|
September, 2008,
Volume 12, Number
11
By Knowledge@Wharton
On the Verge of Change: Giving
Muslim Women the Confidence to Lead
By Knowledge@Wharton
Peak Paradigms: Mountain
Metaphors of Leadership and Teamwork
By Edwin Bernbaum
Dispatch from Omaha Beach: How
Video Games Can Teach Leadership
By Michael Lewis
Mayfield-Brown
Research Brief: Which CEO
Characteristics Matter?
By Mark Hanna
Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of
the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business
By Jeff Howe
K2 Case Study: Leadership on
the “Savage” Mountain
From the Leadership Digest editor
PERSEVERING THROUGH THE STORM:
Radian Group's S.A. Ibrahim on
Leadership in the Subprime Crisis
By
Knowledge@Wharton
In June 2007, the stock price of Radian Group was at
$64 a share, close to its all-time high and Radian was
moving toward a merger with a fellow mortgage insurer
that would have created an almost $12 billion company.
One year later, the merger was off, Radian share
prices were in steep decline -- tumbling below $1 a
share early this month -- and Standard & Poor's had
downgraded the group's credit rating from A- to BBB. The
sub-prime mortgage crisis had hit hard.
 In the midst of this crisis, S.A. Ibrahim, CEO of
Radian, a Philadelphia-based credit risk management
firm, honored a commitment he had made 12 months ago to
speak about leadership at the recent
12th Annual Wharton Leadership Conference. "On
reflection," Ibrahim said with a self-deprecating laugh,
"What could be more relevant than hearing about
leadership from someone in the middle of a multitude of
challenges?"
For the complete article, originally published on
July 23, 2008, please click
here.
ON THE VERGE
OF CHANGE: Giving Muslim Women the Confidence to
Lead
By Knowledge@Wharton
When
Zehre Avci, a daughter of Turkish immigrants in Belgium,
was nine years old, she was sent to buy a coffin for her
grandmother, who had just passed away. "I was crying,"
she recalled. But she had to go, because "there was no
one else to translate." As a young teen, she led Turkish
immigrant women with abusive husbands to get help for
the same reason: There was no one else taking on the
challenge.
 Avci,
now in her early thirties, said those experiences --
doing what others cannot or will not do -- inspire her
current work in Brussels, where she has joined a social
services agency dedicated to bridging the religious,
social and economic gaps between immigrant women, many
of them Muslim, and the wider Belgian population.
Like the more than 20 other Muslim women from around the
world who gathered in Washington, D.C., this summer for
a law and leadership program, Avci's vision involves
both leading her own Muslim community in more
egalitarian directions and pushing for a deeper
understanding of Muslims by Western society. The group
of women received advice from a
range of instructors how to realize their ambitious goals in
the face of their unique challenges.
The three-week
course, which brought together women of various ages
from Belgium, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and the
U.S., was organized by the Washington, D.C.-based
non-profit Karamah: Muslim Women Lawyers for Human
Rights.
F or the complete article, originally published
August 6, 2008, please click
here.
PEAK
PARADIGMS: Mountain Metaphors of Leadership and
Teamwork
By Edwin Bernbaum
 Dynamic, effective leaders know how
to inspire others with a vision of where they are going
and how to get there. They have the ability to
articulate and communicate their visions through vivid
metaphors with the power to bring people together to
work for common goals. Great leaders even become
inspiring metaphors in their own right. During World War
II, Winston Churchill, with his heavy jowls and gruff
voice, came to embody the bulldog determination of the
British people that enabled them to hang on during the
German bombing of England and come back to win the war.
Mountains and mountain climbing
provide some of our most dramatic and powerful metaphors
for overcoming challenges to attain both personal and
corporate objectives. Expeditions to Mount Everest, for
example, stand out in modern culture as inspiring models
of the initiative and determination needed to achieve
the highest goals. For this reason, business
corporations frequently hire Everest climbers to give
motivational talks to their employees. There is no
clearer, more vivid metaphor for a compelling goal than
the summit of a mountain peak.
