On Leading Change

I recently finished reading Leading Change – Overcoming the Ideology of Comfort and the Tyranny of Custom by James O”Toole.

The aim of this book, as summarized best by the author, is to address three related questions: “1) What are the causes of resistance to change? 2) How can leaders effectively and morally overcome that resistance? 3) Why is the dominant philosophy of leadership, based on contingency theory neither an effective nor a moral guide for people who wish to lead change?”. The book addresses these questions through two parts. The first one focuses on the leaders, particularly on values-based leadership (so-called Rushmorean leadership). The second, on the followers with a focus on why people tend to resist change, and strategies to overcome that resistance.

What I particularly enjoyed about this book are the numerous reviews of other classics within these subject areas, which helps the reader further anchor the thoughts being introduced and how they are supported and/or are different from those introduced by the author. A recommended read in the areas of leadership and change!

Below are key excerpts from the book that I found particularly insightful:

1- “In complex, democratic settings, effective leadership will entail the factors and dimensions of vision, trust, listening, authenticity, integrity, hope, and, especially, addressing the true needs of followers.”

2- “As Nelson Mandela understood, people will follow only leaders who take them where they want to go. Leaders thus beget followers, and they do so by allowing the followers to take the leader’s dream as their own. This can occur only when leaders acknowledge the legitimacy of followers’ competing beliefs and diverse values. Hence the overall conclusion from our inquiry: for leadership to be effective, it must be moral, and the sine qua non of morality is respect for people. (This is the concept of leadership we are calling Rushmorean).”

3- “In sum, Rushmorean leadership is not about voting; it is about the democratic value of inclusion. There is nothing oxymoronic, chaotic, or ineffective about leadership based on that moral principle.”

4- “What we will find is that people in organizations resist change advocated by their leaders for exactly the same reasons that the leaders of organizations resist change advocated by outsiders.”

5- “In general, the successful processes of change initiated…had the following things in common: 1) Change had top-management support. 2) Change built on the unique strengths and values of the corporation. 3) The specifics of change were not imposed from the top. 4) Change was holistic. 5) Change was planned. 6) Changes were made in the guts of the organization. 7) Change was approached from a stakeholder viewpoint. 8) Change became ongoing.”

6- “Here’s a sample of some of the most popular hypotheses: 1) Homeostasis, 2) Stare decisis. 3) Inertia. 4) Satisfaction. 5) Lack of ripeness. 6) Fear. 7) Self-interest. 8) Lack of self-confidence. 9) Future shock. 10) Futility. 11) Lack of knowledge. 12) Human nature. 13) Cynicism. 14) Perversity. 15) Individual genius versus group mediocrity. 16) Ego. 17) Short-term thinking. 18) Myopia. 19) Sleepwalking. 20) Snow blindness. 21) Collective fantasy. 22) Chauvnistic conditioning. 23) Fallacy of exception. 24) Ideology. 25) Institutionalism. 26) Natura non facit saltum. 27) The rectitude of the powerful. 28) “Change has no constituency.”. 29) Determinism. 30) Scientism. 31) Habit. 32) The despotism of custom. 33) Human mindlessness.”

7- “…The possession of the skill of overcoming resistance to change is what separates the mass of individuals with good ideas from the few leaders who are able to implement them.”

8- “Thus even though progressives may argue that change will not affect the power, prestige, and positions of the haves, the haves understand intuitively that in fact change must undermine their ideology, upset their belief system, and discomfit them greatly.”

9- “The current focus of leadership studies in business has a misplaced emphasis on helping haves (corporate leaders) overcome resistance among the have-lesses and have-nots in their organizations. As we see from the foregoing analysis…the far greater problem in overcoming resistance among the haves. In fact, it is progressives inside and outside corporations who face resistance from the people who have the most power to resist: the established leaders.”

10- “Conflict, tension, and turmoil are the order of the day – today and tomorrow. Thus, great leaders recognize that there is a never-ending struggle to balance the constant and never-abating demands of those with different objectives…Because it is not possible to ignore, nor to completely satisfy, the conflicting demands of all constituencies, leaders live in a state of perpetual tension. Poor leaders cannot tolerate this discomfiting posture, and they attempt to resolve the tension by either giving in to the demands of those who are most powerful, or by issuing a command that represents their own will. There is another way: the values-based leadership described in this book. At its core, the process of values-based leadership is the creation of moral symmetry among those competing values…Hence, the task is to lead through the process of design, composition, tension, balance, and harmony.”

11- “If one wishes to learn this particular art, the first piece that must be put into place is personal acknowledgment that no other form of leadership can be both moral and effective. Once a leader makes that difficult commitment, all the other pieces will eventually fall into place, bit by bit.”

