The Leader's Journey with Lee Thayer

Reader, Beware!

Not a new caution, for sure. But the gimmickry changes with the fashions. Recently [and reaching epidemic proportions] writers on subjects such as leadership and organizational excellence have been playing a special trick on us readers. They identify some less-used exemplars of (usually) temporary business success, and write a book explaining that those successful companies are successful because they used the writers’ proprietary recipes for how to do it. Since no one could know for sure whether they did or not, it seems a safe enough explanation. The trick gets somewhat exposed when different writers use the same companies, but different theories.

Or when the writers change their theories and disavow any responsibility for the failure of those once-successful companies. Most of this is by innuendo or implication, of course.

To try to gain visibility or status in the guru pecking order by doing this seems a bit sleazy to me. Since most successful corporate leaders can’t really tell you how it was they became successful, it suggests at least overwrought opportunism to me. I was knew a professor who wrote about business “ethics” who get dismissed for being “unethical.” Duplicity abounds in this market.

Any book that does not attribute a good measure of any executive’s success to luck is misleading.

Any comment?

The Gulf between Intention and Accomplishment

I have, for almost 50 years, been engaged in helping chief executives in all kinds of organizations make healthier and better-functioning organizations. And, along the way, helping them to develop themselves into the kinds of leaders required to make and sustain a high-performance organization. The work has been as tough as it has been rewarding. There are no quick and easy recipes for bringing it off – whether “10 Secrets” or “7 Ways.”

There is a universal obstacle standing between the many who try and the few who succeed. It is this: They “understand.” They know what needs to be done. But they don’t do it. Here’s an example of how it usually plays out:

ME: “You didn’t do what you said you were going to do.”

CEO: “Well, okay. But you know how busy we’ve been.”

ME: “Yes. I do. But keep in mind the rule of thumb: there is no failure to perform in organizations that can’t be explained away.”

CEO: “Yeah, well, I won’t try that, then. I just haven’t had time to devote to what we’ve agreed needs to be done. I want you to know it’s very important to me.”

ME: “So you did try it, after all”

People say “this” is what I’m going to do. But they do something else. All exceptions can be explained away. You just need others to buy your excuses.

There are myriad problems, in organizations and in life. People quite often know the right thing to do. BUT THEY DON’T DO IT. And I’m working with people who stood in line to ask me to help them do what they say they want to do. So the distance between intention and accomplishment is as great at the top of the organization as it is elsewhere in the organization.

Why is that, do you suppose?

The Conditions of Learning: Life on the Farm

When I was but a tad, growing up on my grandparents’ small farm in southeast Kansas, I learned some lessons which have served me well over a long life.

So I got to thinking: where are our young people today going to learn those lessons? Not in school, unlikely at home, not from peers, not from the media or the popular electronic games (although they could learn some things there that I couldn’t have learned). Then I thought – is this just nostalgia for the “good old days.” I don’t think so. For one reason, they weren’t all that good.

But here’s an example of what I mean: Because I was clearly the youngest of the three of us, I had daily chores, usually beginning around 4 or 5 am. One was to draw water out of the well by bucket and put in a trough for the horses, which I had to harness and bring to the trough. I had seen my grandfather (a wiry old Irishman) do it. One flowing motion from dropping the bucket to emptying its contents.

I tried. I could fill the bucket in the well, but I wasn’t strong enough to bring it up. There wasn’t anyone I could ask to do it for me. They were busy with their own chores. So, I knew I had to accomplish the larger task of watering the horses, and that I wasn’t going to grow that much in the next 15 minutes. What to do? I tried filling the bucket half-full. Wow! I could haul that half-full bucket up and empty it. But wait a minute. That meant I had to make twice as many trips into the well with the bucket.

So be it. When it is necessary for you to accomplish something, you had to figure out a way. That’s the way my grandparents lived, always on the edge and up against their own wits. We lived in the real world.

That was the lesson. Most people I meet in present-day organizations haven’t really learned that – including their CEOs. An invaluable lesson. And free.

What we call “learning” today has little or no necessity in it – and it is often not about the real world. What does that predict to?

