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WHARTON
LEADERSHIP DIGEST
March,
2004,
Volume 8, Number 6
CONTENTS
Capturing the Spirit of Opportunity:
Leadership Lessons from the Mars Missions
Leadership Conferences: March 23 in San Francisco and June 2 in
Philadelphia
Leadership Decisions: The Perils of a Demanding
Executive Job
Leadership and Credibility: You Are Only As
Good as Your Reputation
Bedrock Leadership: A Timeless Value in a
Changing World
Recognizing Young Leadership: The Admiral
LeMoyne Award
Capturing the
Spirit of Opportunity: Leadership
Lessons from the Mars Missions
Was there water on Mars? Could it have supported life? For centuries,
people have speculated about such questions. Since the beginning of
this year, though, when two unmanned rovers, Spirit and Opportunity,
landed on the red planet, real answers have begun to appear based on the
streams of data that the robots have been beaming back to earth. This
month Spirit and Opportunity found evidence of Martian water in layers
of volcanic rock.
 Sending robots to explore another world -- though it may sound like
stuff out of Star Trek -- is a massive, complex exercise. It is
also part of regular job descriptions at the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California.
Its director, Charles Elachi, is also vice president of the California
Institute of Technology, where he is a professor of electrical
engineering and planetary science. He is the author of more than 230
publications in the fields of space and planetary exploration. Elachi
has received numerous awards, including the NASA Outstanding Leadership
Medal (2002).
Charles Elachi will speak at the Wharton Leadership
Conference in San Francisco on March 23. The conference is focused on
Leading in an Era of Uncertainty and Change.
In a discussion with
Michael Useem, director of
Wharton's Center for Leadership and Change Management and editor of
the Wharton Leadership Digest, Elachi discusses the challenges of
leadership and teamwork involved in carrying out missions in outer space
-- and what lessons they might have for companies on earth.
What follows in an except from the full interview
compiled by Knowledge@Wharton editor Mukul Pandya, and the unabridged
version can be found
here.
Useem: President Bush has just announced a
new set of initiatives to be undertaken by NASA to establish a lunar
base and manned missions to Mars. How has this impacted the Jet
Propulsion Lab and you in particular?
Elachi: The president's announcement has
put in place a policy that will lead to sustained human and robotic
exploration of the solar system. The key point here is the word
"sustained." This is a different perspective than engaging in a big
contest like we did during the 1960s, when we raced to the moon to show
that our capabilities were better than the Russians'. This is a more
grounded, long-term approach based on scientific and exploration
objectives. That is what we do at JPL. We have already had a sustained
program of robotic exploration.
Useem: The Mars missions have generated
tremendous public interest in NASA and the JPL. On television last month
you said that the JPL website has had several billion visits in the past
month. What explains this tremendous interest in the Mars missions?
What impact will that have on some of your current and long-term
projects?
Elachi: Last month we had more than 5.3
billion hits on our website. Clearly, the effect of the Mars missions
has been extremely positive. To give you some more details, we also had
42 million unique visitors to our web site -- of which roughly 40% were
international. Obviously, there is very broad-based interest in these
issues. The level of interest shows how exciting space exploration is
to millions of people around the world....
It is good to know that people believe what we do really counts, because
getting these missions going involves a lot of hard work. People
dedicate years of their careers to make these missions successful, and
it is very encouraging to see how interested people around the world are
in these efforts.
Going forward, a proactive Mars program has been
laid out for the next 15 years. We will conduct missions every two
years. That is when we can go to Mars because of celestial mechanics;
our planets are aligned every 26 months. For the foreseeable future
during the next 10 years, we will have missions lined up to do more
aggressive things.
Useem: I have a question about the enormous
public interest in the work you are doing. I am sure it has been a very
morale-boosting experience for your staff, but it can also be very
distracting. Could you talk about what is involved in finding the right
balance, and what you have to do every day to keep JPL hard at work?
Elachi: I have to maintain that balance all
the time. The director of an institution like JPL has to play two key
roles. The first involves dealing with the external world. For
example, we have to work with the NASA headquarters to develop long-term
strategic plans for JPL. In addition, we have to deal with
representatives of Congress to ensure they are fully informed about our
work. And we must deal with the public, because ultimately the public
is the judge of whether tax-payer money is being used in a positive and
appropriate way. That means we need to share the message about the
benefits of our programs with our external environment.
