|
WHARTON LEADERSHIP DIGEST
May, 2001, Volume
5, Number 8
Contents
Making
Music and Learning Leadership:
Cassatt String Quartet
Learning
from the U.S. Marine Corps:
Combat and Leadership Courses
After the Merger:
Retaining Top Talent
E-Business Leadership:
What Is Needed
New
Economy Management:
Building Business in the Electronic Age
Leadership
Quote:
Bain’s Orit Gadiesh on Distributing Power
Making
Music and Learning Leadership:
Cassatt String Quartet
By Susan Leshnower, Adjunct Faculty, Midland College,
Texas
 Leaders
are made not born.
So say members of the Cassatt String Quartet (CSQ) who teach
leadership through chamber music – a non-traditional approach.
They believe that playing chamber music sharpens leadership skills.
Leaders are developed by learning behavioral and ensemble skills – creating a
vision, communicating effectively while being an active listener, initiating
change, taking risks, and building trust.
Creating a
Vision:
Successful leadership begins with a vision, which reflects the
ensemble’s shared purpose. Stories
teach this idea – the stonecutters’ tale:
The first stonecutter says, “I’m cutting stone,” the second says,
“I’m carving a cornerstone,” but the third says, “I’m building a
concert hall.” The third has
vision. Where do students see
themselves – the school orchestra, a competition, or Carnegie Hall? For any
ensemble, discussing goals, objectives and vision unifies the performance
approach.
Communicating Effectively: Once students have a goal, the Cassatts teach both verbal and
non-verbal methods of communicating. Problem
solving and decision-making begin with clear, open communication.
The CSQ discusses musical ideas and performance strategies in a
democratic fashion to reveal feelings, explore assumptions, and build common
ground. They value all members’
input without diminishing conflicting views.
CSQ students are asked to offer a performance strategy, which in turn
improves their critical thinking skills. Non-verbal
communication also develops leadership by allowing groups to interpret signals
and messages through body language. Leaders
communicate through eye contact, upper body movement, or a nod.
Active Listening:
A good listener devotes attention, energy, and skill to grasping and
interpreting the genuine meaning of messages.
Good quartet skills are defined by the Cassatts as the art of listening
and matching – listening and matching sound, articulation, vibrato, bow
direction and bow speed. Listening
helps gather information, and as the Cassatts’ explain synergy to their
students – four heads are better than one!
Initiating
Change:
Leadership is achieved through influence.
Since leadership centers around creating change, any member can be a
change agent. The first violin,
typically the leader, becomes a follower when another instrument leads.
Working well in a chamber group requires members to anticipate change and
not fear it. Musicians must
initiate and respond quickly to change. Quartet
members influence one another because leaders and followers rotate, and this
flexibility fosters good teamwork.
Risk
Taking:
As chamber music performers overcome fears by taking risks, they build
self-esteem, a valuable leadership capacity.
Those high in self-esteem take risks.
Quartet playing especially encourages risk-taking because four individual
voices face the audience, with no place to hide!
The Cassatts teach students risk-taking skills by letting each instrument
set the tempo.
Building
Trust:
Quartet members are
independent yet collective – a
cohesive team which shares leadership roles. Quartet members are mutually and
individually accountable; the quartet develops a team vision with mutual goals.
Quartet members must learn trust. Building
trust starts with simple behaviors that underscore commitment and loyalty to the
group, such as coming to rehearsal early or practicing in advance.
Leadership skills create ownership and pride in the quartet and enhance
the satisfaction of playing chamber music.
Note:
Susan Leshnower can be reached at zippo@earthlink.net,
and information on the Cassatt String Quartet is available at www.cassattquartet.com.
Learning
from the U.S. Marine Corps:
Combat and Leadership Courses 
 By
Stephen Lessar and Jason Cummins, Wharton MBA Students (WG ’02)
As the
chartered buses pulled into the dark, desolate parking lot of the Marine Corps
Officer Candidate School, the initial student excitement quickly turned to
silent apprehension. For in the
distance, the unfamiliar site of seven waiting drill instructors slowly began to
appear. While many may question
what a Wharton MBA student has in common with a Marine Corps officer candidate,
one answer is rather apparent. Both
attend institutions training them to be leaders in their chosen fields.
Moreover, there is at least one other noteworthy similarity:
Each now knows what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a drill
instructor’s wrath.
On April 19-20, 2001
approximately 85 Wharton students, including those in the MBA, executive MBA,
and undergraduate programs, traveled to the U.S. Marine Corps’ Officer
Candidate School (OCS) in Quantico, Virginia as part of Wharton Leadership
Ventures. The day and a half trip,
sponsored by Lehman Brothers and organized by the Wharton Veterans Club, was
designed to provide Wharton students an insider’s view of how the Marines
train their junior leaders. OCS,
effectively “boot camp for officers,” evaluates the leadership potential of
college graduates who aspire to be Marine officers.