Regards,

Omar Halabieh

On Leading Change

On My Years With General Motors

I recently finished reading My Years With General Motors by Alfred P. Sloan.

This is a true business classic. In this book Alfred Sloan shares his years of wisdom – while heading General Motors – in a variety of areas including planning, strategy, finance, leadership, innovation and management. Alfred was a true pioneer of his time in building the discipline of management and his approach is just as applicable now as it was in the early 1900s.

Below are key lessons in the form of excerpts that I found particularly insightful from this must read classic.

1- “I feel that a proper balance can and must necessarily be established in the course of time between the activities of any particular Operation and that of all our Operations together and as I see the picture at the moment no better way or even as good a way has yet been advanced as to ask those members of each organization who have the same functional relationship to get together and decide for themselves what should be done where coordination is necessary, giving such a group the power to deal with the problem where it is felt that the power can be constructively applied. I believe that such a plan properly developed gives the necessary balance between each Operation and the Corporation itself and will result in all the advantages of co-ordinated action where such action is of benefit in a broader way without in any sense limiting the initiative of independence of action of any component part of the group.”

2- “I am not going to say that rate of return is a magic want for every occasion in business. There are times when you have to spend money just to stay in business, regardless of the visible rate of return…Nevertheless, no other financial principle with which I am acquainted serves better than rate of return as an objective aid to business judgment.”

3- “The growth in the capital employed in General Motors reflects the progress of the corporation. In an economy based on competition, we have operated as rational businessmen, a fact I have tried to demonstrate with  close description of the development of our approach to management. The result has been an efficient enterprise. It should be noted that a rising successful economy like that of the United States is not only an opportunity, it is also very demanding on those whose ambition is to excel in it. “

4- “I believe that the franchise system (dealerships), which has long prevailed in the automobile industry, is the best one for manufacturers, dealers, and consumers.”

5- “The potential rewards of the Bonus Plan to ego satisfaction generate a tremendous driving force within the Corporation…To the recipient it is also an evaluation of his personal contribution to the success of the business. It is a means of conveying to the executive a form of recognition which he prizes independently of his monetary compensation.”

6- “It has been a thesis of this book that good management rests on a reconciliation of centralization and decentralization, or “decentralization with coordinated  control.” Each of the conflicting elements brought together in this concept has its unique results in the operation of a business. From decentralization we get initiative,  responsibility,  development of personnel, decisions close to the facts, flexibility – in short, all the qualities necessary for an organization to adapt to new conditions. From coordination we get efficiencies and economies It must be apparent that c-oordinated decentralization is not an easy concept to apply.”

7- “…To meet the challenge of the market place, we must recognize changes in customer needs and desires far enough ahead to have the right products in the rights places at the right time and in the right quantity. We must balance trends in preference against the many compromises that are necessary volume. We must design, not just the cars we would like to build, but more importantly, the cars that our customers want to buy.”

8- “I also hope I have not left an impression that the organization runs itself automatically. An organization does not make decisions; its function is to provide a framework, based upon established criteria, within which decisions can be fashioned in an orderly manner. Individuals make decisions and take the responsibility for them.”

Regards,

Omar Halabieh

My Years with General Motors

On The Human Side of Enterprise

I recently finished reading the classic The Human Side of Enterprise by Douglas McGregor. Below are selected excerpts from the book that I found particularly insightful:

1- “It seems clear to me that the making of managers, in so far as they are made, is only to a rather small degree the result of management’s formal efforts in management development. It is to a much greater degree the result of management’s conception of the nature of its task and of all the policies and practices which are constructed to implement this conception. The way a business is managed determines to a very large extent what people are perceived to have “potential” and how they develop. We go off on the wrong track when we seek to study management development in terms of the formal machinery of programs carrying this label.”

2- “All managerial decisions and actions rest on assumptions about behavior…We can improve our ability to control only if we recognize that control consists in selective adaptation to human nature rather than in attempting to make human nature conform to our wishes.”

3- “The desirable end of the growth process is an ability to strike a balance – to tolerate certain forms of dependence without being unduly frustrated, and at the same time to stand alone in some respects without undue anxiety.”

4- “The power to influence others is not a function of the amount of authority one can exert. It is, rather, a function of the appropriate selection of the means of influence which the particular circumstances require. Conventional organization theory teaches us that power and authority are coextensive. Consequently, relinquishing authority is seen as losing the power to control. This is a completely misleading conception.”

5- “The central principle of organization which derives from Theory X is that of direction and control through the exercise of authority – what has been called “the scalar principle.” The central principle which derives from Theory Y is that of integration: the creation of conditions such that the members of the organization can achieve their own goals best by directing their efforts toward the success of the enterprise.”

