LEADERSHIP, MORE GRIST FOR THE MILL, A CONVERSATION

LEADERSHIP, MORE GRIST FOR THE MILL, A CONVERSATION

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2008

"Experience, if wisdom's friend, her best; if not, her foe."

English poet Edward Young (1683 - 1765)

A FRIEND WRITES

About six months ago, I finished a tome on the impact of new technologies on warfare through the ages, starting with the Assyrians and ending with the Iraq war. As I have digested this, it became apparent that what it really was is a history of the success or failure of leadership.

Throughout history, new technologies mattered only when a leadership was competent to employ them wisely. The examples were endless and repetitive.
Consider, for example, the Nazi invasion of Europe. The Nazi military equipment was actually inferior to the Allies on a one-to-one basis, and the Nazis had less total equipment. What they did have was an excellent and experienced leadership that put effective training and practices in place. As the war continued, and Hitler and his appointees took over more and more of the leadership, that advantage was lost and with it, the war. (Thank God)

As I look at this history in the whole, I see the same leadership dysfunctions in the ancients as in the modern, and it comes to me that what's broken is not leadership per se, but the process by which individuals are selected and/or rise into leadership positions.

At the root of that brokenness, is a lack of appreciations for differences between the theoretical and pragmatic, an under-appreciation of experience relative to the task, and a preference for appearance over substance.

How many times have you and I observed our common Alma matter (Honeywell, Inc.) put a gynecologist in charge of cardiology because they have a nice smile? Six months later, they are doing a Six Sigma (quality control) intervention to explore skyrocketing cardiac mortality. It is a way of life.

There is a common, and I believe erroneous assumption, and that is that intelligence drives decision quality. In truth, data quality drives decision quality. A mediocre intellect with correct data will beat a brilliant intellect with wrong data 100% of the time.

Experience, relative the task, is what permits an individual to qualitatively evaluate the information. Lacking experience, the individual must rely on the theoretical, which is usually missing some key pieces, and/or based on optimistic and inaccurate premises. Across our species, we have aggressively substituted education for experience. We have highly intelligent, highly educated individuals in positions for which they have no experience making '101' class mistakes. They are blowing the basics.

A second dysfunction is that the skill set required to attain a leadership position and the skill set required to lead are two separate sets, and only rarely does a single individual possess both. To wit, consider our current crop of Presidential candidates. On both sides of the fence, experiences in running large organizations, and experience in geopolitical strategy, are not significant factors in election.

Yet they will be the key factors in the quality of their administration, with millions of lives in the balance. The common government solution so far has been to get elected, and then 'contract out' the experience part. That only seems to work so-so.

As the advancement of technology raises the stakes and the risks higher and higher, I often wonder if this fundamental shortcoming of our species will be our end demise. A vacuum of leadership in the human species is apparent even to someone of my mental density. However, I also wonder if that brain trust you've collected via your writings might somehow divine a path forward.

MY REPLY

As always, your remarks are thought provoking. You have interesting things to say about the nature of intelligence, the role of experience and the selection process in leadership. My take on these subjects is in a conceptual framework with bears on your remarks. I address some of them in a chapter on "self-knowing," which is to appear later in an anthology on "Enlightened Leadership."

I have devised a formula to look at intelligence and experience in the problem solving character of the leader.

Think of a four-point diamond of which the points represent (1) "intellect," (2) "personality," (3) "demographics" and (4) "geography" with the center of the diamond occupied by (5) "intuition." Add (6) "experience" to the equation, and you get some (7) "result."

(1)(2)-(5)-(3)(4) + (6) = (7)

Got it? Good!

1. "Intellect" represents our essence, which, let us say, is reasonably developed.
2. "Personality" is our acquired self that allows us to function in a social context,
3. ""Demographics" represent all the accumulated data that makes you, you and me, me, including I.Q., height, weight, color of eyes, hair, skin, type of physique, condition of health, age, education, religion, Curriculum Vitae, and
4. " "Geography" is all the baggage (programming) we carry no matter where we go, which includes our biases, prejudices, values, beliefs, attitudes, interests, in a word, culture. Like it or not, it is "us," as we encounter the world.

It is pragmatic experience (6) relative to the task in which we are involved that you see, and I believe correctly, critical to (7) "results," or success.

My take on this is to go one dimension higher and bring in the undervalued and under appreciated role of (5) "intuition" and locate it in the center of the diamond box.

The National Business Report (January 24, 2008) disclosed a study that found business leaders claimed they solved 70 percent of their most perplexing problems while dreaming, while another 40 percent claimed they solved difficult problems while driving to work.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of this was the case of the beach bum, surfer and devotee of topless bars, Kary Mullis. The molecular biologist was driving through the mountains in California, and suddenly pulled off the highway.

"I've got it," he screamed to his girlfriend, "I've discovered the DNA fingerprint. I'm going to win the Nobel Prize for this."

And he did, along with Canadian Michael Smith, who independently discovered the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which can take a drop or spec genetic DNA in vitro and determine and verify identity.

