Leadership Mastery

How to Challenge Yourself and Others to Greatness

Dale Carnegie Training

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781439134771
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

In a world becoming more and more virtual, human relations skills are being lost -- along with the skill of leadership. And yet never before have these abilities been more valuable or sought after. What's needed is a new type of leader -- one who can inspire and motivate others while adhering to timeless leadership principles such as flexibility, adaptability, trustworthiness, and distribution of power. With Leadership Mastery, you will identify your strengths and adopt effective strategies to:
• Gain the respect and admiration of others using little-known secrets of America's most successful leaders
• Get family, friends, and coworkers to do what you ask because they want to, not because they have to
• Respond effectively in a crisis
• Make powerful decisions and follow through on them using Carnegie's action formula
Incorporating interviews with top leaders in business, entertainment, sports, and academia, Leadership Mastery stands next to the classic How to Win Friends and Influence People.

CHAPTER 1

What Leaders Do

Keep your mind open to change all the time. Welcome it. Court it.

—Dale Carnegie

In the chapters that follow we’ll be engaged in a very ambitious and extremely important undertaking. It will be of great benefit to you, and also to everyone who comes into your life both personally and professionally.

We’ll be exploring a fundamental principle of human behavior. It’s the basis of successful companies and even of whole nations and cultures. This is the concept of leadership. More specifically, we’ll focus on the meaning of leadership in the context of business and entrepreneurial success. We’ll see how leaders made the most of prosperous times, and how they survived even severe downturns in the business cycle.

Who are the leaders? What are the leaders made of? Who are the men and women who “made it happen” for themselves and the people around them? How did they overcome obstacles? Where did they discover opportunities? This is critically important information for anyone who aspires to financial success, personal satisfaction, and the sense of accomplishment that comes when potential turns into actuality.

In today’s world, the quality of leadership is both respected and revered, but it’s also subtly devalued. We celebrate the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln, great leaders of the past, yet we are deeply suspicious of those who occupy leadership positions in the present day. Perhaps it’s because we know too much about them in our present media-dominated environment. No one knew what Washington and Lincoln did every day, much less every minute of the day. Incredible as it now seems, Franklin Roosevelt served more than three terms as president without the majority of people even aware that he could not walk.

As a first step toward grasping the real meaning of leadership—and more important, as a step toward becoming an effective leader yourself—your present view of leadership may need to be reconsidered, reinvented, and even reborn. This book will give you the tools for doing that. By making full use of those tools, you can take a big step toward achieving all your personal and professional goals.

This raises a very important point that should be emphasized here at the outset. Our purpose here is something much more than theoretical or intellectual understanding of leadership. You’re going to learn what leaders have done so that you can start doing it yourself, right away, in your own life and career. That’s leadership mastery. It’s putting what you learn into action.

This is an extremely ambitious undertaking, and we have some powerful tools to bring it to a successful conclusion. Very simply put, the foundations of our work toward leadership mastery are the insights, writings, and life example of Dale Carnegie. Known the world over as one of the most influential voices in the history of personal development, his lessons are more relevant today than ever before.

We’ll be looking at up-to-the-minute issues in today’s fast-changing workplace. We’ll meet the people, study the organizations, and identify the challenges they face, and that you’re facing, on the road to professional success and personal fulfillment.

THE LONGEVITY OF LEVI STRAUSS

Levi Strauss & Co. has been in business for more than 150 years. Over those many decades there have been plenty of peaks and valleys such as the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which destroyed the company showroom and many local businesses.

Despite the obvious hardships, the company continued to pay its employees while new buildings were built, and extended credit to its wholesale suppliers whose facilities had also been destroyed. Ethical leadership has always been a core value at Levi Strauss, whether the challenge was a major earthquake or competition from Calvin Klein. In keeping with an “aspiration statement” that the company issued in 1987, managers at Levi Strauss know that they’re evaluated in many other areas besides financial performance.

As much as 40 percent of Levi Strauss’s management bonuses are based on measures of leadership in ethics, human relations, and effective communication.