Wharton students signed up for the trip hoping to understand how to apply
military leadership lessons to today’s business environment.
Upon arrival in
Quantico, the Marine drill instructors immediately took charge of their new
“recruits.” The students were
issued equipment including kevlar helmets and canteens and quickly hustled
inside the barracks for a crash course on making a bed to Marine standards.
After this hour-long welcome, the drill instructors marched the students
to a briefing by Colonel George Flynn, the commander of OCS.
Colonel Flynn explained that having the drill instructors create an
unfamiliar, chaotic environment is important because it allows officer
candidates to be evaluated under extremely stressful situations.
An audible sigh of relief filled the auditorium when Colonel Flynn
informed the students that the “basic training” portion of their visit was
over – the drill instructors would assume a mentoring role for the duration of
the students’ stay.
Friday morning began
with a 5:00 AM wake-up and a typical military breakfast:
scrambled eggs and strong coffee. Following
breakfast, students divided into 4-5 person teams, linked up with their Marine
facilitator, and moved to the Combat Obstacle Course. As its name implies, this course is a series of progressively
more difficult obstacles which challenge students to scale 20-foot walls,
traverse ravines using a single rope, and crawl through the “Quigley,” a 100
foot stretch of frigid water and mud. Each
Marine completed every obstacle with his or her team, motivating the students to
complete the physically demanding course and demonstrating the importance of
leading by example.
Said one second year
MBA student: “The basic
principle of ‘lead by example’ means little when read in a theoretical
article. However, the point was driven home when 50 Marines spent over
an hour leading us through the Combat Course.
This ahieved a high level of commitment for us to jump into the mud and
complete the course. This was a real-life demonstration that leading by example
is effective in motivating others!”
From there, students
transitioned to the Leadership Reaction Course (LRC).
Consisting of a series of 20 problem-solving exercises – each contained
in a walled-off area the size of a racquetball court – the LRC evaluates an
individual’s ability to guide a small group in the solution of a difficult
problem in an uncertain environment. Solving
the problem is secondary to how the leader demonstrates an understanding of
sound leadership principles while executing the task.
One particularly difficult exercise, for example, required student teams
to transport a 55-gallon drum across a twelve-foot river using only 3 wooden
planks, none of which was long enough to reach the other side.
Each LRC event was
followed by a thorough debrief led by the team’s Marine facilitator.
The student leader first evaluated his or her performance while
explaining the thought process behind each decision. After feedback from the group, the team’s facilitator
offered his or her insights including potential solutions to the problem.
Key learning points from the LRC were the importance of quick thinking
and decisiveness in time sensitive situations, as well as flexibility and
risk-taking when operating in an uncertain environment.
The Wharton Leadership
Venture culminated with dinner at the Quantico Officers’ Club.
After dinner, several distinguished speakers, including active and
retired Marine officers, addressed the Wharton participants on the subject of
“leadership and decision making under uncertainty and complexity.”
While all the speakers were exceptional, especially noteworthy were Major
General Clifford L. Stanley and Brigadier General (Retired) Thomas V. Draude.
Major General Stanley, Commanding General, Marine Corps Base Quantico,
illustrated the importance of caring for those you work with by sharing how the
Marine Corps rallied around him during a devastating family tragedy.
Brigadier General (Retired) Draude, currently Senior Vice President of
USAA insurance company, detailed how the leadership skills developed in the
Marine Corps have served him well in the private sector.
While there were no
immediate volunteers for the next OCS class at Quantico, each of the Wharton
participants expressed a newfound respect for the Marines’ approach to
leadership training. The Wharton
Leadership Venture effectively captured the essence of Marine Corps leadership
while providing Wharton students with a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
The fundamental principles of Marine Corps leadership are not only
applicable on the battlefields of our nation’s wars, but also in the
boardrooms of global corporations.
Note:
Stephen Lessar can be reached at lessars@wharton.upenn.edu
and Jason Cummins at marcjc@wharton.upenn.edu.
Information on the program can be found at http://leadership.wharton.upenn.edu/l_change/trips/Corps.shtml,
and information on Wharton Leadership Ventures is available at http://leadership.wharton.upenn.edu/l_change/trips/index.shtml.
After the Merger:
Retaining Top Talent
Researchers
Jeffrey A. Krug (University of Illinois) and W. Harvey Hegarty (Indiana
University) followed the careers of top managers of 200 acquired companies for
six years after the acquisition. They
compared the movers with the stayers, the managers who left versus those who
remained after the merger.
Two-thirds
of the executives had departed within five years, and the investigators found
that the managers were most likely to depart when
o
they held a very senior position
o a foreign firm acquired their
company
o they believed that the acquirer
did not understand their firm’s culture.
The
researchers also reported that the better the communication between the two
companies, the more likely were the post-merger managers to depart.
Evidently, when communication was good, many of the managers did not like
what they heard.
By
implication, good communication by management of the acquiring firm will not
itself contribute to retention of top talent in the acquired company.
