Wharton Leadership Conference:  Emerging Trends in the Search for Leadership 

The annual Wharton Leadership Conference is one of the gatherings most appealing to, and most beneficial for, corporate leaders, according to a recent report by public relations firm Weber Shandwick entitled Five-Star Executive Conferences.  An article by Forbes.com writer Matthew Kirdahy on the report notes that the Wharton Leadership Conference is second only to the Fortune Innovation/iMeme conference in the number of C-level speaker participants.  

This year’s speakers include Peter Cappelli, Wharton professor whose new book on talent management is excerpted below; William Weldon, CEO of Johnson&Johnson; Colleen Barrett, president of Southwest Airlines; David Gergen, director of Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership; Captain Wei Jiafu, CEO of Chinese-government-owned COSCO Group, one of the world’s largest shipping and logistics service providers; and S.A. Ibrahim, chief executive officer of Radian Group Inc., a global credit risk management company headquartered in Philadelphia. See here for a complete list of speakers.  

Register now for the 12^th annual Wharton Leadership Conference on June 18.
 

New Business Case:  Learning from WorldCom’s 2002 CEO Search 

This new business case by Aneesha Capur and Michael Useem with Dennis Carey considers the selection of a new CEO for WorldCom in 2002, which was one of the highest-profile CEO searches in the history of telecommunications.

By September 2002, WorldCom, Inc. had been set back by bankruptcy, a multi-billion dollar accounting restatement of its expenses, and a major downturn in the telecom market. Its shares had also been delisted by the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ). However, current management believed the company could move quickly to put its financial house in order. WorldCom was already reorganizing under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and restructuring its debt with creditors. By spring of 2003, WorldCom intended to emerge from Chapter 11 with a new CEO, financial game plan, and a re-invigorated stock. The company also intended to re-emerge as MCI, Inc.; WorldCom acquired MCI Communications (MCI) in 1998, which was one of history’s biggest merger and acquisition deals. 

WorldCom’s board and creditors were dedicated partners in hiring a CEO from outside the company who could command the successful re-emergence of the entire company, including its finances, business operations, strategy, and branding. This case puts the reader in the position of selecting the new CEO. Four candidates have been shortlisted. The finalist selected as WorldCom’s new leader has the potential to emerge as one of the most important corporate leaders in the United States. 

To obtain permission to teach or review a copy of this case, please contact coursematerials@wharton.upenn.edu. 

Authors’ Note: Aneesha Capur is Associate Director of The Wharton School’s Course Materials Platform. Michael Useem, a Wharton management professor, edits the Wharton Leadership Digest. Dennis Carey, senior client partner at Korn Ferry and leader of the WorldCom search, assisted with this case.

Beyond Organization Man: Talent Management for the 21^st Century 

By Peter Cappelli 

As a management professor and director of the Wharton School’s Center for Human Resources, Peter Cappelli is an expert on human resources. It may come as a surprise, then, that in his new book, Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty (Harvard Business School Press: April, 2008), Cappelli calls on companies to think about talent management not in terms of human resources but in terms of business objectives. In this excerpt from chapter one of his book, Cappelli demonstrates how talent-development practices today largely derive from outdated, 1950s-era ideas, and why companies need fresh thinking, borrowed in some cases from supply-chain management, to manage talent supply and demand.   

We need a new way of thinking about the challenge of talent management. The first step is to be clear about the goal. Talent management is not an end in itself. It is not about developing employees or creating succession plans. Nor is it about achieving specific benchmarks such as limiting turnover to 5 percent, having the most educated workforce, or gaining any other tactical outcome. Rather, the goal of talent management is the more general and important task of helping the organization achieve its overall objectives. In the business world, that objective is to make money. And making money requires that you understand the costs as well as the benefits associated with your talent management choices. 

Helping the organization achieve its goals begins with recognizing that the most important problem faced by virtually all employers is the need to respond quickly to changes in competitive environments. Employers now change strategies, structures, and operations quickly and repeatedly in response to customer demands, competitor innovations, regulatory changes, and other outside factors. The developments driving these responses are difficult to predict, and mistakes in responding – waiting too long to change or planning for circumstances that fail to pan out – are costly.  

In this context, the fundamental problem for organizations is to manage risk, which we can think of as the costs associated with events that are uncertain or at least difficult to predict. Business risk, driven especially by uncertainty about business demands, translates directly into risk for talent management. The greatest risks in talent management are, first, the costs of a mismatch in employees and skills (not enough to meet business demands or too much, leading to layoffs) and, second, the costs of losing your talent development investments through the failure to retain employees. These risks stand in the way of the ability of your organization to meet its goals.

