by Lee G Bolman
Her signature initiative was persuading Lynn Blodgett, the CEO of Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), that merging with Xerox would be a win-win for both companies. Burns saw ACS, a $6 billion supplier of back-office services, as the perfect partner to accelerate a shift in the Xerox business mix toward less emphasis on hardware and more on services. ACS had multiple suitors, but Burns helped seal the deal by sending Blodgett on a tour of Xerox’s European research center in France. For a data guy like ACS’s Blodgett, it was love at first sight. “I was already happy with our technology,” he says. “But this was going to make an immediate difference to us.”15
Once the ACS merger was in place, Burns deployed her people skills—a combination of hugs and straight talk—in a campaign to convince Xerox managers that the company’s success required less “terminal niceness” and a lot more candor. In effect, she was hoping to convince her colleagues to be more like her. Burns’s style had always been to tell it like she saw it. She was known for her directness rather than her tact, which sometimes annoyed her bosses but had helped her career.
Burns saw her leadership approach as more about people than politics. Women, she felt, had “been taught to nurture and work in groups. You’ve been handed something to take care of—here’s a baby, here’s someone to dress—there is this natural ability to include more than compete. Now, there’s always competition. I definitely compete, but the role of competition can be too absolute—winning at any cost. It’s just not there for me. More of a balance is there for me.”16 Early in her career, Burns’s talent compensated for her lack of political savvy, but mentors helped her polish the rough edges, improve her listening skills, and develop the political skills to move up in a very competitive environment.
WARRIOR ARTIST: APPLE’S STEVE JOBS
There was never any doubt about Steve Jobs’s genius, and if you look at his profile, there’s very little doubt that he saw organizations as political contests. In 1985, he found himself locked in a battle with just about every senior manager at Apple, a company he had cofounded with Steve Wozniak nine years earlier. Apple’s marketing chief slammed Jobs for “management by character assassination.”17 John Sculley, the CEO whom Jobs had lured away from PepsiCo, reluctantly confronted his former patron for “badmouthing him as a bozo behind his back.”18 After Sculley learned that Jobs was planning a coup to push him out, he and the board agreed that Jobs had to go.
Being sacked took the wind from Jobs’s sails for a time. “It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it.”19 After his bruised ego healed, he went on to invest $50 million in a small computer graphics unit that evolved into Pixar. There, lessons learned at Apple and his failed startup, NeXT, served him well. Jobs understood more clearly that the way to build great products is to build a cohesive organization, and his way of treating people had softened somewhat.
In 1997, Jobs returned to rescue Apple from a death spiral. He was much like the leader fired from Apple twelve years earlier: demanding and charismatic, charming and infuriating, erratic and focused, opinionated and receptive. The difference was in how he thought and how he led. In short order after he returned, he radically simplified Apple’s product line, built a loyal and talented leadership team, and turned his old company into a hit-making machine as reliable as Pixar. Jobs’s leadership configuration is shown in Figure 11.4.
Figure 11.4. Steve Jobs’s Leadership Configuration
Jobs was a master of the symbolic frame. The public knew him as a charismatic salesman whose flair for drama could transform product announcements into compelling theater that captivated the media and the public. He was also a design maven who would settle for nothing less than one “insanely great” product after another. Those who worked with him talked about “Steve’s reality distortion field” and “the world according to Steve,” reflecting his flair for framing any project or product as an opportunity to “put a dent in the universe.” In introducing new Apple products, he transformed digital boxes into mystical wonders conjured by a magical wizard. In advance of a launch, he stoked the fire of expectations and cultivated the media. In the run-up to the launch of the iPhone in 2007, Jobs called the editor in chief at Time, telling him that Apple was about to announce the greatest thing it had ever done. He added that he wanted to give Time an exclusive, but that no one at Time was smart enough to write the article. Time scrambled to find a writer smart enough for Steve, and Jobs got the publicity he wanted.
