-referencing throughout the entire century. For example, Chapter One (1900-1909) is titled “The Land of Opportunity”; Chapter Six (1950-1959) is “Feeding the Machine of Consumption”; and Chapter Ten (1990-1999) is “Reengineering, Restructuring, and Reality Check.”

In my opinion, as in their later book (Paths to Power), Mayo and Nohria’s role, is more that of cultural anthropologists than as biographers or even business historians. They create a social and economic context within a 100-year framework as they examine what differentiated outsiders from insiders in business leadership in the 20th century.

Near downtown Dallas, we have a number of outdoor markets at which slices of fresh fruit are offered as samples of the produce available. In that same spirit, I frequently include brief excerpts such as these from a book to help those who read my review to get a “taste.” Here is a representative selection from the material that Mayo and Nohria provide:

“The business executives of the first decade were driven, opportunistic, and innovative. They operated on a large scale and constantly expanded their base of power. They built businesses that often had far-reaching impact on the way society lived, but they were, for the most part, less concerned about the way people worked; there was generally little regard for progressive employment practices. The focus was not on the quality of work life or necessarily on the quality of the product; it was often the quantity of the output. For many, there was no better way to secure quantity in the 1900s than through consolidation, and the move toward consolidation subsequently spawned another fundamental shift in business – a focus on productivity and efficiency.” (Chapter One, Page 31)

Note: The business leaders discussed in this chapter include Clarence M. Wooley (American Radiator Company), Cyrus H.K. Curtis (Curtis Publishing Company), and Frank C. Ball (Ball Brothers Company).

“Although innovation and technical competence were the principal drivers of products in the 1940s, marketing, advertising, and standardization drove products and services in the 1950s. Sales volume was further increased because many products followed a planned-obsolescence life cycle. Successful businesses adopted this use-and-replace strategy, which was aided significantly with the rise in products manufactured with plastic or other synthetic materials. The lack of focus on product quality would eventually become a major liability for U.S. manufacturers, but that was hard to see in the general prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s as corporate profits continued to rise.”

Note: The business leaders discussed in this chapter include Howard J. Morgens (Procter & Gamble), C. Kemmins Wilson (Holiday Inn), Raymond A. Kroc (McDonald’s), and Malcolm P. McLean (SeaLand Service).

“As we have seen in our analysis of previous decades, the full impact of the entrepreneur’s work is often not visible for many years; these businesspeople often push the limits of what is possible and even what is conceivable. By their nature, entrepreneurs and their businesses are ahead of the curve, and it is relatively dangerous to assess performance and impact as it is unfolding.

Note: The business leaders discussed in this chapter include Alfred M. Zeien (Gillette Company), Louis V. Gerstner Jr. (IBM Corporation), and Meg Whitman (eBay).

Those who share my high regard for this brilliant book are urged to check out the aforementioned Paths to Power as well as Stuart Crainer’s The Management Century and Stewart H. Holbrook’s The Age of the Moguls: The Story of the Robber Barons and the Great Tycoons. (obtaining a copy of it is well worth the effort.) In his book, Holbrook examines a number of “lords of capital” who, in his words, “made `deals’ purchased immunity, and did other things which in 1860, or 1880, or even 1900, were considered no more than `smart’ by their fellow Americans, but which today would give pause to the most conscientiously dishonest promoter….They were a motley crew, yet taken together they fashioned a savage and gaudy age as distinctively purple as that of imperial Rome, and infinitely more entertaining.”

Holbrook’s account of 19th century robber barons and great tycoons “sets the table” for the “feast” of information and analysis that Anthony Mayo and Nitin Nohria so skillfully provide.

Paths to Power: A book review by Bob Morris

Paths to Power: How Insiders and Outsiders Shaped American Business Leadership
Anthony J. Mayo, Nitin Nohria, and Laura G. Singleton
Harvard Business Press (2007)

I recently re-read In Their Time, co-authored by Anthony Mayo and Nitin Nohria, in combination with this book whose subtitle correctly indicates what Mayo, Nohria, and Laura Singleton set out to explain: how “insiders” and “outsiders” of big business (as Michael Useem explains in an insightful Foreword) presided “over our dominant organizations” and, in process, examine “which pathways lead to the apex – or which do not” for those who would also achieve such dominance.