The new way of thinking about talent management is neither the bureaucratic models of planning from the 1950s nor the free agency model of the 1980s and 1990s, both of which were rooted in unique and transient circumstances. This new approach represents a balancing of interests – between internal development and outside hiring, between the interests of employees and those of the organization. Fundamental to this new model is acknowledging the uncertainty that appears to be a permanent part of the business world and being able to respond and adapt to it. That acknowledgment means that you cannot rely on the assumption that drove the old models of workforce planning and talent management – the assumption that you can forecast away the uncertainty and plan years or decades into the future. 

Fortunately, you do not have to invent a set of new practices for responding to uncertainty and risk. Many of the challenges in contemporary talent management are analogous to problems already analyzed in the field of operations research. For example, the issues in managing an internal talent pipeline – the ways employees advance through development jobs and experiences – are remarkably similar to those involved in moving products through a supply chain. In both cases, the significant challenges are to reduce bottlenecks that block advancement, to speed processing time, and to improve forecasts of need and thereby avoid mismatches. Other techniques from economics allow you to better manage the return on your investments in development, especially in an environment where employees have a market for their skills and your key concern becomes retention. 

One of the great conundrums in business is that even though executives acknowledge the importance of employees in theory – “people are our most important asset, and we really mean that” – in practice they often disparage, or at least ignore, the management of people. It has been difficult for them to see how most human resource practices relate to the issues on which they focus: the business strategy challenges that define the direction of organizations and the ways they compete. Traditionally, internal talent development practices have been so long-term in their orientation that they are disconnected from the immediacy of contemporary business strategy decisions; the outside hiring model is reactive (after problems occur), becoming an execution issue that often disappoints not only because of its costs but also because it lags the need for talent.  

This new way of thinking about talent management connects it directly to business decisions. In virtually every organization, people are the biggest component of costs and the source of the most important competencies, so it is crucial to adopt approaches to manage the risks associated with talent issues in helping your organization manage overall business risk. The ability to get the right people with the right skills into the right jobs in a cost-effective way makes it possible for an organization to adjust and respond in the strategy arena. 

This approach to talent is strategic in the two most important uses of that term in business: it involves choices or strategies about managing human capital that must be made based on each organization’s needs, and those choices also relate directly to business strategy. If done correctly, talent management feeds into the process of strategy formation by outlining the possibilities for those who are making business decisions. 

The Current State of Talent Management 

A recent survey reported that roughly two-thirds of U.S. employers do no planning for their talent needs. For such organizations, every new need for talent presents a serious disruption. Every employee who quits represents a calamity, and every new demand for skills represents a crisis. A company that does no planning – does not manage its talent – basically waits for a need to develop or current employees to leave and then hunts for a solution. 

A good illustration of the consequences of not managing talent is the apparent panic under way in many parts of the business community at the idea that the baby boom generation will begin to retire soon and its skills, knowledge, and competencies will be lost. Surely nothing was more predictable than the fact that a generation of individuals is growing older and will eventually stop working. Employees had been retiring from companies for generations without causing as much as a ripple in corporate planning. The reason for the panic now is that many organizations have just begun to realize that they have no arrangements for replacing these retiring workers, because outside hiring does not work for company-specific and legacy skills of the kind many of these older workers possess. 

The only good news is that most employers are essentially facing the talent management challenge with a clean slate: they have little idea how to address the challenge. Unfortunately, the advice they are getting is to return to the practices of the 1950s. Foremost among these practices are long-term succession plans, which attempt to identify which individuals will move into what jobs, mapping out careers years into the future. 

That approach is a mistake. The practices of the 1950s, including detailed talent pipelines and succession plans, no longer work because the business environment to which they were tailored no longer exists. The older models were based on the assumption that one could plan the future of an organization years or even decades in advance with reasonable certainty. Its human capital requirements could then be predicted with some certainty. A second crucial assumption was that a company’s internal pipelines of talent, through which individuals advanced in roles and responsibilities, did not leak and that the supply of talent being developed would be available when it was needed. The title of William H. Whyte’s classic book The Organization Man reflected the historically distinctive  relationship between these candidates and their employers. They were tied to the organization over a lifetime in a way previously associated only with military or religious service. 

