Source: TED

Ralph Kerle, Executive Chairman of the Creative Leadership Forum, explains the how to of creative leadership.

Download the podcast here

Interview courtesy of ThinkXchange.com.au

What is in line for our future?... Evolution of course... So before we start with the serious stuff, here is Homer's view on evolution...,

But then, where do we go from there?
TED have once again provided a summary, encapsulated in an entertaining video…

The power of thousands of individuals acting en masse has become a weapon of war. While politicians, revolutionaries, and totalitarian governments have long known how to send crowds of protesters to the streets to parade in front of the television cameras, the new trend is to mobilize forces over the Internet to engage in the equivalent of mass online protests. In some case the results can be humorous. In others, not. Remember Mr. Splashy Pants? In an attempt to garner sympathy for its cause Green Peace posted a poll to choose a name for a whale. A call to the members of Reddit , the hugely popular social bookmarking site, was put out. It read:

Greenpeace are having a vote to name a whale they have ‘adopted’. All the options are the names of ancient gods of the sea. And then there’s ‘Mister Splashy Pants’. Please vote ‘Mister Splashy Pants’.

Green Peace demonstrated extremely good humor in accepting the results of over 100,000 votes for “Mr. Splashy Pants” for the humpback whale they were tracking via satellite.

During the US Presidential elections of 2008 any online poll was quickly inundated with votes derived from a call to arms by the followers of one candidate or the other with Ron Paul, the small government libertarian, usually winning out because of his appeal to the tech-savvy.

Alexader Putin, Prime Minister of Russia, has learned to use crowdsourcing to orchestrate massive Denial of Service attacks capable of shutting off an entire country’s ability to access the Internet. Included in his growing list of successful attacks are Estonia 2007, Lithuania 2007, Ukraine 2007, Georgia 2008, and Kyrgystan 2009. Putin commands a youth group called the Nashi, which meet every summer for fresh air, exercise and indoctrination. When it comes time to spread a little trouble Putin has an operative post instructions for downloading tools for spewing web requests along with a list of targets. Nashi, and Putin followers then download the tools and kick off the targeted attacks. DDoS by crowdsourcing. The beauty is that this technique provides a shield of plausible deniability. This was not Russia it was a bunch of patriots that were angry at [insert justification here].

During the recent military action in Gaza attacks against Israeli and American web sites became the most recent example of a crowd sourced cyber attack. Dozens of attackers systematically defaced over 800 web sites with pro-Hamas messages, many of them depicting gruesome images of dead babies and wounded civilians. Among the sites attacked were Israeli news sites, government servers, and even hospitals that were treating Palestinian casualties of the Gaza war. (Hamas supporters hack into Hadera hospital Web site)

Every age brings its new methods of warfare. The Romans perfected field combat with foot soldiers. Napoleon developed modern staffing for command and control combined with the science of logistics for re-supply, and the use of canon batteries. World War I saw the introduction of poison gas and mechanized armies. World War II introduced aviation, missiles, and rockets to the mix. Vietnam was the most tragic example of the use of guerrilla warfare to vanquish the techniques and technology of World War II era armies. The so-called war on terror is seeing the rise of cells, suicide bombers, and IED’s as effective weapons.

While defacing websites and disabling government communication vehicles such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs site of the Georgian government have not yet been recognized as warfare, it is apparent that networks, which have had an immeasurable positive impact on communication, commerce, and social interaction, are also vulnerable to attacks. Attacks on and across networks will become the defining innovation of future wars.

The motivation for using a disbursed and large group of non-professionals in a cyber attack are both political and technical. Political advantage arises from the plausible deniability. China still maintains the fiction that attacks against the Pentagon, France, Germany, India, Australia, and New Zealand that emanated from within its borders are the acts of unaffiliated young hackers. Even now Russia does not accept responsibilities for attacks against Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine or Georgia. Russia, perhaps the most accomplished country at manipulating world opinion, continues to deny all responsibility for its well orchestrated attacks that have not only brought down the immediate targets, such as web sites of government agencies, but have effectively brought Internet traffic to a halt in the targeted regions.

The technical advantage of crowd sourcing cyber attacks comes from the difficulty in defending against a massively distributed flood of requests sent against a web site or web resource such as DNS. Hackers have been exploring and refining the techniques of Distributed Denial of Service for two decades. The earliest denial of service attack was a simple ping flood. Anyone with a fast computer running Unix could execute a simple command that would generate ping packets, small one way communications used by network monitoring products to check to see if a host is still responding, to completely tie up the resources of the target computer or even completely clog its network connection. Ping floods are simple to defend against. A single rule in a router or firewall between the attacker and the target can block all pings.

