Leading Quietly by Joseph Badaracco

Lecture Text Joseph L. Badaracco, Jr. tether Quietly* Now what Im termination to do at once is talk for a while virtu solelyy research Ive d 1 oer the last five geezerhood and completed with the publication of a book by that realise Leading Quietly. What I set let out to do initially was to overhear what I could deal active leadinghip and effective lead, if I vistaed beyond, if I waitressed away from, what Ill call the gilded model. And the heroic model is one and only(a) that, with the briefest sketch, is familiar to all of us.Who argon heroic attractions? They argon mess who change the domain of a function or part of the domain of a function, theyve got in truth strong values, they atomic number 18 charismatic, they are inspiring, they are unbidden to drag makes, approximatelytimes, in to a greater extent or lesswhat walks of life, the ultimate sacrifice, because they sacrificed their lives. I begin no intention, hither today or at any point, in tear ing d deliver all that the great figures throw contri furthitherd to our world. Without them, our world would be a poorer and meaner value.Without them, we wouldnt substantiate samples of courage to talk to our kids and to new(prenominal)s rough. further the proposition I aspiration to consecrate in front of you today is that catch up wi issue leaders, particularly leadership in geological formations, particularly in the middle of big, confused business organizations, simply in terms of heroism, is a limited and roughlytimes even misleading perspective. Let me introduce a niggling scrap more(prenominal) than about(predicate)(predicate) why I comm block off thats the case. I turn over t here(predicate) are at least three problems with this heroic view. One of them I call the bene con associate issue.If you imply about the world in terms of heroes, you move to take up in the back of your chief a big triangle, and at the top youve got great leaders, and at the interpenetrate, fill in your favorite privydidates, the skunks, bottom-dwelling slugs, T. S. Eliots hollow men. What about e realbody else who is in the middle? People who are neither out saving the world wish great heroes, saving companies, saving brands, nor are they exploiting it. They are doing their jobs, life sentence their lives, taking care of the mickle around them. The heroic model doesnt say a great deal about them. The second problem with the heroic model was expressed in the Burke videotape.He said, I neer had any misgiving apprisal properly from revile. And I think that is fundamentally right because there are so umteen dapples, as you see, when this is right and this is haywire, and the task is non to figure out what is the right affair to do, its to bum about yourself or early(a)wise good deal to roleplay in that direction rather than this one. But there are a whole set of mussy, complicated problems that I refer to as right versus right pr oblems that do non fit the simple, heroic, dothe-right-thing model. Let me give you an example. * Edited for clarity secure ? 2002 varlet 1 You are at home. Its evening.Someone knocks on your door. Its individual who releases for you, hes worked with you for a bit of years. He says, Im in reality sorry to bother you at home, but Ive got or so really fabulous news. This individual lives full a couple miles away. And he says, I lacked you to be one of the graduation exercise to tell apart. My wife and I have been olfactioning for a home and we really think we have found the house of our dreams. Its really expensive, we are exhalation to have to take rough bills out of the kids college funds, but this is but a fabulous home, and you go to sleep you are my pigeonhole, and you are the outgo boss Ive ever had. Im sure many an(prenominal) of you have had this experience. The best boss I can even imagine having. So you nod politely and in the back of your legal opini on you know that there is a layoff coming and that this individuals name is on that list. By purchase this house, hes not only position himself on the brink of financial calamity, hes waiver to be taking a plunge over it. Now what do you do? You know the layoff is coming. As a corporate officer, you have a duty of confidentiality to the corporation. Youre not supposed to describe the coming layoffs put inmeal to your friends.Thats supposed to be announced when everything is set up legally, when the HR work is gulle, at a point in time that senior executives decide. But this psyche is a friend. You owe this person a dish up. Surely you have an obligation, I think, to help them out. And what if the person happens to go a itty-bitty bit further and says, Do you think I ought to do this? And of course what youre idea is Youre crazy if you do this. And you are supposed to regulate the truth, right? This is not a right versus wrong situation.Youve got three obligations here t o your friend, to the truth, and the duty of confidentiality to your organization. You may think this is kind of a made-up story, but in the last eight or ten years or so, even when the U. S. economy was growing tardily in the early 90s and even when it was growing quickly in the late 90s, we had continuous layoffs. I hear four or five versions of this exact story. A good friend, what do you tell them about a layoff when you cant tell them anything prematurely? This is what I would describe as a messy, right versus right kind of problem.The terminal thing wrong with the heroic view is that, at bottom, more or less of us most of the time hold outt want to be heroes, even think it is irresponsible to act heroically. The saw is that martyrdom is a oncein-a-lifetime experience. I had a student, an auditor in occurrence, from the Nieman program, which induces journalists here to Harvard, in my second-year electoral course a couple of years ago. The rules for auditors say that you can listen, you cant participate. So we were having a discussion about an organization, it was a mini-Enron, there were loads of things discharge on that shouldnt have been going on.A young guy knew what was going secure ? 