Developing talent internally was an imperative in this earlier period because there was no alternative. Competitors used the same internal development approach, rewarding success with promotions and pay increases. Even if another employer wanted to hire talent from the outside, only those candidates who were failing to advance in their current organizations were interested in changing employers. This was a classic adverse selection problem, as they had to start in other companies at a much lower level. Because the failure to develop talent meant not having the players needed to run the organization, the costs of internal development were largely irrelevant, although internal accounting systems were so poor that it would have been difficult to assess the true costs of arrangements as complicated as developing employees in any case. Development practices, such as rotational job assignments, were so deeply embedded in the operating models of business that their costs were rarely questioned. 

The current environment for talent management is fundamentally different because the two basic assumptions that underpinned the Organization Man model no longer hold. First, product markets are no longer predictable. The rise of deregulation of product markets in the late 1970s, increases in foreign competition in the 1980s, and changes in consumer tastes mean that it is now much more difficult to predict what will sell or, in the not-for-profit world, what constituents will demand. Customer demands change much more rapidly as new products from a larger group of competitors come onstream more quickly. The idea that a company can predict accurately what it will be making ten years from now – something that was common in industries as diverse as telecommunications, transportation, consumer goods, and financial services until the 1970s – has disappeared. The demand for talent follows directly from business and operating demands. So as business forecasts and plans have shrunk from ten years to five years to, in most cases, one year, the ability to predict the talent those plans demand also must be scaled back. Years-long programs for developing talent create a false sense of accuracy and no longer make sense. 

Second, the supply of internal talent is no longer easily predictable. The period of managerial layoffs beginning in the early 1980s made jobs insecure from the employee’s perspective, but from an individual employer’s perspective, the internal supply of talent was still reasonably predictable until labor markets tightened in the 1990s. Then more companies began outside hiring, and one employer’s outside candidate became another’s retention challenge. Talent pipelines hemorrhaged as employees embraced the overtures of executive search firms and other employers. It became difficult to predict what percentage of candidates who began a development program would remain when it ended. A company that has a 10 percent turnover rate among its managerial ranks – not an unusual level – will lose half the candidates in its management pipeline within five years. Does it still make sense to call that arrangement a pipeline, or is it better thought of as a sieve? Some number of employees will make it through to the end, but it is not clear exactly how many will drop out and when they will do so.  

As if these two complications were not enough, another important change has occurred: pressure exists to show that there is a financial return associated with every set of practices. Internal accounting systems have gotten better at estimating costs, and the arrangements associated with earlier models of talent management, such as maintaining jobs for developmental purposes, proved to be costly following the reengineering trend. There is no trick to developing talent if you don’t care how much money it costs. Because outside hiring provides an alternative to internal development, the latter must demonstrate its value just as does every other practice and form of investment. 

At this point, if you’re a thoughtful executive you throw up your hands: developing employees is too expensive and uncertain, and outside hiring has also become expensive and cannot meet unique organizational needs. What can you do? That is why you need to approach the problem in a different way.  

As noted earlier, talent management should be about helping a business make money, finding the most cost-effective ways of meeting the organization’s needs for talent. And the big challenge is uncertainty. The type of talent management that makes sense in this economic context does not pretend that it can eliminate uncertainty through better forecasting and planning. Talent forecasting cannot be any more accurate than the business forecasts on which it is based, and the latter are not very accurate. Because every plan involves commitments and commitments come with costs, long-term plans end up being expensive because they are often wrong. Rather than pretend to eliminate uncertainty, the better approach is to find ways to manage it. 

Note: The above passage was excerpted from Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty by Peter Cappelli. Copyright © 2008 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation; All Rights Reserved.

NEWS FROM WHARTON EXECUTIVE EDUCATION:  Leadership Program for Philadelphia City Leaders  

By Wendy Parsons 

When Mayor Michael Nutter assumed leadership of Philadelphia in 2008, the task before him was formidable. The City of Brotherly Love had become infamous for its homicides, including the slaying of police officers. Children were dropping out of high school at an alarming rate. The citizens had become disheartened by a government that no longer seemed to be of, for, and by the people. And then came Michael Nutter. With a vision of government shaped by his passion for public service and his business background as a Wharton alum, Nutter has set about changing the very culture of the city.  

