TWO ESSENTIALS WE CAN DO WITHOUT

I’ve written quite a lot on leadership. Shelves in bookshops are crammed with beastly tomes on the subject (“Leadership Plain and Simple”; “the Top 100 Ways to be a Great Leader”; “The Three Levels of Leadership” and over 24,000 more on this subject). I worked out that being conservative there’s around 1 ¼ billion words on the topic and counting.

And I’m not sure that I really believe in the concept of the leader, well not the Genghis Khan sort of leader we keep pretend we’re seeking. It’s the terminology that goes with leadership that worries me. We don’t talk about the calming of leadership or the guidance of leadership. Instead we talk about the “smack of firm leadership”.

We had the legendary workaholic Harriet Green ex CEO of Thomas Cook who allegedly fired people whilst painting her nails. Nice. We had Steve Jobs who when at Pixar, fired people and didn't give any severance pay. Pamela Kerwin, a Pixar employee, pleaded that employees at least be given two weeks’ notice.

"Okay," he said, "but the notice is retroactive from two weeks ago."

Frank Lowe, the advertising man who founded Lowe Howard Spink, being an insomniac, would summon senior executives at midnight to a meeting. They returned home exhausted and he’d call to get them back saying there was other stuff to go through.

Recent research into football management suggests changing managers in general has little effect. The irony of the David Moyes’ debacle at Manchester United was his successor’s record, whilst he was being praised for being so much better, was actually pretty much the same as David’s.

The nearest to making sense of the leadership cult came from Jim Collins in his book “From Good to Great” when he talked about what he called ‘level five leaders’. These were leaders “in whom genuine personal humility blends with intense professional will.”

The second thing I wanted to comment upon is the pointlessness, indeed the destructive capability, of much market research. Anyone in advertising always knew it was futile to expect the average consumer to know what day it was let alone whether an ad was any good. Steve Jobs was smart as well as behaving boorishly from time to time. Dismissing the idea that people knew what they wanted he said average people just can’t predict. Instead: “We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.”

The polls in the recent election rather prove the point. The one below was pretty typical of a week ago. Scores an F.

Look at trends and think of basics. The conservatives had a better economic plan which just made more people feel safer. A few weeks earlier Benjamin Netanyahu, predicted to lose badly in Israel, won
comfortably by making more people feel safer too.

So don’t ask people. Just work it out…that’s what we get paid to do

HARRIET GREEN SCARES ME TO DEATH

Harriet’s CEO of Thomas Cook. She’s turned a basket case of a company into a Prada handbag. So she’s terrific. But here’s what she said about sleep:

“I don't sleep much, I never have. It's over-rated.”

Apparently she manages on less than three hours a night. Well done her - for now - until she implodes - because life has an ironic way of mugging people who flaunt their alpha-ness.

My advice to you if you want to think and produce thoughtful and carefully created solutions, not plans that are conceived in a daze, is the following:

• Slow down - most golf swings by the greats look measured and graceful. That’s what we want our leaders to look like and how we them to behave.
• Calm down by breathing deeply and employing (within reason) mindfulness. Clear your mind but don’t empty it.
• Use soft eyes. Sit and look gently into the middle distance letting your unblinking eyes float and go soft. Try it - it’s an ideal mode for deep reflection.
• Then try and widen your angle of vision. Think about a problem and imagine standing above it and doing two things: seeing it in a broader context and also seeing how small or big it is real terms.
• Most of all listen carefully and stand up straight and notice what’s going on around you.

• And sleep. Sleep restores you, replenishes your energy and in your sleep your brain is sorting things out and quite often finding ingenious solutions to intractable problems. 

When I was young, dynamic, thrusting and a greasy pole climber - a thoroughly ghastly person - I was shockingly unobservant, unpunctual but I had a remorseless focus. This is my least favourite word in the current management lexicon (it comes next to passion). That’s when I behaved like Harriet and had 5am meetings just for show.

And then I read Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow” where he says:

“…cognitive load is not the only cause of weakened self-control. A few drinks have the same effect as does a sleepless night.”

Harriet do you hear me?

How to solve problems and make brilliant decisions. (Business Thinking Skills that really work) published by Pearson is coming out on November 12th 2014