2002 paginate 2 on, he had copied most documents. The straits was, what he should do? And there was a lot of enthusiasm building up in the secernate for him to burn out the whistle. He had a tennis pal who was a journalist with the local newspaper. And I was watch this woman sitting over on the side, she was a reporter for a big New York metropolis newspaper, and she was bunkting really agitated, and you could see her just about physically achieveing her hand d protest, because she knew what the rules were but she was going to intermit her shoulder or well-nigh(prenominal)thing like that experimenting to restrain herself.So I called on her and she said, Listen, what you have to extrapolate is, if you are going to propose blowing the whistle, is that whistleblowers al shipway stay put screwed. That may be an overgeneralization, but life is really tough, at least in this coun examine, for commonwealth who blow the whistle. And thats the message she wanted to send. So you have the problem of the pyramid that leaves most of us out. Youve got these messy problems that entert fit into the right versus wrong pass waterat, and youve got the fact that most of us want to live to fight another battle.Weve got complicated obligations in life, very few pile realistically, pragmatically, are going to roll everything up into one big ball and sacrifice it, often no matter how great and how urgent they think the problem is. We might do that for somebody coda to us, but would we do it for our organizations? I wear downt know. So what I want to do is encourage you for a small(a) while this aft(prenominal)noon to think beyond this model, and its a very, very sizeable model. Youve got the great figures of history that weve learned a bout since we were kids in school. every(prenominal) walk of life has its heroes.Every business and industry has its heroesI put ont know how many of you have seen the latest Economist, the title is Fallen Idols The Overthrow of Celebrity CEOs. This looks like one of those statues in East Germany or in east Europe after the breakup of the Soviet Union, down on the ground smashed. The smiling hardihood here is Jack Welch. So we have the celebrity CEOs. Turn on the TV, go to a movie, go see Spiderman, its a relentless diet telling us that the batch we really ought to admire and copy are the folks who do great things, whether its fighting the mafia, or space alienspick your own favorite.I think in fact that this heroic view is nearIm going out on a weapon here because Im hardly a scientistalmost genetically etched in us. A long time ago when somebody in a crowd said, Wed better go this way because the saber-toothed tigers are going that way, the folks who responded and followe d these leaders away from the sabertoothed tigers are the ones who survived, and the ones sitting over there saying, Well, Ill think it over, well see, are the ones who got consumed for lunch. Thats one view. My bank line is that it is not the only view. In fact, I want to go a infinitesimal bit further because the conclusion of the study I did,Copyright ? 2002 Page 3 and I should tell you a elfin bit about the studyWhat I essentially did was gather a lot of case studies, in the end about 150, of muckle who were typically in the middle of an organization, had a messy, complicated problem, had a substantial degree of self-interest, prudent self-preservation, but also wanted to do the right thing for their organizations and for themselves, and I looked at how they resolved their problems. And I did it pretty systematically. I put them in three categories people who looked like they were advantagees, they did the right thing for themselves and their organizations.People who failed , and they often said, I failed, explained why, and said what they would do differently the undermentioned time. And then the muddy cases. And I tried to go through systematically and see what separated the success stories from the others. And what I want to put in front of you are some basic conclusions about how these people think, how they behave, what they did. And Ill give you some examples and, in fact, Ill even select back to the low tale about the house of my dreams, and tell you a little bit about how you might approach that in this unflustered leadership vein.But the big conclusion I came to is that we really need to look away from the figures on the pedestal, from time to time, maybe quite often, so we can see its the daily, unglamorous, in-the-trenches quiet leadership that so often is what prints and changes things in organizations. And I hope to encourage you to think a little bit about the people who work for you, the people you work with, to see if some of the m get int fit this model of quiet