The second role is internal. It involves ensuring
that our projects are being conducted correctly from a technical
standpoint and making sure we have the right infrastructure, talent and
facilities. We also have to make sure that our employees are well
trained, with the right background and experience. We have to create an
environment in which we bring in exciting work, gather the best talent,
and allow our people to excel. Ultimately, these things are done by the
employees. I don't sit down and build the hardware. My job in
management is to create an environment and background where employees
can excel, while also bringing to bear the experience of past missions.
Typically the way we do that is to bring senior people to work with the
younger generation. That allows us to avoid past mistakes and also to
capitalize on previous successes. This is a balancing act that the
senior managers and I have to do all the time.
Useem: In early January Spirit, one of the
Mars rovers, began to malfunction just as Opportunity, the second rover,
was about to land on Mars. You had a Spirit team that was undoubtedly
working frantically to correct the problems. What steps did you need to
take so that the teams' energy, focus and motivation were effectively
applied to solve the problems?
Elachi: One thing I keep telling people is
that you have to have nerves of steel. Everyone involved in the project
has to keep calm and composed so that we can think clearly about what is
happening. Anyone who panics under pressure is just in the wrong
business. We operate under very heavy pressure, with the knowledge that
many critical things are riding on our decisions. So we tell people
right from the beginning that they should be prepared for problems that
will occur. That helps them to be calm and composed under heat.
Useem: When you need people with iron
stomachs, is that a matter of selecting the right people?
Elachi: It is a combination of selecting
the right people and preparing them for what to expect. We know that
problems are going to happen. People have been through similar
pressure, though it is not as intense when it actually happens. For
example, when the rovers were getting ready for launch, things did get
very compressed towards the end. There always are delays, and you find
small problems at the last minute. The key thing is to get people
trained to keep calm. If someone tends to get very excited too quickly,
we usually don't put such a person in a lead role.
The other process we follow is to have senior people work on projects so
that they can carefully review everything with several checks and
balances. We do a lot of peer reviewing. We bring in people who have
been involved in the program but not on a day-to-day basis, and who have
technical depth, to look into new ideas that may be proposed to solve
problems. As soon as we saw that Spirit had developed problems, we
called upon a number of technical experts at JPL to help the team with
the issue.
We divided the team into two groups. One focused on Spirit, and the
other focused on Opportunity, which was landing the following day. That
is how we ensured that the landing mission could get appropriate
attention.
As for Spirit, one of the first concerns we had was
whether it had any consumables on board, such as battery power. Once we
had stabilized that, we were free to focus on other problems. It's
similar to the approach a surgeon might take. The first priority is to
make sure the patient is stable, so that you can calmly diagnose where
the problem lies.
Useem: Thinking about those qualities in a personal sense, you
obviously have to have nerves of steel yourself, and also the capacity
to make quick decisions in a fast-moving setting. Your career is very
interesting -- you have a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and sciences
and geology as well as an MBA from the University of Southern
California. You have navigated a rather diverse terrain. W hat
qualities did it take to navigate that terrain as well as to run JPL?
Elachi: In a highly technical institution such as this, on the
one hand you need to have a lot of depth in a certain area or field.
That is how you gain the respect of the engineers. The only way to
manage imaginative people is if they respect you. You cannot dictate to
them by military order. Smart people don't take that kind of treatment.
So you need to win their respect by having deep expertise in a certain
discipline. My work in synthetic aperture radars and radar technology
-- and the international recognition I got in these fields -- helped me
get respect for being technically knowledgeable. On the other hand, the
MBA and geology studies helped me to develop a broad background. Even
though I am not an expert in each and every discipline, at least I have
reasonable knowledge about them. When I look at the project budget
sheet, my eyes don't glaze over. I do understand what it means, even
though I'm not a business expert. Having that combination of breadth
and depth is essential.
