The General, Full of Wise Saws

November 7, 2007

One of the greatest challenges a leader faces at the height of his or her career is not simply allowing people to speak the truth but actually being able to hear it. Once again, Shakespeare proves instructive. In Julius Caesar, that brilliant study of failed management, Caesar goes to the forum on the ides of March apparently unaware that he will die there. How could he not have known that something dreadful was going to happen on that inauspicious day? The soothsayer warns him to “beware the ides of March.”There are signs of impending evil that any superstitious Roman would have been able to read, including an owl hooting during the day and a lion running through the streets. And then there is the awful dream that makes Calpurnia,Caesar’s loving wife, beg him to stay home. She dreams that his statue gushed blood like a fountain with a hundred spouts. Shouldn’t that have been clear enough for a military genius used to amassing and evaluating intelligence? If not, consider that Artemidorus, a teacher in Rome, actually writes down the names of the conspirators and tries three times to thrust the note of alarm into Caesar’s hand, the last time seconds before Brutus and the gang fall upon him.

Caesar’s deafness is caused as much by arrogance as anything else, and he is hardly the only leader to be so afflicted. Like many CEOs and other leaders, movie mogul Darryl F. Zanuck was notorious for his unwillingness to hear unpleasant truths. He was said to bark,“Don’t say yes until I finish talking!” which no doubt stifled many a difference of opinion. A more current example can be seen in Howell Raines, the deposed executive editor of the New York Times. Among the many ways he blocked the flow of information upward was to limit the pool of people he championed and, thus, the number of people he listened to. Raines was notorious for having a small A-list of stars and a large B-list made up of everyone else. Even if Raines’s division of the staff had been fair, which it certainly was not in the case of now-disgraced reporter Jayson Blair, the two-tier system was unwise and ultimately a career ender for Raines. He had so alienated the vast majority of people in the newsroom who knew what Blair was up to that they didn’t even bother to warn him of the train wreck ahead, and he refused to believe the few who did speak up. The attitude of Raines and his managing editor, Gerald Boyd, was that their way was the only way.

When a distinguished reporter dared to point out an error Boyd had made, Boyd literally handed him a coin and told him to call the Los Angeles Times about a job. The reporter promptly did, quitting the New York Times for the West Coast paper.

But the episode most clearly recalls Caesar’s situation in that Raines seemed genuinely surprised when he was forced out in the summer of 2003. He had no doubt read Ken Auletta’s lengthy profile of him that ran in the New Yorker in 2002, showing that Raines was widely perceived as arrogant. And he should have been a good enough newsman to be able to tell the difference between acceptance and angry silence on the part of those who worked for him. Arrogance kept Raines from building the alliances and coalitions that every leader needs. When Blair’s journalistic crimes and misdemeanors came to light, there weren’t enough people on the A-list to save Raines’s professional life. Authentic leaders, by contrast, don’t have what people in the Middle East called “tired ears.” Their egos are not so fragile that they are unable to bear the truth, however harsh – not because they are saints but because it is the surest way to succeed and survive. I’ve mentioned the wisdom of avoiding major change in the early months in a new position.At this stage, the challenge is different, because leaders further along in their careers are frequently brought in with a specific mandate to bring about change, and their actions have a direct and immediate impact on an organization’s long-term fortunes. Hesitation can be disastrous. However, you still need to understand the mood and motivations of the people already in the company before taking action.

I wish I’d understood that when I arrived at the University of Cincinnati in 1971 with a mandate to transform the university from a local institution into a state one – a goal that was by no means widely shared among the faculty or, for that matter, the citizens of Cincinnati. One longtime university board member had warned me to keep a low profile until I had a better grasp of the conservative community and the people in it were more comfortable with me. I chose to ignore his wise counsel, believing that broad exposure of the university and, by extension, myself would benefit my cause. As a result, I accepted an invitation to host a weekly television show. Worse, the title of the show was Bennis! The exclamation point still makes me cringe. I might have been perceived as an arrogant outsider come to save the provinces under any circumstances, but Bennis! guaranteed that I would be viewed that way. That perception (all but indelible, as early perceptions tend to be) made it much harder to realize my vision for the university.

The corporate world is filled with stories of leaders who failed to achieve greatness because they failed to understand the context they were working in or get the support of their underlings. Look at Durk Jager, who lasted less than a year and a half at Procter & Gamble. Critics accused him of trying to change the company too much, too fast. But what Jager couldn’t do was sell his vision of a transformed P&G to its staff and other stakeholders. His very able successor, A.G. Lafley, seemed at first to back off from Jager’s commitment to “stretch and speed,” but in fact Lafley has been able to bring about change every bit as radical as any Jager spoke of, including going outside the company for new ideas, a reversal of P&G’s traditional “invented here” philosophy. How did Lafley manage? “I didn’t attack,“ he told BusinessWeek. “I avoided saying P&G people are bad…I preserved the core of the culture and pulled people where I wanted to go. I enrolled them in change. I didn’t tell them.”

Another model for doing it right is Carly Fiorina. She took over Hewlett-Packard with at least three strikes against her – she was a woman, she was an outsider, and she wasn’t an engineer. And the person who chose to battle her was none other than the son of a company founder and thus tradition incarnate–Walter Hewlett. But Fiorina cleverly honored the company’s illustrious past, even as she prepared for change, including the merger with Compaq. Her first annual report included a vision statement that starts with the word “Invent,” paying homage to the pioneering spirit that created HP while simultaneously rewriting the “rules of the garage.” She also appreciated the gravity of the threat presented by Walter Hewlett and systematically buttressed her support among the other members of her board. When the moment came, the majority of the members took action and removed Hewlett from the HP board. Time will tell how successful the Compaq deal will be, but Dr. Bion would have given Fiorina an A. She didn’t overreact to Walter Hewlett – she didn’t attack him, nor did she spend too much time trying to address his concerns. Instead, she stayed her course and kept the focus of all her stakeholders on what was truly important.

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