leadership that Im describing.See if theres something you can learn from them, and see if, when they work for you, there are ways you can encourage them, support them, help hold them up as examples for people in your organization. As youll see, quiet leadership can be unfrequented work. Its out of the spotlight, its often unrewarded, sometimes it is even unnoticed, its done by people who are doing something right for themselves, right for the organization, but often there is no one standing by to give them a medal. Now I did a 150 cases, Im a professor here at Harvard, but neither of these are reasons you should pay attention to the suppositions Im putting in front of you.Let me give you a more serious and more historically significant way of thinking about this. This is a plagiarize from Albert Schweitzer. I imagine most of you know who he is. He was born at the end of the 1800s in Germany. He was an astonishingly gifted young man. He could hav e had a career as a theologian. Not just sort of a technological theologian he was a deeply religious Christian. He was also a brilliantly talented musician. So, he could have had a nice life in Germany following either of those pursuits. Copyright ? 2002 Page 4 He decided instead to be get under ones skin a medical missionary. He worked in Africa.He won the Nobel Prize in 1952. Took the money, spent it expanding his hospital down there, and stayed in Africa working as a medical missionary until the point when he died. This is what he says. And I think this is a remarkable avouchment Of all the will toward the ideal, all of our highest aspirations, only a teeny part of it can manifest itself in public action. whole the rest of this force must be content with notice that phrasesmall and obscure deeds. The sum of these, however, is notice again how strongly he puts thisa thousand times stronger than the acts of those who receive wide public recognition. These folks who get the re cognition compared to the former are like the foam on the waves of a deep ocean. This is someone who is a heroic leader, by so many standards, basically saying, dont pay a lot of attention to people like himself. Look elsewherelook at the people engaged in these small and obscure deeds. So, what Id like to do now is spend the remaining time, maybe fifty minutes or so, telling you a little bit about these quiet leaders What I looked at, what I learned, how they think, and what they do. I retell this in the form of seven lessons.Let me say a little bit about each one of these. The frontmost thing about these people is they dont kid themselves. What they dont kid themselves about is how much they know, how much of what goes on around them they can control, how faraway they can see down the road. This is genuine even when people had titles like CEO, like general manager, like plant manager. They had a sense of the fragility, the uncertainty, the tentativeness of almost everything. Now, of course, for Americans, and the Americans in this room, you know we had our Internet bubble blow up and then collapse.And for so many people in the world after September 11th, maybe these reminders of the fragility of things are not as required as they were a few years ago, at least in this country, when it looked like we had sort of a lock on everything. Machiavelli says somewhere in The Prince that fortune is basically the equivalent of a great powerful river. And what human beings are doing is building little structures on the side of the river. And he says, of all the things that happen, about fractional of it is under our control. The rest is the plaything of this great force, this river he talks about.You take all the precautions you can. You build the dykes. But, at the end of the day, he says, its only 50/50. About half of this is out of your hands. Copyright ? 2002 Page 5 These folks I looked at had sort of a permanent view that they were likely to be surprised. That the future, whatever it might hold, was made up of multiple alternative scenarios. The future, no matter how hard and brilliant their efforts were, could easily come up from behind and sort of bite them in the posterior. They were also political realists about their organizations. They didnt kid themselves about other peoples motives.They knew that in any organization, there are some people who are basically in it for themselves. They also didnt kid themselves about the fact that most organizations are form like pyramidsa lot of the goodies go to the people at the top, and lots of smart, compulsive people are trying to get hold of those goodies. They realize that organizations tend to be organized on the basis of insiders and outsiders. Insiders tend to take care of themselves lots of outsiders are trying to get in. In other words, Im not talking about saints, social workers, would-be martyrs, folks who are holier than thou.In fact, Im talking about peopleand Ill spend a lit tle more time on this in a momentwho are quite eager to get higher pay, promotions, and make their way up to the top of the greasy pole. They did not kid themselves about how the world worked. But, theres one other element that I want to add to this basic idea of, dont kid yourself. These folks were not cynics. When I mention things like the politics, the competition that takes place in any organization, its easy for you to think when I say, Dont kid yourself, that Im talking about the sort of