IBM: BUSINESS AND BELIEFS

More than twenty years before Levi Strauss created its aspiration statement, Thomas J. Watson, Jr., then the head of IBM, wrote a book called A Business and Its Beliefs. Watson knew that one of his most vital responsibilities as a leader was to clarify the core values of IBM. The values he led by made IBM one of America’s truly dominant companies throughout the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s.

Interestingly enough, years before he wrote the book, Watson foresaw the problems that would almost cause IBM’s downfall when the technological revolution dawned. Thirty years before anyone had ever heard of a blog or a Web site or an e-mail, Watson told an interviewer, “I’m worried that IBM could become a big inflexible organization that won’t be able to change when the computer business goes through its next shift.” In fact, that’s exactly what happened after Watson’s retirement. IBM did not fully recover until another leadership master, Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., became chairman and CEO in 1993. And we’ll have much more to say about Gerstner in the chapters that follow.

JOHNSON & JOHNSON: BIG BUT SMALL

Levi Strauss and IBM are big corporations. Johnson & Johnson is as well, but the former leader of that company, chairman and CEO Ralph Larsen, has said, “We don’t view ourselves as one $20 billion health care company; we see ourselves as 170 small ones.” This puts into practice one of the basic principles of leadership mastery. Larsen had a strong aversion to top-down edicts and directives. “We have a strong history of decentralization,” he told an interviewer. “People are very independent at Johnson & Johnson. You have to convince them of the rightness of your cause. Otherwise not much is going to happen.”

Larsen might have added that once the rightness of the cause has been made clear, a lot of good things happen year in and year out. Virtually from its beginnings, Johnson & Johnson has been one of America’s most admired companies, as well as one of the most profitable. With Dale Carnegie’s timeless lessons providing the core of our strategy, and with tactics drawn from the example of today’s leadership masters, we are ready to move ahead in our exploration of this vitally important subject.

GATES AND JOBS

The names of two men will always be linked to the technological innovations that transformed our lives in the late twentieth century. It’s hard to believe that Bill Gates and Steven Jobs are now “senior citizens” of the computer age, but it’s the truth. From the start their contributions were very different from one another, and they’re still different today. Gates has to some extent withdrawn from the operational side of Microsoft, and is concentrating on philanthropic endeavors throughout the world. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, has been a very hands-on manager at Apple Computer. In fact, he’s so involved that shareholders become extremely nervous at any signs that he might be backing off. Coverage of his recent health issues have demonstrated that.

Later in the book we’ll have more to say about these two very strong leaders, who are also equally strong rivals. It remains to be seen which of the two men’s legacies will be the more enduring. Perhaps surprisingly, one test of this may be which man was able to disengage more smoothly. We usually evaluate leaders in terms of how much they do, not how they transition to doing less. There’s a lesson here: What leaders mean to us changes with time just as the leaders themselves change.

APPLYING THE WISDOM OF JAMES GLEICK

James Gleick, a science writer whose books have introduced readers to the wonders of chaos theory and superstrings, published a volume entitled Faster. Gleick discusses the seemingly unstoppable acceleration of all aspects of our lives, from the introduction of e-mail and cell phones to the raising of the speed limits on interstate highways. We have the tools to accomplish things very quickly these days and we’ve come to expect almost instantaneous results. As we make our way at lightning speed through our new environment, though, we must realize that our approaches, our ideas, and even our vocabularies must also be new.

The word leader, for example, can no longer bear any resemblance to the word boss. Bosses have subordinates or subjects or followers. Today’s true leaders have no followers in the conventional sense of the word. Leadership masters even go a step further by transforming followers into other leaders. For true leadership masters, this process includes not just everyone in an organization, but literally everyone they meet. How does this happen?

For starters it requires personal qualities beyond traditional leadership virtues: qualities like toughness and decision-making ability, flexibility, innovation, and the ability to accommodate sudden change. These traits are now absolutely essential. The image of the leader as a lion tamer with a chair and a whip can no longer work for any extended period of time, if indeed it ever could. So the purpose of leadership mastery is not to show you how to order people around, or to manipulate them with fear of failure or promise of reward. Instead you’ll focus on giving people the tools to lead themselves in the direction of what they do best.

