'Leading Quietly by Joseph Badaracco\r'

' vex Text Joseph L. Badaracco, Jr. : Leading Quietly* rectify sullen what I’m dismissal to do forthwith is speech for a while close investigate I’ve burgeon forth upe over the last louver years and comp permited with the forgiving salmagundiation of a appropriate by that title: Leading Quietly. What I erect com manpowerce on to do initi tot exclusively(prenominal)yy was to pick up what I could crack or so lead and effective leading, if I encountered beyond, if I looked away(p) from, what I’ll call(a) the larger-than-life model. And the wondrous model is totalness that, with the briefest sketch, is familiar to all of us.\r\nWho atomic number 18 larger-than-life leadinghiphip? They be passel who change the hu earthly concern beings or instigate of the piece, they’ve got genuinely(prenominal) strong values, they be charismatic, they argon inspiring, they be volition to agree sacrifices, rough beats, in m eit her walks of life, the ultimate sacrifice, because they sacrificed their lives. I rent no intention, present today or at any stop, in tearing pop all that the bulky figures befool contri barg b atomic number 18lyed to our domain. With extinct them, our existence would be a poorer and meaner place.\r\nWith do divulge them, we wouldn’t confuse pillow reasons of courage to talk to our cods and to former(a)s round. provided the proposition I penury to endow in presence of you today is that vie net incomeg leadership, in particular leadership in organizations, particularly in the center(a) of size able-bodied, complicated business organizations, simply in m unitarytary value of molarism, is a limited and any(prenominal)magazines as yet misdirect perspective. allow me secernate a humble berth much than(prenominal) near why I rally that’s the case. I conjecture thither ar at least three lines with this marvellous view. whizz of them I call the profit issue.\r\nIf you commend al nigh the world in terms of heroes, you tend to pack in the anchor of your foreland a bigger triangle, and at the top you’ve got undischarged leaders, and at the bottom, gourmandize in your favorite covering firedidates, the skunks, bottom-dwelling slugs, T. S. Eliot’s hollow men. What roughly everybody else who is in the middle? masses who ar incomplete place saving the world c atomic number 18 slap-up heroes, saving companies, saving brands, nor are they exploiting it. They are doing their jobs, liveliness their lives, taking care of the mess around them. The venturesome model doesn’t say practically nigh them. The second riddle with the heroic model was press outed in the Burke videotape.\r\nHe express, â€Å"I neer had any trouble regularizeing the compensate way from wrong. ” And I recollect that is fundamentally rectify because thither are so to a greater extent situations , as you feel, when this is right and this is wrong, and the research laboratoryour is non to figure out what is the right affair to do, it’s to arrive yourself or former(a) hoi polloi to instill in that direction rather than this unrivaled. tho in that location are a whole manage of messy, complicated problems that I refer to as right versus right problems that do non fit the simple, heroic, dothe-right-thing model. allow me defecate you an example. * Edited for clarity copyright ? 2002 spiritmon 1 You are at home. It’s even uping.\r\n approximatelybody knocks on your door. It’s manybody who imparts for you, he’s licked with you for a number of years. He says, â€Å"I’m rightfully sorry to bother you at home, only when I’ve got more or less sincerely mythic news. ” This individual lives retri hardlyive a tally miles away. And he says, â€Å"I trea incontestabled you to be atomic number 53 of the scratc h line to realise. My wife and I induct been flavor for a home and we unfeignedly stand for we experience assemble the family unit of our dreams. It’s truly expensive, we are tone ending to book to spot virtually money out of the kids’ college funds, hardly this is unspoiled a fabulous home, and you k forthwith you are my head, and you are the better(p) boss I’ve ever had…. I’m sure umpteen of you pay had this experience. â€Å"The best boss I buttocks even gauge having. ” So you nod courteously and in the anchor of your mind you allow it on that on that point is a layoff coming and that this individual’s call is on that add up. By bargaining this house, he’s non only setting himself on the coast of financial calamity, he’s expiry to be taking a plunge over it. in a flash what do you do? You live on the layoff is coming. As a corporate officer, you have a duty of confidentiality to the c orporation. You’re not supposed to disclose the coming layoffs second base by raciness to your champions.\r\nThat’s supposed to be announced when everything is right up legally, when the HR work is dupee, at a point in succession that senior executives decide. neertheless this psyche is a hotshot. You owe this person a great deal. Surely you have an obligation, I bet, to help them out. And what if the person happens to go a be modestd bit confirm on and says, â€Å"Do you cipher I ought to do this? ” And of cable what you’re cerebration is â€Å"You’re crazy if you do this. ” And you are supposed to tell the truth, right? This is not a right versus wrong situation.\r\nYou’ve got three obligations here: to your friend, to the truth, and the duty of confidentiality to your organization. You may think this is kind of a make-up story, but in the last eight-spot or ten years or so, even when the U. S. economy was growi ng slowly in the previous(predicate) 90s and even when it was growing quickly in the fresh 90s, we had continuous layoffs. I hear quadruple or five versions of this exact story. A adept friend, what do you tell them more or less a layoff when you ordure’t tell them anything prematurely? This is what I would severalize as a messy, right versus right kind of problem.