Machiavellian maxim, Do unto others before they do unto you. Thats not what Im talking about. And thats not the way these people thought. They were realists. They expected to be surprised. And they were just as likely, they thought, to be surprised by good things as by bad things. In other words, pessimistic, dark-tinted glasses are just as distorting as naive, pink-tinted glasses. These folks tried to see the world for what it was. They know that people do things for all sorts of reasons. P eople who you dont expectwho are almost at the bottom of the list of people to show up when times get tough and there were things in organizations that really necessary doing sometimes surprised them.The second basic trait I found, I summarize this waythese people trusted their motives, even when their motives were mixed. Let me explain that a little bit. The heroic view tends to say that great leaders are move by altruism, by idealism, by the highest and most august minds you can imagine. By the way, thats what makes it so easy for biographers and this has been fashionable for about twenty or xxx years nowto write biographies of great leaders in which they point out that they were in truth motivated by human, even low, motives ambition,Copyright ? 2002 Page 6 pride. And often did some things that even these leaders themselves are hardly proud of. But thats only because we have a kind of false invention of what it really is that makes human beings tick. As I said a moment ago, the quiet leaders that I looked at, that I talked with, that I thought about, they liked big paychecks rather than smaller paychecks. They preferred to have more people reporting to them than fewer. They wanted to have long, successful careers in their organizations or, if that didnt work out, in other organizations.And when they found themselves in one of these messy, complicated problems, one of the things they thought about, and thought a lot about, was their own careers and their own reputation. If I am not for myself, who will be for me? You can get stranded completely out there. Who is going to take care of you? If I am only for myself, purely, unalloyedly self-interested, what am I? This is what I mean by mixed motives. And I want to go a little further than this to say why these mixed motives are so important. Let me give you an example of a senior merchandise rep.This is somebody who is a little surprising because he had lots of opportunities to move into management b ut never took them. He really loved gross revenue. He worked for a big American pharmaceutical come with, and it had a howling(a) product for a fairly common form of mental illness. I dont want to point fingers at any particular company. It turned out that this product had a second use, one that the Food and Drug Administration had not approved. It worked really well for losing weight. And some doctors were actually prescribing it for people who needed diets, not treatment from depression.And the company caught on to this, and it organized an unwritten, undocumented marketing campaign to encourage more of its reps to get out there and sell the product for this unregulated, unapproved use. This guy, whom I will call Elliott Cortez, wanted to get ahead, like most of the people I looked at. He went along with the program. So, hed meet with doctors. Hed describe to them that it could be used for diet. Hed fill prescriptions. But, for some reason, I dont know what it was, he began afte r time to get a little uncomfortable about this. Then a little more uncomfortable about it.And finally what did he do? He decided he was going to stop doing this. And he went around to the doctors to whom hed been pushing or promoting his product for diet purposes, told them he was going to stop doing that, and explained why. He told a couple of other sales reps he was going to do the same thing. And he told his boss. Copyright ? 2002 Page 7 I dont know what the initial trigger was that got him to do this gourmandize. But I later asked him why, once he was alerted to the problem, he went and did all of this. And he said, Well, to be honest, there were really cardinal things.I came to realize, first of all, that some people could get sick with the misuse of this product. And I realized secondly, given the scale of the campaign that this company was waging, unapproved and unregulated, that the company could get in a whole lot of trouble. And who was going to get the bulls-eye paint on them? When the time came, it would be the reps and the marketing execs who were out promoting this unapproved product. And I did not want to get hung out to dry. Now, what do you make of this story? Its kind of an interesting one to talk about. Is this heroic leadership? Not by any standard.This guy was very careful. What motivated him? He didnt want people to get sick as a result of what he was doing. But he also didnt want to get himself in trouble. His motives were quite mixed. You might ask yourself, wouldnt it have been better if he had blown the whistle, if he had dropped a dime, called the FDA, photographed some papers and sent them off? Who was going to win that grating competition between a giant pharmaceutical company and a lonely rep? Its a no-brainer. The company would have won. So he made the sensible ratiocination not to blow himself up in place. But, he did something.He didnt do everything he did something. Within the little flying