Traditionally it’s been said that some people are born leaders just as certain wolves or baboons naturally assume dominant positions in their groups. There’s a view that certain human beings are simply destined by their genetic makeup to take responsibility and point the way for others. That’s one way of looking at it.

But another view says that leaders aren’t born, they’re made. It’s not in the genes. It’s in the experience and in the training. This suggests that anybody can be a leader if he or she gets the necessary training and preparation. A person may be in the back of the line today, but with the right kind of attitude, knowledge, skills, and experience, that same person can be out in front of the pack tomorrow.

Which one of these theories is correct? Fortunately we don’t really have to answer that question because there’s a basic flaw in both possibilities. Each describes leadership as a stage of development we arrive at, whether through heredity or training. However, today the biggest challenge of leadership is not to move from a starting point to a state of expertise beyond anyone else. Rather, today’s leader must find a way to keep the mind-set of the starting point no matter how far along the track he or she may have run.

Leadership mastery is about seeing people, environments, and circumstances freshly, as if for the first time. The truth is, we really are seeing everything for the first time because, as James Gleick points out, everything is constantly changing at an ever-increasing rate of speed. In fact, leadership masters are so free of preconceived ideas that they even question the validity of leadership itself (at least in the old-fashioned sense of the word). Great leaders of the past were seen as indispensable to the success of their groups. But today’s great leaders realize that no one is indispensable, not even themselves.

It wasn’t always that way. Many centuries ago, when Alexander the Great led his armies in conquest of much of the known world, a great battle was about to take place between the Greeks and the forces of the Persian Empire. The Persians had assembled a huge force, one that outnumbered the Greeks by as many as ten to one. On the night before the battle, however, Alexander assembled his troops and declared his absolute confidence that victory would be theirs, regardless of the numbers. He offered three basic reasons that the Greeks would win.

First he said, “Greece was a harsher environment than Persia.” Second, because of the demands of simply surviving, let alone creating a great civilization, in Greece, the Greek soldiers were much tougher man-for-man than the Persians, regardless of the numbers. But the third reason for Alexander’s confidence was the most important one, the one that he really emphasized to his troops, and the one that inspired them to win one of the most decisive military engagements in the history of the world. “The real difference between our army and the Persians,” Alexander said, “is that they have their emperor for a leader and you have me.”

In the ancient world there’s no doubt that this expression of total confidence in destiny on the part of a leader was an effective strategy. In fact, it may have continued to be effective as recently as the ’60s and ’70s, although the benefits of this approach were clearly diminishing. Consider this: When George Steinbrenner first gained control of the New York Yankees, his dictatorial style of personal leadership quickly became evident. There was continuous news coverage of his feuds with players and managers such as Reggie Jackson, Billy Martin, and even Hall of Famer Yogi Berra (whom Steinbrenner abruptly fired as Yankee manager only sixteen games into a season).

In those days, Steinbrenner’s team continued to win championships despite his overbearing leadership. Then interestingly something seemed to change in the national consciousness. People no longer responded to a rigid military model of leadership based on threat and intimidation. In the case of the New York Yankees, the stream of pennant-winning seasons came to an end until, much to his credit, Steinbrenner formed a new type of relationship with his players and his managers. He gave much more control to and empowered the men on the field. He was much more forgiving of setbacks in their play and their personal lives. As the players experienced these changes, the Yankee team of the late ’90s was favorably compared with the greatest baseball dynasties of all time.

Instead of being criticized for his tyrannical despotism, George Steinbrenner was praised for his enlightened leadership. The message is clear: In today’s environment, a highly personalized, individually centered, crudely aggressive leadership style is almost never effective, and certainly not over any extended period. Of course there are still people in leadership positions today who take issue with this. There are authoritarian leaders in every field who still see themselves as generals or cowboys. Some of these old-style leaders can point to very good results over the last year or the last two or three years.

In today’s world, however, it is almost impossible for a purely authoritarian style of leadership to remain successful over the long term. People just won’t put up with it. And society has changed so that they don’t have to.

OLD-STYLE LEADERS CANNOT SURVIVE TODAY

At the height of his leadership days, John D. Rockefeller said,

The ability to deal with...