Another important factor is that employees must really feel that they
can rely on your leadership. I do care about the employees, and they
see it. I go out of my way to meet with them. I made a resolution that
every year, every employee would have a chance to meet with me, even
though we have 5,500 employees. I line up meetings with groups of
employees every week. They know I care and want to hear their concerns.
Whenever I get any input from employees, I assure them that some action
will be taken. The action might be that I don't agree with them, and so
we may not make any changes, but they always get a response.
Useem: JPL is a long-term organization; your missions run over
years, and for missions to Mars you need to plan over a couple of
decades. How do you develop new generations of people at JPL who can
master all the art and science that goes with that?
Elachi: We have a process to do that.
Every quarter, the senior management team develops a series of lists.
One is of potential project managers -- that means people who have been
building some experience and who have the leadership capacity to lead a
project. We also have a list of fast risers -- these are people whom we
see being on a very fast track because of their talent, energy and so
on. We look at those lists -- they might have about 100 people -- and
go one by one over what these people have done. We decide what future
assignments they should be given so that we can enhance their talent and
capability, and we keep track of them.
We don't hesitate to put relatively young people in positions of great
responsibility. For example, on the Mars team, the average age is in
the early thirties. There are people in their mid- to late- 20s who are
mission managers, and people who have lots of experience. We mix people
with a lot of experience with younger people. A project manager might
be in his mid to late 50s, with a lot of project experience, while the
deputy may be in the late 30s. The mission managers are in the late 20s
or early 30s. In this way, by identifying people who have high
potential and positioning them proactively to ensure that they spend
some time handling different kinds of responsibilities -- that is how
you build them. You can't get people who have nerves of steel under high
pressure by attending a course or reading a book. You can only get that
through training.
Let me give you another illustration. We do
tolerate people failing. When we had the Mars failure in 1998, my
statement to the senior people was that "We have spent $400 million
training you. You have to learn from those mistakes, and I'm sure you
will not repeat them." Of the two lead people on that project, one is
the deputy project manager for Spirit and Opportunity. The other person
is heading a series of missions for JPL. The reason is that these
people did not fail because they were dumb. They failed for a lot of
other factors -- such as pressure on the budget, lack of personnel to
maintain oversight over contractors, and so on. Their failure was not
because of their lack of talent or because they made stupid mistakes.
It was because of the constraints under which they had to operate.
That is how we look at failure. Normally, when a project fails, people
look around for someone to blame. But if you hang the person who made
the mistake, you've also lost a lot of experience.
Useem: What do you see as the major
accomplishment of the Mars missions?
Elachi: If I were to look back upon the Mars
missions 10 years from now, I would hope to say that these missions
opened the doors to a permanent presence on Mars. Between the two
Spirits and two Orbiters, we could say this is the first time for
humankind to have a permanent presence on another planet. It is
robotic, but still it is a permanent presence -- similar to the kind we
have in Antarctica, where we now have permanent stations to do
scientific investigations. These are humanity's first steps in that
direction.
Leadership Conferences:
March 23 in San Francisco and June 2 in Philadelphia
The annual
Wharton Leadership Conferences in Philadelphia and San Francisco are
focused this year on "Leading in an Era of Uncertainty and Change."
The San
Francisco speakers includes Charles Elachi, Director of the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory; Lewis Platt, Chairman of Boeing and former CEO of
Hewlett-Packard; David Pottruck, CEO of Charles Schwab; Jeffrey R.
Rodek, CEO of Hyperion; and Sherron Watkins, former VP of Enron. For
information and online registration, click
here.
The
Philadelphia speakers include John A. Byrne, Editor-in-Chief, Fast
Company; Douglas Conant, CEO of Campbell Soup; Jay S. Fishman, CEO
of The St. Paul Companies; Admiral Harold Gehman, Chair of the Columbia
Accident Investigation Board; Jamie Gorelick, National Commission on
Terrorist Attacks Upon the U.S.; Marilyn Carlson Nelson, CEO of Carlson
Companies. For information and online registration, click
here.
Leadership Decisions: The Perils of a Demanding Executive Job
By Donald Hambrick, Pennsylvania State
University; Sydney Finkelstein, Dartmouth College; and Ann Mooney,
Stevens Institute of Technology
 
Executive jobs vary widely in their difficulty.