6- “Confidence thus rests heavily on the subordinate’s belied in the integrity of the superior, When one is dependent, any suspicion that the superior cannot be fully trusted arouses anxiety.”

7- “To be sure, some people are dishonest. The question, however, is whether it is cheaper to setup procedures for dealing with the bulk to honest people or to build procedure for dealing with the dishonest few. In this field (retailing) at least, the data are clear: the former strategy is economically superior.”

8- “There are at least four major variables now known to be involved in leadership: (1) the characteristics of the leader; (2) the attitudes, needs, and other personal characteristics of the followers; (3) characteristics of the organization, such as its purpose, its structure, the nature of the tasks to be performed; and (4) the social, economic, and political milieu…This is an important research finding. It means that leadership is not a property of the individual, but a complex relationship among these variables.”

9- “Let us consider some of the important environmental conditions which affect the growth of managers…(1) economic and technological characteristics of the industry and the firm, (2) policies and practices of the company, and (3) the behavior of the immediate superior.”

10- “If a climate and soil conditions conducive to growth are created by the way management manages, the cream will rise to the top, in the sense that individual managers throughout the whole organization will be involved in a process of self-development leading to the realization of their full potentialities.”

11- “In view of the complexities and difficulties involved in improving managerial competence through classroom learning, our expectation should be modest. This is not to undervalue the contributions of classroom education, but to suggest that managers sometimes expect formal education to relieve them of responsibility for the growth on the job of their subordinates.”

12- “What distinguishes such groups (really good top management team or series of staff meetings or committee)? … (1) The atmosphere…tends to be informal, comfortable, relaxed…(2) There is a lot of discussion in which everyone participates…(3) The task or the objective of the group is well understood and accepted by the members…(4) The members listen to each other!…(5) There is disagreement…(6) Mist decisions are reached by a kind of consensus in which it is clear that everybody is in general agreement.”

13- “Management is severely hampered today in its attempts to innovate with respect to the human side of enterprise by the inadequacy of conventional organization theory…It is not important that management accept the assumptions of Theory Y. These are one man’s interpretations of current social science knowledge, and they will be modified…It is important that management abandon limiting assumptions like those of Theory X, so that future interventions with respect to the human side of enterprise will be more than minor changes in already obsolescent conceptions of organized human effort.”

14- “The purpose of this volume is not to entice management to choose sides over Theory X and Theory Y. It is rather, to encourage the realization that theory is important, to urge management to examine its assumptions and make them explicit. In doing so, it will open a door to the future.”

Regards,

Omar Halabieh

The Human Side of Enterprise

On Contrarian Leadership

I recently finished reading The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership by Steven B. Sample.

As the author best states: ”The purpose of the this book is to get you to think about leaders and leadership from a fresh and original point of view – from what I call a contrarian perspective…The Key is to break free, if only fleeting, from the bonds of conventional thinking so as to bring your natural creativity and intellectual independence to the fore.” He further argues that: ”One of the important and contrarian point we can make about leadership is that it is highly situational and contingent; the leader who succeeds in one context at one point in time won’t necessarily succeed in a different context at the same time, or in the same context at a different time.”

The principles of such leadership are then discussed over ten (10) chapters as follows: 1) Thinking Gray, and Free 2) Artful Listening 3) Experts: Saviors and Charlatans 4) You Are What You Read 5) Decisions, Decisions 6) Give the Devil His Due 7) Know Which Hill You’re Willing to Die On 8) Work for Those Who Work for You 9) Follow the Leader 10) Being President Versus Doing President. The author then concludes the book with an illustrative example through his experience at the University of Southern California.

A great recommended read that brings fresh perspective on servant leadership!

Below are key excerpts from the book, that I found particularly insightful:

3- “The essence of thinking gray is this: don’t form an opinion about an important matter until you’ve heard all the relevant facts and arguments, or until circumstances force you to form an opinion without recourse to all the facts.”

4- “…clients who benefited most from my services were leaders who never became too dependent on me, who always maintained their intellectual independence, and who never kidded themselves that expertise could be a substitute for leadership.”

5- “The key contribution of the supertexts is not a set of timeless truths about leadership, but rather some timeless truths about human nature. One of the great fallacies of our age (and perhaps any age) is the belief that we are fundamentally different from our ancient forebears, that we have somehow outgrown the barbaric and benighted practices of centuries and millennia past…we are every bit as human, and no more human, that the characters in the Old Testament or the people of sixteenth-century Florence.”

6- “All leaders, whether contrarian or otherwise, are heavily influenced bu what they read. Indeed, in many cases leaders are directed and inspired as much by their readings as they are by their closest advisers…In reading as in so many other areas, maintaining one’s intellectual independence is an essential prerequisite for effective leadership.”