At the launch itself, Jobs connected to Apple’s history by inviting Steve Wozniak and the heroes who had developed the first Mac.20 He opened by telling the faithful, “Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” offering the Macintosh and the iPod as examples. Then he built to his climax. “Today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls.” The audience applauded. “The second is a revolutionary mobile phone.” The applause grew louder. “And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.” Still more applause. He repeated the list three times, revving up his audience for the punch line. “Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device, and we are calling it the iPhone. Today, Apple is reinventing the phone.”21 The audience laughed, cried, and cheered wildly.
Beyond the showman, Jobs was also a lifelong warrior, as we saw in his battle with Disney chief Michael Eisner (described in Chapter Seven). Short-tempered but supremely confident in his own intuition and opinions, Jobs regularly went to war with anyone who got in his way. Even though he was a rebel all his life, he also had an appreciation for organizational design. He built a distinctive structure at Apple that reflected his own personality and biases. He and his small executive team were the nerve center of a highly centralized, functional organization.22 Everything important was hammered out in that group’s Monday morning meetings. As Jobs described it, “We look at every single product under development. I put out an agenda. Eighty percent is the same as it was the last week, and we just walk down it every single week. We don’t have a lot of process at Apple, but that’s one of the few things we do just to all stay on the same page.”23 A unified team at the top could turn on a dime to exploit new opportunities or to correct error, and its job was more manageable because of Jobs’s insistence on doing only a few great things rather than trying to do everything. “Jobs often contrasts Apple’s approach with its competitors’. Sony, he has said, had too many divisions to create the iPod.”24
Like Jeff Bezos, Jobs rarely displayed the warmth and sensitivity that are often associated with human resource leadership. He cared little about other people’s feelings and was famously tyrannical and punitive. An example was a meeting he called for the team that had developed MobileMe, a software application that had failed to deliver on its promises. After asking the team to explain what MobileMe was supposed to do, he responded, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?” He excoriated them for tarnishing Apple’s reputation and told them they should all hate each other.25 People feared his temper, but admired his genius and craved his approval. He divided the world into “A players” and bozos. If he decided you were a bozo, your career at Apple was likely to end soon, but he knew he needed great people to produce great products, and loved working with people he respected, including Apple’s brilliant design chief, Jony Ive, and Jobs’s eventual successor as CEO, Tim Cook.
CONCLUSION
Versatility in understanding and applying all four frames is valuable for any leader, but few of us are completely symmetrical. Understanding your current strengths and weaknesses is a starting point for becoming a more balanced leader. Equally important is to recognize the degree of alignment between your configuration and the leadership challenges you face. Jeff Bezos, for example, has made Amazon successful with a business model that compensates for his disinterest in human resource issues by relying on metrics and technology. By contrast, Tony Hsieh has used his passion for people and culture t
o build Zappos into a customer service phenomenon. It is vital to know how well your leadership kite positions you to take on your most significant opportunities and challenges. The endless parade of leaders—like Ron Johnson in Chapter One—who crash into a wall they didn’t see is destructive to all involved. If you recognize your blind spots, you can work on expanding your vision or collaborating with others who complement your worldview because they are attuned to things that you might miss.
NOTES
1. Helft, M. “Mark Zuckerberg’s Most Valuable Friend.” New York Times, Oct. 2, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/business/03face.html?_r=0.
2. Helft, M. “Sheryl Sandberg: The Real Story.” Fortune, Oct. 28, 2013, pp. 123–130. http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/10/leadership/sheryl-sandberg-mpw.pr.fortune/.
3. Rivlin, G. “A Retail Revolution Turns 10.” New York Times, July 10, 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/10/business/yourmoney/10amazon.html?_r=0.
4. Anders, G. “Jeff Bezos Gets It.” Forbes, Apr. 23, 2012, pp. 76–86. http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2012/04/04/inside-amazon/.