WHY How We Do Anything Means Everything

A recent book by Dov Seidman, How: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything…in Business (and in Life), is worth reading for the many nuggets of wisdom it offers amongst the platitudes. An example of the former: With the democratization of info, the standard of info verification has been lowered. Translation: when everyone has an opinion which we are obligated to consider, the road map is lost sight of.

An example of the latter: People who feel overregulated in turn feel distrusted. This would certainly be true of marginally-competent people. But competent people feel far less victimized by regulations. Their attitude is more likely to be found in the actions they take to accomplish something in spite of the regulations.

Much of Seidman’s book is about communication, but he seems to assume that no one before him has thought very deeply about this central aspect of the human condition. For example, “information” as such may contribute in some way to what you know. But knowing-about is light years away from knowing-how. In my opinion, the starring role ought to be that of competence, and not information. Information never made anyone competent, except those who get competent at hyping it.

Anyway, here’s a very smart, broadly-educated person who is ruminating on his life and thoughts. That’s why it is worth reading—and challenging. There is always a caveat for the reader. It comes from Seneca: “To the person who does not know where he wants to go [even in this book, I add], there is no favorable wind."

Interviews with Yvonne DiVita: How Executives Fail

In our continuing interview series, Yvonne DiVita and I talk about How Executives Fail. Not just the book, but the reality. As noted in the book, and elsewhere on this blog, I have uncovered "25 Surefire Recipes to Sabotage Your Career," if you are aiming at an executive level role in your company.

I arrived at the realization that executives need help failing because of all the books out there that teach you how to succeed. If, even after reading said books, so few actually do succeed, I wondered if a book about how to fail [might] have the same perverse effect.

Forty-Five Years in the Trenches

In a recent "Source for Communicators," Melcrum's weekly e-zine for corporate communicators, the “strategy expert” Bill Quirke wrote about what makes a good internal communication plan. Certainly recipes to think about. [subscription required; some content is free, some isn't]

But a communication expert who commits the sin of misplaced concreteness (e.g., #1, that “organizations” seem to have “business ambitions” and “strategic aspirations”) calls for some kind of response.

After forty-five years of being in the trenches, partnering with CEOs to make more effective, better performing organizations, my suggestions for “internal” communicators would be somewhat different, as follows.

• Most people seem to believe that communication has magic powers. This would be only partly true if the sender and the receiver both had magic powers.


• It required a great deal of communication for an organization to get into the state it is in. If you have the same players, it will most likely continue on the course it is on. Think of a marriage on the rocks.


• You can't change people via "communication" alone.


• Mass communication in organizations is about as effective and inefficient as any other form of mass communication.


• You cannot raise people’s competencies with words.


• Internal and external communication systems need to be seamless.


• No matter what you do, internal communication will be about as efficacious as the organization’s leaders are as communicators.

Competence, Admitted

Tim O'Toole is the managing director and CEO of London's "Underground." There were the 7/7 bombings last year. The Underground was open for business the following morning by rush hour. O'Toole's philosophy: There were 14,000 frontline workers out there who knew what to do and how to do it. They behaved that way because of training and competence.Not just paper evidence. We "drill, drill, drill, and train, train, train."

There has to be proof of every member's competence. He gives them something to hang on to, like his slogan, "A world-class tube for a world-class city."

But he knows it all hinges on their competence, tested.

In this era of proprietary panaceas, it is refreshing to hear a CEO talk about the foundation stone, competence. It is a foundation stone of my book Leadership: Thinking, Being, Doing. O'Toole represents a small cadre of common-sense CEOs who understand that a competent organization hinges on competence in every role in that organization. There is no fairy-dust, contrary to the posture of so much of our business press in the U.S. Maybe the Brits know something we don't?

More in the full text of "Turning Around the London Subway System: From Terrorism to the Olympics" at the link here.

The Ubiquitous Phenomenon of How Executives Fail

How Executives Fail--back to that ubiquitous phenomenon:

That you may recognize as the title of one of my books. I've long been intrigued by the fact that most executives fail. But where are they learning how to do this? When I realized that there were no courses or guru recipes for how to fail, I concluded that there needed to be one. Why were we ignoring the most likely outcome?

That's part of it. Another part of it is simply that you would be hard put to find a CEO who would admit that she is determined to fail in her role -- or at least determined to be no more than mediocre. Yet if you ask about such things as excellence, CEOs almost universally claim this as their aim in life. So, again, it is not for want of enthusiam that so many say they would like to achieve excellence. But in my work, it doesn't pay to confuse enthusiasm with competence, or commitment.