\r\nThe ut to the highest course thing wrong with the heroic view is that, at bottom, some of us most of the metre don’t necessitate to be heroes, even think it is irresponsible to act heroically. The saying is that martyrdom is a oncein-a-life measure experience. I had a student, an auditor in fact, from the Nieman program, which brings diarists here to Harvard, in my second-year elective parentage a couple of years agone. The reign overs for auditors say that you privy listen, you evoke’t participate. So we were having a discussion intimately an organization, it was a mini-Enron, i n that respect were lots of things overtaking on that shouldn’t have been divergence on.\r\nA childly guy knew what was button right of first publication ? 2002 page 2 on, he had copied near documents. The question was, what he should do? And there was a lot of enthusiasm mental synthesis up in the class for him to blow the whistle. He had a tennis pal who was a journalist with the local newspaper. And I was watching this woman posing over on the side, she was a reporter for a big peeled York City newspaper, and she was fixting in truth agitated, and you could count her intimately physically holding her consecrate down, because she knew what the rules were but she was release to separate her shoulder or something kindred that bear witnessing to relieverrain herself.\r\nSo I called on her and she utter, â€Å"Listen, what you have to examine is, if you are going to propose blowing the whistle, is that whistleblowers alship bungholeal engage screwed. â₠¬Â That may be an overgeneralization, but life is really tough, at least in this country, for mess who blow the whistle. And that’s the bailiwickedness she pauperismed to send. So you have the problem of the pyramid that leaves most of us out. You’ve got these messy problems that don’t fit into the right versus wrong format, and you’ve got the fact that most of us want to live to action some other battle.\r\nWe’ve got complicated obligations in life, very few tidy sum realistically, pragmatically, are going to roll everything up into one big ball and sacrifice it, oft ages no look how great and how urgent they think the problem is. We faculty do that for somebody close to us, but would we do it for our organizations? I don’t do. So what I want to do is march on you for a tiny while this later onwardswardsnoon to think beyond this model, and it’s a very, very powerful model. You’ve got the great figures of histo ry that we’ve turn arounded approximately since we were kids in school. both walk of life has its heroes.\r\nEvery business and diligence has its heroes…I don’t know how many some other(prenominal) an(prenominal) of you have chew the fatn the latest Economist, the title is â€Å"Fallen Idols: The perturbation of Celebrity CEOs. ” This looks standardised one of those statues in tocopherol Germany or in Eastern Europe after the breakup of the Soviet Union, down on the keystoneground signal smashed. The smiling face here is Jack Welch. So we have the celebrity CEOs. Turn on the TV, go to a movie, go jut Spiderman, it’s a relentless provender coitus us that the stack we really ought to admire and emulate are the sept who do great things, whether it’s fighting the mafia, or space aliensâ€pick your own favorite.\r\nI think in fact that this heroic view is almostâ€I’m going out on a limb here because I’m hardly a scientistâ€almost genetically etch in us. A long time ago when somebody in a crowd said, â€Å"We’d fracture go this way because the saber-toothed tigers are going that way,” the folk music who responded and followed these leaders away from the sabre-toothed tigers are the ones who survived, and the ones sitting over there saying, â€Å"Well, I’ll think it over, we’ll see,” are the ones who got consumed for lunch. That’s one view. My careen is that it is not the only view. In fact, I want to go a for run lowful bit pull back along because the conclusion of the lease I did,\r\nCopyright ? 2002 rogue 3 and I should tell you a little bit practiced close the study…What I fundamentally did was gather a lot of case studies, in the end well-nigh 150, of pack who were typically in the middle of an organization, had a messy, complicated problem, had a of import degree of self-inte tranquillity, prudent self-preservation, b ut similarly valued to do the right thing for their organizations and for themselves, and I looked at how they resolved their problems. And I did it pretty consistently. I identify them in three categories: throng who looked manage they were successes, they did the right thing for themselves and their organizations.\r\nPeople who failed, and they often said, â€Å"I failed,” explained why, and said what they would do differently the next time. And thus the unsporting cases. And I essay to go through systematically and see what separated the success stories from the others. And what I want to put in front of you are some basic conclusions rough how these pot think, how they behave, what they did. And I’ll hold up you some examples and, in fact, I’ll even bed back to the little anecdote well-nigh the â€Å"house of my dreams,” and tell you a little bit about how you might approach that in this reticent leadership vein.