The Leadership Secrets of Hewlett Packard

@lucykellaway complains about the boneheaded aphorisms from Davos’s windy summit. Among other things, she critiques the advice given by Meg Whitman of HP — “You can always go faster than you think you can” — and points out that no, you can’t. Sometimes, when you go faster you fall flat on your face.

I hate to say this, but Lucy Kellaway is not entirely correct here. Or at least her counter-example doesn't prove her point. When you fall flat on your face, you ARE going faster than you thought you could. Just not quite in the direction you wanted.

But that's not to let Meg Whitman off the hook. Her quote has been widely disseminated as a leadership lesson. Framed thus, it appears to encourage people to ALWAYS go faster than they thought they could, and to imply that going faster than you thought you could is ALWAYS a good thing.

But what if it's not quite in the direction you wanted?

World Economic Forum underway. Meg about to participate in digital transformation panel. @HPE @wef @Davos pic.twitter.com/OeGK1sarhy

— Henry Gomez (@magicgus) January 20, 2016

“The future belongs to the fast” - Meg Whitman @Davos https://t.co/uYR2Kb3oeA #wef #digitaleconomy pic.twitter.com/S04angFGzD

— HPE (@HPE) January 21, 2016

The plot thickens. The Financial Times receives an email from Henry "MagicGus" Gomez, head of marketing and communications at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, alleging biased reporting on Ms Kellaway's part, and warning FT management to consider the impact of unacceptable biases on its relationships with advertisers.

Fortunately, FT management is made of sterner stuff.

My reply to HP, which threatened to cut ads in FT after reading my col. I love the FT for letting me write this. https://t.co/m4oBFxzHFn

— Lucy Kellaway (@lucykellaway) February 7, 2016

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HT @stoiczak

Digital Transformation of Industries (World Economic Forum, 20-23 January 2016)

Stéphanie Thomson, Leadership lessons from Davos 2016 (World Economic Forum, 23 January 2016)

Lucy Kellaway, Boneheaded aphorisms from Davos’s windy summit (FT 1 February 2016)

Lucy Kellaway, An old-school reply to an advertiser’s retro threat (FT 7 February 2016)

Paywall note: I believe the FT allows one link per day for non-subscribers.

Psychodynamics of leadership at Microsoft

Here's what I wrote in October 2010, on the news of Ray Ozzie's departure from Microsoft.

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This week's news that Ray Ozzie is leaving his role as Chief Software Architect at Microsoft is being interpreted as a personal failure either for Ozzie himself or for the Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Some commentators are saying that Ozzie had not been a satisfactory replacement for Bill Gates (for example suggesting that he couldn't match Gates' ability to bridge business and technology), while others are suggesting that Ballmer is using Ozzie as scapegoat for his own mistakes.

From a systems perspective, we might ask whether any two men or women, however brilliant, could have satisfactorily performed this divided leadership for an extended period. We might recall that Bill Gates performed both roles himself until 2000, so Ballmer and Ozzie were each being asked to replace one half of Gates. (Stepping into Bill's shoes, getting one shoe each.) We might also note that the Microsoft's share price has been relatively flat since 2000, although it would be wrong to draw simplistic conclusions from this. (For what it's worth, Microsoft's share price fell after the announcement of Ozzie's departure.)

Where there are two strong figures at the top of an organization, this can produce certain psychodynamic patterns, both functional and dysfunctional. That doesn't mean that shared leadership can never work, but that it doesn't work in quite the same way that sole leadership works.

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In November 2012, the focus shifted to Steve Sinofsky.

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My earlier note cited Joe Wilcox's piece, but failed to explore his theme of hawks and doves. Although Wilcox did not name Steve Sinofsy, it now makes sense to classify Sinofsky as one of the Windows hawks Wilcox is talking about. It appears that Sinofsky had successfully battled with Ray Ozzie for control of Windows Live Mesh, and Ray Ozzie left Microsoft immediately after Ballmer folded Windows Live Mesh into Sinofsky's organization.

See my post on Functional Organization at Microsoft (Nov 2012), describing Sinofsky's departure from Microsoft and its implications.

So we get one story if we look at Ballmer versus Ozzie, and a different story if we look at Sinofsky versus Ozzie.

