WHARTON LEADERSHIP DIGEST
January, 2002, Volume 6, Number 4
CONTENTS
Leadership
Development on the Line: Wildland
Firefighters
Riding
the Wave: Jeanette McCleannan of
Ogilvy Interactive
Leadership
and National Crisis: It’s Everyone’s Business
Conferences:
Corporate Governance, Innovative Leadership, and Leading in All
Directions
By Larry Sutton, Fire
Training Unit Leader, U.S. Bureau of Land Management, National Interagency Fire
Center, Boise, Idaho
 Wildland
firefighters fight fires that burn in natural vegetation.
It’s hard, dirty, dangerous work, but we love it.
Wildland firefighters need good
leadership. In fact, maybe it’s
even more important to us than it is to a lot of other folks:
poor leadership can literally kill us.
Our business is similar to other types of emergency management such as
structural firefighting, emergency medical services or the military.
Decisions must often be made in very compressed time frames, and the
results of poor decision making can be loss of life, property or public
confidence.
Like any other discipline,
wildland firefighting has its legendary leaders.
Edward Pulaski was one of the first.
He is credited with saving the lives of a number of men in the Big Blowup
of 1910 in northern Idaho.
"On Aug. 20, a terrific hurricane broke over the mountains," Pulaski
later told his wife. "The wind
was so strong it lifted men out of their saddles.
The smoke and heat became so intense that it was difficult to breathe.
Under such conditions, it would have been worse than foolhardy to attempt
to fight the fire. I got on my horse and went where I could, gathering my
men." By the time Pulaski
collected 45 men, his voice was nearly gone from trying to shout over the din of
fire, wind and falling trees. Not a tree remained standing out front of the
fire, so great was the wind.
It was nearly impossible to see through the smoke, nearly impossible to move
through the crashing timber. Pulaski
knew, from his prospecting days, that two old mine tunnels were nearby, one
shorter, one longer. He and his men raced for the longer of the two. On the way,
one man was killed by a falling tree. Another
fell behind and was caught by the fire.
"We reached the tunnel just in time," he said. "I ordered the men
to lie face down upon the ground and not dare to sit up, unless they wanted to
suffocate, for the tunnel was filling with fire, gas and smoke."
The mine timbers caught fire. The cold air of the tunnel rushed out, drawn into
the fire. Smoke and fire rushed in. Pulaski
stood at the entrance, assuring those who might try to leave that he would shoot
them, then filling his hat with mine water and throwing it at the burning
timbers.
Today, the most ubiquitous hand tool used in wildland firefighting, a
combination hoe and axe, is named the Pulaski.
Today we also realize that it probably wouldn’t be acceptable to give orders
to subordinates and then threaten to shoot them if they disobey.
Different leadership paradigms exist, and we are engaged in studying them
and adapting them for our own use.
In 1998, a “safety awareness study” was undertaken by the wildland
firefighting agencies. Hundreds of firefighters responded in what was the first
direct survey of its type. Sure
enough, leadership (or the lack of it) was raised as a huge safety issue.
One firefighter made the statement “we understand a lot about the
science of fighting fires, but we understand nothing about people fighting
fires.”
That statement sums up our interagency training approach to date.
We have focused almost exclusively on training in the cognitive domain:
teaching people how to operate pumps, the physics of fire behavior and
firefighting tactics. We have
placed very little emphasis on the affective domain, the so-called “soft
skills”, even though everyone involved in wildland firefighting understands
that without effective leadership firefighting won’t be either effective or
safe.
Our recent focus on leadership development led us to benchmark other
organizations, one of which was the U.S. Marine Corps.
We didn’t really know what to expect when a group of our training
specialists visited the Marine Corps Base at Quantico, Virginia.
Most people expect military leadership to be of the autocratic, top-down
variety, based on our Hollywood image of the military and what we know of how
the concept of “rank” is supposed to work.
What we found was quite different.
Marine officers are students of leadership from their first day as a Marine
onward. Even though the Marines can afford high-tech computer
simulations and other gadgetry, the methods and devices they use to develop
their leaders are elegant in their simplicity.
“Sand tables” are used to model terrain and run a variety of
scenarios where a leader is put “in the hot seat”, making decisions and
explaining them to his peers. They
have a “Leadership Reaction Course” that consists of a series of simple
problems that are devilishly difficult to solve.
Four-person teams with a designated leader are given ten minutes to
“solve” the problem. The leader
is evaluated not on whether he or she solved the problem, but rather on the
leadership skills displayed. The
intent is to assess individual leadership potential, and the Marines feel it
works.
Through the study of history, developmental reading lists, staff rides and a
number of other tools, the Marines are developing their leaders in a
never-ending “pipeline”. In
wildland fire, we want to start doing essentially the same thing, and the need
for it is starkly evident. Last
summer on the Thirtymile Fire in Washington state, four wildland firefighters
died; leadership problems were identified as one of the primary causal factors
in that tragedy.
How do we create our own “leader factory” in the wildland fire community?
We don’t know for sure, but we’re going to try a few things.