7- “The contrarian leader’s approach to decision making can be summarized in two general rule: 1) Never make a decision yourself that can reasonably be delegated to a lieutenant. 2) Never make a decision today that can reasonably be pt off to tomorrow.”

8- “The challenge for the leader isn’t to delude himself into thinking that people are intrinsically better or worse than they really are; rather, it is to find ways to bring out the best in his followers (and in himself) while minimizing the worst.”

9- “An outstanding candidate (for an open position) must be at least two notices above the leading insider in order to be a good risk.”

10- “In the long run the most difficult part of building a diverse team of lieutenants is to integrate people whose intellectual and moral perspectives cover a wide spectrum and are not simply isomorphic with those of the leader.”

11- “It has been my experience that money is often as essential element in attracting and retaining outstanding people…however I don’t believe money is a very effective tool for inspiring people to reach for and achieve extraordinary goals; rather, the actual motivation in such instances seems to be pride or the desire to beat out the competition.”

12- “The challenge is for the person at the top to be such an excellent supervisor – fair, supportive, demanding, a good listener, motivating, and inspiring – that these values will be internalized and replicated via people chains at every level in the organization.”

13- “The contrarian leader knows that he himself must answer the question of what’s right both a worldly and a moral perspective. This at times will make his experience more exhilarating than that of other leaders, and at times more excruciating. But it will always be his experience – one for which he willingly takes responsibility  And what could be a greater or more meaningful adventure in leadership than that?”

Regards,

Omar Halabieh

The Contrarian’s Guide To Leadership

On Presence

I recently finished reading Presence – Human Purpose and the Field of the Future by Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworkski and Betty Sue Flowers.

The central theme in this book is to present a new theory – the U movement – around how collective change occurs. The theory presents a new way for us to look at current reality and understand how we are contributing to it, but more importantly how we can re-shape it to what we want it to be. One of the fundamental underpinnings of this theory is that, while we usually break down systems into their individual parts to understand them, this decomposition does not work effectively for understanding living systems. As the authors state: “living systems…create themselves”. Therefore a deeper level of learning is required to understand the whole “as it is, and as it is evolving”, this will lead to “actions that increasingly serve the emerging whole”.

The book is divided into four parts, the firsts three discuss the deeper learning theory, while the fourth integrates that theory in “the context of a more integrative science, spirituality, and practice of leadership.” A very original book, that is both thought provoking on the theoretical/philosophical side and also on the practical side as well.

Below are key excerpts from the book that I found particularly insightful:

1- “Scenarios can alter people’s awareness…If they’re used artfully, people actually begin to think about a future that they’ve ignored or denied. The key is to see the different future not as inevitable, but as one of several genuine possibilities.”

2- “Suspension…hanging our assumption in front of us…By doing so, we begin to notice our thoughts and mental models as the workings of our own mind. And as we become aware of our thoughts, they begin to have less influence on what we see. Suspension allows us to “see our seeing”.”

3- “Third Possibility: to suspend one’s view and then inquire rather than defend. For example, rather than saying nothing or telling the other person why you think he or she is wrong, you can simply say, “That is not the way I see it. My view is…Here is what has led me to see things this way. What has led you to see things differently?” The form of the question doesn’t matter. But the sincerity does.”

4- “When people who are actually creating a system start to see themselves as the source of their problems, they invariably discover a new capacity to create results they truly desire.”

5- “Using scenarios to think about alternative stories of the future is only one of the ways that organizations can become more aware of the assumptions that lie behind their strategies. But without some discipline or practice like this, we tend to get stuck in a story of who we are on this earth as human beings, and something in us wants to break free of it.”

6- “If the situation is new, slowing down is necessary. Slow down. Observe. Position yourself. Then act fast and with a natural flow that comes from the inner knowing. You have to slow down long enough to really see what’s needed. With a freshness of action, and the overall response on a collective level can be much quicker than trying to implement hasty decisions that aren’t compelling to people.”

7- “U movement: Sensing – Observe, observe, observe / become one with the world – Presencing – Retreat and reflect / allow inner knowing to emerge – Realizing – Act swiftly with a natural flow”

8- “There’s nothing more personal than vision, yet the visions that ultimately prove transformative have nothing to do with us as individuals.”

9- “What matters is engagement in the service of a larger purpose rather than lofty aspirations that paralyze action. Indeed it’s a dangerous trap to believe that we can pursue only “great visions”.”

10- “When you move from crystallizing intent to prototyping, you move from domain of ideas to the domain of action. Not only does this make what is emerging more tangible, it eventually leads to a new level of clarity about the underlying purpose animating the entire undertaking.”