Rather than limiting their attention to a set number of exemplary leaders – in chronological order — and then devoting a separate chapter to each, taking a linear approach to the material, the co-authors chose to examine the evolution of 20th century business leadership in terms of the ten decades, assigning to each following the first chapter an appropriate component (birthplace, nationality, religion, education, class, gender and race, etc.) while frequently cross-referencing throughout the entire century. For example, they juxtapose comparable individuals such as James Stillman’s presidency of National City Bank (1891-1909) and Sanford “Sandy” Weill’s of Citigroup (that National City Bank eventually became) a century later.

Mayo, Nohria, and Singleton’s role in Paths to Power is more that of cultural anthropologists than as biographers or even business historians. They create a social and economic context within a 100-year framework as they examine what separated outsiders from insiders in business leadership in the 20th century. In the city where I live, we have a number of outdoor markets at which slices of fresh fruit are offered as samples of the produce available. In that same spirit, I frequently include brief excerpts from a book to help those who red my review to get a “taste.” Here is a representative selection from the material that Mayo, Nohria, and Singleton provide.

On birthplace: “As a starting point in our examination of twentieth-century leader backgrounds, we thus come away with the decisive conclusion that even in the United States, the great land of opportunity, not every birthplace was created equal…While mobility between regions tended to increase later in the century, people with more prosperous family origins – origins that typically stemmed from birth in a similarly prosperous region of the country -retained an advantage when entering business in a new area. The distinguishing features of each of the country’s major regions, both as sources of and sites for leaders, will constitute an important backdrop for further discussions about leader characteristics.” (Page 54)

On education: “Yale’s popularity among business leaders like the Weyerhaeusers vaulted it to a preeminent position in the early part of the century: it was the most popular school for all of our leaders prior to 1950, educating thirty-two of them (about 15 percent of all that era’s college graduates). With twenty-seven leaders, Harvard came next, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ranked a distant third with fourteen graduates. Yale was a perfect fit for the era of the dominant Protestant establishment, to which the Weyerhaeusers, steadfast Presbyterians, belonged. Yale was seen as a bastion of conservative, faith-oriented values during this period, in contrast to the more intellectual and individualistic attitudes at Harvard. (Page 124)

On class: “With nearly 30 percent of the leaders consistently coming from relatively poor backgrounds and, because of their success, passing on wealthy or at least quite comfortably middle-class upbringings to their own children, genuine upward mobility is undoubtedly represented by almost one in three of these leaders. Still, countermeasures such as the GI Bill and trends toward professional management, rather than improving the chances of those from poorer backgrounds, appear to have only held the line against an inexorable advantage of those with advantages.” (Page 184)

In his Foreword, Useem explains this book’s unique importance. “Studies of the social origins of America’s business elite have been a long-standing research tradition, dating to such classics as W. Lloyd Warner and James Abegglen’s Big Business Leaders in America and Mabel Newcomer’s The Big Business Executive, both published in 1955. We have not had the benefit of a truly comprehensive portrait since those works of more than fifty years ago; now Mayo, Nohria, and Singleton have not only updated the picture but also produced the definitive portrait of our time.”

Those who share my high regard for this brilliant book are urged to check out the aforementioned In Their Time as well as Stuart Crainer’s The Management Century and Stewart H. Holbrook’s The Age of the Moguls: The Story of the Robber Barons and the Great Tycoons. (Obtaining a copy of it is well worth the effort.) In it, Holbrook examines a number of “lords of capital” who, in his words, “made `deals’ purchased immunity, and did other things which in 1860, or 1880, or even 1900, were considered no more than `smart’ by their fellow Americans, but which today would give pause to the most conscientiously dishonest promoter….They were a motley crew, yet taken together they fashioned a savage and gaudy age as distinctively purple as that of imperial Rome, and infinitely more entertaining.”

Holbrook’s account of 19th century robber barons and great tycoons “sets the table” for the “feast” of information and analysis that Anthony Mayo and Nitin Nohria with Laura Singleton so skillfully provide.

HBR 10 Must-Reads on Change: A book review by Bob Morris

HBR 10 Must-Reads on Change
Various Contributors
Harvard Business Press (2011)

This volume is one of several in a new series of anthologies of articles that initially appeared in the Harvard Business Review, in this instance from 1960 until 2006. Remarkably, none seems dated; on the contrary, if anything, all seem more relevant now than ever before as their authors discuss what are (literally) essential dimensions of organizational and/or individual change.