Einstein was a dreamer imagining since he was a boy of riding a moonbeam. His intuitive faculty was developed to such an extraordinary sense that he had to have help translating his ideas into mathematical calculations, not his longest suit.
We don't have to look too far to see it in evidence pragmatically.

CASE IN POINT

You mention "war" in the context of the ancients to the moderns. Americans prefer war in the vicarious, mainly as couch potatoes. About as close to war as they get is watching combative professional sport. Consider NFL playoffs.

The New York Giants managed to make the playoffs in the final days of the season. The Tampa Bay Bucs had a division crown and home field advantage with three games left in their schedule. The Buc's coach elected to mainly rest his regular players, once the division was won, and won only one game in the last four of the regular season.

The New York Giants, on the other hand, didn't have a secure position in the playoffs until the next to last game. That last game was with the undefeated New England Patriots gunning for a perfect season. Now, here comes my equation into play.
Both the Giant's and the Buc's coach are veteran coaches in the NFL. The Buc's coach rested his people; the Giant's coach did not.

The Buc's coach was worried about injuries and wanted the players to be healthy, forgetting that in war momentum is crucial to success. The Giant's coach did not forget this. He played his hunch and won. The Buc's coach played his hunch, and lost.

Most leadership boils down to psychology where intuition lives and thrives.
U.S.S. Grant understood the psychology of momentum in the Civil War. George McClellan did not.

McClellan was a highly intelligent and sophisticated man, but self-ignorant to fault.
Grant had a reputation of an uncouth drunk, but was brought out of retirement by Lincoln after the president reviewed his feats in the Indian wars.

Grant had been merciless and accepted nothing less than total victory. Grant knew who he was and what he was and what he wasn't. Grant could not conceive of any half-pregnant victories. Lincoln sensed this.

Grant and Lincoln were two men well acquainted with their ghosts.

McClellan, when it came to my diamond, found it impossible to separate his "ideal self," how he should act, from "real self," how he actually behaved.

Nor could McClellan distinguish between his "self demands," what a big deal he was, from his "role demands" which were to win the war! Clearly, he had deficient intuition, and because of that deficiency, was a disaster on the battlefield, and through this incompetence added at least two years to the Civil War, and tens of thousands of deaths on both sides.

Back to my NFL analogy.

The Giants had to play their final game of the season at Foxboro and in the cold and on the road, and then a game with the champion Buc's on the road in Florida, then the champion Dallas Cowboys on the road in Texas, and finally the champion Green Bay Packers on the road in Wisconsin in 4 degree below zero weather on their road to the Super Bowl.

The leadership difference between the Giant's coach and the Buc's coach was the diamond in the middle of the box, "intuition." The Giant's coach relied on that nebulous tic in the back of the neck and pit of the stomach that often is far more resonating with possibility than cognitive reasoning in the cranium when it comes to decision-making. Why? Because decision-making in leadership is not flat line thinking. It is thinking with the mind, body and soul, not compartmentally, but holistically.

Incidentally, flat line thinking represents the limits of the computer and computer science. Scientists (Wire magazine) have suggested that the most sophisticated computer ever to be developed will unlikely possess more than one-millionth of the intuitive capacity of the human brain to make timely and complex decisions. McClellan thought like a computer, as did Jon Gruden of the Tampa Bay Bucs, and both came up short.

In my chapter on "self-knowing," I point out that chronological time is not a good index to results when psychological time is not given its due. Einstein found the perfect place to gestate at the Swiss patent office, where he had little to do and could dream his theories at his heart's content.

Where do we have that luxury today?

We are programmed to be busy, to evaluate work in terms of quantitative time, not qualitative time. Coach Gruden is reputed to typically work 15-hour days, including weekends. No amount of time can make up for self-ignorance, in fact, it may reify it.

FLAT LINE THINKING

When it comes to widget making, and all manufacturing has reduced itself to this thinking, from multi-billion dollar air buses produced by Boeing in Oregon to penny pencils produced in sweatshops in India.

Whether quality drives intelligence or intelligence drives quality, it is mainly a one-dimensional affair or flat line thinking. The perfect widget is still a widget, and that extends to iPods and cell phones and laptops, and all matter of widgets. These tools now treated as toys find the thinking behind them and in their use of a similar modality.

Experience (6) added to flat lining tasks, as you correctly point out, bumps the matter up to qualitative consideration. The diamond now comes fully into play with intuition. You cannot substitute one component of the diamond, say a charismatic personality (1), or a wow with words and ideas (2), or an imposing persona (3) or pedigree beyond repute (4), and expect, as General McClellan did, to get automatic (7) results because of who he was.

Intuition (5) is often referred to as "gut intelligence," or a hunch. It is actually the playground of the creative mind, and great leaders as with greats in all disciplines have always had such playful minds. It is when minds try to outthink themselves that they get into trouble.