5. Anders, “Jeff Bezos Gets It,” p. 77.
6. Ibid., p. 77.
7. Stone, B. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. New York: Little, Brown, 2013, p. 177.
8. Anders, “Jeff Bezos Gets It,” p. 77.
9. We have relied on several sources for the Zappos story. A good place to start is Tony Hsieh’s book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose. New York: Business Plus, 2010. Other sources include Schoenmann, J. “What’s Behind Tony Hsieh’s Unrelenting Drive to Remake Downtown Las Vegas?” Las Vegas Sun, Apr. 20, 2012; Rich, M. “Why Is This Man Smiling?” New York Times, Apr. 8, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/fashion/10HSEIH.html?pagewanted=all; Frei, F. X., Ely, R. J., and Winig, L. “Zappos.com 2009: Clothing, Customer Service, and Company Culture.” Case study. Prod. 610015-PDF-ENG. Boston: Harvard Business School, Oct. 20, 2009; Hsieh, T. “CEO Letter.” 2009. http://blogs.zappos.com/ceoletter.
10. Weisul, K. “A Shine on Their Shoes: Zappos.com’s Blue-Ribbon Customer Service Is Winning Market Share.” Bloomberg Businessweek, Dec. 5, 2005. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_49/b3962118.htm.
11. “Zappos Family Music Video,” YouTube, Aug. 30, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gHlEBU_NSg.
12. Brown, V. “The Importance of a Company’s ‘Culture.’” Interview with Tony Hsieh. Bigthink.com, June 30, 2010. http://bigthink.com/ideas/20672.
13. Pestrak, D. Playing with the Big Boys. New York: Sun, 2001, p. 167.
14. McGirt, E. “Fresh Copy: How Ursula Burns Reinvented Xerox.” Fast Company, Nov. 19, 2011. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/161/ursula-burns-xerox.
15. Ibid.
16. Pestrak, Playing, p. 174.
17. Isaacson, W. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011, p. 196.
18. Ibid., p. 197.
19. Jobs, S. Commencement Address at Stanford University, June 2005. http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html.
20. Isaacson, W. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011, p. 474.
21. A video of Jobs at the iPhone launch event can be found at “Steve Jobs Introduces iPhone in 2007,” YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnrJzXM7a6o.
22. Lashinsky, A. “Inside Apple.” Fortune, May 23, 2011, pp. 126–134.
23. Lashinsky, A. “How Apple Works: Inside the World’s Biggest Startup.” Fortune, Aug. 25, 2011. http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/08/25/how-apple-works-inside-the-worlds-biggest-startup/. (This article appeared in the May 23, 2011, issue of Fortune magazine.)
24. Lashinsky, “Inside Apple,” p. 128.
25. Lashinsky, “How Apple Works.”
Chapter 12
Leadership and Change
Machiavelli observed many years ago, “It must be realized that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more uncertain of success, or more dangerous to manage than the establishment of a new order of [things]; for he who introduces [change] makes enemies of all those who derived advantage from the old order and finds but lukewarm defenders among those who stand to gain from the new one.”1
His observation helps explain the durable truth in the adage, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Many leaders have learned the hard way that departing from the status quo is risky business. You might be a veteran of the change wars, still licking your wounds, or an eager aspirant waiting for your turn. In this chapter, we examine what makes change so difficult, first by exploring the limits of leadership. We then contrast leaders who impose change on an organization with those who stimulate the latent energy for improvement that is already present. Next, we use the four frames to identify barriers to innovation and to anticipate what leaders can do to move change forward. Finally, we examine the remarkable turnaround that Alan Mulally engineered in bringing Ford Motor Company back to life.
LIMITS OF LEADERSHIP
We most often portray leaders as change agents—carriers of innovation and transformation. In politics, for example, new candidates running for office blame the incumbents for anything that’s gone wrong, while promising a better future. In 2008, Barack Obama promised “New Hope,” but fulfilling that pledge was daunting in the face of the recession he inherited from his predecessor. By 2012, Obama was the incumbent, and his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, promised to “restore America’s greatness” by fixing everything Obama had broken. One election after another, voters are asked to put hope above experience and to believe the message, “I can do what the incumbent didn’t do.”