We aim to use courses that start developing our leaders beginning at the
“follower” level and keep developing them as they progress to more advanced
levels in the organization. In our environment, it’s important for followers to
understand that they have certain responsibilities for communication, for
example. A follower might pick up
on a subtle environmental cue – for example, a change in wind direction –
that a leader might overlook because he’s otherwise occupied. Yet that subtle cue, and a fire crew’s reaction to it,
might mean the difference between life and death.
We want to stress the importance of leadership values and principles to our
people at all levels. We intend to
articulate those values and adopt a set that is common to all our agencies, and
then incorporate the values into leadership training at all levels.
In the benchmarking work that we did and the literature that we read
while researching leadership, the importance of values surfaced with such
regularity that it could not be ignored.
We want our people to become “students of fire” so that they are familiar
with the history of fire management, its triumphs and tragedies.
This is crucial to us since many of our fatalities are eerily similar in
circumstances to other fatalities that happened in the past.
We know that we repeat our own mistakes, and we want to change that.
Finally, we want to explore productive partnerships with private enterprise and
academia. We recognize that for
complex issues like leadership development, there is no one panacea or model
that will solve all problems. A
combination of the best solutions from a variety of environments seems to us
like it might be pretty effective. We
certainly hope for the best, because our stakes are high.
Note: Larry
Sutton can be reached at laurencesutton@hotmail.com.
Riding
the Wave:
Jeanette McCleannan of Ogilvy Interactive
By John Joseph, Wharton Center for Leadership and Change
Some might refer to it as bold optimism and keen foresight.
Others may suggest dumb luck. Probably
with some combination of both, Jeanette McCleannan, President of Ogilvy
Interactive (a division of Ogilvy & Mather), has ridden the Internet
wave from boom to bust and back, and has managed to stay on top for most of the
ride.
 McCleannan
became involved in “e” well before the mass consumer adoption of the
Internet. As a founding member of
Prodigy Services Company, she grew its membership to one million.
Then, as a founding figure for MapQuest, she built it to one of the top
ten travel-related websites, and subsequently, she moved to Ogilvy Interactive.
McCleannan credits her sense of direction to a personal compass.
Before any career move, she says, “ I ask myself – is this something
I am passionate about, do I believe in the product, can I really grow this
business, can I add value to this company, and do I feel good about the people
I’ll be working with.”
Even at the height of the dotcom frenzy, McCleannan remained skeptical of its
models and prospects. She was
sought by one of more promising startups, GeoCities, but after looking carefully
at its business model, she warned its founders that they’ve “got hell’s
chance to meet these numbers,” and baldly concluded, “I don’t buy it.”
Hindsight suggests that she could have missed the “numbers” and still
made millions, but without a belief in the business, she took a pass.
McCleannan passed up other startup offers too when she examined the revenue
models and didn’t like what she saw under the hood.
But one proved very different: “When
I saw MapQuest,” she recalled, “I knew it was a winner.
I new it intuitively because it had multiple sources of income, it
actually delivered value, and we had many ways to evolve the business.”
After taking MapQuest through a successful initial public offering, McCleannan
moved to the advertising firm, Organic, where she gained a reputation as a savvy
marketer with clients like Tommy Hilfinger.
But when Organic’s top team decided to take itself public, she parted
ways once again. “I didn’t agree with going public – I had already gone
public with MapQuest and I understood how disruptive that process is to a
company and felt it was the wrong thing to do.”
Though the initial public offering promised instant wealth, she opted to
resign before its execution.
McCleannan then moved to Ogilvy Interactive where she found that its parent’s
chairman had paved the way for a new Internet team to work exceptionally well
with the traditional parts of the agency. Given
the reigns, she has taken Ogilvy Interactive from a nascent group to a
powerhouse department that MediaPost recently named “agency of the
year.” Her secret:
“I don’t get jazzed by reading books about leadership, or reading
about Bill Gates. For me it’s how
can I make my people work great. How
I can help them succeed.”
Note: John Joseph can be contacted at John.Joseph.wg01@wharton.upenn.edu.
Leadership
and National Crisis: It’s Everyone’s Business
By Chris Maxwell, Associate Director, Wharton Undergraduate Leadership Program
 The
U.S. Naval Academy brought students from eleven institutions to Annapolis in
January for an intensive look at leadership in a period of crisis.
The Naval Academy has hosted an annual leadership conference for the
military academies since 1984, and this year for the first time it invited
students from nine colleges and universities as well.
The conference opened with General Peter Pace, Vice Chairman of the U.S. Joint
Chiefs of Staff, posing a set of questions to the more than 300 civilian and
military students attending. Looking
forward to your first assignment as a junior officer or company manager, he
asked, what are your leadership responsibilities to your subordinates, peers,
boss, and yourself in the area of counter-terrorism?
How do you get your boss to do the things you know are essential for the
unit or operation – or change his or her mind if you know it’s wrong?
And will you get subordinates to follow you?