More specifically, why transformation efforts fail (John P. Kotter), how to achieve change through persuasion (David A. Garvin and Michael A. Roberto), what can be learned from an interview of Samuel J. Palmisano about leading change when business is good, why radical change can be “the quiet way” (Barbara E. Meyerson), what “tipping point leadership is and does” (W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne), what a survival guide for leaders should provide (Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky), the real reason people won’t change (Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey), how to crack “the code of change” (Michael Berr and Nitin Nohria), the hard side of change management (Harold L. Sirkin, Perry Keenan, and Alan Jackson), and why change programs don’t produce change (Michael Beer, Russell A. Eisenstat, and Bert Spector).

Each article includes two invaluable reader-friendly devices, “Idea in Brief” and “Idea in Practice” sections, that facilitate, indeed expedite review of key points. Some articles also include brief commentaries on even more specific subjects such as “Dysfunctional Routines” (Pages 238-29), “Tempered Radicals as Everyday Leaders” (Page 64), “Adaptive Versus Technical Change: Whose Problem Is It?” (Paged 105), “Getting Groups to Change” (Pages 124-125), “Big Assumptions: How Our Perceptions Shape Our Reality” (Pages 132-133), “Calculating DICE [duration, integrity, commitment, and effort] Scores” (Pages 166-168) and “Tracking Corporate Change” (Pages 183-184).

These ten articles do not – because they obviously cannot – explain everything that one needs to know and understand about formulating and then executing effective change initiatives. However, I do not know of another single source at this price (currently $14.41 from Amazon) that provides more and better information, insights, and advice that will help leaders to achieve success in the business dimensions explained so well by the authors of the articles in this volume.

Suggested readings for leadership development in 2011

Awaiting you....

Randy Mayeux has already shared his choices and all are eminently worthy, to which I presume to add a few others.

Please keep in mind that this list is (as are Randy and I) a work in progress.

The Right Values
True North by Bill George and Peter Sims

MY ADDITIONS:
The Executive’s Compass by James O’Toole
The Highest Goal by Michael Ray
The Heart Aroused by David Whyte

The Right Strategy
The Opposable Mind by Roger L. Martin
Mastering the Rockefeller Habits by Verne Harnish

MY ADDITIONS:
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
Unstoppable by Chris Zook
Enterprise Architecture as Strategy by Jeanne Ross, Peter Weill, and David Robertson

Effective Leadership
Fierce Leadership by Susan Scott
Encouraging the Heart by James Kouzes and Barry Posner

MY ADDITIONS:
Maestro by Roger Nierenberg
True North by Bill George and Peter Sims

Effective Communication
Words that Work by Frank Luntz
Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

MY ADDITIONS:
Influence by Robert Cialdini
The Back of the Napkin and Unfolding the Napkin by Dan Roam
Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler

Functional & Effective Teamwork
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

MY ADDITIONS:
Organizing Genius by Warren Bennis and Patricia Ward Biederman
Collaboration by Morten Hansen
Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Cultivating Creativity and Innovation
The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson

MY ADDITIONS:
Freedom, Inc. by Brian M. Carney and Isaac Getz
The Idea of Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation by Thomas Kelley
Six Thinking Hats by Edward De Bono
Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind by Guy Claxton

Successful Execution
Execution by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan

MY ADDITIONS:
Reality Check by Guy Kawasaki
The Other Side of Innovation by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble
Open Innovation and Open Business Models by Henry Chesbrough

Plus two additional categories:

Leadership Development

MY RECOMMENDATIONS:
Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice co-edited by Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana
The Talent Masters by Bill Conaty and Ram Charan
The Center for Creative Leadership Handbook of Leadership Development co-edited by Ellen Van Velsor, Cynthia D. McCauley, and Marian N. Ruderman
Extraordinary Leadership co-edited by Kerry Bunker, Douglas T. Hall, and Kathy E. Kram

Employee Engagement & Talent Management

MY RECOMMENDATIONS:
A Sense of Urgency and Buy-In by John Kotter
The Art of Engagement by Jim Haudan
Engaging the Hearts and Minds of All Your Employees by Lee J. Colan
Growing Great Employees by Erika Andersen

The AMA Handbook of Leadership: A Book Review by Bob Morris

The AMA Handbook of Leadership
Marshall Goldsmith, John Baldoni, and Sarah McArthur, Co-Editors
AMACOM (2010)

What we have in a single volume are 23 essays from 29 contributors, including the three co-editors (Marshall Goldsmith, John Baldoni, and Sarah McArthur), that – together – provide 360º perspectives on leadership. The book’s objective is to enable each reader, in James Kouzes’ words, “to more effectively forge ahead, develop people, engage people, facilitate change, and take the lead.”  Continuing to address the reader directly, Kouzes adds, “Your challenge in moving from the page to practice is to make the lessons genuinely yours. It’s essential that you do that, because making them yours is the only route to authentic leadership. Making them yours is the only route to becoming the kind of leader others will want to follow.”