11- “You can influence a natural system but you can’t control it. It’s not surprising that machine thinking has produced institutions that make it virtually impossible for us to live in harmony with nature and with one another.”

12- “Globalization is reshaping societies and culture on a scale that has never happened before. Yet the old ideas that those in positions to influence such organizations’ power must be committed to cultivation or moral development has all but completely disappeared. I doubt that few even thought what such cultivation means – what it takes to develop a capacity for delayed gratification, for seeing longer term effects of action, for achieving quietness in mind.”

13- “If you want to be a great leader…you need to enter seven meditative spaces. These seven spaces – awareness, stopping, calmness, stillness, peace, true thinking, and attainment – can look like one step, but actually, its a long, long, long process.”

14- “What distinctive power does exist at the top of hierarchies is usually skewed toward power to destroy rather than the power to build.”

15- “The entire U movement arises from seven core capacities and the activities they enable. Each capacity is a gateway to the next activity…Suspending, Redirecting, Letting Go, Letting Come, Crystallizing, Prototyping, Institutionalizing.”

Regards,

Omar Halabieh

Presence

On Long Walk To Freedom

Below are ten excerpts that I found particularly insightful from  Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela – a truly spectacular story of one of the greatest men of the century!

1- “As a leader, I have always followed the principles I first saw demonstrated by the regent at the Great Place. I have always endeavored to listen to what each and every person in a discussion had to say before venturing my own opinion. Oftentimes, my own opinion will simply represent a consensus of what I heard in the discussion. I always remember the regent’s axiom: a leader, he said, is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.”

2- “…I learned from Gaur that a degree was not in itself a guarantee of leadership and that it meant nothing unless one went out into the community to prove oneself.”

3- “Non-violent passive resistance is effective as long as your opposition adheres to the same rules that you do. But if a peaceful protest is met with violence, its efficacy is at an end. For me, nonviolence was not a moral principle but a strategy; there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon.”

4- “Although I read a variety of newspapers from around the country, newspapers are  only a poor shadow of reality; their information is important to a freedom fighter not because it reveals the truth, but because it discloses the biases and perceptions of both those who produce the paper and those who read it.”

5- “Prison not only robs you of your freedom, it attempts to take away your identity. Everyone wears the same uniform, eats the same food, follows the same schedule. It is by definition a purely authoritarian state that tolerates no independence or individuality. As a freedom fighter and as a man, one must fight against the prison’s attempt to rob one of these qualities.”

6- “Prison was a kind of crucible that tested a man’s character. Some men, under the pressure of incarceration, showed true mettle, while others revealed themselves as less than what they had appeared to be.”

7- “In some ways, I saw the garden as a metaphor for certain aspects of my life. A leader must also tend his garden; he, too, plants seeds, and then watches, cultivates, and harvests the result. Like the gardener, a leader must take responsibility for what he cultivates; he must mind his work, try to repel enemies, preserve what can be preserved, and eliminate what cannot succeed.”

8- “There are times when a leader must move out ahead of the flock, go off in a new direction, confident that he is leading his people the right way.”

9- “It is relatively simple proposition to keep a movement together when you are fighting against a common enemy. But creating a policy when the enemy is across the negotiating table is another manner altogether.”

10- “I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another’s man freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.”

Regards,

Omar Halabieh

Long Walk to Freedom

On The Halo Effect

I recently finished reading The Halo Effect…and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers by Phil Rosenzweig.

As best summarized by the author: “The central idea in this book is that our thinking about business is shaped by a number of delusions…More recently, cognitive psychologists have identified biases that affect the way individuals make decisions under uncertainty. this book is about a different set of delusions, the ones that distort our understanding of company performance, that make it difficult to know why one company succeeds and another fails. These errors of thinking pervade much that we read about business, whether in leading magazines or scholarly journals or management bestsellers. They cloud our ability to think clearly and critically about the nature of success in business.”

The book then goes on to present the nine delusions excerpted below:

“Delusion One: The Halo Effect – The tendency to look at a company’s overall performance and make attributions about its culture, leadership, values, and more. In fact, many things we commonly claim drive performance are simply attributions based on prior performance.

Delusion Two: The Delusion of Correlation and Causality – Two things may be correlated, but we may not know which one causes which. Does employee satisfaction lead to high performance? The evidence suggests it’s mainly the other way around – company success has a stronger impact on employee satisfaction.

Delusion Three: The Delusion of Single Explanation – Many studies show that a particular factor  - strong company culture of customer focus or great leadership – leads to improved performance. But since many of these factors are highly correlated, the effect of each one is usually less than suggested.

Delusion Four: The Delusion of Connecting the Winning Dots – If we pick a number of successful companies and search for what they have in common, we’ll never isolate the reasons for their success, because we have no way of comparing them with less successful companies.