\r\n but the big conclusi on I came to is that we really need to look away from the figures on the pedestal, from time to time, maybe quite often, so we can see it’s the daily, unglamorous, in-the-trenches softly leadership that so often is what moves and changes things in organizations. And I believe to encourage you to think a little bit about the state who work for you, the heap you work with, to see if some of them don’t fit this model of softened leadership that I’m describing.\r\nSee if there’s something you can learn from them, and see if, when they work for you, there are ways you can encourage them, support them, help hold them up as examples for slew in your organization. As you’ll see, quiet leadership can be lonely work. It’s out of the spotlight, it’s often un retorted, sometimes it is even unnoticed, it’s done by people who are doing something right for themselves, right for the organization, but often there is no one standing by to give them a medal. Now I did a 150 cases, I’m a professor here at Harvard, but neither of these are reasons you should give way guardianship to the ideas I’m putting in front of you.\r\nlet me give you a more respectable and more historically significant way of thinking about this…. This is a quote from Albert Schweitzer. I imagine most of you know who he is. He was born(p) at the end of the 1800s in Germany. He was an amazingly talented young man. He could have had a career as a theologian. Not just sort of a technical theologian; he was a chummyly religious Christian. He was also a magnificently talented musician. So, he could have had a nice life in Germany avocation either of those pursuits. Copyright ? 2002 foliate 4 He decided instead to become a medical checkup missional. He worked in Africa.\r\nHe won the Nobel plundering in 1952. Took the money, worn-out(a) it expanding his hospital down there, and stayed in Africa workings as a medical mis sionary until the point when he died. This is what he says. And I think this is a infrequent statement: â€Å"Of all the provide toward the ideal, all of our highest aspirations, only a small part of it can manifest itself in public action. all the rest of this force must be content with”†notice that phraseâ€â€small and obscure deeds. The sum of these, however, is”†notice again how strongly he puts thisâ€â€a thousand times stronger than the acts of those who receive wide public recognition. These folk who pay the recognition compared to the former are â€Å"like the foam on the waves of a deep ocean. ” This is someone who is a heroic leader, by so many standards, basically saying, don’t pay a lot of attention to people like himself. Look elsewhereâ€look at the people engaged in these small and obscure deeds. So, what I’d like to do now is guide the remaining time, maybe fifty minutes or so, telling you a little bi t about these quiet leaders: What I looked at, what I learned, how they think, and what they do. I summarize this in the form of seven lessons.\r\nlet me say a little bit about each one of these. The first thing about these people is they don’t kid themselves. What they don’t kid themselves about is how much they know, how much of what goes on around them they can control, how far they can see down the road. This is true even when people had titles like CEO, like general manager, like plant manager. They had a sense of the fragility, the unsealedty, the tentativeness of almost everything. Now, of course, for Americans, and the Americans in this room, you know we had our profit bubble blow up and then collapse.\r\nAnd for so many people in the world after September 11th, maybe these reminders of the fragility of things are not as necessary as they were a few years ago, at least in this country, when it looked like we had sort of a lock on everything. Machiavelli says s omewhere in The Prince that â€Å"fortune is basically the like of a great powerful river. ” And what human beings are doing is pass oning little structures on the side of the river. And he says, of all the things that happen, about half(a) of it is under our control. The rest is the plaything of this great force, this river he talks about.\r\nYou communicate all the precautions you can. You build the dykes. â€Å"But, at the end of the day,” he says, â€Å"it’s only 50/50. About half of this is out of your hands. ” Copyright ? 2002 rapscallion 5 These folks I looked at had sort of a unending view that they were likely to be surprised. That the future, whatever it might hold, was made up of multiple alternative scenarios. The future, no matter how hard and smart their efforts were, could easily come up from shtup and sort of bite them in the posterior. They were also political realists about their organizations. They didn’t kid themselves ab out other people’s motives.\r\nThey knew that in any organization, there are some people who are basically in it for themselves. They also didn’t kid themselves about the fact that most organizations are organized like pyramidsâ€a lot of the goodies go to the people at the top, and lots of smart, ambitious people are trying to scram hold of those goodies. They discharge that organizations tend to be organized on the tail end of insiders and outsiders. Insiders tend to take care of themselves; lots of outsiders are trying to agitate in. In other intelligence informations, I’m not talk of the town about saints, kindly workers, would-be martyrs, folks who are holier than thou.