SKILL SET/SKILL REQUIREMENTS

Your "second dysfunction" refers to how leadership positions are acquired. Both of us have known many who are more interested in making an impression than a difference, and who spend their full time campaigning for the next job, finding little time to work the job they are paid to do. These pyramid climbers are a dying breed, but they hang on desperately hoping against hope that the pyramid will be fortified, when it is crumbling into dust and them with it.

This has been a special interest of mine. When I was a young man, I was plucked out of the Industrial Division as a field manager and catapulted to a top executive position by the executive vice president of international operations, who had a hunch I was right for the job. I was not. I had never campaigned for any job nor was I prepared for the duplicity of the executive world.

My new boss in the International Division did not understand "my diamond box," or the intuitive decision-making process. He knew my work but he did not know me. This is often how mistakes are made in leadership promotions.

I was known in my company as its "token intellectual" because I read books, and its "rabbi" because I was naïve and idealistic. What was joked was close to what I was, and proved my undoing in South Africa where I was given a demanding assignment. The work was the easy part; the hard part was South African apartheid. I was not prepared to live in a draconian society of inequality.

I did the job, and was scheduled next to go to Australia, but apartheid was too much. It was all there in my diamond. It was 1969. I retired and came to Florida to read and write.

In the field, I demonstrated creative skills in my work, which did not go unnoticed, but I had had no training, or programming for the devious world of senior management, where Machiavellian principles were unconscionably employed as if they must.

I was an Irish Roman Catholic, idealistic to a fault with little give in my give. I was dropped into a culture and society that was antithetical to what I knew and had experienced, and could not disentangle myself from it and the job at hand.

It has taken me forty years to have the courage to reexamine that time and place and circumstance close to the terms you outline: i.e., leadership positions versus skills required.

As for the leadership that we get in society, I suspect it is the leadership we deserve.
You look at the current crop of presidential candidates and they reflect us. There is not a thinker in the group, mainly politicians and business people, who stumble along to get along the same as we do.

We couldn't handle the raw bone manner of an Andrew Jackson, or the melancholy of Abraham Lincoln, or the hubris of Thomas Jefferson.

The modern presidency is not of their ideal type. Today's president must have the faculty of "self knowing" so that he chooses wisely to surround him or herself with the actual people that run the country, people who are not elected but run everything, while the president runs his or her mouth from bully pulpit in symbolic leadership.

You are also correct that a successful leader in one industry is not necessarily a successful leader in another.

Apple, Inc. found that out when Steven Jobs stepped down and appointed the Pepsi CEO with disastrous consequences. Now Chrysler has done the same naming the former CEO of Home Depot to its top job. Good luck!

Harold Geneen of IIT fame once claimed a great manager can manage anything.
Things can be managed; people must be led. Things and people are not the same. Geneen lived long enough to experience the fallacy of his thinking.

EVERYONE A LEADER

Your last lament is why we need everyone to be a leader. I feel in my bones that top down leadership has run its course. It is not enough because we can't expect our leaders to be omniscient or to have sufficient experience to have omnipresent input throughout operations.

We have seen how human and vulnerable is the presidency, the major banks of the United States, the main brokerage firms of the United States, the main manufacturers of the United States; I could go on and on.

Only yesterday, a 31-year old Frenchman cost the second largest bank in France $7.4 billion or 15 percent of its banking assets by fraudulently manipulating the bank's funds. In 1995, a British trader in Singapore threw the Barclay Bank of Great Britain into insolvency speculating with the bank's assets and lost $2 billion. Jerome Kerviel, in the most recent case, had a backroom job in that Paris bank where he learned to bypass all the security systems.

All leadership is vulnerable because those we think as leaders are not always in charge. Most of the pragmatic decision-making in the most pristine of circumstances is farmed or contracted out to individuals or institutions far removed from the top of the pyramid.

Information, even in this era of advanced technology, goes through a series of filters and passwords with appropriate massaging along the way, until what is acted upon is long past consequences. Who can forget Hurricane Katrina and FEMA?

My view is we need to find our misplaced moral compass and then we will find our way. We need to raise our self-knowing index so that actions are more consistent with self-interests, and self-interests are more consistent with requirements, and requirements are more consistent with what is in support of humanity.

Corruption to me is basically self-ignorance because in the end the loser is the corrupter as well as the victims of the corruption. It appears only a game. Kerviel did not attempt to make money for himself; he was just trying to cut his losses and it all got out of control. Why did he do it? Good question. Perhaps it was because he could, proving how clever he was (self demands) in his servile backroom job (role demands).

We must first win the war within ourselves before we can successfully do battle with anyone else. Corrupters don't know this, or don't know it until it is too late. I am reminded as I end this with the words of Benjamin Franklin:

"Experience keeps a dear school; but fools will learn in no other, and scarce in that; for it is true we may give advice, but we cannot give conduct."
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Dr. Fisher's latest book is "A Look Back to See Ahead" (AuthorHouse 2007). Ideas here are excerpted from his piece "Requisite To Enlightened Leadership - Self-Knowing" of a planned anthology to be published later in 2008 by THE NAPLES INSTITUTE, a think tank dedicated to social justice.