Delusion Five: The Delusion of Rigorous Research – If the data aren’t good quality, it doesn’t matter how much we have gathered or how sophisticated our research methods appears to be.

Delusion Six: The Delusion of Lasting Success – Almost all high performing companies regress over time. The promise of a blueprint for lasting success is attractive but not realistic.

Delusion Seven: The Delusion of Absolute Performance – Company performance is relative, not absolute. A company can improve and fall further behind its rivals at the same time.

Delusion Eight: The Delusion of the Wrong End of the Stick – It may be true that successful companies often pursued a highly focused strategy, but that doesn’t mean highly focused strategies often lead to success.

Delusion Nine: The Delusion of Organizational Physics – Company performance doesn’t obey immutable laws of nature and can’t be predicted with the accuracy of science – despite our desire for certainty and order.”

Every now and then one comes across a book, that makes its reader take a step back and re-assess his views, experiences and readings. The Halo Effect is one of these books. It delivers both on account of the content and also of the numerous corporate examples and references to leading work in the leadership/management space to illustrate the concepts presented. A very refreshing and highly recommended read!

Below are excerpts from the book that I found particularly insightful:

1- “In fact, for all the secrets and formulas, for all the self-proclaimed thought leadership, success in business is as elusive as ever.”

2- “…There was talk, over and over, about customer orientation and leadership and organizational efficiency, but these things are hard to measure objectively, so we tend to make attributions about them based on things we do feel certain about – revenues and profits and share price. We may not really know what leads to high performance, so we reach for simple phrases to make sense of what happened.”

3- “If we start with the full data set and look objectively at many years of company performance, we find the dominant pattern is not one of enduring performance at all, but one of rise and fall, of growth and decline. Foster and Kaplan conclude: “…Managing for survival, even among the best and most revered corporations does not guarantee strong long term performance for shareholders. In fact, just the opposite is true. In the long run, the markets always win”.”

4- “March and Sutton explain: “In its efforts to satisfy these often conflicting demands, the organizational research community sometimes responds by saying that inferences about the causes of performance cannot be made from the data available, and simultaneously goes ahead to make such inference.”"

5- “We can’t turn back the clock, change one variable, and then run the experiment again…It’s easy to blame one man for a company woe’s, but these sorts of attributions, while appealing for their simplicity, may not provide the best basis on which to manage a company.”

6- “…An organization isn’t a system of mechanical parts, interchangeable and replaceable. It’s better understood as a sociotechnical system, a combination of mean and machines, of people and things, of hardware and software, but also of ideas and attitudes. Some technical elements can often be copied and applied with predictable results…but when we begin to examine how those technical systems interact with social systems, with people and values and attitudes and expectations, the results are harder to predict.”

7- “Managers quite naturally find it easier to keep the attention on execution, which everyone will always agree can be done better.”

8- “What leads to high performance?…we’re left with two broad categories: strategic choice and execution…In spite of our desire for simple steps, the reality of management is much more uncertain that we would often like to admit – and much more so that our comforting stories would have us believe.”

9- “As Tom Peters observed: “To be excellent, you have to be consistent. When you’re consistent, you’re vulnerable to attach. Yes, it’s a paradox. Now deal with it.”"

Regards,

Omar Halabieh

The Halo Effect

On Gandhi

I recently finished reading Gandhi – An Autobiography – The Story of My Experiments with Truth, as part of a book club I am a part of.

As the title indicates, this book is one about Mahatma Gandhi’s life covering the years between his birth (1869) and 1921 – at which point his life and movement had become publicized.

While it would be very difficult to summarize his life, there are a few key themes that characterized it:

a) His deep-rooted belief in truth. A belief that he lived through his actions.

b) His passion for public service, particularly fighting for the rights of the oppressed

c) Servant Leadership

d) Self Discipline – a leader must lead himself before leading others

Through this autobiography, numerous leadership lessons can be learned in each of these areas.

Below are key excerpts from the book that I found particularly insightful:

1- “But one thing took deep root in me the conviction that morality is the basis of things, and that truth is the substance of all morality. Truth became my sole objective. It began to grow in magnitude every day, and my definition of it also has been ever widening.”

2- “He (Mr. Leonard) exclaimed, ‘Gandhi, I have learnt one thing,and it is this, that if we take care of the facts of a case, the law will take care of itself. Let us dive deeper into the facts of this case.”

3- “But all my life though, the very insistence on truth has taught me to appreciate the beauty of compromise. I saw in later life that this spirit was an essential part of Satyagraha. It has often meant endangering my life and incurring the displeasure of friends. But truth is hard as adamant and tender as blossom.”