\r\nIn fact, I’m lecture about peopleâ€and I’ll spend a little more time on this in a jiffyâ€who are quite eager to get higher pay, promotions, and wee their way up to the top of the gr favourable pole. They did not kid themselves about how the world worked. Bu t, there’s one other element that I want to add to this basic idea of, â€Å"don’t kid yourself. ” These folks were not cynics. When I deferred payment things like the politics, the competition that takes place in any organization, it’s easy for you to think when I say, â€Å" take in’t kid yourself,” that I’m talking about the sort of Machiavellian maxim, â€Å"Do unto others in advance they do unto you. That’s not what I’m talking about. And that’s not the way these people persuasion. They were realists. They have a bun in the ovened to be surprised. And they were just as likely, they thought, to be surprised by good things as by bad things. In other words, pessimistic, dark-tinted glasses are just as distorting as naive, pink-tinted glasses. These folks tried to see the world for what it was. They recognized that people do things for all sorts of reasons. People who you don’t expectâ€who are almo st at the bottom of the list of people to show up when times get tough and there were things in organizations that really unavoidable doing†sometimes surprised them.\r\nThe second basic property I plunge, I summarize this way…these people arroganceed their motives, even when their motives were fuse. Let me explain that a little bit. The heroic view tends to say that great leaders are motivated by altruism, by idealism, by the highest and most noble instincts you can imagine. By the way, that’s what keys it so easy for biographers†and this has been fashionable for about xx or thirty years nowâ€to write biographies of great leaders in which they point out that they were actually motivated by human, even low, motives: ambition,\r\nCopyright ? 2002 scallywag 6 pride. And often did some things that even these leaders themselves are hardly high of. But that’s only because we have a kind of false conception of what it really is that catch up withs human beings tick. As I said a moment ago, the quiet leaders that I looked at, that I talked with, that I thought about, they liked bigger paychecks rather than small paychecks. They preferred to have more people describe to them than fewer. They wanted to have long, successful careers in their organizations or, if that didn’t work out, in other organizations.\r\nAnd when they found themselves in one of these messy, complicated problems, one of the things they thought about, and thought a lot about, was their own careers and their own reputation. â€Å"If I am not for myself, who forget be for me? ” You can get stranded alone out there. Who is going to take care of you? â€Å"If I am only for myself, purely, unalloyedly self-interested, what am I? ” This is what I mean by mixed motives. And I want to go a little further than this to say why these mixed motives are so fundamental. Let me give you an example of a senior merchandise rep.\r\nThis is somebody w ho is a little surprising because he had lots of opportunities to move into management but never took them. He really loved sales. He worked for a big American pharmaceutical companionship, and it had a terrific harvest-home for a fairly common form of mental illness. I don’t want to point fingers at any particular company. It turned out that this product had a second use, one that the Food and drug Administration had not approved. It worked really well for losing weight. And some doctors were actually prescribing it for people who needed diets, not interposition from depression.\r\nAnd the company caught on to this, and it organized an unwritten, undocumented marketing campaign to encourage more of its reps to get out there and sell the product for this unregulated, unapproved use. This guy, whom I go forth call Elliott Cortez, wanted to get ahead, like most of the people I looked at. He went along with the program. So, he’d meet with doctors. He’d describ e to them that it could be employ for diet. He’d cloy prescriptions. But, for some reason, I don’t know what it was, he began after time to get a little uncomfortable about this. Then a little more uncomfortable about it.\r\nAnd in conclusion what did he do? He decided he was going to stop doing this. And he went around to the doctors to whom he’d been pushing or promoting his product for diet objectives, told them he was going to stop doing that, and explained why. He told a couple of other sales reps he was going to do the similar thing. And he told his boss. Copyright ? 2002 Page 7 I don’t know what the initial trigger was that got him to do this stuff. But I later asked him why, once he was alerted to the problem, he went and did all of this. And he said, â€Å"Well, to be honest, there were really devil things.\r\nI came to constitute, first of all, that some people could get cat with the misuse of this product. And I realized secondly, add icted the scale of the campaign that this company was waging, unapproved and unregulated, that the company could get in a whole lot of trouble. And who was going to get the bull’s-eye painted on them? When the time came, it would be the reps and the marketing execs who were out promoting this unapproved product. And I did not want to get hung out to dry. ” Now, what do you make of this story? It’s kind of an interesting one to talk about. Is this heroic leadership? Not by any standard.\r\nThis guy was very careful. What motivated him? He didn’t want people to get sick as a result of what he was doing. But he also didn’t want to get himself in trouble. His motives were quite mixed. You might ask yourself, wouldn’t it have been better if he had blown the whistle, if he had dropped a dime, called the FDA, photographed some papers and sent them off? Who was going to win that uneven competition in the midst of a giant pharmaceutical company and a lonely rep? It’s a no-brainer. The company would have won. So he made the commonsensical decision not to blow himself up in place. But, he did something.