Goodbye to Swaggering CEOs; Hello Mr. Rogers
Goodbye to Swaggering CEOs; Hello Mr. Rogers
Beginning in the 1980s, the business world developed a fever for a new generation of executive and financial chiefs with a bold, aggressive, combative, ruthless, for-profit approach and attention to leadership.
They obtained nicknames such as "Chainsaw Al", "Neutron Jack" and "Junk-Bond King" and popularized concepts such as Six Sigma, powerful lunches, leveraged purchases and a worker evaluation philosophy called "range and pull".
Today, many prominent companies are once again favoring a certain type of CEO. However, these choices inspire different feelings. It makes me want to take a nap.
This summer, WPP replaced Martin Sorrell, with a hard voice and charge, with a "soft spoken introvert" named Mark Read. In September, Jack Ma from Alibaba, a colorful jet set, announced plans hand over the reins to the "brain" Daniel Zhang.
Even
the old feud of Jack Welch, bigger than life, has fixed his hopes for change in Larry Culp, an extravagant and oblivious to the media.
For employees who are tired of tracking the boss's antics through news alerts, this is a comforting development, something like borrowing a Mr. Rogers cardigan or spreading mayonnaise on Melba Toast.
However, a group is decidedly grumpy about this, and no, it is not the International Association of Leadership Columnists. It consists of men and women who have spent their careers teaching managers the virtues of audacity.
"If you're oozing confidence, people will follow you," says Jack Nasher of Stanford, a negotiating advisor and author of "Convinced! How to prove your competition and win over people." Today's CEOs are so scared of making mistakes, he adds, "they do not say anything that could bother anyone, everything is terribly boring and boring."
The urge to lower the temperature in the corner office is not crazy. A dynamic CEO can raise the profile of a company, but that cuts both ways. In what has become a noisy, extreme and disruptive era in the history of business, the unattractive choice is sometimes the most sensible.
Uber hit the "humble", "meaningless" Dara Khosrowshahi in large part to help crush the toxic culture that had grown up around its aggressive-minded founder, Travis Kalanick. And the high octane holdings of Steve Wynn at Wynn Resorts, Les Moonves on CBS Y Mr. Sorrell at WPP It ended in the wake of allegations of sexual misconduct. The three men have denied the accusations.
In June, my colleague Christopher Mims argued that Silicon Valley shares "The genius-technology-founder mythology" who had supported people like Kalanick, Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos and Elon Musk of Tesla, was often bad for companies.
Since 2001, when Jim Collins, the author of "Good to Great," presented "Level 5 Leadership," a growing body of evidence has supported his conclusion that A little humility can be a business asset.. My own research on The captains of elite sports teams. confirms it. As I wrote in April, companies rarely benefit to have a bold, disruptive CEO who breaks with China, unless the next one takes a much less grandiloquent approach.
No one is saying that arrogance must be mandatory.
The modest Satya Nadella, who followed the famous Steve Ballmer in 2014, seems to be doing a good job.
The real danger we face is the all too tempting conclusion that arrogance is inherently bad or invariably accompanied by fatal arrogance. That interpretation is just an investment of the 1980s, the last time the business world forgot how to distinguish between style and substance.
"
They do not say anything that could bother anyone. Everything is terribly boring and boring.
'
The truth is that the person facing someone's public may have no effect on how they actually lead. It is possible that someone with a solidly excellent management instinct is also cocksure, forceful or prone to show business. After all, if Steve Jobs had not inspired blind faith in
Apple
'S
Engineers, suppliers and wireless operators, could never have launched the iPhone.
This week, I visited the University of Michigan, the former stamping field of the great football coach Bo Schembechler. On the surface, Mr. Schembechler was almost as abrupt, tough and "alpha" as they come. Behind the scenes, however, former players and staff remember him as a compassionate, fatherly and selfless boss who got angry with his people. That's not the side I wanted the audience to see, but it was clearly a component of his genius.
In his book "Leadership" of 1978, historian James MacGregor Burns wrote that every "transformational" leader throughout history had some things in common. The main one was the ability to inspire others to overcome their natural abilities. Common sense tells us that CEOs should also take advantage of that power.
A recent study of 1,921 companies in the US UU They found that firms whose CEOs expressed "overconfidence" in the future (holding on to purchased stock options instead of cashing them) posted significantly lower rates of employee turnover. Its workers also seemed to reflect the optimism of the CEO to have a greater proportion of shares of the company in their own retirement portfolios.
Women have their own challenges when it comes to boasting. Despite the #MeToo movement, and the growing evidence that senior managers often make, women remain underrepresented within companies at all levels of leadership. One of the most cited problems is that women are not strong enough to defend themselves.
Barri Rafferty, the CEO of Ketchum, a global communications firm, has never been accused of lack of assertiveness. "I was born and raised in the south, so I have that southern label," he says, "but my father is from Brooklyn."
Too often, says Ms. Rafferty, women are paralyzed by concerns that their arrogance may be seen as aggressive. The challenge is to learn to project confidence without compromising your values, or as she puts it, "how to throw a punch with a velvet glove".
Her two central messages to the bosses are that it is more important that they trust more than what they want, and that there is no reason why trusted leaders can not be servant leaders. "You can be a tough person with confidence," she says. "The way you deliver the message may reflect the softer side."
I think Mrs. Rafferty may have nailed it. Companies looking for new leadership should stifle their automatic suspicion of any candidate that brings a bit of spark and sizzle to the game. The important thing to study is how they drive when the cameras are off.
The truth is that nobody becomes a CEO without confidence. Humble and soft-spoken bosses can behave like tyrants behind the scenes. At the same time, CEOs with personalization can become stable and reliable managers.
The difference is that bold and colorful leaders are more likely to inspire greater effort from others. And if nothing else, they will prevent the rest of us from falling asleep.
-Sir. Walker, a former reporter and editor of The Wall Street Journal, is the author of "The Captain Class: A New Theory of Leadership" (Random House).
Write to Sam Walker in sam.walker@wsj.com
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