Driven to breathe new life and hope into the beleaguered city, Nutter set about transforming the way city government operates in Philadelphia. He views the city as a $4 billion business that must deliver outstanding service to its customers and stakeholders – the people of Philadelphia. To prepare for this task, he reached out to his alma mater to prepare his top city leaders for what lay ahead of them.  One hundred of his key administrators attended a two-day leadership program on April 10–11, 2008, delivered by the University of Pennsylvania’s Fels Institute of Government, the Leadership Center at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Wharton’s Aresty Institute of Executive Education.  

“I realized a long time ago that most governments don’t think of themselves as a business,” Nutter remarks. “Because there is no real business-based training in government, I have long thought that governments should send people to professional development training. The leadership program at Wharton was exactly what I envisioned.” 

The program focused on building leadership strengths from an interdisciplinary approach, integrating leadership from Wharton’s business perspective with legislative and policy insights from the Fels Institute. The program represents a launching pad for an ongoing collaborative relationship between Wharton and the city, according to Tom Colligan, vice dean of executive education. “This program is the first outcome of a close working partnership between the mayor’s office and Wharton,” Colligan says. 

Academic co-director and Wharton professor Michael Useem helped design the program to support the mayor’s vision for improving education, expanding jobs, improving health, enhancing ethics, reducing crime, and strengthening services. 

 “In terms of bringing the mayor’s vision into reality, the leadership of the mayor and his team will make all the difference,” Useem explains. “And to that end, the Fels Institute and the Wharton School worked with the city to help his top team sharpen and strengthen its leadership – an essential ingredient for achieving the mayor’s vision during the months ahead.”  

Academic co-director Don Kettl, director of the Fels Institute, says that the program represents a unique collaboration of Wharton’s best faculty with cutting-edge ideas from Fels for improving government performance. “This signifies the very best of interdisciplinary partnerships, in service of one of the most important urban transformations under way in the country.”  

The mayor visited on the second day of the program to address his team. “We’ve set the bar high, and people want us to be successful,” Nutter told city leaders. “The driving force behind what we do is to deliver higher-quality service. Your obligation to the public ­­is to provide the leadership the city needs. You are here because you care, and I could not be more proud of you.” 

The mayor views the city as a 24-hour-a-day business with a million and a half shareholders – the people of Philadelphia – who expect a return on their investment. Nutter has dedicated his efforts to reshaping the city’s culture for both immediate and long-term benefits. “We have to move beyond thinking in the short term, because we won’t have long-term impact. It’s not about who gets the credit,” the mayor says of his plan for improving the city. “It’s about what the results will be 20, 30, or 40 years from now.”  

The change in the city’s culture is one that his managing director, Dr. Camille Barnett, expects to be one of the greatest organizational and city transformations ever. “Our partnership with the Fels Institute and Wharton allows us to benefit from best practices in both the public and business sectors. This program gives our people the tools they need to execute our five-year plan in six key areas,” she says. “Our two days at Wharton have given us a common experience and a common language. But most importantly, this program imbues us with courage and hope, the leadership values that are essential to accomplishing what lays ahead of us.”  

The six areas of Mayor Nutter’s plan for Philadelphia include the following immediate and long-term goals: 

• Transform Philadelphia into the safest large city in the country and reduce the homicide rate by 25 percent in 2008.
   
• Make Philadelphia one of the country’s premier education cities, reducing the high-school dropout rate by 50 percent in five to seven years and doubling the number of Philadelphians with a bachelor’s degree in five to 10 years.
   
• Increase jobs, raise incomes, and add 75,000 people to the population in five to 10 years.
   
• Foster vibrant neighborhoods, decrease litter, and increase recycling.
   
• Maintain the highest standards for ethics and increase the number of citizens who trust in their government.
   
• Become a national customer-service leader, meeting customer-service standards for all city services as measured by citizen surveys.

The Wharton/Fels program covered subjects such as reengineering government, successes and failures in city governance, and developing strategic leadership skills. The experience gave attendees a more in-depth understanding of how they could actively work toward implementing the mayor’s ambitious goals.  

“Michael Nutter's vision for Philadelphia requires city leaders to think very differently about the organization and its mission. This program gave them the focus and opportunity to think of themselves as inspirational leaders and change managers as they steer their teams through this transition period,” says Sandhya Karpe, Wharton Executive Education senior program director.

The program also gave city leaders who attended the time to reflect on their roles and process what they learned, according to Deputy Mayor Everett Gillison. “We don’t get that kind of time on the job. The faculty understood the culture we’re working in, and gave us tools we could put to use immediately.” 

