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DEVELOPING LEADERS WE CAN TRUST

Written by: Bruce Piasecki

Article Overview: DEVELOPING LEADERS WE CAN TRUST

DEVELOPING LEADERS WE CAN TRUST

The world of superior leadership is not simple. They must bring us better products for a better world.

Witness the recent demise of mighty firms such as General Motors. Add to that the parade of valuation scandals involving Enron’s Jeff Skilling and Worldcom’s Bernard Ebbers over the last fifteen years, the financial wizardry of a Bernie L.Madoff, plus the average flim flam man around the neighborhood, and we must raise a new century fundamental question: How can we develop leaders that we can trust? The clock on bad management is drawing near midnight.

We need in this new century, a set of social and corporate leaders to address the global challenges of making business sustainable and profitable in a carbon and capital constrained world.

One of my favorite models for a trustworthy leader is Abraham Lincoln. His skill as a leader offers important lessons for today’s business and social leaders.

Not only one of our most revered presidents, Lincoln’s odds of success were deemed slim at the time of his election in 1861. Consider the following: Lincoln was the first Republican elected president in this country, and the first president elected with a minority of the popular vote. Ten days after he took office, the Confederate States of America seceded from the Union.

A business analogy for this might be a hostile takeover that ends up leaving you with only half of your assets. Lincoln then engaged in a head-to-head war for the survival of his country. He leveraged great resources and his famous team of rivals in his cabinet, mobilized a stunning range of human talents in his remaining asset base, and produced a pleasing product—a reunited nation. He knew how to compete in the swift and the severe world we all now know. He knew, through direct field observation, how to surf the most turbulent waters with a sense of direction and corporate purpose. But in this new century, there are a particular set of Lincoln and Gandhi skills that need to go global as we go green. The contradictions that abound, are as massive as those facing both Lincoln and Gandhi.

Lincoln was a master of articulate paradox, a skill necessary today to refine and reapply knowledge in response to the topsy-turvy global market, reacting accordingly to such diverse stresses as insecure energy supplies, unstable governments and often invisible terrorist organizations.

This mastery of paradox, and mobilization of forward motion is evident in the “Today, Tomorrow, Toyota” campaign. I saw this at work when we helped Toyota bring the hybrid-power train into ten models, from the Prius to the Lexis and Highlander brands. I am seeing this again as I work for a Warren Buffett firm, Shaw Industries, facilitating their Growth and Sustainability Council.

Articulating paradox as one keeps a forward corporate and product brand momentum is necessary to make major improvements in hundred year old traditions in making cars and carpet, in leveraging energy access with energy intensity, and in producing new generations of products that pass the “eco” smart tests of today. This new S-Frontier is not linear. It is swift, severe, and helps a few lift as it swamped many. It is a cleansing force, but it has the force of a wave, where market and regulatory conditions are requiring “better” not just “more.”

That’s why we need a new generation of Lincolns and Gandhis to bring in significant change in corporations. Leading the charge in developing this new force in Social Response Capitalism – a more sustainable economy fueled by a purpose beyond the almighty buck – requires a new brand of leader, one who recognizes the future in a world that is swift and severe. We need this leader to compete on price, quality and social needs. A leader of the magnitude and caliber of a Lincoln or the articulate power of a Churchill can always help. But there are many supporting roles for each of us. What this job calls for is someone who can bring passion and focus to forge solutions in a more severe and rapidly changing world.

Regardless of whether President Obama will ultimately compare best to Lincoln or Churchill, Mandela or Gandhi is besides the point. We need this kind of leadership in the private sector, running all of the companies of tomorrow, from large to small. Wal-Mart, GE, and Toyota cannot do it alone. We need to develop leaders we can trust.

The world of corporate decision making is not as linear and direct as one first learns in business school. Those beheaded, or those that bask in triumph, often do not follow routes as direct as a football game plan. Competing in today’s swift and severe world is more like surfing. You need to learn how best to let the little waves go by, but you had better know when the big wave appears.

We need master surfers, leaders who actually stay on top of the waves of these mounting social needs such as global climate change, health care reform and our ever shrinking natural resource base.

I find that the best leaders are both in this world and in the world of the near future – at the same time. At firms like Toyota, HP, Shaw Industries and Agrium, I learned firsthand that you best have one foot in the here and now making the current market and technological choices, and the other foot pressing ahead for the clear gain, for both the consumer and the company, when the product hits the market with a shelf-life of a decade or more, not just a single shopping season.

The trick is mounting a wave that matters, that has real momentum based on real social needs, and not the whims of fashion, ego or greed. With Social Response Capitalism, the roles of public and private sector can merge to develop a “surprising solution” to the challenges of this century.

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Article Tags: capitalism, churchill, corporations, developing leaders, gandhi, lincoln, mandela, new generation, passion, social response, sustainable economy



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