 The
participants had been divided into teams of twelve – with both military and
civilian students on each – and the conference organizers asked the teams to
tackle General Pace’s questions. Wharton
School student Jerome Greco, reporting on his team’s deliberations, said an
officer’s or manager’s first leadership responsibilities included
“protecting oneself and subordinates, understanding the situation, sharing
information, and recognizing that people below you will look to you for
answers.”
General Pace concurred, adding: “Know where you are before you take over a new unit.
Do your people need time to recover from the last challenge, or are they
anxious to get out there? Meet your people one on one….
Let them know you care about them as an individual.
With this solid grounding, you can effectively get to the business you
need to address – whether it’s counter-terrorism or day-to-day issues.”
General Pace urged upward attentiveness along with downward communication.
“Ask about your boss’s goals,” he said.
“If he or she can quickly articulate three or four of them, it can help
you. If not, you’ll learn
something important about your boss.”
He added that it is essential to be well prepared in advance of the critical
leadership challenges that lie ahead. They “always come as a surprise,” he said, citing both
his own battlefield experience as a young officer in Vietnam during the Tet
offensive and the terrorist attacks on September 11.
 The
student teams then focused on a case study of security preparations for the 1996
Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta. Based
on their analysis of the past, the teams drew up recommendations for
inter-agency cooperation and leadership during the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in
Salt Lake City, and the conference organizers forwarded the proposals to the
U.S. Office of Homeland Security.
The student teams were subsequently asked to identify the factors key to the
execution of leadership. One of the
teams – whose membership included Michael Waters of Southern Methodist
University, Nick Huber of the U.S. Naval Academy, Mac McGilvroy of the U.S. Air
Force Academy, and Josh Padnick of the University of Pennsylvania – singled
out the establishment of core values and the value of learning from mistakes.
The student participants later heard from former Congressman Dave McCurdy and
Admiral Richard W. Mies, Commander in Chief, U.S. Strategic Command.
Ken and Carol Adelman’s “Movers and Shakespeares” highlighted
leadership lessons from Henry V, and concluded with a rousing skit by a
student team in Elizabethan costume.
Near the end of the conference,
Nick Huber, a midshipman and company commander, reflected:
“I think we learn best from seeing good leaders and hearing about
different approaches that have helped to shape their lives.
What I’d like to take from the conference and apply is the concept of
really knowing your people and the environment you’re working in.” Colonel
Jose Picart, Professor of Psychology at the U.S. Military Academy, observed that
the conference allowed “some of America’s best and brightest students to
focus their thinking on leadership in a national crisis.”
Note: Chris
Maxwell can be contacted at maxwellc@wharton.upenn.edu,
and information on the conference is available at http://prodevweb.prodev.usna.edu/LEL/Conference.
The participating military academies were the U.S. Air Force Academy,
U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, U.S. Military Academy, and the U.S. Naval Academy;
the participating universities were Duke University, Maine Maritime Academy,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Southern Methodist University, Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute, University of Nebraska, University of Maryland,
University of Richmond, and the Wharton School of the University of
Pennsylvania.
Conferences:
Corporate Governance, Innovative
Leadership, and Leading in All Directions
Corporate Governance Developments and the New Tools of Governance
Birmingham Business School in the U.K. launches its new Centre for Corporate
Governance Research with a governance conference on July 9, 2002.
The conference focuses on governance ratings, executive compensation, social
indices, electronic voting, and institutional investors. Papers are invited by April 12, speakers include Ariyoshi
Okumura from Japan, Howard Sherman from the U.S., and Sir Adrian Cadbury from
the U.K. Further information
is available here.
Innovative Leadership Forum
Harvard Business School Publishing offers a forum on “Innovative
Leadership” in San Francisco on February 28-March 1, 2002. The organizers note:
“Dogmatic, command-and-control leadership went out in the 1990s.
What replaced it
– knowledge
sharing, agility, flattened hierarchies, and decentralization – has
been difficult for many to master. Now companies need to explore new ways
to build organizations and encourage leadership that fosters innovation,
explores new opportunities and takes risks. This event will step into the
passionate debate about which leadership qualities will create a company – and
a legacy – that will endure.” Spekers
include Warren Bennis, Daniel Goleman, and Ronald Heifetz, and further
information can be found here.
Leading in All Directions
The Wharton School offers a conference on “Leading in All Directions” in
Philadelphia on June 5, 2002. The
organizers write: “Lateral leadership –
leveraging your partners' strengths instead of directing subordinates' actions – is required for achieving results when managers have no authority to
guarantee them. Upward leadership – taking charge when you’re
not formally in charge – is essential as well.
For these
distinct forms of leadership to work well, they'll require inward self-assurance
and personal self-confidence. Leadership, then, should be viewed as a
four-pronged capacity – downward,
outward, upward, and inward. But building that capacity is a challenge,
and the sixth annual Wharton Leadership Conference is devoted to exchanging
ideas on how leadership for all directions and a supporting culture can best be
developed.” Information is
available at here.
Copyright
© 1996-2002, Wharton Center for Leadership and Change Management,
University of Pennsylvania.
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