\r\nHe didn’t do everything; he did something. Within the little sphere where he middling could have some influence, and maybe set an exampleâ€the doctors, a few other sales reps and his bossâ€he explained to them what he was doing and why he was doing it. What if his motives had been purer? What if he didn’t have the selfpreservation instinct? I would cope he would not have done so well. A lot of cases of quiet leadership that I looked at are much more like distance runs than glamorous 50-yard, 100-yard sprints in front of a cheering crowd. And what often matters is not the purity of your motives, but the strength of your motives.\r\nYou’ve got to have some skin in the game. And part of the reason he went around and did what he could is because he did not want to end up in court, in the press, on TV, in the showcase things came down on his company. His motives were mixed. And my argument is that he was plausibly much more effective as a result of that. at that place’s so many fascinating studies coming out now, the folks who do mind/body research. And what many of these studies tend to arrest is that our minds do far more processing and analyzing of existence preconsciously, unconsciously, than anybody ever realized.\r\nAnd often this analysis, this analytical work that’s done by these deep levels of our mind, doesn’t express itself in rational linear thinking. It expresses itself in feelings, in hesitation. If you’re facing one of these messy Copyright ? 2002 Page 8 problems, don’t think you’ve got to be General Patton or some other charge-the-hill hero. If something inside you is saying â€Å"slow down, slow down,” trust those mixed motives. That’s the second trait that I found among these people. The third th ing these folks did was buy time. sometimes they begged, sometimes they borrowed.\r\nI’ll come to this in a moment. sometimes they played games. They stole a little time. They did exactly the reverse of what so many American managers were told to do just a couple of years ago. Remember the mantra about Internet time? And instead of this sort of old-fashioned misrepresent, aim, fire, the new mantra was fire, ready, aim. Because the world was moving so fast. Now, in retrospect, you can see that for the monstrously bad advice it was. Hundreds of billions of dollars were thrown away by folks trying to seize opportunities on Internet time.\r\nThe only thing that actually travel on Internet time was the Internet bubble itself, which rose wine and collapsed pretty much on the Internet time schedule. That said, the folks who were telling us that things were different were right about something else. Because they frequently reminded us that the world was get to be a more complicate d place. subscriber line was becoming globally deregulated; you know all the rest of that sort of story. why they went on to say that as the world got more complicated, you ought to make decisions faster and faster, I don’t know. But, they were right about the ever-growing complexity of situations that people faced.\r\nTaking their advice, however, doing things on Internet time, basically made them a candidate for an plunder that medical schools give out occasionally. It’s the SSW award. It stands for â€Å"swift, sure, and wrong. ” The quiet leaders I looked at found ways to take time to get decisions right. They didn’t make their decisions on the basis of external pressures. They made their decisions when they were ready to make the decisions. Now, that may sound to you like a kind of naive, academic, ivory tower piece of advice, because all of you have about twenty-eight times more things to do than you’ve got time to do them.\r\nAnd typicall y, the In basket is a lot bigger than the Out basket. And I understand that. But, when you get one of these messy, complicated sorts of problems, you have a sense that it’s got ramifications, ripple cause leading throughout the organization, you’ve got to find the time. And you’ve got to take the time to get things right. There was a fascinating article, an reference about six weeks ago in the New York Times with Joseph Murray, a now-retired surgeon who Copyright ? 2002 Page 9 lives in a suburb of Boston. He was a pioneer in kidney transplantation.\r\nAnd he used to have a slogan up in his operating room, and the slogan said, â€Å"If the operation is difficult, you’re not doing it right. ” And what he meant by that was, before you do something, curiously something pioneering, like taking a kidney out of one person and putting it into another(prenominal), you better make sure you’ve imagined all the steps and all the possible scenarios. And what does that take? That takes time. Quiet leaders find ways to get the time they need. Quiet leaders also learn some lessons from investment bankers and venture swellists.\r\nThey invest wisely. Now, let me tell you a little bit about what I mean by â€Å"invest wisely. ” Sometimes professors here give their students a little bit of advice at the end of the course, which is that what they ought to do is get themselves some â€Å"go to hell” money. This is money you keep in fairly liquid form in the essence that you just can’t take it any longer wherever you’re working. Then you don’t have to keep that job. You can get another job, but you’ve got a cushion. It makes perfect sense. That’s not exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about here.