A Passion for Leadership Read Online Free PDF

believing the Cold War could be won; the West German chancellor Helmut Kohl and his vision of a unified Germany; Deng Xiaoping and economic reforms that transformed China; Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin visualizing real peace between Egypt and Israel; F. W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela, jailer and jailed, reconciling and envisioning a South Africa without apartheid. None of these figures were uncontroversial, but each had a vision of a better future. There are also failed reformers and visionaries, men such as Mikhail Gorbachev, who destroyed the Stalinist structure that propped up the Soviet Union but had no idea what to put in its place. Or the leaders of the “Arab Spring” who sought economic and political freedom but lacked the practical skills to overcome both Islamists and authoritarians.
    Of course, business has its own successful pragmatic visionaries, people such as Alan Mulally (Ford), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook), Steve Jobs (Apple), Anne Mulcahy (Xerox), Howard Schultz (Starbucks), * Jeff Bezos (Amazon), and Marillyn Hewson (Lockheed Martin). And it also has its big strategic failures such as those who drove two of the big American automotive companies off a cliff, the CEOs of multiple failed financial institutions, and those big bosses who took a wrong strategic turn in manufacturing and retailing and wrecked their companies in the process.
    To again quote Jacques Barzun in
From Dawn to Decadence
:
To govern well requires two distinct kinds of ability: political skill and the administrative mind. Both are very rare, either in combination or separately. The former depends on sensing what can be done, at what moment, and how to move others to want it….But one can be a true politico and be at the same time incapable of administration. To administer is to keep order in a situation that continually tends toward disorder. In running any organization, both people and things have to be kept straight from day to day.
    If a single person with these two skills cannot be found, the boss must be the visionary, and she had damn well better have a deputy or chief operating officer who can deliver the practical goods.
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    So, you are the new leader, appointed with the expectation that you can reform and improve the organization. You may be a middle manager with a dozen people working for you, or you may be the big boss with thousands of employees. It is your first day in charge. What do you do?
    Those who would be agents of change must first conceive and articulate where they believe an organization has to go and rally support for that vision. They need to diagnose what is wrong and needs to be changed, why reform is necessary. That is essential in order to persuade employees to get on board. How does a leader establish concrete goals, an agenda for action? Is the problem an immediate crisis, a near-term challenge requiring prompt action, or is it longer term, allowing for a more gradual approach?
    To answer those questions, the most critical thing a new leader at any level should do is listen.
    Too many new bosses arrive confident they have all the answers—the solutions to an organization’s problems—and on day one begin firing off e-mails and giving orders to “light a fire” under people, to demonstrate a new sheriff is in town ready to kick ass and take names, and to show dynamism (and control). Too many openly disdain their predecessors and all that was done before: “Things are going to be different around here now that I’m in charge!”
    We all have worked for such “conquering heroes,” who see themselves as riding in on a white horse to save the day. What they do, mainly, is scare the hell out of people, who then focus on keeping out of the way—lying low—and keeping their jobs. Employees quickly come to resent the arrogant know-it-all who has just condemned the work they had been doing and either resolve to do all they can to thwart the new leader’s agenda or passively stand