Some executives, for instance, operate in munificent environments, lead
companies that have well-fortified (sometimes even monopoly) positions,
and are supported by highly capable colleagues, while other executives
have none of these comforts. In our recent research, we build on
concepts in psychology to explore the concept of executive job demands,
including its major determinants and key implications for strategic
choices and leadership behaviors.
Most executive jobs are demanding, but some are
more demanding than others. Executives encounter varying degrees of
task challenges from environment (e.g., complexity, dynamism) and from
the organization itself (e.g., resource limitations). Executives also
differ in how much performance is required of them. Some are under
enormous performance pressure from powerful owners, boards, and other
constituencies (e.g., employee and customer groups); whereas, others
face few of those pressures. Finally, executives differ in the demands
they place on themselves. Although executives are sometimes portrayed
as uniformly highly motivated to lead their organizations to lofty
outcomes, in actuality they vary widely in their drive to perform.
Factors such as personality, age, and tenure can all affect an
executive's aspirations, and the higher their aspirations, the more job
demands the executive will experience.
When their job gets demanding, executives feel
the pinch. In MBA classes, we portray executives as largely
comprehending their strategic situations and pursuing actions that
logically follow from the situations they face. As executive job
demands increase, however, strategic rationality becomes less possible.
Executives have so much performance pressure, so many decisions to make,
in the face of so much information, that they simply cannot afford -- in
terms of cognitive wherewithal, time, or other resources -- to be
comprehensive in their analyses or search for solutions.
In reaction to high executive job demands,
executives subconsciously or unconsciously take shortcuts. For
example, executives who face high job demands will economize in their
strategic decision-making by relying on their experiences to search for
and interpret information, as well as to select among options. They
will be drawn to what has worked for them before, what they find
familiar, and what fits their pre-existing mindsets. Accordingly,
decisions made by executives who are under significant job demands will
greatly reflect their backgrounds (e.g., functional background,
education, and age) and their psychological dispositions. In contrast,
executives whose jobs are less difficult do not encounter such
information overload or extreme pressures; they take advantage of
greater available time, attention, and other resources to be
comprehensive in their analysis and search for solutions.
Another shortcut executives with demanding jobs
take is to imitate the strategic actions of other firms. We can
expect that highly pressured executives, who lack the capacity to
conduct comprehensive search and analysis, will look to other firms --
those that are similar, visible, or admired -- for signals as to what
might work for their own companies. Imitative action is economical,
because it minimizes search and analysis costs; and, it can easily be
defended, since exemplar companies have given it legitimacy. But the
imitative action may not work well for the firm if it doesn't really fit
the firm's own situation or (as often happens) the executives don't
adequately understand the more subtle elements of the initiative being
copied. Namely, shortcuts taken under pressure may be economical as
acts of decision-making; but, to the extent that they neglect the
objective and detailed realities facing the firm, they will not
necessarily lead to the hoped-for results.
When job demands become extremely high, the
executive's tendency to engage in simplified search, analysis, and
decision-making can give way to outright decision desperation.
Executives who face extraordinary task challenges and performance
pressures will experience stress, as well as the decision flaws that
accompany stress, such as wishful thinking, freezing up, or,
alternatively, lashing out with unusual or far-fetched behaviors. In
short, executives who are under extreme job demands will exhibit more
extreme strategic behaviors, and more vacillation in their strategic
behaviors, than will executives who are under more moderate job demands.
Executives who face high job demands will not
always perform poorly. Sometimes -- by luck, instinct, or skill --
they will perform well. When success occurs for highly pressured
executives, they become supremely confident. This ultra-confidence will
be reflected in the next round of their decisions, often leading to
over-the-top risky actions, such as high-priced acquisitions and large
capital outlays.
Indeed, the potential perils of a demanding
executive job might help explain some of the recent strategic and
ethical debacles we have seen on the American corporate landscape.
While we do not wish to be seen as apologists for the executives'
missteps, it may be that extremely intense job demands may have played a
major role in these problems. Executives in the late 1990s faced
prodigious task challenges and performance challenges, and they were
incentivized in a way that sent their own performance aspirations to
supreme heights.