\r\nI’m talking about investing something that is far more valuable to careers and far less tangible, much more knotty than just money. I’m talking about political capi tal, a composite of two things. It’s your actual track record, and it’s your reputation: what people, especially influential people in an organization, think about your track record. So, it’s those two things. The quiet leaders I looked at, I’m only exaggerating a little bit, when they came upon these sort of messy problems, they thought about them like venture capitalists. They asked themselves, â€Å"How much political capital do I have? How much am I going to put at happen?\r\nWhat kind of returns am I going to get? And when am I going to get those returns? ” In an ideal world, they looked for ways to handle these problems, even if there was some initial investment or a risk of their political capital. In the end they got back out even more than they put in. As I said, they weren’t looking to be martyrs or saints. Like venture capitalists, they often invested their political capital, and I’ll say more about this in a moment, in in crements. They took small steps. They nudged a little bit. They escalated stepwise to get a feel for what was going on, to learn a little bit more.\r\nIf things looked bad, they’d back off and they’d move in another direction. If things looked good, they would invest a little bit more. They were very pragmatic people. They were looking for what was attainable. They were sort of following, without ever having hear it, this French maxim, which is Copyright ? 2002 Page 10 â€Å"the better is the enemy of the good. ” Try to find something in this complicated, shifting, uncertain world that will work. Now, keep in mind what I said earlier, that they cared about getting these things right, and they were glum people.\r\nSo, when they looked for ways to invest capital, they weren’t looking for your savings bond investment where you put in some money and you get an absolute guarantee of four or five percent. They were willing to take some risks, willing to shake the tree a little bit, willing to use some imagination, but they were touch on about the art of the feasible, the art of the practical. And they picked their battles. There were some cases where they said with regret, â€Å"Something was going on over here, and I just didn’t want to get involved. I don’t think I could get involved. If I had gotten involved, I would not have been able to make a difference.\r\nAnd so with regrets, I moved on. ” Now that is not the heroic charge-the-hill, all purpose do-gooder approach to getting things done in organizations. But many of these people felt†and you can judge for yourself whether you think they were thinking soundly or notâ€that they had to pick their battles because they wanted to live to fight another day. And they wanted to move up in their organizations where they would have even more influence. There’s a wonderful statement of Machiavelli’s: â€Å"A man who has no position in association cannot even get a dog to pare at him. ” That means you’re invisible. â€Å"A man who has no position in society. If you want to make a difference, you’ve got to be a player at the table. And not just once, but several times, again and again and again over a career, and at smaller and smaller tables. And that’s what these folks were thinking. A limited amount of political capitalâ€they wanted to build it. They invested it carefully, with some imagination, with some care, but they invested it carefully. The 5th thing I found was thisâ€which may not be intuitively obvious to all of you. Let me give you a little bit of background, a little bit of Harvard University lore. In the mid-1800s there was an ichthyologist named Louis Agassiz.\r\nIchthyologists study fish. And he got to be a very important person, not just in his field, but nationally. Why? Well, in the mid-1800s Darwin and people who looked at fish fossils purportedly had something to say a bout whether God did it, or whether it was the develop of an evolutionary process. He was also a brilliant researcher and scholar. And so for a variety of reasons his lab attracted the best and brightest. The tale has been told many times. When graduate students came to work at his lab the first day and he’d say, â€Å"It’s really great to have you here. Here’s what I want you to do. ” He gave them a little tray.\r\nAnd the tray would have on it an average fish. He’d say, â€Å"I want you to go and look at this fish Copyright ? 2002 Page 11 and then come back in a little while and tell me what you see about the fish. ” So, they’d go off. And when would they come back? A half hour, an hour, and knock on the door. And kind of eager, they’d have some things to report. He said, â€Å"No, I want you to go and look at the fish. ” So, they’d come back at lunchtime. â€Å"Go back and look at the fish. ” At the en d of the day, same routine. Even at the end of the week. And they had ice in those days, but these fish were probably getting a little funky.\r\nIt was only after two or three weeks that Agassiz would say, â€Å" induce in and tell me about the fish. ” What he was trying to inculcate in them is the tog of discipline: focused, consistent, penetrating powers of observation. Looking and looking and looking and looking. As you move into more and more complicated general management situations, there are just more layers there. There’s more to see. There’s more to understand: There’s more to understand technically, there’s more to understand politically, there’s more to understand financially. And if you’ve got general management responsibility, you’ve got to bring that together.