But there is more to climbing a
mountain or succeeding in business than getting to the
top. As Ida Hiroshige, the Japanese leader of a Mount
Fuji devotional society, puts it, "The most important
thing in climbing is the inner strength to help each
other, so that not just the strongest but all the
members of the group reach the goal." Reaching a summit,
or attaining any hard-won objective, helps forge team
identity and establish the core values organizations
need to endure and thrive where others wither and die.
Even just seeing a mountain or visualizing important
goal can be important. Whether or not we ever climb it,
the view of a distant peak gives us a sense of where we
are and where we are going; such clarity of vision also
gives a sense of direction and purpose to an enterprise.
Metaphors involve seeing and
experiencing one thing in terms of another. Powerful
metaphors, such as the idea that “life is a journey,”
operate at a deep level to structure how we think and
act. They shape how we envision our goals and the steps
we must take to reach them, and the choice of metaphor
can lead to different outcomes. If, for example, we view
business through the prism of warfare, we will be more
likely to regard others as either enemies or allies and
to think in terms of battlefield tactics and strategy.
If we see business as a game, we will focus on finding
the underlying rules and developing the skills to play
by them more effectively.
Mountain metaphors have a number of
advantages over the sports metaphors of baseball and
football commonly used in business today. As we have
noted, the summit of a peak is one of the clearest and
most powerful symbols for attaining a goal or objective.
The flexibility of mountain metaphors makes it easier to
formulate win-win approaches to cooperative business
ventures. Although climbers can compete with each other
or the mountain, they don’t have to; everyone can get to
the top and win without one side having to lose, as is a
must in football or baseball. Instead of regarding each
other as implacable enemies, management and unions, for
example, can work together on pension plans that benefit
both sides. A mountaineering expedition emphasizes team
efforts, but also allows scope for individual initiative
and leadership; one or two people go out in front to
establish the route for others to follow. Climbing takes
place not on an artificial, neatly controlled playing
field but in the natural, unpredictable setting of
mountains, mirroring the uncertainties of the real world
where unexpected events, such as the recent sub-prime
mortgage meltdown, can sweep financial markets like
storms and avalanches, catching almost everyone by
surprise.
The usual mountain-climbing
metaphors of leadership and teamwork, which focus on
attaining a goal, can be broadened if we look at the
significance of mountains around the world. As the
highest and most dramatic features of the landscape,
mountains tend to become associated with people’s
highest and most central values and aspirations,
revealing what inspires and motivates them at the
deepest levels—precisely what a leader needs to tap into
in order to galvanize a team or organization.
Mount Sinai occupies a special place in the Bible as the
sacred site where Moses received the Ten Commandments,
the basis of law and ethics in Western civilization. The
remote Himalayan peak of Mount Kailas, rising aloof
above the Tibetan Plateau, directs the minds of millions
of Hindus and Buddhists toward the utmost attainments of
spiritual liberation. For many in the modern world,
Mount Everest symbolizes the highest levels of human
achievement. In other words, there is more than one way
to see a mountain.
By exploring the varied ways people
around the world relate to mountains, we can improve our
own leadership skills, opening ourselves up to different
ways of approaching tasks and, in the process, becoming
more flexible. In particular, this investigation can
help us work with people of different cultural
backgrounds within our own organizations and do business
across cultures.
In subsequent issues of the
Wharton Leadership Digest, we will use well-known
peaks from different parts of the world as paradigms—or
exemplary models—to identify and develop the key aspects
of leadership and teamwork needed to succeed in today’s
world of rapid change and cultural diversity.
Mount Everest will highlight
various ways of setting and attaining goals that stretch
members of a team to do their utmost. Mount Sinai will
focus our attention on the inspirational power of
cultivating a sense of calling and service, while Mount
Fuji will stress the need to develop and maintain strong
corporate cultures. Other mountains and mountain ranges,
such as Mount Kailas in Tibet and the Sierra Nevada in
California, will serve as paradigms for implementing
core competencies and providing opportunities for
inspiration and renewal.
Author’s Note: Edwin
Bernbaum is an author, scholar, climber, and authority
on mountains as sources of inspiration and meaning
around the world. He has co-designed and organized
Himalayan leadership programs for Wharton Leadership
Ventures and lectures widely on leadership to corporate
audiences. For inquiries about his presentations,
contact the Leigh Bureau at
info@leighbureau.com or 908 253-8600. He can be
reached at
ebernbaum@mountain.org.