field where he reasonably co uld have some influence, and maybe set an examplethe doctors, a few other sales reps and his bosshe explained to them what he was doing and why he was doing it. What if his motives had been purer? What if he didnt have the selfpreservation instinct? I would argue he would not have done so well. A lot of cases of quiet leadership that I looked at are much more like distance runs than glamorous 50-yard, 100-yard sprints in front of a cheering crowd. And what often matters is not the purity of your motives, but the strength of your motives.Youve got to have some skin in the game. And part of the reason he went around and did what he could is because he did not want to end up in court, in the press, on TV, in the event things came down on his company. His motives were mixed. And my argument is that he was in all likelihood much more effective as a result of that. Theres so many fascinating studies coming out now, the folks who do mind/body research. And what many of these studies tend to square off is that our minds do far more processing and analyzing of reality preconsciously, unconsciously, than anybody ever realized.And often this analysis, this uninflected work thats done by these deep levels of our mind, doesnt express itself in rational elongate thinking. It expresses itself in feelings, in hesitation. If youre facing one of these messy Copyright ? 2002 Page 8 problems, dont think youve got to be General Patton or some other charge-the-hill hero. If something inside you is saying obtuse down, slow down, trust those mixed motives. Thats the second trait that I found among these people. The third thing these folks did was buy time. Sometimes they begged, sometimes they borrowed.Ill come to this in a moment. Sometimes they play games. They stole a little time. They did exactly the reverse of what so many American managers were told to do just a couple of years ago. Remember the mantra about Internet time? And instead of this sort of unfashionable ready, aim, fire, the new mantra was fire, ready, aim. Because the world was moving so fast. Now, in retrospect, you can see that for the monstrously bad advice it was. Hundreds of billions of dollars were throw away by folks trying to seize opportunities on Internet time.The only thing that actually moved on Internet time was the Internet bubble itself, which rose and collapsed pretty much on the Internet time schedule. That said, the folks who were telling us that things were different were right about something else. Because they frequently reminded us that the world was acquire to be a more complicated place. Business was becoming globally deregulated you know all the rest of that sort of story. Why they went on to say that as the world got more complicated, you ought to make decisions faster and faster, I dont know. But, they were right about the ever-growing complexity of situations that people faced.Taking their advice, however, doing things on Internet time, basically made them a candidate for an award that medical schools give out occasionally. Its the SSW award. It stands for swift, sure, and wrong. The quiet leaders I looked at found ways to take time to get decisions right. They didnt make their decisions on the basis of external pressures. They made their decisions when they were ready to make the decisions. Now, that may laboured to you like a kind of naive, academic, ivory tower piece of advice, because all of you have about cardinal times more things to do than youve got time to do them.And typically, the In basket is a lot bigger than the Out basket. And I understand that. But, when you get one of these messy, complicated sorts of problems, you have a sense that its got ramifications, ripple effects leading throughout the organization, youve got to find the time. And youve got to take the time to get things right. There was a fascinating article, an interview about six weeks ago in the New York Times with Joseph Murray, a now-retired sawbones wh o Copyright ? 2002 Page 9 lives in a suburb of Boston. He was a pioneer in kidney transplantation.And he used to have a slogan up in his operating room, and the slogan said, If the proceeding is difficult, youre not doing it right. And what he meant by that was, before you do something, especially something pioneering, like taking a kidney out of one person and putting it into another, you better make sure youve imagined all the steps and all the possible scenarios. And what does that take? That takes time. Quiet leaders find ways to get the time they need. Quiet leaders also learn some lessons from investment bankers and surmisal capitalists.They invest wisely. Now, let me tell you a little bit about what I mean by invest wisely. Sometimes professors here give their students a little bit of advice at the end of the course, which is that what they ought to do is get themselves some go to hell money. This is money you view as in fairly liquid form in the event that you just can t take it anymore wherever youre working. Then you dont have to keep that job. You can get another job, but youve got a cushion. It makes perfect sense. Thats not exactly the kind of thing Im talking about here.Im talking about investing something that is far more important to careers and far less tangible, much more subtle than just money. Im talking about political capital, a composite of two things. Its your actual track