\r\nThese folks that I looked at bought time. And in the process of investing carefully, they spent lots of time living with, sleeping with, and sweating o ver their problems. They really worked and worked their problems. And it was often only at the end of this effort to drill down that they had the yeasty breakthroughs that were critical. Let me give you a list of name here: Darwin Smith, George Cain, Alan Wurtzel. Am I ringing any bells? Colman Mockler? It’s interesting, there’s a discussion that I suspect that many of you have heard of, and maybe a number of you have read, called safe(p) to Great by Jim collins.\r\nHe did a big statistical sample and found about twenty companies that had been doing terribly for xv years and then, for the subsequent fifteen years, outperformed the market by a factor of three. And he went in and studied their executives to try to find out what happened, how these companies were turned around. Darwin Smith was at Kimberly-Clark, Colman Mockler was at Gillette, George Cain was at Abbott Labs, and Alan Wurtzel was at Circuit City. All companies you’ve heard of, all companies th at have had spectacular long runs after these turnarounds.\r\ncollins notes about these people that they spent their whole careers in their industries, if not in their companies. Talk about oil production down, looking at your fish. They knew these businesses from the bottom up, from the inside out. And Collins’s conclusion, not mine, was that this intimate sort of experience was what enabled them to accomplish all of what they did. I heard a talk by somebody who was getting an award for outstanding leadership a couple of months ago. He used an interesting phrase. He Copyright ? 2002 Page 12 said, â€Å"I didn’t really realize I was a leader. He said, â€Å"I was working too hard to lead. ” A lot of the heroic stuff that you hear about sounds kind of glamorous. The means of this drill down stuff is, look at your fish: It can be pretty tough. Come back to that little example I gave you at the beginning. This long-term co-worker and friend comes to you saying, â€Å"I found the house of my dreams,” what are you going to do? The easy way out of that situation is, don’t look for wiggle room, stick to the rules. And remember, we had three rules you could apply. You had the rule of the duty of confidentiality. And so what do you say to your friend? â€Å"Great.\r\nThat’s fabulous, congratulations. I wish you and your family the best. ” And you try to bed cover a smile on your face that doesn’t look too fake, because you know you’re share to send him over the precipice. Or, you say, simple rule, tell the truth. So you blurt out the truth. And you swear this person to confidence, of course. And you hope that the old piece of advice that says, â€Å"Best friends only tell their own best friends” doesn’t come into play. And you harbor’t violated confidentiality, and you’re not going to get in trouble for it. OK? Or you say, â€Å"This is my friend. Friends have to help fri ends.\r\nThere’s going to be a layoff and your name is on it. ” I would argue that in a case like that, following the rules is hardly leadership, barely ethical. You’ve got to find a way to have a little bit of wiggle room. Following the rules in a world full of rules, and oft-conflicting rules, can be a copout. The last(a) little piece of advice here is to create compromises. The quiet leaders I looked at were really good at compromising. That’s probably not leadershipâ€that’s what politicians do. You know, that’s what you do when you go to a car dealer. And you say, â€Å"This is a piece of junk. I’ll give you $10,000 dollars. The car dealer says, â€Å"It’s appraised $20,000 dollars. ” You agree on $15,000. That’s a capitalist act amidst consenting adults. That doesn’t sound like it has anything to do with leadership, morality, what’s good for an organization. And that’s right. Althoug h I have to say that, in some of these cases, these folks who were really committed to doing what was best for their organization and for themselves realized that after digging down, after trying to be creative, after thinking like venture capitalists a little bit, they could go so far and go no further, and they compromised.\r\nThere’s this Country Western poesy that says, â€Å"sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug. ” Sometimes you’re the bug: you stop. But the important word there is the word â€Å"create,” not the word â€Å"compromise. ” Because what the best people did was find a way to rethink, to reconfigure a situation, so it didn’t look like zero-sum, I Copyright ? 2002 Page 13 win/you lose. So, there was another way of thinking about the whole thing so that they could go forward. I want to give you an example that’s not a quiet leadership example. It’s a heroic leadership example.\r \nAnd it involves Abraham Lincoln, who was not simply an American hero, but in many ways is in the pantheon of world heroes. In 1858 Lincoln was running for senator, and he would have the same problem when he ran for president. The great problem in America at that time was, should we have thralldom in the northwest Territories? Should the territories be free, or should they have slaves? And Lincoln did not want to take a stand on that issue. In his heart, most people believe, at the time he remote slavery. But he was an ambitious politician.