Anuj Gupta, one of the mayor’s “Team Performance” leaders who attended the program, says that the experience at Wharton represents a great step in what the mayor hopes will be an ongoing relationship with the university. “It is vital for the administration to work with civic institutions like the University of Pennsylvania to achieve results for the city.”  

The future of the city hinges on the success of the mayor’s plan. Dedicated to making the city the “crown jewel of the east,” the mayor is convinced that a new approach to leadership, a new culture for the city, will make Philadelphia a magnet for business and new residents. “If we deliver, people will come back. If we don’t, they will leave. People vote with their feet. If we do the job right, people will come back to Philadelphia.” 

Note:  Wendy Parsons is Director of Marketing Communications for the Wharton School’s Aresty Institute of Executive Education.  She can be reached at parsonsw@wharton.upenn.edu.

Undergraduate Leadership Conferences:  Leading Diversity and Leading under Pressure 

By Chris Maxwell 

It’s a question all leaders grapple with: How to build and maintain an organization that achieves its goals while still valuing and promoting the potential of each member. The U.S. Naval Academy’s annual leadership conference, held in early February, acknowledged both the importance and challenges of promoting diversity in organizations, as reflected in the conference title, “Leading Beyond Barriers.”  

Addressing an audience of over 4,000 military cadets and civilian university students, diversity consultant Samuel Betances urged listeners to develop cultural competencies, cross barriers, and think outside of the box.  “Equal opportunity isn’t enough,” he said. “It’s about freedom; the freedom to pursue passions, to make a contribution.”  Citing a U.S. Army study that found a lack of diversity in its higher ranks, Betances offered a key insight for leaders concerned with diversity: “It’s not about representation, it’s about utilization. Give good assignments, really challenging assignments, that can lead to promotion.” 

Focused on these challenging questions, conference participants continued the discussion in small groups of military and civilian university students.  Rahul Parikh, an undergraduate at the Wharton School, said, “The main question in our discussion groups was, ‘What actions do leaders need to take now and in the future to promote or support diversity?’”  Although his group didn’t arrive at a definitive answer, he said, “The idea of destroying stereotypes was a popular response. I learned how harmful a racist joke can be.”   

Richard Hillen, a senior at the Wharton School who served as a panelist at the conference said, “It is necessary to explain why diversity is important, and how it can help not only individuals, but also the group as a whole. The question is: How to deliver that message? Leadership, we concluded, is key: The leader not only explains the need for diversity within the organization, but also sets the tone with his or her actions, so that everyone sees the issue should be taken seriously.” 

Colonel Arthur Athens, director of the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership at the Naval Academy, wrapped up the three-day conference on leadership and diversity with three take-away points: 

• Reflect inwardly when someone points out something about our behavior that we may not recognize;
   
• Set the example by articulating standards and confronting bad behavior; and
   
• Set the tone with peers and superiors by having the courage to speak up when something is wrong. 

Leaders can effectively promote diversity in organizations and make a difference, Athens said, but they must deal with their own “unbalanced” views and those of others. 

Success in a Fast-Paced World 

The joint learning between Wharton and the U.S. Naval Academy continued at a conference in late February focused on crisis leadership. The one-day event, “Leading Under Pressure: Success in a Fast-Paced World,” brought together 70 participants, including an invited group of U.S. Naval Academy midshipmen and faculty, who heard strategic perspectives from leaders with a wide range of backgrounds.   

C. William Schwab, chief of Trauma and Surgical Critical Care at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, discussed how his team of trauma surgeons has developed systems to both improve outcomes for victims of urban violence and develop leadership skills in resident surgeons and trauma nurses. As part of this new system, all resuscitations – 3,000 per year at HUP’s Trauma Center – are now video-taped and reviewed, and resident surgeons review their performance within 24 hours. At the conference, Schwab showed two videos of real-life resuscitations. In the first, participants saw a surgeon, easily identifiable in a red surgical cap, calmly but firmly giving commands to her team. In the second video, the team leader did not wear a red cap or exert authority; the scene was chaotic and the examination progressed almost randomly.  

Schwab outlined several strategies for success in crisis leadership that are applicable to both the trauma room and to business: Control yourself, control the team, control the environment, have a plan, take action, and be flexible. The leader must be open to input but also willing to make decisions. Pre-assigned team roles and procedures are critical to success in crisis. Schwab demands that trauma center surgeons take action and set a clear course in each case they deal with, even though that course may change rapidly, because inertia under pressure can lead to chaos. Finally, Schwab said listening to contrarian viewpoints and asking “How can we do things better?” are key leadership skills both inside the trauma center and out. 