So, the first reason why so many want to do it, but so few succeed, is that they want to achieve excellence, but are not willing to pay the price. They will buy a few billion dollars worth of books and seminars looking for the fairy dust that will make them successful in spite of themselves, but the field is littered with failed wannabes. To repeat: They want excellence, but they are not willing to pay the price.

There are some other factors at play that I have observed, and which may account in part for the negative prognosis:

1. Excellent or high-performance organizations require grown-ups in most roles, certainly in the top ones. But increasingly, those at the top may be brilliant, but they haven't grown up. So they surround themselves with people of similar arrested development.
2. Great organizations require most of their members to be in the "learning mode"--that is, having insatiable curiosity about their roles, their industries, and anything else that might bear upon their performance in their roles
3. Typically, they are dilettantish--they may "want" to be good at what they do, but if not they are more likely to look for something else to do. People seek second and third "careers" because the aren't masterful in the career they're in.
4. The whole notion that great performance exists in a different paradigm from adequate performance is not comprehensible to average folk. They just want to be who they are, doing what they do, but adding some tricks to the brew. If you want to go where you have never been, you may have to do what you have never done. Seems pragmatic enough. Why don't they "get" it??

Those are some of my observations about the failure rate. What are yours?

"How Can We Fail When We're So Sincere?" A Charlie Brown Moment

"How can we fail when we're so sincere?"

At least that's the way Charlie Brown put it (about his baseball team of friends).

My work involves partnering with capable and committed CEOs to transform their organizations into high-performance organizations. In spite of the optimistic hyping of occasional success stories by the business press, most of the attempts made to achieve sustainable organizational excellence fail.

Those attempts fail for many reasons, of course. But from my perspective, having been in the trenches with these carefully-selected CEOs for forty-five years, those attempts fail because the CEO--and usually his or her staff--assume

1. that they can continue to be who they are, and
2. that achieving high-performance is primarily a matter of adding a few tricks to their customary ways of doing things.

A comment by Mac Anderson (of Simple Truths) is apropos here (my paraphrase): To get to where we've never been before, we must do what we've never done.

This is apparently too tough for people who are smart enough, but who suffer from the business-as-usual syndrome. I function as a guide (having been there before) and a coach (knowing what it takes to get there). So the success rate climbs from around 25% to around 60%.

The reason for failure remains the same: not having the courage to transform oneself into the kind of leader needed to in turn transform the organization. Abandoning one's comfort zone even for a far better future is something that many CEOs apparently just can't do. 

The Devil Wears Prada is an almost universally misunderstood movie. Most people who watch it have never had any understanding of a high-performance organization is actually like. We live in a pop culture that encourages us to side with the victim, in this case -- the incompetent assistant. There is precious little about our culture that encourages or rewards the effort required for true excellence.

Just one more reason why most attempts fail.

Why Experts Disagree

It seems that experts in this field (leadership) -- or any other field where expertise is unrelated to facts -- are forever looking for a panacea. But wait, it may not be a panacea at all. It may be merely a proprietary idea that can be used to elevate their status.

Recently we've been exposed to a panoply of opinions about why two (or more) heads are better than one. Nicholas Carr offered a piece in strategy+ business entitled "The Ignorance of Crowds." Albeit Carr's article is mainly about certain technology issues (e.g., peer production, open sourcing, etc.), he does not reference the book, The Wisdom of Crowds, as obvious as that allusion seems to be.

It is not the particulars that would interest our readers. It is the cultural drift in the direction of the "democratic" notion that "two heads are better than one." He does quote Eric Raymond, who started the whole argument in technology in 1997 with his metaphors of the "cathedral" and the "bazaar," to the effect that the greatest breakthroughs will always begin with "one good idea in one person's head."

Very little leadership emerges from meetings. A leader in business or the arts who needs to be propelled by a town hall meeting (like today's pols) would seem to me to make the concept of "leader" meaningless.

Moses was not instructed to take people where they wanted to go.

If leadership can be made to be without risk, based in the consensus of the followers, then the task is no more challenging than driving a locomotive on fixed tracks that go where the tracks go.