2016-02-10 11:39:47
The cornerstone of a superboss.
10 February 2016
I had been a university professor for 10 years by the time I met Alan Elkins.
Alan was very different from most of my MBA students. He was a psychiatrist and
knew how to ask better questions than I did. He was also 68 years old. Most
students are in their twenties.
At the time I was in the midst of an intensive research project on CEO failure
and had compiled dozens of case studies about leaders who failed at a company,
such as Stephen Wiggins of Oxford Health Systems, George Fisher and Gary Tooker
at Motorola, and William Smithburg of Quaker/Snapple. Perhaps unsurprisingly,
Alan was interested in the project, and encouraged me to interview these
leaders, and others, to find out what really caused these leaders and companies
to go astray in such a spectacular fashion.
They re real people, with all the warts and biases and emotions that go along
with that.
I couldn't imagine why these CEOs high-profile and already pilloried for
their incompetence - would ever consider going on record discussing how they
had screwed up. But Alan was persuasive, and offered to help in organising and
conducting the interviews.
Oh, the humanity
It turns out, if you want to really understand why companies do what they do,
you have to pay attention to the leaders running those companies, and recognise
that they are human too. It s not an accident that the great strategy treatises
of history, from Sun Tuz s The Art of War to Shakespeare s Richard III, take
readers into the mind of the leader their frailties as much as their power.
What was said by the executives Alan and I spoke to brought home to me a basic
truth about CEOs it turns out they re no different than you and me. Rather
than being unfeeling technocrats, they re real people, with all the warts and
biases and emotions that go along with that.
For example, have you ever messed-up something in a big way but when called-out
on it, proceed to blame everyone else? That s just how one CEO evaluated a
corporate meltdown that cost him his job. In our interview, he proceeded to
tell me that there were seven reasons why the company fell apart. First, my
chief financial officer let me down; second, our customers were not smart
enough to grasp what we were trying to do; third, the regulators were out to
get me; and on and on. You get the picture.
For others, however, speaking to Alan and I was almost cathartic; an
opportunity to talk freely about what went wrong.
The heart of the matter
Some of the most revealing insights in to how senior executives think emerged
when I interviewed prot g s of great leaders who had spawned a generation of
talent in their industries, people who I call the superbosses.
(Credit: Alamy)
Of course, it s easy to fall into the trap of believing that the captains of
industry are heartless, just in it for the money. And I m not suggesting there
aren t people like that around. What I learned, however, is something quite
different. Time and again senior executives and CEOs who had worked for a
superboss talked about what their former boss had meant to them, personally. I
heard about support, loyalty and emotional bonds.
When I interviewed Chase Coleman, billionaire hedge fund investor and prot g
of superboss Julian Robertson (founder of Tiger Management and directly
responsible for spawning dozens of successful investment companies), Coleman
described how Robertson, with just a slight nod, could provide a powerful
affirmation of Coleman s work. He was attuned to the approval of his superboss,
just like a son to a father.
[He] had a bigger impact on my life and value system than my own parents did.
This paternal or maternal relationship was reflected in other interviews I did.
For example, Stevan Alburty, a manager at advertising agency Chiat/Day (famous
for creating the Apple 1984 advertisement announcing the launch of the
Macintosh), told me that his former boss Jay Chiat had a bigger impact on my
life and value system than my own parents did. He was an incredibly impacting
person, and I consider myself fortunate to have worked with him .
Superboss and famed chef Alice Waters. (Credit: Getty Images)
Some people remained loyal to famed chef Alice Waters even when she fired them.
(Credit: Getty Images)
Jean-Pierre Moull , a longtime Chez Panisse chef who was fired by superboss
Alice Waters, put it this way: Her employees will give and do anything for
her. But sometimes they can be annoyed . . . like when your mother tells you
over and over to clean up your room, clean up your room, clean up your room.
And she s right. So that s it.
Loyalty and regrets
I even heard about love and regret.
Several former managers under fashion impresario Ralph Lauren used that word,
love, to describe their feelings toward their superboss. Sal Cesarani, an
award-winning designer who worked for Ralph Lauren in the early years, put it
this way: If you were to talk to [any other former employees of Ralph Lauren],
they would tell you the same thing: they would have given him their lives.
Leaving Ralph Lauren led some to sadness and regret. (Credit: Getty Images)
Leaving the employment of Ralph Lauren in the early days led some designers to
feel sadness and regret. (Credit: Getty Images)
Yet when it came time to leave, Cesarani remembers it as an excruciating
decision: Lauren never jumped up and down, but he would shake his head in
disbelief that I would have betrayed him, because he always felt that I was
there for him. And I really took enormous amounts of stress to decide what I
wanted to do. Even years later, the memory of leaving Lauren seemed to provoke
sadness and regret in Cesarani; his voice hung heavily during our interview.
We put CEOs on such a high pedestal - especially now in places like Silicon
Valley - but we sometimes forget that they're human, and therefore, emotional.
Many of the same vulnerabilities we have, they have too. Many of the same
emotional bonds that govern our lives, they have too.
Alan Elkins is gone now, but his insight in to people - no matter how rich or
famous - has stayed with me. So many people build these fabulous constructions
about the leaders around them, and about themselves. What looks solid and
unassailable from a distance may actually be a lot more fragile than we like to
think.
Sydney Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management and Director of
the Leadership Center at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. His
new book is Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Manage the Flow of Talent
(Portfolio/Penguin, 2016).