February, 1998, Volume 2, Number 5

Best Book: Leadership and Change

Let us know what you consider the best book available on leadership and change. If a work colleague asks for one book to read, what would you recommend? Please submit your suggestions, and we'll list them in the next issue:

Leading through Uncertainty

Drawing on a U.S. Marine-Corps sponsored study, Major John F. Schmitt and psychologist Gary A. Klein assess how military commanders cope with uncertainty. Defined as "doubt that threatens to block action," uncertainty too often leads to actions, they find, that are intended to reduce the associated anxieties rather than the uncertainty itself.

Most strategic surprises, they also observe, do not derive from a lack of information but an inability to draw the right meaning from it. Before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and invasion of Kuwait in 1990, early signals warned of imminent assault but they were misinterpreted. Uncertainty often stems not from poor data but what the data mean.

Schmitt and Klein find that successful military commanders focus of knowing what the data really say. "Effective commanders," they observe, "get beyond the data level quickly and spend more of their time drawing inferences and making projections than collecting and sorting out the facts."

New technologies are providing access to mountains of information. During the first 30 hours of Desert Storm, the command of the Marine Expeditionary Force received 1.3 million electronic messages (along with countless faxes and radio dispatches).

But too many facts can get in the way of sense making. Decision-making performance is found to decline with data overload: The reliability of weather forecasts by experienced weather predictors declines as the amount of information available to them becomes very large.

Preparing for uncertainty: Effective military commanders anticipate uncertainty before they face it. They tend to rely, for instance, on simpler plans requiring fewer assumptions about the future, and they are quicker to alter their plans. They more clearly express the intentions of their plans so that subordinates can better deal with unexpected developments. And when uncertainty is high, they hold more of their forces in reserve.

Reducing uncertainty: Effective commanders go well beyond data collection to reduce uncertainty, devoting more time to the extraction of meaning from the information at hand. They are also exceptional at "decentering" -- taking the view of the enemy to anticipate its actions -- and are better at "structuring the battlefield" -- constraining the enemy's options.

Managing uncertainty: Effective managers exhibit greater than average tolerance for uncertainty, are quicker to act on the basis of less than certain data, and better appreciate that the enemy suffers the same problems of uncertainty. Civil War general U.S. Grant writes of his attack on a Confederate commander: "It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before, but it was one I never forgot afterwards."

Source: John F. Schmitt and Gary A. Klein, "Fighting in the Fog: Dealing with Battlefield Uncertainty,"Marine Corps Gazette , August, 1996, pp. 62-89.

Developing Leadership Inside,
Recruiting From Outside

Many companies are moving from a posture that relies primarily on internal development of leaders to one of "mix management" -- the development of promising young managers within the firm while at the same time leavening the organization with fresh talent from the outside. The Corporate Leadership Council, a Washington-based research firm that serves senior human resources executives at 700 companies, has identified a set of practices for accelerating the recruitment, development, and retention of individuals with high potential for senior leadership. Using information from its member companies and other sources, it finds that:

• A shortage of leadership talent is one of the most important constraints on growth at many companies.
• Many companies are instituting programs of intensive guidance and mentoring for promising managers viewed as prospective "corporate assets."
• Some companies are reaching well below the top management tiers to identify future leaders who are not "imprinted" with the past.
• Best practices for building internal leadership include carefully calibrating the match between the development needs of individual managers and the stretch potential in management positions.
• Even among companies that have traditionally relied upon internal development, growth pressures and increasing labor market fluidity are forcing them outside their walls. (Four major high-technology companies, for instance, now recruit 30 to 75% of their mid-level executives from outside).
• The more aggressive recruiters of outside talent are actively tracking high-potential managers at other firms. Technology companies are leading the charge with sophisticated internet-based search devices.
• A new challenge facing some companies is how to retain their "key value creators" in light of the resulting "talent wars" among firms. (At one aerospace firm, the turnover rate among exempt employees is 10% -- but among high-potential managers has reached 30%.)

The study includes data from a number of surveys on leadership talent. One asked firms to identify the main reasons for failure among newly appointed leaders. The leading causes: 82% reported that the new leader "failed to build partnership with peer and subordinates"; 58% said they were "unclear or confused about role expectations"; and 50% reported they "lacked requisite political savvy." In another survey, executives said that their own single most pressing leadership development priority (among a dozen considered) is to "assess the company's leadership talent against current and future competitive challenges."

Source: Corporate Leadership Council, Shortage Across the Spectrum; The Next Generation: Accelerating the Development of Rising Leaders; and Forced Outside: Leadership Talent Sourcing and Retention (Washington, DC: The Advisory Board Company, 1998). Contact: Alexander C. Kleinman at <kleinmana@advisory.com>.

Management Basics

Wharton Executive Education is offering a two-week program on "The Essentials of Management." Divided into two five-day sessions separated by a month, the program focuses on the basics of finance, marketing, strategy, and leadership under the direction of Joseph Harder. The program is presented on May 10-15 + June 7-12, and November 29 - December 4 + January 10-15.

Information: execed@wharton.upenn.edu and http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/execed/eecat/eom.html

"There is an apocryphal story of a physician who was offered a leadership position for $160,000 a year. He replied, 'I'll take the job, but for $80,000. The other $80,000 is for all the times you want me to do things and I say no.'"

"Many leaders see opportunities nearly everywhere; indeed...many of us are not satisfied with achieving because we know that we have within us the ability to overachieve."

"I have struggled to modify the expectations others concerning my performance, so that the impossible is not deemed to be the ordinary, and so successes can be appreciated rather than focusing on failures."

Source: Mark Linzer, MD, "Leaders or Lemmings?" Journal of the American Medical Association, February 4, 1998, p. 279.