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Posted
on 06-Dec-00 11:16 AM
Thought book "Leadership As A Team Effort" by Marvin Bower and review might be interesting to those who wants to take leadership role in community and outside and is willing to learn how to run the show might be good book to read.Since we "Nepalese" lack such skills when it comes to starting our own.
Followed by a review by former GBNC president Ashutosh Tiwari,which was published on April 1996, in Kathmandu Post Review of Books section.
regards,
H
Leadership As A Team Effort
The Will to Lead:
Running a Business with a Network of Leaders
By Marvin Bower
Harvard Business School Press, 1997. $27.95
A review by Ashutosh Tiwari
Marvin Bower, now in his 90s, is a legendary figure in corporate America. The management consulting firm he co-founded, headed for 17 years and indelibly molded with his values – McKinsey & Company – is today a most sought-after employer for many of the best talents from the world’s top business schools. Indeed, for many fresh MBAs, spending a few years at McKinsey as a consultant is a prestigious rite of passage before they go on to assume top positions in global corporate settings.
In this book, in straightforward English, mixing personal stories with business anecdotes, Bower distills more than 60 years of his McKinsey experience to share the "guidelines for running a business by replacing all the bosses with a network of leadership teams, that is, by converting command-and-control managing to multiple leading."
"For thousand of years," writes Bower, "people have been moved by great leaders to do great things. [U]nfortunately, people in business are not being led to do great things in their companies." For this, Bower finds problems with two dominant aspects of corporate cultures: First, the hierarchical rigidity that blocks out access to a full range important information available within a firm. And second, the style of management by command-and-control that exercises authority to achieve abstract goals while fails to turn employees into mini-leaders who too share those corporate goals. In this context, Bower says that his guidelines are for those CEOs who, with support of their board, want to lead employees "to think and act through trust, example and persuasion."
From anyone else, such an approach could be dismissed as yet another touchy-feely claptrap by yet another American management pundit peddling a leadership book. But not from Bower. The Will to Lead is only his second book ever, and as Bower’s life’s story makes it clear in the book, McKinsey became McKinsey because it was and is devoid of hierarchy and committed to be run as a network of peers who lead one another to success.
Bower’s guidelines appear in the third chapter. In it, he lists and explains leadership attributes such as trustworthiness, fairness, unassuming behavior, listening patiently, open-mindedness which Bower contrasts with broad-mindedness, sensitivity to situations and people, taking initiatives, exercising good judgment, flexibility, and a capacity to motivate with a sense of urgency.
Quoting a colleague, Bower urges CEOs to earn trust and respect from their employees by "demonstrat[ing] behavior that suggests (1) a willingness to make a real investment in the professional development of junior people and (2) a genuine concern for the junior person as a human being." This way, a CEO’s job is to become the leader of leaders; that is to say, create, nurture and sustain leaders within her firm so ultimately more value is created for all concerned. But can such a network of leaders really be developed? Bower offers his own thoughts, in the seventh chapter, on how a firm may custom-design such a network.
Though I enjoyed reading and re-reading this book, and would recommend it to all CEOs, I wondered why Bower did not make clear an important assumption implicit in his leadership principles. For a leadership team to work consistently, the members of the team have to start off with the same degree of trust for one another, and that since many firms fail to make this initial trust a firm-wide value, their efforts at making subsequent leadership teams work fail.
A firm like McKinsey can afford to practice these principles because it invests heavily on recruiting consultants, developing their teams, and ruthlessly letting under-performers go. But for family-owned or public-owned or one-person-dominated firms, establishing the initial trust among the employees can be difficult, let alone be open enough to create a network of leaders. Besides, as early last year’s example of fight for the top post at the New York investment bank Goldman, Sachs made it clear, even a well-respected tradition of having co-leaders at the helm for many years is no guarantee that leadership in teams will always be possible.
Still, for those familiar with horrors of hierarchy and command-and-control style of management, Bower’s book forces one to think that an alternative, and possibly a more productive, style for assuming business leadership exists.
(Founded by A. Tiwari in April 1996, this Review of Books remains a small example of a regular activity run by a network of peers.)
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