So what should be done? Well, the starting point
is to grasp the idea that executive job demands can be both too low
and too high. We need to find ways to pull job demands into a
moderate range, perhaps by shrinking the scale and complexity of some
firms, improving executive delegation, and improving executive
selection. Clearly, much work needs to be done to develop practical
prescriptions for executives who face extreme job demands. Our analysis
suggests that job demands, a factor that has gone unacknowledged in
scholarly research on executives, is an instrumental factor in shaping
strategic choices and leader behavior.
Note: This is a summary of the authors'
article, "Executive Job Demands: New Insights for Explaining Strategic
Decisions and Leader Behaviors," forthcoming in the Academy of
Management Review. Donald Hambrick is professor of management at
the Smeal College of Business of Pennsylvania State University and can
be reached at
Dch14@psu.edu; Sydney Finkelstein is professor of management at the
Tuck School of Business of Dartmouth College and can be contacted at
Sydney.Finkelstein@dartmouth.edu; and Ann Mooney is assistant
professor at the Howe School of Technology Management of the Stevens
Institute of Technology and can be reached at
amooney@stevens-tech.edu.
Leadership and Credibility: You Are Only As Good as Your
Reputation
 By Ronald J. Alsop, News Editor and Senior
Writer, Wall Street Journal
You're only as
good as your reputation. That's a lesson many companies and
institutions have painfully learned over the past two years. Scandals
have shaken Americans' trust in institutions and icons from the Catholic
Church to Wall Street and wrecked the images of companies from defunct
Arthur Andersen to WorldCom and Tyco International.
Even now, many companies don't fully understand the
value of a sterling reputation. A good name can enhance business in
good times, protect it during a crisis and, in an instant, be destroyed
by people at the highest or lowest levels of the corporate structure.
People tend to focus on reputation only when there
are troubles and forget about it in sunnier times. But reputation
requires constant vigilance. Companies today are exposed to
unprecedented scrutiny through the Internet and 24-hour all-news
television channels. Business is truly global and information,
especially gossip, travels fast.
Studies have demonstrated the powerful impact of
reputation on profits and stock prices, and yet less than half of all
companies have a formal system for measuring reputation. Whenever I
write about corporate reputation, I am struck by the number of corporate
managers who contact me and confess that they are still struggling to
understand the reputation management process. Many people mistakenly
equate reputation with corporate social responsibility. While certainly
of growing importance, corporate citizenship is but one element of the
equation. Financial performance, the workplace environment, the quality
of products and services, corporate leadership, and vision all figure
heavily into reputation. There is also that elusive emotional bond
between a company and its stakeholders that is central to the most
enduring reputations.
All of the corporate malfeasance not only showed
how precious and fleeting reputation is, but it also demonstrated how
one company's misdeeds can taint an entire industry. Some businesses
with superb reputations have found themselves unfairly lumped with the
pack of fraudulent companies. A news report about an investigation into
alleged problems at a Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical plant in Puerto
Rico put J&J in the company of the accounting-fraud scoundrels. The
company requested a retraction.
Ron Sargent, the CEO of Staples, told me about
visiting a high school in suburban Boston to talk with students and
being appalled by a couple of their questions. "How much money do you
make?" one teen asked, while another wondered, "Do you have a $6,000
shower curtain?", a reference to the extravagant purchases that Dennis
Kozlowski, the former CEO of Tyco, allegedly used company funds to pay
for. Sadly, many admirable corporate officials have been unfairly
tarred by the accounting fraud and executive greed.
The scandals, of course, offer many cautionary
tales about reputation pitfalls. But there is much more to learn from
companies that have long valued their reputations and work hard everyday
to preserve them. Their stories clearly show the value of reputation
management -- how Johnson & Johnson inculcates a sense of integrity
throughout its global workforce, how DuPont vigilantly polices its
200-year-old reputation, how IBM projects a consistent corporate image,
and how Timberland makes social responsibility the essence of its
corporate culture.
If companies ever hope to maximize the value of
their reputations, they must make reputation management a fundamental
part of the corporate culture. Companies should spread the message of
reputation management throughout the organization and make employees
cognizant of how each and every one of them affects reputation on a
daily basis. Reputation must be central to the corporate identity, not
merely clever image advertising and manipulative public-relations ploys.