DISPATCH
FROM OMAHA BEACH: How Video Games Can Teach
Leadership
 By
Michael Lewis Mayfield-Brown
The day this summer when I
visited the beaches in Normandy, France, the site of the
D-Day invasion, the skies were clear, the water was blue
and nothing about the place looked like a war zone. Our
group of 100 or so American teenagers, all taking part
in a week-long trip to England and France with the
Orlando, Fla.-based
Student Leadership University, had just heard from
Will Cavanaugh, an expert tour guide and instructor
for the U.S. Army’s European staff ride program, about
the battle at Point du Hoc, a spit of land between Omaha
beach and Utah beach.
Point du Hoc
Cavanaugh explained how a U.S.
Ranger battalion scaled the cliffs of Point du Hoc with
the mission of eliminating the large German guns
stationed there. Unbeknownst to the Americans, the
Germans had removed the guns several days before,
although the Nazi forces still fought the Americans from
fortifications atop the cliffs. As I walked along the
dramatic cliffside, I said to my friend, “I have a
strange feeling of having been here before.” He nodded
and answered, “Yeah, I remember running through here,
and the soldiers running back, yelling, ‘The guns aren’t
there! The guns aren’t there!’”
You might wonder if we both
imagining some previous life as World War II soldiers.
In fact, both of us are major video-game fans, and
through playing the popular game,
Call of Duty 2, which includes D-Day and other
World War II battles, we had already walked this
landscape long before we ever arrived in Normandy. To
me, this is just one example of how video games are
helping my generation learn about leadership – something
that older generations don’t always get.
I have been fooling around
with video games for as long as I can remember. My
parents bought a Nintendo when I was four, and I was an
instant fan. Some of my fondest memories come from
playing
Treasure MathStorm! with my friends in
kindergarten. As I grew older, a cousin introduced me to
some real classics, from fantasy titles like
Ocarina of Time to more mature games like
Killer Instinct. It was then that my parents
grew concerned with my obsessive interest in games and
comic books. With school shootings in the news, they
thought they should put an end to the time I spent
playing video games.
What my parents didn't realize
then was that I wasn't just into playing games, though
that was fun. I was into the game industry as a whole.
It was a window for me into the worlds of business,
computer engineering, industrial design and product
marketing. Through high school, I fed my interest with
gaming and technology magazines and regularly attended
game conventions, where I tested out new games and
shared my interests with others. I watched as my
favorite game company,
SEGA, rose to the heights of success and then fell
to a shadow of its former glory. The experience helped
me see that it’s not enough to have a good product, and
that winning a cult following is no guarantee of future
success: You have to constantly think ahead. When my
parents slowly realized I was getting more out of the
game scene than just sore thumbs from hours of play,
they began to accept my interest. My father even rushed
out to get me an upgrade for my old Nintendo.
I’m 18 now, and although I
just started college this fall, I still live at home. I
sometimes ask myself: How can I be a leader? How can
any teenager be a leader? My involvement with the
Student Leadership University for the past three years
has helped me realize that we can all be leaders in our
own way, and that our temperaments affect our leadership
styles. As someone who is naturally introverted, my
leadership style may not look like everyone else’s. But
I also realize that my best opportunities for leadership
may come from doing the thing I love most: in this case,
playing games.
In my
own lifetime, the quality and depth of video games has
expanded in all directions. Games can now immerse you in
real experiences and evoke emotional responses. It was
the excitement and intensity of playing Call of Duty
2 that burned into my mind, and the mind of my
friend, the outlines of that battle in Normandy. I want
to do a lot of things after college, and one of those
things is to make my own video game. I want to create
something entertaining that teaches history and
leadership skills and leaves a lasting impression. This
won’t be a bold new endeavor, however. As I discovered
in Normandy, it’s already happening.
Author’s Note: Michael Lewis Mayfield-Brown is a
freshman at Northern Virginia Community College. He also
works with a government contractor to produce proposals
involving game technology. He can be reached at:
digitaldevmike@gmail.com
RESEARCH
BRIEF: Which CEO Characteristics Matter?