The greatest risk comes when companies acquire across national
boundaries, but whatever the nationalities, the acquirer will need to appreciate
the distinctive culture of the target if its best talent is to be retained.
Source:
Jeffrey A. Krug and W. Harvey Hegarty, “Predicting Who Stays and Leaves
After an Acquisition: A Study of
Top Managers in Multinational Firms,” Strategic Management Journal 22,
2001, pp. 185-196.
E-Business Leadership:
What Is Needed
 Forrester
Research’s Tom Pohlmann and three colleagues surveyed 546 managers on their
views of the Internet. The managers were based in a diverse array of companies,
one-third with annual revenues of less than $100 million, two-fifths with
revenues of more than $1 billion. Only
one in eight of the managers held a specific e-commerce role; the others, a
traditional management role.
In responding to a question
about the skills that are “very important for being an effective leader in the
digital economy,” more than half of the managers pointed to five capacities:
o
Communicating effectively
o Retaining talented employees
o Motivating employees
o Dealing with accelerating rate of
change
o Setting strategic direction in
the face of ambiguity
The president of a utility
company observed, “eBusiness has dramatically transformed both the supply side
and the sell side of our company – requiring intense communication across
organizations. I have had to speak
with every single manager in the company at length about what the Net means for
them.”
The chief executive of a
software and services company offered:
“All employees demand more communication from me – such as monthly
updates on how we are doing. I’m
constantly selling them on our corporate direction just to retain them.”
While the surveyed managers
placed a premium on such skills, many were critical of their own capacities to
develop them in a timely fashion. An
executive vice president of a financial services company confessed:
“We don’t have a topnotch development program. Great programs take 11 months to build, but by that time
we’re looking for a different type of leader.”
The results pointed to the
importance of “distributed leadership,” managers throughout the firm who
appreciate company strategy and make decisions on behalf of it.
One method for building such leadership is to place large numbers of
managers on projects teams for e-business initiatives.
Source:
Tom Pohlmann with Bobby Cameron,
Emily Jastrzembski, and Mary Lynn Pulley, Building eBusiness Leadership
(Forrester Research, 2001). Tom
Pohlmann can be contacted at TPohlmann@forrester.com.
new
economy management:
Building Business in the Electronic Age
By
John Joseph, Research Associate, Wharton
Center for Leadership and Change
 Harvard
Business School Professor D. Quinn Mills prescribes a business and leadership
strategy to help firms succeed in the increasingly global and digital
marketplace. Successful leadership,
Mills argues in his new book, e-Leadership: Guiding Your Business Success in
the New Economy, is built around four concepts:
business array, organizational lattice, global mindset, and strategic
speed.
Business Array:
An array is a hybrid of informal and formal alliances along the value
chain, and it consists of organizations that in “working for themselves also
work toward a common objective.” The
personal computer industry hosts a number of such arrays:
Microsoft, Intel and IBM along with their respective retailers constitute
one; Apple and Motorola are another. The
key for company leaders is to position their firm properly within this array to
build brand and extract value.
Organizational Lattice: When operating within an array, firms require a lattice
design, characterized by an architecture for creating, leveraging, deploying,
and using knowledge across geographic boundaries.
Global Mindset:
Rooted in the organization’s culture, a global mindset entails making
the best use of a firm’s knowledge assets and diverse workforce.
To promote a global mindset, firms screen out people who are not flexible
and champion those who are.
Strategic Speed:
Strategy is viewed as a continuous, iterative process, and moving swiftly
from concept to implementation is vital.
Mills reminds readers that in
an environment of diverse nationalities, virtual communication, and frequent
mergers, nothing substitutes for a level head and emotional strength.
He sums it up with Napoleon’s assessment of military leadership:
“The first quality of a General-in-Chief is to have a cool head which
receives exact impression of things, which never gets heated, which never allows
itself to be dazzled or intoxicated, by good or bad news.”
Note:
D. Quinn Mills, e-Leadership: Guiding Your Business Success in the New
Economy (Prentice-Hall, 2001). John
Joseph can be contacted at John.Joseph.wg01@wharton.upenn.edu.
Leadership
quote: Bain’s
Orit Gadiesh on Distributing Power
“As
organizations get larger and reach further an era of turbulence, the challenge
of appropriately distributing power to propel corporate strategy becomes
enormous. The Internet can bring
the frontline to the boardroom, but today’s operators need mandates, not
directives, to seize opportunities.
This
means 21st century leaders face the daunting task of both decentralizing
decision-making and ensuring coherent, strategic action.
They need leadership tools to connect corporate strategy to frontline
decisions that create competitive advantage.”
Source:
Orit Gadiesh is chair of Bain & Co., and her commentary appears in Leadership
Opus: Access and Influence in the 21st Century (Heidrick & Struggles,
2001).
Copyright ©
1996-2001, Wharton Center for Leadership and Change Management,
University of Pennsylvania.
|