With reputation management, success is in the
details. FedEx, of course, is well aware that a plane crash or too many
late packages would certainly harm its reputation. But it also works
zealously monitoring everything from the friendliness and responsiveness
of employees to the cleanliness of its white trucks emblazoned with the
FedEx logo.
No doubt the CEO ought to set the tone and be
ultimately accountable for reputation. But reputation management is a
24/7 job. Companies should designate certain managers or departments to
be the primary guardians as GlaxoSmithKline, FedEx and others are doing.
Glaxo, for example, tries to keep employees informed of the company's
perspective so they can answer tough questions about why executive pay
seems so high, why Glaxo performs animal research, and why it charges
more for medicine than some people can afford. With pharmaceutical
companies under siege over the price of drugs, Glaxo believes that it is
especially important now to appoint one person to reflect on what the
world thinks of Glaxo and how it would like the world to see it.
Companies like Glaxo need to take an honest look at
the reasons their reputations are ailing. That doesn't mean the
solutions will be easy, but self-awareness is the first step to
self-improvement. Companies will almost certainly benefit from being
honest about their shortcomings. People are inclined to like both
individuals and companies that admit their faults and apologize. Of
course, they also must demonstrate that they intend to fix the problems
-- and fast.
Too many companies have managed to survive by
living in denial. The major airlines have been slow to address
shortcomings in everything from high fares to employee courtesy. Now,
they are paying the price as carriers like Southwest Airlines and
JetBlue win the loyalty of many disillusioned travelers and develop
stronger reputations.
New government regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley
Act are expected to improve corporate governance and increase
transparency. But to attain a truly outstanding reputation, corporate
America must aspire to go well beyond government regulations. What the
law demands and what the public expects are often two very different
things.
It's apparent that we live in an increasingly
cynical age. People just naturally expect to get spin, not sincerity
from companies, politicians, even their churches. Cynicism was
percolating through the American populace long before most people had
ever heard of Enron. But the scandals of the last two years have
certainly made the cynics feel vindicated and given birth to many new
pessimists. A recent Harris Interactive survey found that a stunning
three-quarters of Americans rate corporate reputation as either "not
good" or "terrible." Clearly, much work remains to be done to repair
reputations. Here are 18 ways for doing so:
1: Maximize your most powerful asset
2: Know thyself -- measure your reputation
3: Learn to play to many audiences
4: Live your values and ethics
5: Be a model citizen
6: Convey a compelling corporate vision
7: Create emotional appeal
8: Recognize your shortcomings
9: Stay vigilant to ever-present perils
10: Make your employees your reputation champions
11: Control the Internet before it controls you
12: Speak with a single voice
13: Beware the dangers of reputation rub-off
14: Manage crises with finesse
15: Fix it right the first time
16: Never underestimate the public's cynicism
17: Remember -- being
defensive is offensive
18: If all else fails, change your name
 Note: Ron Alsop is author of the newly
published The 18 Immutable Laws of Corporate Reputation: Creating,
Protecting, and Repairing Your Most Valuable Asset
(Wall Street Journal
Books/Free Press of Simon & Schuster, March, 2004). Information
on the book is here, and he can be contacted at
ron.alsop@dowjones.com.
bedrock
Leadership: A Timeless Value in a Changing World
 By Mike Eskew, Chairman and CEO, UPS
Part of our jobs as business leaders today is to
restore the confidence of the American public. But before we can take
those critical steps forward to begin reestablishing that trust, we
might take just a few steps back and reclaim something from another
generation of this country's leaders: values.
While I firmly believe the vast majority of
businesses and business leaders do the right thing day in and day out,
there's no denying that all us in the business community have taken a
hit by the highly publicized wrongdoings of a few executives in recent
years.
We live and work in a different world -- and that's
not a bad thing. It's just that in this lightning fast, disposable,
"everything right now" age it's far too easy to lose sight of the most
fundamental elements of fair play -- things such as values.
Values like integrity. That means doing the
right thing -- not the quick, cheap or convenient thing -- but the
right thing.