By Mark Hanna
CEOs are a diverse lot. They are
men and women, young and old, self-made and born to
privilege. Most attend college and major in conventional
fields like marketing, engineering, or finance, while
others pursue more offbeat interests, like Carly Fiorina,
former CEO of Hewlett Packard, who majored in medieval
history and philosophy as a Stanford undergraduate,
while still others, like Bill Gates, are college drop
outs. It takes all kinds.
But whatever their interests, or
education, or backgrounds, all successful CEOs have some
mysterious inner quality that makes them truly great
leaders. A working paper issued by the
National Bureau of Economic Research in July, 2008,
attempts to shed some light on that mysterious inner
quality.
In
Which CEO Characteristics and Abilities Matter?,
authors
Steven N. Kaplan, Mark M. Klebanov, and
Morten Sorensen argue that what counts most for
successful CEO performance outcomes, even more than
“soft” team-related people skills, is the “hard” skill
of getting the right things done.
The Study
The authors were interested in
seeing how the characteristics and abilities of CEO
candidates for positions in firms funded by
private-equity investors correlated with three outcomes:
whether the CEO candidate is hired; the private equity
firm invests in the firm; and the CEO who is hired
succeeds.
The sample consisted of 316
candidates for the CEO position in firms funded by
private-equity investors, consisting of both venture
capital (VC) and leveraged buy-out (LBO) investors. Of
these 316 candidates, 224 were eventually hired.
The CEO pre-assessments were
performed from 2000 to 2006 by
ghSMART, a Chicago-based company that specializes in
leadership testing. A report on a given CEO candidate
typically ranged between 20 and 40 pages of detailed
information. The assessments classified the CEO
candidates on 30 dimensions in five different areas:
“leadership,” “personal,” “intellectual,”
“motivational,” and “interpersonal.” Assessments were
made by highly qualified interviewers with a high degree
of inter-rater consistency. These data were fairly clean
and straightforward.
The post-assessment information
(“CEO candidate hired,” “private equity firm invests in
firm,” and “CEO hired succeeds”) was acquired through
both direct and indirect means. The direct method
consisted of going to the private-equity firm and asking
them for the information. The indirect method consisted
of going to publicly available sources (Lexis-Nexis,
public web sites, etc.) to cross-check the information.
The authors described their performance data as “coarse”
and “potentially noisy.”
Findings
Once the data were collected, they
were analyzed using descriptive statistics, simple
correlations, and factor analyses.
Here is what the authors found:
“The [30] abilities are highly correlated; a factor
analysis suggests there are two primary factors with
intuitive characterizations – one for general ability
and one that contrasts team-related, interpersonal
skills with execution skills.” It should be noted that
the execution skills factor included items like
“aggressive,” “fast mover,” “persistent,” and
“proactive,” The team-skills factor included items like
“teamwork,” “listening skills,” “open to criticism,” and
“treats people with respect.” The authors go on to say
that:
Both LBO
and VC firms are more likely to hire and invest in CEOs
with greater general abilities, both execution- and
team-related. Success, however, is more strongly related
to execution skills than to team-related skills. Success
is, at best, only marginally related to incumbency,
holding observable talent and ability constant.”
Conclusion
The authors make the following
observation, drawing on Peter Drucker’s famous 1967
book, The Effective Executive:
According
to Drucker, effective executives “differ widely in their
personalities, strengths, weaknesses, values, and
beliefs. All they have in common is they get the right
things done.” To get things done, effective executives:
“utilize time efficiently”; “focus on contribution”;
“make strengths productive”; “do first things first”;
and “make effective decisions.” These appear to be the
execution-related skills we find are most correlated
with success.
The authors also warn that based on
their limited sample scope of buyout and venture-capital
funded company CEOs, the “results may not generalize to
CEOs of other firms, particularly public companies,” but
their findings certainly corroborate Drucker’s
observations, which were based on executives in many
kinds of firms.
One take-away, then, is that
success comes in many packages, but that it depends
primarily on the ability to get the right things done.
Author’s Note: Mark Hanna
is a freelance business researcher and writer based in
Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He can be reached at
markhanna@mchsi.com.