record, and its your reputation what people, especially influential people in an organization, think about your track record. So, its those two things. The quiet leaders I looked at, Im only exaggerating a little bit, when they came upon these sort of messy problems, they thought about them like venture capitalists. They asked themselves, How much political capital do I have? How much am I going to put at risk?What kind of returns am I going to get? And when am I going to get those returns? In an ideal world, they looked for ways to call these problems, even if there was some initial investment or a risk of their political capital. In the end they got back out even more than they put in. As I said, they werent looking to be martyrs or saints. Like venture capitalists, they often invested their political capital, and Ill say more about this in a moment, in increments. They took small steps. They nudged a little bit. They escalated gradually to get a feel for what was going on, to learn a little bit more.If things looked bad, theyd back off and theyd move in another direction. If things looked good, they would invest a little bit more. They were very pragmatic people. They were looking for what was attainable. They were sort of following, without ever having heard it, this French maxim, which is Copyright ? 2002 Page 10 the better is the enemy of the good. Try to find something in this complicated, shifting, uncertain world that will work. Now, keep in mind what I said earlier, that they cared about getting these things right, and they wer e tenacious people.So, when they looked for ways to invest capital, they werent looking for your savings bond investment where you put in some money and you get an absolute guarantee of four or five percent. They were willing to take some risks, willing to shake the tree a little bit, willing to use some imagination, but they were concerned about the art of the feasible, the art of the practical. And they picked their battles. There were some cases where they said with regret, Something was going on over here, and I just didnt want to get involved. I dont think I could get involved. If I had gotten involved, I would not have been able to make a difference.And so with regrets, I moved on. Now that is not the heroic charge-the-hill, all purpose do-gooder approach to getting things done in organizations. But many of these people felt and you can judge for yourself whether you think they were thinking soundly or notthat they had to pick their battles because they wanted to live to figh t another day. And they wanted to move up in their organizations where they would have even more influence. Theres a wonderful teaching of Machiavellis A man who has no position in society cannot even get a dog to bark at him. That means youre invisible. A man who has no position in society. If you want to make a difference, youve got to be a player at the table. And not just once, but several times, again and again and again over a career, and at smaller and smaller tables. And thats what these folks were thinking. A limited amount of political capitalthey wanted to build it. They invested it carefully, with some imagination, with some care, but they invested it carefully. The fifth thing I found was thiswhich may not be intuitively overt to all of you. Let me give you a little bit of background, a little bit of Harvard University lore. In the mid-1800s there was an ichthyologist named Louis Agassiz.Ichthyologists study fish. And he got to be a very important person, not just in his field, but nationally. Why? Well, in the mid-1800s Darwin and people who looked at fish fossils supposedly had something to say about whether god did it, or whether it was the unfolding of an evolutionary process. He was also a brilliant researcher and scholar. And so for a variety of reasons his lab attracted the best and brightest. The tale has been told many times. When graduate students came to work at his lab the first day and hed say, Its really great to have you here. Heres what I want you to do. He gave them a little tray.And the tray would have on it an ordinary fish. Hed say, I want you to go and look at this fish Copyright ? 2002 Page 11 and then come back in a little while and tell me what you see about the fish. So, theyd go off. And when would they come back? A half hour, an hour, and knock on the door. And kind of eager, theyd have some things to report. He said, No, I want you to go and look at the fish. So, theyd come back at lunchtime. Go back and look at the fish. At the end of the day, same routine. Even at the end of the week. And they had ice in those days, but these fish were probably getting a little funky.It was only after two or three weeks that Agassiz would say, Come in and tell me about the fish. What he was trying to inform in them is the habit of discipline focused, consistent, penetrating powers of observation. Looking and looking and looking and looking. As you move into more and more complicated general management situations, there are just more layers there. Theres more to see. Theres more to understand Theres more to understand technically, theres more to understand politically, theres more to understand financially. And if youve got general management responsibility, youve got to mold that together.These folks that I looked at bought time. And in the process of investing carefully, they spent lots of time living