Values like humility which lead us to take our
jobs, families and communities seriously -- but never ourselves.
Values like leadership that hold you to your word
and make you follow through by doing what you say you're going to do.
And values like respect -- providing opportunity by
treating people fairly and with dignity.
I believe these four bedrock values -- integrity,
humility, leadership and respect -- not only define President Ronald
Reagan, they still serve as a beacon to guide our decision-making in
these complex and challenging times. And that's really what I'd like to
talk about -- those enduring values and their role in today's society.
So, let's start with integrity -- a word that has
gained a lot of attention in recent years -- if only by its absence.
It's a word that speaks to consistency of actions and conviction of
ideals.
You may ask in these times of shifting public
opinion and customer demands, how can values stay consistent? Holding
on to nearly century-old values may seem restrictive, but let me assure
you, it's quite the opposite -- it's liberating.
Take for example the power of humility. Visitors to
the Oval Office saw a plaque on President Reagan's desk that read: "It's
surprising what you can accomplish when no one is concerned about who
gets the credit."
Humility is also a reflection of selflessness --
the belief that we're all part of something much larger than ourselves.
It's all about not being afraid to delegate and in promoting a culture
that speaks in terms of "we" and not "I."
Like Reagan, UPS founder Jim Casey preached a
doctrine of enduring values. He told us that while times and conditions
will -- and indeed should -- cause us to change our strategies, mission,
and even our purpose, the one thing that must never change is our core
values.
Another value under scrutiny today is leadership
itself, or doing what you say you're going to do. Jim Casey believed in
what we call ambidextrous leadership. That is, leadership that starts
with vision on one hand and that possesses the discipline to execute
that vision on the other. That second part of ambidextrous leadership
-- the discipline to execute -- is essential.
During President Reagan's time in office, much of
his vision was passed into law. It was his natural bias for action. As
business leaders, we must follow his example.
We must clearly communicate a vision, so our people
know exactly where we're heading.
We must get buy-in from our people. Everyone must
know why they're important.
Then we must align our business processes and our
interactions with customers around that vision.
But perhaps the most enduring of all values is that
which is ultimately the foundation of the Golden Rule. And that comes
down to respect.
Ronald Reagan respected people and institutions --
and trusted in the innate power of the individual to do the right
thing. He believed each of us possessed the power to do extraordinary
things if given the opportunity and a climate for success.
While President Reagan's four-point formula of
integrity, humility, leadership and respect were shaped in a different
time -- the values themselves remain timeless.
I would argue that they are more relevant today
than they were even a century ago.
I can't think of a better time nor a better place
to rekindle our national discussion about the values and principles that
will keep our nation and our nation's businesses healthy for the next
100 years.
Note: This article is taken from a speech
Mr. Eskew delivered at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on January
28, 2004.
Recognizing Young Leadership: The Admiral LeMoyne Award
 By Perry Martini, Executive Leadership Programs
Director, Academy Leadership
The Admiral Charles LeMoyne Leadership Award was
presented by the Ben Franklin Global Forum in January, 2004 to John
Ferry, Jr., a high-school senior at the Valley Forge Military Academy
and Ashley Yelland, a senior at Quakertown (Pa.) Community High School.
The award is presented annually to high school seniors who have shown
the character, determination and leadership exemplified by the late
Admiral LeMoyne. A 35-year career with the U.S. Navy, LeMoyne had
served as Deputy Commander in Chief of U.S. Special Operations Command.
John Ferry was a top-ranked student at Valley Forge
and has received an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy. Ashley
Yelland was at the top of her Quakertown class and has accepted
admission to Lafayette College. They had led their schools in sports,
student government, and community service. "Leadership was a way of
life for Chuck LeMoyne," observed former U.S. Navy Secretary Gordon R.
England at the award presentation. "Integrity, courage, perseverance,
and love of country and community" characterized the admiral, said
England, and the two students recipients represent in that tradition
"the finest our country has to offer."
Note: Dr. Perry Martini is director of Executive
Leadership Programs for Academy Leadership,
and he can be reached at
pjmartini@comcast.net.
Copyright 1996-2004, Wharton Center for Leadership and Change Management
University of Pennsylvania.
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