Read an Excerpt
C H A P T E R 1: KNOW WHEN TO PISS PEOPLE OFF
“Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.”
COLIN POWELL, the nation’s former number-one soldier and current number-one statesman, is above all a gentleman. He’s unfailingly polite -- the very embodiment of civility. I would be surprised if he ever applauded the management styles of Darth Vader (Star Wars) or “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap (multiple corporate dismemberments). Simply put, Powell is not interested in intimidating people. Why? Because, as well as being a gentleman, he also is convinced that frightened people don’t take initiative or responsibility, and that their organizations suffer as a result. And yet this same Colin Powell is perfectly prepared to make people angry, even really angry, in pursuit of organizational excellence. His explanation for this seeming inconsistency is pithy: “Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.” Let’s take a closer look at how Powell’s personal comportment as a gentleman and a team player fits together with his sense of responsibility as a leader. At the same time, let’s get a clearer sense of the organizational realities to which he is alluding when he talks about “pissing people off.”
YOU CAN’T PLEASE EVERYONE
Effective leadership is exercised across a full spectrum of responsibilities, and also over time. Across an entire organization, involving a wide variety of people engaged in a multitude of tasks (both concurrently and in sequence), the leader must spark high performance and ensure the welfare of the group. Well, that’s complicated. Even if the leader manages to get everybody happy with today’s reality, somebody’s very likely to get off the bus tomorrow. A leader simply cannot please everyone all the time.
Making people mad was part of being a leader. As I had learned long ago . . . an individual’s hurt feelings run a distant second to the good of the service.
Leadership can’t be a popularity contest. Trying not to offend anyone, or trying to get everyone to like you, will set you on the road to mediocrity. Why? Because leaders who are afraid to make people angry are likely to waver and procrastinate when it comes time to make tough choices. Leaders who care more about being liked than about being effective are unlikely to confront the people who need confronting. They are unlikely to offer differential rewards based on perfor-mance. They won’t challenge the status quo. And inevitably, by not challenging tradition, they hurt both their own credibility and their organization’s performance. Powell learned this lesson in his first leadership position: as company commander of the Pershing Rifles, his ROTC military society at City College of New York. All of CCNY’s ROTC societies (like ROTC programs throughout the region) competed at a regional meet each year for various awards. Powell hoped that his Pershing Rifles would win both the regular and the trick drill competitions at the regional meet. As the meet approached, however, he began to hear discouraging comments about the student he had chosen to lead the trick drill routine. The student was distracted by girlfriend troubles, he was told, and had lost his edge. Powell’s problem was that he was friendly with this student, and so, although he talked to him about the negative feedback he was hearing, he decided not to relieve him of his leadership position. Predictably, the Pershing Rifles lost the trick drill competition -- although they won the regular drill competition, under Powell’s leadership -- and Powell realized that his unwillingness to relieve his friend of command had cost the Pershing Rifles their second medal. The issue is far deeper and more pervasive than a personnel problem. Organizations, like people, get into ruts. As the environment continuously changes around them -- with new technologies, new demographics, new competitors, new consumer expectations, new waves of deregulation and globalization, and so on -- organizations get stale. Systems, processes, and cultures become calcified. People get comfortable with what they know, and they fend off the unfamiliar. “Not invented here” (NIH) takes root, and the organization settles into a comfortable, backward-looking mindset. Nostalgia and rigidity get woven into the fabric of the organization. This is a big problem, and it is one of the reasons why more than half of the companies that appeared on the 1980 Fortune 500 list no longer exist. They were big, dominant, and resource-rich -- and they couldn’t adapt. The fresh and compelling ideas came from their scrappier, faster-moving competitors.A few years ago, a vice president of a faltering Fortune 500 company told me ruefully that his company’s financial swoon was due primarily to one factor: “We’ve got years of tradition, unmarred by progress.” Carly Fiorina echoed this sentiment a year after taking the helm of HP in 1999, when she described the company’s biggest challenge as a culture marked by “a gentle bureaucracy of entitlement and consensus.” This is the kind of environment that Colin Powell, gentle and gentlemanly as he is, is perfectly willing to disrupt for the greater good.
I’ll be frank. From time to time, I’m going to make you mad as hell. CHANGE RUFFLES FEATHERS
Because Powell’s career has been all about change, change is a central focus of this book. As we will see, changing things inevitably makes some people upset -- even angry. But the fact is that external change is endemic, proliferating, and accelerating. In such a context, good leaders defy conventional wisdom. They constantly prod their people with “what if?” and “why not?” questions. They engender a climate of let’s-try-it experimentation, demand innovative initiatives from people, and reward performance. And, yes, along the way they definitely piss some people off. Think about the pace of change that has prevailed in the last decade or so. Before the mid-1990s, few people were using e-mail, and few were even aware of something called the “World Wide Web.” People did business by phone, fax, and FedEx. Then that world got turned upside down. As a new reality set in, a certain percentage of people simply chose to dig in their heels. Here’s Powell’s comment on exactly this subject: the tendency of some people to fend off the new realities of a digital world by rejecting new technologies:
I’ll bet you right now that there’s no established organization where you won’t find somebody who says . . . I know what I’ve been doing for the last fifteen years, and you’re not going to screw me up.
That’s absolutely true. And the leader’s role, in this situation, is to overcome institutional (and individual) inertia. Pissed-off people are the inevitable result of challenging the status quo. In fact, they may be the best indicator that the leader is on the right track.