Evan Wittenberg, a senior manager at Google, Inc. and former director of Wharton’s Graduate Leadership Program, focused on the leadership challenges at the rapidly growing Mountain View, Calif.-based firm, which has been doubling its number of employees each year.  In contrast to the command-and-control structure of Schwab’s trauma room, Google favors a rapid product launch and development cycle in which end users provide feedback for product improvement. Employees operate within a largely non-hierarchical structure, and Google leaders ask employees to act on their knowledge rather than waiting for instructions from above. 

Besides encouraging leadership at all levels, the organizational culture at Google favors displays of humility (senior leaders wait in line and hunt for parking spaces like everyone else), clearing roadblocks so teams can get needed resources, and focusing on self-development.  

Despite the wide differences in environment, culture, and structure in these two organizations, conference participants found some key similarities for leading under pressure.  First, both organizations ask leaders to take action before inertia sets in – in the trauma room to save lives, and at Google to get new products out to be used and improved. Second, both organizations invest in the development of leaders at all levels. Finally, as trauma surgeons must listen to contrarian viewpoints and Google executives must forgo some trappings of high office, leaders in both cases are called upon to lead with humility. 

Author’s Note: Chris Maxwell is Associate Director of the Undergraduate Leadership Program at the Wharton School. He can be reached at maxwellc@wharton.upenn.edu.

The Politics of Smiling: Leadership Pointers from the Campaign Trail 

By John Baldoni 

Most commentators seemed to agree that Barack Obama was “off his game” in the presidential debate held the week before the Pennsylvania primary in late April. The senator’s demeanor ranged from rattled to bored, disengaged to lethargic. Mark Shields commenting on PBS’s NewsHour noted something else: Obama did not smile. John Kennedy, noted Shields, would have smiled. For a politician with Obama’s gift for connecting to audiences, his failure to leaven his performance with a smile was striking. It may be unrealistic to expect someone who is being criticized and critiqued on live television to smile, but when you are running for president you need to radiate confidence. 

Smiling is a visible form of confidence. Voters want to know that the person they may elect for the highest office in the land is someone who knows how to take a punch while remaining in control, someone who is unfazed when things are not going according to plan, someone who can remain positive in the face of intimidating odds. 

For the past century or so, Americans have always gone for a president who smiles. Teddy Roosevelt bounded across the American stage with a larger-than-life personality and a radiant smile that seemed to echo the age, as America, an emerging international power, was just beginning to exert itself on the global stage. Franklin Roosevelt used his smile to radiate calm and uplift a nation in the throws of the Great Depression. 

Dwight Eisenhower’s expansive grin provided a sense of home and comfort to GIs fighting a tough and bloody war first in North Africa and later Italy, France and ultimately Germany. Ike’s successor in the White House, John Kennedy, conveyed the hopes of a new generation with his sense of style and of course a radiant smile. 

Jimmy Carter’s toothy grin, much beloved by political cartoonists, served as an antidote to the scandals of the Nixon era. His smile punctuated his promise: “I will never lie to you.” Carter’s successor outdid him in the smile department. Ronald Reagan knew how to smile for the cameras in ways that seemed totally genuine. As a former actor, he possessed that self-controlled demeanor, but it also helped that by nature Reagan was as cheerful off stage as he was on. 

A smile is no guarantee of success, of course. Carter ran into difficulties with the economy and Iran that no smile would cure. Harry Truman boasted a dynamite smile, but after FDR he would always seem diminished by comparison. Richard Nixon smiled prolifically, but voters never seemed to buy his sincerity. Poor Lyndon Johnson never seemed to put on a smile in public, though in private he was a born charmer and preternaturally gifted persuader. 

The day after the debate in Philadelphia Obama seemed to regain his poise. Addressing a friendly crowd, he beamed like a newly crowned Miss America. He also laughed and joked with the audience as he distanced himself from his subpar performance the night before. Obama was back on his game. 

Smiling may be an act, but it is an act that people want to see in their presidents and their leaders. 