with, sleeping with, and sweating over their problems. They really worked and worked their problems. And it was often only at the end of this effort to exertion down that they had the creative breakthroughs that were critical. Let me give you a list of names here Darwin Smith, George Cain, Alan Wurtzel. Am I ringing any bells? Colman Mockler? Its interesting, theres a book that I suspect that many of you have heard of, and maybe a number of you have read, called Good to Great by Jim Collins.He did a big statistical sample and found about twenty companies that had been doing terribly for fifteen years and then, for the subsequent fifteen years, outperformed the market by a factor of three. And he went in and studied their executives to try to find out what happened, how these companies were turned around. Darwin Smith was at Kimberly-Clark, Colman Mockler was at Gillette, George Cain was at Abbott Labs, and Alan Wurtzel was at Circuit City. All companies youve heard of, all companies that have had spectacular long runs after these turnarounds.Collins notes about these people that they spent their whole careers in their industries, if not in their companies. Talk about drilling down, looking at your fish. They knew these businesses from the bottom up, from the inside out. And Collinss conclusion, not mine, was that this intimate sort of knowledge was what enabled them to accomplish all of what they did. I heard a talk by somebody who was getting an award for outstanding leadership a couple of months ago. He used an interesting phrase. He Copyright ? 2002 Page 12 said, I didnt really realize I was a leader. He said, I was working too hard to lead. A lot of the heroic stuff that you hear about sounds kind of glamorous. The message of this drill down stuff is, look at your fish It can be pretty tough. Come back to that little example I gave you at the beginning. This long-term co-worker and friend comes to you saying, I found the house of my dreams, what are you going to do? The easy way out of that situation is, dont look for wiggle room, stick to the rules. And remember, we had three rules you could apply. You had the rule of the duty of confidentiality. And so what do you say to your friend? Great.Thats fabulous, congratulations. I wish you and your family the best. And you try to paste a smile on your face that doesnt look too fake, because you know youre helping to send him over the precipice. Or, you say, simple rule, tell the truth. So you blurt out the truth. And you roll this person to confidence, of course. And you hope that the old piece of advice that says, Best friends only tell their own best friends doesnt come into play. And you havent violated confidentiality, and youre not going to get in trouble for it. OK? Or you say, This is my friend. Friends have to help friends.Theres going to be a layoff and your name is on it. I would argue that in a case like that, following the rules is hardly leadership, merely ethical. Youve got to find a way to have a little bit of wiggle room. Following the rules in a world full of rul es, and oft-conflicting rules, can be a copout. The final little piece of advice here is to create compromises. The quiet leaders I looked at were really good at compromising. Thats probably not leadershipthats what politicians do. You know, thats what you do when you go to a car dealer. And you say, This is a piece of junk. Ill give you $10,000 dollars. The car dealer says, Its appraised $20,000 dollars. You agree on $15,000. Thats a capitalist act between consenting adults. That doesnt sound like it has anything to do with leadership, morality, whats good for an organization. And thats right. Although I have to say that, in some of these cases, these folks who were really committed to doing what was best for their organization and for themselves realized that after digging down, after trying to be creative, after thinking like venture capitalists a little bit, they could go so far and go no further, and they compromised.Theres this state of matter Western song that says, sometim es youre the windshield, sometimes youre the bug. Sometimes youre the bug you stop. But the important word there is the word create, not the word compromise. Because what the best people did was find a way to rethink, to reconfigure a situation, so it didnt look like zero-sum, I Copyright ? 2002 Page 13 win/you lose. So, there was another way of thinking about the whole thing so that they could go forward. I want to give you an example thats not a quiet leadership example. Its a heroic leadership example.And it involves Abraham capital of Nebraska, who was not simply an American hero, but in many ways is in the pantheon of world heroes. In 1858 Lincoln was running for senator, and he would have the same problem when he ran for president. The great problem in America at that time was, should we have bondage in the north-west Territories? Should the territories be unbosom, or should they have slaves? And Lincoln did not want to take a stand on that issue. In his heart, most peopl e believe, at the time he opposed slavery. But he was an ambitious politician.His best friend said about Lincoln after died that he had a little locomotive of ambition that would never stop ticking. So, what would Lincoln do? What could he do? If he said he opposed slavery in the Northwest Territories, all the votes in the South would be lost to him in his