Here in Dallas at the Farmers Market near the downtown area, several merchants offer complimentary slices of fresh fruit as samples. In that same spirit, I now offer brief excerpts (albeit out of context) from three of the essays.

“Today, if we are not developing a richly diverse organization, led by a wonderfully diverse team of leaders, then we are already an organization of the past, led by leaders of the past…The initiative, the imperative for a bright future. Is grounded by values that are palpable. With values that we live by, as mission-focused, values-based, and demographics-driven, we lead into the future. This is the organizational life we are building, the leadership life we are leading. We are the future.” Frances Hesselbein (Pages 9 and 12)

“In my many years of watching leaders successfully grow new leaders, I have observed that three characteristics separate the winners from the also-rans. First, successful leaders have an attitude that supports learning and growth…Second, successful leaders provide feedback and tell the truth…Finally, successful leaders create cultures that value inclusion, not exclusion, and they know that every person can make valuable contributions to the team when encouraged and given the opportunity.” Beverly Kaye (Page 80)

“The first task for change makers is to create real awareness at every level of an organization that (1) these practices [based on fear and depression] create serious problems with powerful negative effects that impede success, and (2) there are policies that make success much more likely. In order to have an impact, the message must resonate with people – it must be an honest, simple, brief, and focused message. It must begin with a sense of alarm that when the core issues are faced, the right changes can be made and then success and a better future become likely. Experience teaches us that this message will need to be repeated often.” Judith M. Bardwick (Page 114)

Note: In Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, Verne Harnish suggests that supervisors keep repeating the “message” they are trying to deliver to their direct-reports until they begin to mock and mimic them.

I urge those who share my high regard for this book to check out Extraordinary Leadership: Addressing the Gaps in Senior Executive Development co-edited by Kerry A. Bunker, Douglas T. Hall, and Kathy E. Kram as well as Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice co-edited by Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana. I also recommend Charles S. Jacobs’ Management Rewired: Why Feedback Doesn’t Work and Other Surprising Lessons from the Latest Brain Science.

Extraordinary Leadership: A Book Review by Bob Morris

Extraordinary Leadership: Addressing the Gaps in Senior Executive Development
Kerry A. Bunker, Douglas T. Hall, and Kathy E. Kram, Editors
Jossey-Bass/A Wiley Imprint (2010)

What we have in this single volume is a collection of essays that address the gaps in senior executive development from 23 contributors, including the co-editors who are Kerry A. Bunker, Douglas T. Hall, and Kathy E. Kram. As explained in the Preface, “The authors and editors came together for two days early in the [collaborative] process to identify the nature and pattern of the gaps in senior executive development, structure the format for the book, and identify and shape the content for individual chapters. We all returned to [the Center for Creative Leadership] after completing first drafts to identify and strengthen the collective themes in our work, fine tune the structure, and give and receive input on individual chapters. The integrative involvement and commitment of the chapter authors played an important role in teasing out the subtle and often invisible dynamics that either cement or undermine the development of extraordinary leadership.”

Here is how the material is organized: authors of the essays in Part One examine the gaps at the intrapersonal that “tend to block the pathway to growth and success at subsequent stages of leadership development”; authors of the essays in Part Two “highlight several subtle yet powerful dynamics within individual leaders that, if not clearly understood, can undermine relations with colleagues at work and ultimately impede critical work outcomes…Sharing the basic premise that leadership is a relational process,…the authors offer specific strategies for transforming these invisible dynamics into positive influences”; the authors of the essays in Part Three “look at applying what we already know about developing leaders to promote understanding and management of power relationships in organization, and toward informed actions that promote inclusion in a diverse global environment”; authors of the essays in Part Four focus on the external environment “for a perspective that may be missing most often in writings on leadership [i.e. the gap at the institutional level]. Perhaps this view is missing because we often tend to think of leadership as focusing on the relationship between the leader and those who report to him or her. But the process of managing up or out is generally even more important than managing down.”