This takes us to a perennial question about leadership: Do the times make leaders, or do leaders make the times? The prevailing view is that leaders can and should make a difference. However, there is much merit in the opposing, more disturbing view that circumstances often overwhelm leaders. Cohen and March provocatively compare the command-and-control capabilities of college presidents to the situation facing the driver of a skidding automobile: “The marginal judgments he makes, his skill, and his luck will probably make some difference to the life prospects of his riders. As a result, his responsibilities are heavy. But whether he is convicted of manslaughter or receives a medal for heroism is largely outside his control.”2 The same assertion holds for leaders in almost any organization.
The backing and faith of followers are vital to leaders’ ability to bring about successful change. When people believe in you, they will give you credit when good things happen and are less likely to blame you when things go wrong. “Successful leadership is having followers who believe in the power of the leader. By believing, people are encouraged to link positive events with leadership behavior.”3 Leaders can make a difference in moving an organization forward, but they are wise to undertake change with a dose of humility. Attempting to command an organization to perform differently is usually futile. Command is about authority, control, and dominion—which most leaders learn are in short supply. But leaders do have influence, which Webster’s dictionary defines as “the power of persons or things to affect others, seen only in its effects.” The difference between command and influence can be seen in comparing two different leader roles: carrier or catalyst of change.
CARRIERS VERSUS CATALYSTS OF CHANGE
Leaders often undertake change in one of two different ways. The first is to impose an innovation imported from outside, particularly one currently in vogue. The second approach is to stimulate or inspire energy in an organization by drawing on historical memory, a flicker of cultural readiness, and a reservoir of employee initiative.
The first mind-set is exemplified in the wide diffusion of Six Sigma, which began as a statistical concept but evolved into a range of metrics, methods, and management techniques intended to reduce defects and increase quality in products and services. First developed at Motorola in 1986, it was later honed by Jack Welch at General Electric. Six Sigma became an integral part of the GE Way. It flowered as a new corporate shibbo
leth in the 1990s after its success at GE.
When Welch retired, several potential successors who lost out to Jeff Immelt for the top job at GE left the company for new CEO positions, taking the Six Sigma techniques with them. One was James McNerney, who was snapped up by 3M in 2001 to bring some discipline to a legendary enterprise that seemed to be losing its edge. Profit and sales growth were erratic, and the stock price had languished.
McNerney wasted no time. Thousands of 3M workers trained to earn the Six Sigma title of “Black Belt.” These converts pioneered company-wide Six Sigma initiatives, such as boosting the tempo of production by reducing variation and eliminating pointless steps in manufacturing. The Black Belt elite maintained metrics that tracked both overall and “neighborhood” efforts to systematize and streamline all aspects of work—including R&D.
In the short run, McNerney’s strategy paid off. Indicators of productivity improved, costs were trimmed, and the stock price soared. But Six Sigma’s standardization began to intrude on 3M’s historical emphasis on innovation. Prior to McNerney’s arrival, new ideas were accorded almost unlimited time and funding to germinate—with little accountability. This approach had given birth to legendary products such as Scotch Tape and Post-it Notes. No more. The new-idea spigot began to dry up.
McNerney left 3M in 2005 to become the new CEO of Boeing. Art Fry (inventor of Post-it Notes) lamented, “What’s remarkable is how fast a culture can be torn apart. [McNerney] didn’t kill it because he wasn’t here long enough. But if he had been here much longer, I think he would have.”4 McNerney’s successor, George Buckley, observed in retrospect, “Perhaps one of the mistakes that we made as a company—it’s one of the dangers of Six Sigma—is that when you value sameness more than you value creativity, I think you potentially undermine the heart and soul of a company like 3M.”5