4- “The heart’s earnest and pure desire is always fulfilled. In my own experience I have often seen this rule verified. Service of the poor has been my heart’s desire, and it has always thrown me amongst the poor and enabled me to identify myself with them.”

5- “And now after considerable experience with the many public institutions which I have managed, it has become my firm conviction that it is not good to run public institutions on permanent funds. A permanent fund carries in itself the seed of the moral fall of the institution. A public institution means an institution conducted with the approval, and from the funds, of the public. When such an institution ceases to have public support, it forfeits its right to exist.”

6- “During my professional work it was also my habit never to conceal my ignorance from my clients or my colleagues. Whenever I felt myself at sea, I would advise my client to consult some other counsel, or if he preferred to stick to me, I would ask him to let me seeks the assistance of senior counsel. This frankness earned me the unbounded affection and trust of my clients. They were always willing to pay the fee whenever consultation with senior counsel was necessary. This affection and trust served me in good stead in my public work.”

7- “But the path of self-purification is hard and steep. To attain to perfect purity one has to become absolutely passion-free in thought, speech and action; to rise above the opposing currents of love and hatred, attachments and repulsion. I know that I have not in me as yet that triple purity, in spite of constant ceaseless striving for it. That is why the world’s praise fails to move me, indeed it very often stings me. To conquer subtle passions to me to be harder far than the physical conquest of the word by force of arms…So long as a man does not of his own free will put himself last among his fellow creatures, there is no salvation for him. Ahimsa is the farthest limit of humility.”

Regards,

Omar Halabieh

 

The Story of My Experiments With Truth

Servant Leadership

I recently finished reading Why Leadership Sucks – The Fundamentals of Level 5 Leadership and Servant Leadership by Miles Anthony Smith. A copy of the book was offered to me by the author, to whom I am very grateful.

As the title indicates, this book focuses on discussing authentic servant leadership, which as esteemed author Jim Collins designates as Level 5 leadership. The book is composed of four parts. Part 1 and 2, discuss servant leadership. Part 3 discussed humility, which is a key value for authentic leadership. Finally, the last part, part 4 includes common situations through which the previous learnings are applied.

Below are key excerpts from the book that I found particularly insightful:

1- “ Jim Collins describes Level 5 leadership in his book Good to Great as a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will (fierce resolve). He goes on to write of the five attributes Level 5 leaders possess: They are self-confident enough to set up their successors for success. They are humble and modest. They have “unwavering resolve.” They display a “workmanlike diligence— more plow horse than show horse.” They give credit to others for their success and take full responsibility for poor results. They “attribute much of their success to ‘good luck’ rather than personal greatness.”

2- “Servant leadership is about caring for others more than for ourselves. It is about compassion for everyone who serves the group. It enriches everyone, not just those at the top. Servant leadership requires us to sit and weep with those who weep within our organizations. It requires getting down and dirty when hard work has to be done. There is nothing in my organization that anyone does that I should not be willing to do myself if it promotes the good of us all. HANS FINZEL, THE TOP TEN MISTAKES LEADERS MAKE”

3- “Great leaders ask great, thoughtful questions. We all have a strong desire to be understood, but we have a responsibility to our team to listen first.”

4- “When making decisions, stop and ask yourself whether you are trading short-term gain for long-term pain. Also think of how this affects others, not just yourself. And when you choose to delegate, don’t reverse course. It does more damage than not delegating in the first place.”

5- “We are either ignorant of the need for us to actively participate in empowerment, or we choose to be lazy, since true empowerment takes a lot of work. In order to empower others, we must define the power and authority they have in decision making. I liken this to setting guardrails on a task or project being delegated; it is our job as a leader to define what we want them to do— and more importantly, what we don’t want them to do. Then we must define what types of choices they can make without our involvement and what decisions they must bring to us for input. Then they have been genuinely empowered, since we have properly equipped and invested in them first.”

6- “In the vacuum created by a lack of communication, people tend to dream up and believe in the wildest explanations of fact.”

7- “We need to leave situations better than we found them. One of my goals in my career is to leave the organization better after my stewardship tenure than it was when I began. We should have the same goal in any relationship.”

8- “Mutual responsibility is at the core of accountability; the onus is not solely on the manager to provide direction. It is equally the duty of the leader and team member to hold each other accountable.”

9- “After we have done our part as leaders by coaching, we must step back and allow others the opportunity to make mistakes, even if it costs us or the company something of value in the short term.”

10- “It is quite risky to let our guard down and make ourselves vulnerable with others by giving them the right— no, the duty— to call us out on our faults. But doing so allows us to prove our true leadership in the sense that we are comfortable in who we are, despite our shortcomings and insecurity. This leads to others recognizing and choosing to follow our trustworthy, genuine authority.”