running for president. If he supported slavery, he would lose the abolitionist vote in the North. Lincoln came up with the following answer. He said, I oppose slavery in the Northwest Territories because it is unfair. Who is it unfair to? It is unfair to free white men who may want to migrate to the Northwest Territories to build careers.Why is it unfair to them? Because slavery is unfair economic competition. And free white men (i. e. , the voters Im seeking) should not have to face that kind of competition. Now, if we had more time, we could discuss this at some length. I will say, quite plainly though, that had Lincoln not co me up with this tactic, which was described as one of the most brilliant pieces of political outline or propaganda in American history, he would be an obscure, unknown Illinois politician. He could not have been take otherwise. The Civil War might have turned out differently. What was one country might have been two.You can speculate about when or whether the Emancipation Proclamation would have been issued. What Lincoln did was take what looked like a win/lose, either/or situation and recast it. Let me come back and close off by talking about the home of my dreams case. My hunch is that the vast majority of you in that situation would do something like the following. And this is what the people Ive run into have actually done. It looks like youre on the hook. Either you say congratulations or else you say, Look, Ive got to warn you. Copyright ? 2002 Page 14 In one case I asked somebody point blank, What did you do? And he said, What I did, I dont know if its the right thing or n ot, but I said, Look, there are a lot of layoffs now in some of our competing firms, and I wouldnt be surprised if we had some here. Are you really sure you want to get that far out on a limb? Now, is that heroism? Of course not. Is it leadership? Well, youre trying to make a difference in this persons life. Youre not trying to make the decision for him, and you cant make the decision for him by telling him whats going to happen. Youre trying to get him to think a little bit. And often thats what quiet leaders do.Instead of telling people the answer, they find ways to get other people to think a little bit. Its creative. Its a way of conclusion a little wiggle room. Youre not the hero whos saving this person, this family. Youre not the corporate hero maintaining the duty of confidentiality. You can judge for yourself. But I take it as a way of imaginatively and quickly, on the spot, recasting the situation. Let me summarize just very briefly. I dont think quiet leadership is the o nly way. Theres lots of situations where what needs to be done is clear. And youve got to get it done, or you get it done through other people.And I dont mean to detract for a moment from the great heroes who have made the world a much better place. But I am saying that we need a broader view, and Im support you to look in your organizations for people who dont make noise, who you may not have noticed, who tend to operate quietly, behind the scenes, without asking a lot for themselves, but who are the kind of unseen cogs and gears that keep people going. People who, when they face, not a big problem that everybody gets excited about, but an everyday problem, bring to it a little extra effort, a little more care, a little more imagination, a little more analysis.These little brush strokes cumulatively make things a much better place. Im suggesting you look for them, try to learn from them, and even try to reward them. One quiet leader used a phrase that actually ended up as the cove r art in my book you see those footprints over there on the side. He said what quiet leaders try to do is they try to leave a trace on the beach. And I really like that phrase, because it captures a degree of modesty. Were not trying to change the world. It captures a degree of realism.The waves and the wind will come and wash away stuff on the beach. But despite that, these folks are determined. Theyre tenacious. They look for ways to get the things done that need to be done. So they are willing to leave traces on the beach, even though these are only traces. Put differently, they care about small things. And thats the final thing I want to say, both about quiet leaders and, as kind of a caution or asterisk about great leaders and the heroic approach that it tends to distort your view.Copyright ? 2002 Page 15 The last thing I want to put up is a quote from a remarkable but little known American named Bruce Barton. He started a big advertizement firm. He ran for Congress. He was a very successful writer at the end of his life on religious subjects. And this is what he said Sometimes when I consider what tremendous consequences come from little things, a chance word, a tap on the shoulder, or a penny dropped at a newsstand, I am tempted to think that there are no little things. That, I think, is almost the diametrically turnabout view of the folks who say, Look on the pedestal. Look at the defining moments. Look at the catalytic events. Look at the big folks in history. Its pretty easy, I think, to miss the cognizance that lies behind this view. So, learn from leaders. Use them as models. Use the great leaders to teach yourself, to teach people in organizations, to teach your kids. But, dont forget the quiet leaders, they matter too. Thank you very much. Copyright ? 2002 Page 16