Author’s Note: John Baldoni is a leadership and communications consultant and speaker, and author of the book, How Great Leaders Get Great Results (McGraw-Hill, December 2005).  He can be reached at john@johnbaldoni.com
 

The Leadership Landscape Perspective: Reframing Leadership 

By Tom Cummings and James P. Keen 

Why do some leaders have an ability to integrate the landscapes of their work and lives while others do not? How do some leaders possess the composure to stay in balance yet adapt to changing circumstances? How does one build and sustain an integrated leadership practice that can both respond and adapt to the most urgent challenges while weaving actions into a coherent framework?  Our study of leadership has been oriented around these questions, and years of research on and work with leaders have led us to craft a new approach to leadership, which we detail in our new book, Leadership Landscapes.  

There are two main, interrelated pillars that lie at the heart of the Leadership Landscapes approach. The first is an image of a landscape. Imagine you are perched on a vista (“your job”) looking out across the peaks and valleys. What you might notice first is the big picture, or the macro-business landscape, which reveals how you and your organization relate to society and the world at large. Typical focal points here are sustainability, emerging technologies, political systems, non-governmental organizations, the broader regulatory environment, social responsibility, environmental concerns, social (im)balances, and so on. Increasingly these macro-factors include the global economy and the planetary environment, and these mountains in the background will have a tremendous business impact, yet are often less immediate than the sharper peaks and valleys of the industry and markets landscape. Here we find challenges that relate to our direct external business context, such as demanding customers, changing markets, shifting competition, and our most direct stakeholders (e.g. investor relations). 

Yet according to our research, few leaders dwell long on the lofty heights, because they are pulled into the morass of the organization landscape. This landscape mainly deals with issues of organizational concern, such as how we govern, how we attract and distribute resources, how we org-chart our people, how we setup, maintain, and live our culture and values, and how we keep the organization aligned and informed. Subsequently, there are bands of brothers and sisters on the team landscape who require our attention. This is where we manage the team, steer it, chair meetings, do appraisals, oversee recruitment and personal development, and improve team performance. Finally, we come to the nearest environment, the indi­vidual landscape, which involves the time spent on our own devel­opment and learning, reflection, coaching, meditation, and other activities that help maintain and strengthen our physical and mental health. 

These five landscapes cover the areas where “leadership attention” is typi­cally spent. Most leaders falter by concentrating on a single landscape, often the organizational landscape, at the expense of others. Worse yet, leaders are often taught only to understand a single landscape, denying them the ability to see the wealth of factors and interconnections that could underpin their decision making. The Leadership Landscape Approach is different because it encourages sensitivity to the entire landscape.  

Our first pillar, the Leadership Landscapes Perspective, allows you to look across all the lead­ership levels simultaneously and expand your relational field of vision. It creates a context for decision making. Yet a backdrop is worthless if it is not accompanied by an attitude, a state of equanimity. In other words, a leader needs to maintain a state of dynamic balance.  

The equanimity shift, the second pillar of the Leadership Landscapes Perspective, represents a comprehensive view on an attitude of mind. It is an attitude that can be developed, nurtured, and practiced. It is the idea of equanimity –  an approach that underpins all we advocate in Leadership Landscapes. It may at first seem like an abstract or vague notion, and it is in some sense elusive, but we have found it to be the key to optimal leadership. 

Equanimity, or dynamic balance, can be described in at least five aspects. These aspects form an integrated set, in which none is as powerful alone as when connected to the others. Everyone possesses some measure of equanimity, and that measure can be increased through practice. Like a muscle in the body, equanimity gains strength through a combination of everyday use, exertion in meeting chal­lenging circumstances, and practices directly targeted at its development. Just as muscles work in sets, so equanimity can be seen as a bundle of attributes with multiple applications. The five attributes of equanimity are: An Eye for Possibility; Reframing; Presence; Recovery; and Commitment. Through mastery of these five areas, leaders learn to maintain balance while applying these tools to decision-making, inspirational leadership, and peak performance. 

When the Leadership Landscapes perspective and the equanimity shift are used in tandem, they form a powerful tool for any leader desiring mastery of his or her craft. In our book we offer tools, such as inquiry and scenario mapping, that show how to apply the Leadership Landscapes perspective to emergent problems and how to develop sustained practices that hone your abilities as a leader.  

Authors’ Note: A former leadership executive at global firms including Unilever and ABN AMRO Bank, Tom Cummings is founder of the Executive Learning Partnership, an alliance of executive development professionals.  Jim Keen is an executive coach, leadership development advisor and a professor at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. For more information about the book and its approach, visit www.leadershiplandscapes.com.

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 University of Pennsylvania