11- “But I learned a valuable lesson not to put absolute faith in any one person. It simply sets them up for failure and sets us up for disappointment when they make a mistake. Having said that, we do need leaders who will stand up and choose to do what is right, but leaders are human and all of them will make poor choices. Some of them will fail spectacularly. And even though leaders have failed me, I won’t stop trusting all leaders, just the ones who prove untrustworthy.”

12- “Much as the wisdom of Solomon admonishes us that “there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven,” 14 there is a time to display emotion (sorrow, anger, etc.) and a time for a lack of emotional display.”

13- “The best managers/ leaders can both inspire people (leadership) and hold them accountable for work that needs to be done (management).”

14- “Organizations who think they are maintaining/ holding ground are mistaken. You are either growing or dying. JIM COLLINS”

15- “Chris Zook and James Allen point to four key rules that companies should follow to increase shareholder value. Build intolerance for excess complexity. Compete for the long term. Focus on your greatest strengths. Make strategy a search for a repeatable model that can replicate and adapt your greatest successes again and again.”

16- “All Level 5 leaders, it turns out, are hedgehogs. They know how to simplify a complex world into a single, organizing idea— the kind of basic principle that unifies, organizes, and guides all decisions.”

17- “The company that quickly builds on the failures of the first-to-market company, learning from their mistakes and improving on their initial efforts, is likely to reap a majority of the market without having to invest the same R& D money.”

A very light and educative read. The author’s examples are on point to illustrate the concepts presented. Finally, the numerous references embedded within this book on leadership (servant and authentic) makes it a great starter within this field.

Regards,

Omar Halabieh

Why Leadership Sucks

Out of the Crisis

I just finished reading Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming.

Dr. Deming best summarizes the purpose of the book: “This book teaches the transformation that is required for survival, a transformation that can only be accomplished by man. A company can not buy its way into quality – it must be led into quality by top management. A theory of management now exists. Never again may anyone say that there is nothing new in management to teach.”

He then proceeds with outlining and subsequently detailing his “14 points for management”. These fourteen points, he argues, form the basis of the required transformation of the American industry:

“

1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide jobs.

2. Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.

3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.

4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.

5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.

6. Institute training on the job.

7. Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul, as well as supervision of production workers.

8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.

9. Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.

10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.

11a. Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership.

11b. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.

12a. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.

12b. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating of management by objective.

13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.

14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody’s job.

“

While the book may seem dry at points, particularly if being read from cover to cover, it encompasses numerous gems in management. Particularly as it relates to the overall management of and leadership in quality and its importance to re-gain competitive edge.

Below are key excerpts from the book, that I found particularly insightful:

1- “This increase in production led to a new goal. The new goal will create questions and resentment among production workers. Their first thought is that the management is never satisfied. Whatever we do, they ask for more. Here are the fruits of exhortations: 1) Failure to accomplish the goal 2) Increase in variability 3) Increase in proportion defective 4) Increase in costs 5) Demoralization of the work force 6) Disrespect for the management”

2- “The job of management is to replace work standards by knowledgeable and intelligent leadership…Wherever work standards have been thrown out and replaced by leadership, quality and productivity have gone up substantially, and people are happier on the job.”

3- “Incidentally, computation of savings from use of a gadget (automation or robotic machinery) ought to take account of total cost, as an economist would define it. In my experience,  people are seldom able to come through with figures on total cost.”

4- “Quality must be measured by the interaction between three participants: (1) the product itself; (2) the user and how he uses the product, how he installs it, how he takes care of it, what he was led to expect; 3) instructions for use, training of customer and training of repairman, service provided for repairs, availability of parts. The top vertex of the triangle does not by itself determine quality.”

5- “There are two types of quality in any system, whether it be banking or manufacturing. The first is quality of design. These are the specific programs and procedures that promise to produce a saleable service or product: in other words, what the customer requires. The second type is quality of production, achievement of results with the quality promised. Quality control works both with the product and with the design of the product. And it is at this point that quality control begins to differ from the traditional system. To find the mistake is not enough. It is necessary to find the cause behind the mistake, and to build a system that minimizes future mistakes.”

6- “…Good agreement between independent results of two men would only mean they have a system. It would not mean they are both right. There is no right answer except by methods agreed upon by experts.”

7- “Figures on accidents do nothing to reduce the frequency of accidents. The first step in reduction of the frequency of accidents is to determine whether the cause of an accident belongs to the system or to some specific person or set of conditions. Statistical methods provide the only of analysis to serve as a guide to the understanding of accidents and to their reduction.”

Regards,

Omar Halabieh

Out of the Crisis