CROWDSOURCING:
Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of
Business
By Jeff Howe
 Journalist
Jeff Howe’s
2006 article for Wired magazine about the
idea of “crowdsourcing” caught the attention of many
trend-watchers. His newly minted term suddenly became
ubiquitous, used by many to describe Internet-based
phenomenon that rely on the mobilization of skilled
workers – for free. In the introduction to his new book,
Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the
Future of Business, Howe tells the stories of
Threadless.com, a successful t-shirt company based
around the concept of amateur designers submitting their
own designs, and iStockphoto, an online service for
sharing and selling stock photo images – at a fraction
of the price of regular stock photo outlets – that was
acquired by Getty Images in 2006. An excerpt follows:
Threadless and iStockphoto aren’t
novelty acts. They are a part of the first wave of a
business and cultural revolution that will change how we
think about the Internet, commerce, and, most
importantly, ourselves. Over the past several years
people from around the world have begun exhibiting an
almost totally unprecedented social behavior: they are
coming together to perform tasks, usually for little or
no money, that were once the sole province of employees.
This phenomenon – which is sweeping through industries
ranging from professional photography to journalist to
the sciences – has come to be called crowdsourcing.
Crowdsourcing had its genesis in
the open source movement in software. The development of
the Linux operating system proved that a community of
like-minded peers was capable of creating a better
product than a corporate behemoth like Microsoft. Open
source software revealed a fundamental truth about
humans that had gone largely unnoticed until the
connectivity of the Internet brought it into high
relief: labor can be organized more efficiently in the
context of community than it can in the context of a
corporation. The best person to do a job is the one who
most wants to do that job; and the best people to
evaluate their performance are their friends and peers
who, by the way, will enthusiastically pitch in to
improve the final product, simply for the sheer pleasure
of helping one another and creating something beautiful
from which they all will benefit.
There’s nothing theoretical about
this. Open source efforts haven’t merely equaled the
best efforts of some of the largest corporations in the
world, they have exceeded them, which explains why IBM
has pumped a billion dollars into open source
development. Analysts at IBM know that open source
produces results. From the Linux operating system to
Apache server software to the Firefox Web browser, much
of the infrastructure of the information economy was
built by teams of self-organizing volunteers. And now
that model of production is migrating to fields far and
wide. […]
Despite their obvious differences,
Threadless, iStockphoto and P&G all have one thing in
common. They articulate a central truth that was first
articulated by Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems.
“No matter who you are,” Joy once said, “most of the
smartest people work for someone else.” That, in a
nutshell, is what this whole book is about. Given the
right set of conditions, the crowd will almost always
outperform any number of employees – a fact that
companies are becoming aware of and are increasingly
attempting to exploit.
Note: The above passage is
an excerpted from the Introduction of
Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the
Future of Business,
with permission from Crown Business, @ 2008, All Rights
Reserved. Further information about the book is
available at the book’s website:
http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com.
K2 CASE STUDY: Leadership on
the “Savage” Mountain
From the Leadership Digest editor
 On
August 13, 1996, at 9:30 a.m., four members of a Chilean
climbing team reached the summit of K2. The environment
above 8,000 meters is so inhospitable that the human
body begins to physically deteriorate from dehydration
and lack of oxygen. In their oxygen-deprived state, the
team decided to celebrate with a glass of Chilean wine
while the clock was ticking off fateful minutes. The
team had been climbing for nearly 16 hours. On mountains
like K2, the difference between coming home alive and
not coming home at all were made up of a series of small
decisions with potentially devastating results. Base
camp, the expedition control center located low on the
mountain at 5,000 meters, received a dreadful call at 2
p.m., shortly after the team left the summit: “Miguel is
exhausted. He sat down and he does not want to continue
walking.” The summit team faced its most serious
challenge of the climb.
This case considers the leadership capacities, strategies and decisions
applied to this expedition on K2 and was prepared by
Rodrigo Jordan, founding director of Vertical S.A.,
a leadership consulting firm based in Santiago, Chile;
Mark Davidson of Global HR Program Deployment, Juniper
Networks; and
Michael Useem.
Note:
To obtain permission to teach or review a copy of this
case, please contact
coursematerials@wharton.upenn.edu. |
