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Sounds alot like Skilling -----Original Message----- From: Mark Williams [mailto:williams@tvmcapital.com] Sent: Monday, November 26, 2001 9:32 AM To: undisclosed-recipients Subject: On leadership http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB1006731723317077840 .djm&template=doclink.tmpl November 26, 2001 Manager's Journal Beware the Self-Promoting CEO By Jim Collins. Mr. Collins is the author of "Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... and Others Don't" (HarperBusiness, 2001). He operates a management research laboratory in Boulder, Colo. In December 1999, Carelton Fiorina appeared on the cover of Forbes magazine above a three-inch headline, "The Cult of Carly." The article -- titled "All Carly, All the Time" -- dubbed her activities the "Carly Show." It described how she launched "Travels With Carly," a global lecture tour aboard a $30 million Gulfstream IV -- something that no previous Hewlett-Packard CEO had ever had, not even David Packard or Bill Hewlett. But of course, Carly needed the Gulfstream to project her image world-wide. "Leadership is a performance," she explained. And perform she did. The article detailed how she appeared widely on national television shows -- morning shows with Carly, Tom Brokaw with Carly, Japanese television with Carly -- and how she launched a $200 million campaign with commercials featuring her talking about the innovative spirit of HP. One was immediately left to wonder: Whose brand was she building anyway? It sure looked like the brand of Carly would soon eclipse the brand of HP. The really striking point is that Ms. Fiorina had been on the job less than six months before she posed for the cover of Forbes as a superhero savior. She hadn't done anything significant. And now, two years later, she still hasn't produced any significant results. During her watch, HP stock has fallen more than 50% -- substantially underperforming the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500, and falling nearly twice as far as Apple, IBM and Sun Microsystems over the same period. These results, combined with a negative reaction from the capital markets to the proposed Compaq merger, put Carly in a tenuous position. And now, key members of the Hewlett and Packard families have lined up against her strategy, in part because it runs counter to the core values that made HP great in the first place. If Ms. Fiorina's tenure proves to be a failure (I hope not, but the cards don't look good), it will be the most high-profile failure of a woman CEO in history. And the real tragedy will be that some people will pin the blame on the fact that she is a woman. "It just goes to show, a woman can't handle a job like this," I can hear them say. But to say that Ms. Fiorina is failing because she is a woman would be entirely the wrong conclusion. Her failure has nothing to do with the fact that she is a woman and everything to do with the fact that she is the wrong type of leader. Anyone who led like Carly would also likely fail. A case in point is Mike Armstrong at AT&T. Like Ms. Fiorina, Mr. Armstrong rode in as the great heroic savior. Like Ms. Fiorina, he put on a good show and became a celebrity. Like Ms. Fiorina, he allowed media hype about himself to overshadow the real nuts and bolts of what needed to be done. Like Ms. Fiorina, he lurched after big splashy acquisitions, despite the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever to support the idea that a company can buy its way to greatness. (Two big mediocrities never make one great company.) And like Carleton Fiorina, C. Michael Armstrong has thus far failed to live up to outsized expectations. The real issue at hand is not male or female, but the type of leadership. My research team and I recently completed a five-year research project in which we systematically analyzed leaders who took good companies and made them great. All the good-to-great leaders were the complete opposite of Ms. Fiorina and Mr. Armstrong. They deflected attention away from themselves, shunned the limelight and quietly focused on the tasks at hand. One described himself as "more plowhorse than showhorse," an apt description of all the good-to-great leaders we studied. We learned in our research that the most effective leaders never make themselves the center of attention. They are understated yet determined, quiet yet forceful. Most lack the liability of charisma. Indeed, the very best ones overwhelmed us not with their ego, but with their humility. They are ambitious, to be sure, but ambitious first and foremost for their institutions, not for themselves. Charles R. Walgreen III, for example, transformed Walgreens from a mediocrity into a machine that produced cumulative stock returns that beat Intel by nearly two to one, GE by nearly five to one, and the general stock market by over 15 times from 1975 to 2000. These results stem directly from Mr. Walgreen's stoic resolve to make a series of tough decisions, such as jettisoning the entire food-service business (which dated back to his grandfather and was quite profitable) because it was not an arena where Walgreens could be the absolute best in the world. Few executives have the guts to get rid of profitable businesses where their company can only be good, but never great. Mr. Walgreen not only had the guts, but he made his decisions without fanfare -- quietly taking action based on understanding, not bravado. Yet despite these results, not once did Mr. Walgreen stand in front of the mirror and point to himself as a key factor, preferring instead to point out the window to credit the great people he had on his team. When we confronted him with the undeniable fact of stupendous results created under his leadership and pushed him to discuss his own role in getting great people to make those results happen, he deflected again, and pinned much of the credit for his success on being "lucky." Now, you might be thinking, "But women leaders in a male-dominated world cannot afford to be self-effacing. They need to show that they can be more Patton than Patton, more Jack than Jack, so that people will take them seriously." Well, think again. Consider Katherine Graham of the Washington Post Company, whose practical approach to leadership differed so dramatically from Ms. Fiorina's that it's as if they came from opposite ends of the solar system. When Graham became president of the Washington Post, she did not position herself as the great leader or savior. In her own words, she was "terrified." Shy, awkward and socially fearful, Graham did not launch "The Katherine Tour" or create "The Cult of Katherine." Reflecting on her early years atop the Post in her book "Personal History," she hardly gives herself any credit whatsoever, writing that she was surprised even to land on her feet. But as with Mr. Walgreen, if you were to interpret Katherine Graham's genuine personal humility as a sign of weakness, you would be terribly mistaken. Just ask members of the Nixon White House, who were brought down in large part because of her courage to stand absolutely firm behind her reporters in their pursuit of the Watergate story. Even so, she pinned the success principally on other people, the enduring core values of the Post, and good luck. In a single paragraph summarizing the whole Watergate episode, she uses the word "luck" or "lucky" nine times. The only time she uses the pronoun "I" is to deflect acclamation for her courage. Katie and Carly. One took a good company and made it great, the other has thus far taken a great company and made it good. One embodied the type of leadership required for true greatness, the other has thus far shown the type of leadership that erodes greatness. One saw the purpose of it all as far beyond herself, the other has acted as if the supreme purpose is herself. I hope that Carly Fiorina grows into the type of leader that is required to take a company from good to great -- a type epitomized by Charles Walgreen and Katherine Graham -- and thereby leads HP back to greatness. But if she does not, her failure lies in her inability to become such a leader and not in the utterly irrelevant fact that she is a woman. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------- URL for this Article: http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB1006731723317077840 .djm ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------- Copyright © 2001 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Printing, distribution, and use of this material is governed by your Subscription Agreement and copyright laws. For information about subscribing, go to http://wsj.com
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