Here are a few of the essay titles that suggest the scope of coverage:

Unlocking Leadership Potential: Overcoming Immunities to Change, Deborah Helsing and Lisa Lahey

Helping Leaders to Become Emotionally Intelligent, Cary Cherniss

The Not-So-Secret Sauce of the Leadership Development Recipe, Morgan W. McCall Jr. and George P. Hollenbeck

Developing Leaders with Cultural Intelligence: Exploring the Cultural Dimensions of Leadership, Laura Cornutt, Mireia las Heras, and Jina Mao

Looking Forward: Creating Conditions for Extraordinary Leadership, Kathy E. Kram, Douglas (Tim) Hall, Kerry A. Bunker

As I began to work my way through the 14 essays, the thought occurred to me that extraordinary leadership would be needed to reduce (if not eliminate) the current “gaps” to which the 23 contributors refer. Moreover, that each “gap” poses challenges at the interpersonal level, between and among leaders, in the system, and at the institutional level. It remains for each reader to determine which specific subjects and which specific essays are most directly responsive to her or his own needs and interests.

I also highly recommend these two sources:

The AMA Handbook of Leadership
Marshall Goldsmith, John Balboni, and Sarah McArthur, Co-Editors
AMACOM (2010)

Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice: A Harvard Business School Centennial Colloquium
Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana, Co-Editors
Harvard Business Press (2010)

Richard Barker’s “Big Idea”: No, management is not a profession

Richard Barker

Here is the first page from an article written by Richard Barker for the Harvard Business Review. To read the complete article, please click here.

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It is natural to view management as a profession. Managers’ status is similar to that of doctors or lawyers, as is their obligation to contribute to the well-being of society. Managers can also be formally trained and qualified, notably by earning an MBA. If management is a profession, the business school is a professional school.

That perception has fueled criticism of business schools during the recent economic crisis. They have come under fire for allegedly failing in their obligation to educate socially responsible business leaders. The same perception has informed the schools’ response, which has been to work toward greater professionalism. Writing in the June 2009 issue of Harvard Business Review [click here], Joel Podolny, a former dean of the Yale School of Management, argued, “An occupation earns the right to be a profession only when some ideals, such as being an impartial counsel, doing no harm, or serving the greater good, are infused into the conduct of people in that occupation. In like vein, a school becomes a professional school only when it infuses those ideals into its graduates.”

The MBA Debate: It’s Not Over Yet

Podolny is in sympathy with Harvard Business School professors Rakesh Khurana and Nitin Nohria, who argued in the October 2008 issue of HBR [click here] that it was time to make management a true profession. In their view, “True professions have codes of conduct, and the meaning and consequences of those codes are taught as part of the formal education of their members.” Yet, they wrote, “unlike doctors and lawyers,” managers don’t “adhere to a universal and enforceable code of conduct.”

These calls to professionalism are hardly new. Writing in the very first issue of HBR, in 1922, HBS professor John Gurney Callan claimed, “Business…may be thought of as a profession [and] we may profitably spend a good deal of time in considering what is the best professional training for [those] who are to take important executive positions in the coming generation.”

A. Lawrence Lowell, the president of Harvard University, was even more assertive in his 1923 HBR essay “The Profession of Business” (adapted from his address to the incoming class at HBS the previous September). He attributed the very creation of HBS to the emergence of business management as a distinct profession.

In contrast with these views, I will argue that management is not a profession at all and can never be one. Therefore, business schools are not professional schools. Moreover, laudable and beguiling though professional standards and ethics may be, and however appealing professional status is, hanging the mantle “professional” on business education fosters inappropriate analysis and misguided prescriptions.

A Code of Business Ethics?

Let’s begin by examining what actually constitutes a profession.

What is a profession?

Professions are made up of particular categories of people from whom we seek advice and services because they have knowledge and skills that we do not. A doctor, for example, can recommend a course of treatment for an illness; a lawyer can advise us on a course of legal action. We cannot make these judgments ourselves—and often we cannot judge the quality of the advice we receive. The Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow wrote about the medical profession, “The value of information is frequently not known in any meaningful sense to the buyer; if, indeed, he knew enough to measure the value of information, he would know the information itself. But information, in the form of skilled care, is precisely what is being bought from most physicians, and, indeed, from most professionals.”

To read the complete article, please click here.