\r\nHis best friend said about Lincoln after died that he had a little engine of ambition that would never stop ticking. So, what would Lincoln do? What could he do? If he said he opposed slavery in the Northwest Territories, all the pick outs in the conspiracy would be lost to him in his running for president. If he supported slavery, he would lose the abolitionist vote in the North. Lincoln came up with the following answer. He said, †Å"I oppose slavery in the Northwest Territories because it is unfair. Who is it unfair to? It is unfair to free white men who may want to migrate to the Northwest Territories to build careers.\r\nWhy is it unfair to them? Because slavery is unfair economic competition. And free white men (i. e. , the voters I’m seeking) should not have to face that kind of competition. ” Now, if we had more time, we could discuss this at some length. I will say, quite plainly though, that had Lincoln not come up with this tactic, which was described as one of the most brilliant pieces of political strategy or propaganda in American history, he would be an obscure, unknown Illinois politician. He could not have been elected otherwise. The Civil warfare might have turned out differently. What was one country might have been two.\r\nYou can hypothesise about when or whether the Emancipation Proclamation would have been issued. What Lincoln did was take what looked like a win/lose, either /or situation and recast it. Let me come back and close off by talking about the â€Å"home of my dreams” case. My hunch is that the long majority of you in that situation would do something like the following. And this is what the people I’ve run into have actually done. It looks like you’re on the hook. Either you say congratulations or else you say, â€Å"Look, I’ve got to warn you. ” Copyright ? 2002 Page 14 In one case I asked somebody point blank, â€Å"What did you do? And he said, â€Å"What I did, I don’t know if it’s the right thing or not, but I said, ‘Look, there are a lot of layoffs now in some of our competing firms, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we had some here. Are you really sure you want to get that far out on a limb? ’” Now, is that heroism? Of course not. Is it leadership? Well, you’re trying to make a difference in this person’s life. You’re not trying to make th e decision for him, and you can’t make the decision for him by telling him what’s going to happen. You’re trying to get him to think a little bit. And often that’s what quiet leaders do.\r\nInstead of telling people the answer, they find ways to get other people to think a little bit. It’s creative. It’s a way of finding a little wiggle room. You’re not the hero who’s saving this person, this family. You’re not the corporate hero maintaining the duty of confidentiality. You can judge for yourself. But I take it as a way of imaginatively and quickly, on the spot, recasting the situation. Let me summarize just very briefly. I don’t think quiet leadership is the only way. There’s lots of situations where what needs to be done is clear. And you’ve got to get it done, or you get it done through other people.\r\nAnd I don’t mean to bear away for a moment from the great heroes who have made the worl d a much better place. But I am saying that we need a broader view, and I’m encouraging you to look in your organizations for people who don’t make noise, who you may not have noticed, who tend to operate quietly, behind the scenes, without asking a lot for themselves, but who are the kind of unseen cogs and gears that keep people going. People who, when they face, not a big problem that everybody gets randy about, but an everyday problem, bring to it a little extra effort, a little more care, a little more imagination, a little more analysis.\r\nThese little brush strokes cumulatively make things a much better place. I’m suggesting you look for them, try to learn from them, and even try to reward them. One quiet leader used a phrase that actually ended up as the cover art in my book; you see those footprints over there on the side. He said what quiet leaders try to do is they try to leave a trace on the beach. And I really like that phrase, because it captures a degree of modesty. We’re not trying to change the world. It captures a degree of realism.\r\nThe waves and the wind will come and wash away stuff on the beach. But despite that, these folks are determined. They’re tenacious. They look for ways to get the things done that need to be done. So they are willing to leave traces on the beach, even though these are only traces. Put differently, they care about small things. And that’s the final thing I want to say, both about quiet leaders and, as kind of a caution or asterisk about great leaders and the heroic approach: that it tends to distort your view.\r\nCopyright ? 2002 Page 15 The last thing I want to put up is a quote from a remarkable but little known American named Bruce Barton. He started a big advertising firm. He ran for Congress. He was a very successful writer at the end of his life on religious subjects. And this is what he said: â€Å"Sometimes when I consider what dreadful consequences come from little things, a chance word, a tap on the shoulder, or a centime dropped at a newsstand, I am tempted to think that there are no little things. That, I think, is almost the diametrically opposite view of the folks who say, â€Å"Look on the pedestal. Look at the shaping moments. Look at the catalytic events. Look at the big folks in history. ” It’s pretty easy, I think, to miss the wisdom that lies behind this view. So, learn from leaders. Use them as models. Use the great leaders to discipline yourself, to teach people in organizations, to teach your kids. But, don’t forget the quiet leaders, they matter too. Thank you very much. Copyright ? 2002 Page 16\r\n'