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Sources

Steve Ballmer, E-mail to Employees on Ray Ozzie Transition (Microsoft Oct 2010)
Nick Eaton, Ray Ozzie leaving post as Microsoft’s chief software architect (SeattlePi Oct 2010)
Joe Wilcox, It's a shame about Ray Ozzie (Oct 2010)
Roger Strukhoff, Ray Ozzie, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs and The Cloud (Oct 2010)

Eric McNulty, Sinofsky Led at Microsoft, but That Doesn't Make Him a Leader (HBR Nov 2012)
Ashlee Vance and Dina Bass, Why Steven Sinofsky Really Left Microsoft (Bloomberg Nov 2012)



updated 17 November 2012

Entrenched CEO 2.0

In The Perils of Having a Passionate Helmsman (Financial Times, 20 November 2008), John Gapper explains what was wrong with Jerry Yang as CEO of Yahoo.

"What he thought was right for Yahoo turned out not to be, and his passion for the enterprise he built, which he thought could flourish independently, was misguided. Sometimes, what a company requires is not a passionate leader but a dispassionate one."

The traditional pattern of the entrenched CEO was an indolent and complacent executive, who built himself mansions at the company's expense (or selling his stock to fund an expensive lifestyle), and spent more time playing golf and schmoozing with politicians than running the company. A recent study suggested this was a strong signal for investors to sell.

"Liu and Yermack discovered important correlations with future company stock performance: The larger and more costly the home, the worse the stock performance. Also, when a CEO liquidates company shares or options to finance a home purchase, even if the sale represents a small share of the CEO's total holdings, it bodes poorly for future company performance." [Knowledge@W.P Carey, May 2007. See also Michael Brush, CEO Mansions, A Stock Indicator (MSN Money, April 2007)]

Yang certainly doesn't fit that pattern. But all the same, the company didn't get rid of him until it was too late. See my post Yahoo Endgame?

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Further Reading

Roman Inderst & Holger M. Mueller, Keeping the Board in the Dark: CEO Compensation and Entrenchment (April 2005, pdf)

Contingency Theory of Leadership

Different leadership styles are appropriate for different situations. Management writers including Fiedler, Tannenbaum and Handy have identified various factors as relevant. 

Style Depends on Circumstance

Leader-Member Relations (Respect, Trust)	Good / Poor
Task Structure	Structured / Unstructured
Position Power and Authority	High / Low

 

Gauge Situation Favourableness

Very Favourable	Task-Oriented
Moderately Favourable	Person-Oriented
Very Unfavourable	Task-Oriented

 

The following diagram represents a combination of these factors.

 

Implications for Action

Enterprise design should be based on an assessment of the complexity of a given task, together with an assessment of the urgency of a given requirement for change.

Design tasks to fit the abilities of the team. Each team should have some simple and some complex tasks. Design organizations and systems with a mix of leadership styles, so that the organization culture is not fixed at either end. 

Moving towards the participative end of the spectrum is valuable for several reasons. It improves the quality of working life for the team, which is in turn likely to have a good effect on the quality and productivity of their work. It also reduces supervision costs and increases bottom-up organizational learning. However, if the organizational culture is fixed at the participative end of the leadership spectrum, this may make it more difficult in future to impose top-down change. 

The implementation of complex systems is usually a highly complex task, and requires the knowledge and skills of the ‘followers’ as well as the ‘leaders’. However, radical change is often prompted by organizational crisis. In such circumstances, there may be little opportunity for extensive discussion and participation. 

Avoid simply dividing people into ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’. Consider multiple leadership patterns (distribution of authority), where not all leadership roles reside in one person/agent. (For example, one person may have technical authority, in the sense of being deferred to for technical decisions, without having direct control over investment.) 

If people are able to acquire leadership positions gradually, rather than all at once, this increases opportunities for personal growth, to both individual and collective advantage.

 

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Fred Fiedler, ‘Engineer the job to fit the manager’ Harvard Business Review 5, 1965 

Charles Handy, Understanding Organizations (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) pp 96 ff

Robert Tannenbaum & Warren Schmidt, How to choose a leadership pattern (Harvard Business Review 2, 1958)

Wikipedia: Fiedler Contingency Model, History of Contingency Models of Leadership

Originally posted at http://www.veryard.com/orgmgt/leadership.htm