There are, however, some packets that cannot be simply blocked at the firewall. Packets associated with the normal operation of the attacked web site or other type of server have to be let through. In the case of a website there is the TCP packet that initiates a connection between a browser and a web server, the SYN packet. When a web server receives a SYN packet it begins a three way handshake and waits for a response. An attacker simply sends millions of SYN packets which ties up the web server to the point where it cannot accept any more connections. While effective defenses have been developed for blocking SYN floods it still means deploying special equipment in the network path. Another type of attack, the GET flood, mimics thousands of web browsers requesting pages. This type of attack makes the web server work at maximum capacity serving up its pages and effectively prevents legitimate traffic from getting through.

Flood attacks using SYN and GET can be blocked if the source is known. Once again, just block all traffic from a specific IP address. It did not take long for hackers to develop techniques for distributing their attacks among hundreds, thousands and potentially millions of attacking hosts. These are the most effective attack techniques known, and can be very expensive to counter. The winner is usually the one with the most available bandwidth. So, when Russian sources attack small, recently networked countries, like Estonia and Georgia, they will inevitably win.

There are two ways to create an army of attacking hosts. Hackers have been “recruiting” hosts by spreading malware that surreptitiously infects a computer and enlists it in a network that can be controlled from a central point and commanded to launch an attack against a target at the whim of the owner of the army of what are called “bots”. These “bot armies” are available for hire and have been used to threaten and launch attacks, most famously against online gambling sites. In those instances the motivation was extortion. The other way is crowd sourcing whereby a large group of constituents, such as Putin’s Nashi, or Hamas members, or Israelis, are provided with software downloads and instructed how to attack the targeted web sites or infrastructure.

Just prior to its invasion of South Ossitia, the Georgian province, attack software was made available at stopgeorgia.com a web site traceable to the nefarious Russian Business Network, which in turn has been linked to ex-KGB operatives. The site also included a list of targets at which to direct the attacks in Georgia. It appears that traffic normally routed through Turkey to Georgia was also blocked.

While Russia continues to scoff at allegations that it engaged in cyber attacks the fact remains that a weapon was used to great advantage for Russia during a military operation. The almost plausible deniability afforded Russia by crowd sourcing is one of its advantages.

Source: Crowdsourcing Log

Change This is quite a unique on-line service. It engages thought leaders to write provocative opinions on any topic with the purpose of changing and enhancing people's view. The material is always high quality and available in a .pdf file to download and there is no advertising. How they keep it together I don't know.

I think there their latest release is very insightful

"...In November of last year, we sent out a survey to gauge the mood of ChangeThis readers and see if they could help provide some solutions and encouragement for ourselves and each other. After many months of immense change, both in the country as a whole and within our small company, we have finally finished sifting through those responses

They made the following three inquiries: "In one word, sum up how you feel right now;" "How is this affecting you?" and; "What are you choosing to do about it?" The 1400 replies we received to this survey are further proof, beyond the intuitive, that work is life and that the personal is the professional. Some people used creative metaphors to express their situations. Others used humor. Some enumerated their action plan. Some ranted. Some marveled. Some refused to accept a doom and gloom outlook and endeavored to see the possibilities that come with change. There are some trends, of course, and there were ample frustrations--with capitalism and ageism, with excess and politics.

The cover of the manifesto is a word cloud of the most common responses to that first inquiry, "How do you feel right now?" and each paragraph thereafter is a different individual's response to the third question, "What are you choosing to do about it?"

Click here to download the full report

From the Dec/Jan 09 issue of Fast Company magazine comes a great article about Cisco. Several paragraphs of note including:

Get ready for the upturn. “What’s our vision for where this industry is going with or without us?” That, [CEO John Cambers] says, is a five-year horizon. “What is our differentiated strategy within that vision?” That’s a two- to four-year plan. “How are we going to execute in the next 12 to 18 months?”

Chambers is convinced that the role of the CEO has to morph. He recalls a lesson he learned working for An Wang of Wang Laboratories, whom he has often called one of the smartest people he’s ever known: “One person cannot anticipate a market transition. At Wang, we transitioned four times, but we missed the fifth, from mini computers to PC and software. If you don’t catch them [all], you leave your company behind.”

It is Ron Ricci’s (Cisco VP) job to translate Chambers’s ideas into action — as he puts it, “I’m John’s scaling machine” — and he was the chief architect with Chambers of the new quasi-socialist Cisco. They were inspired in part, Ricci says, by management guru Gary Hamel’s ideas about the need to democratize strategy and distribute leadership in order to stimulate innovation.

Recently I caught up with an old aquaintance who had some information relevant to SME's and their marketing. It is interesting how these ideas can also be applied to larger organisations

Here is a summary...

The talk of the economy and its impact on SME’s surrounds us daily. The media reinforces the tough times that consumers are currently experiencing and the business world watches on as the ASX continues to fluctuate. This is weakening both consumer confidence and the consumer spending that has been buoying our economy for the last 12 years or more.

Obviously this downturn in spending and confidence sees many companies ‘retreat’ (cut their marketing budgets) in order to weather the financial storm. This strategy of course is an easy one to justify (especially by those responsible for finances) and has the added advantage of seemingly bolstering (some would say, camouflaging) earnings by simply cutting marketing costs as an expense to the company.

However, according to Harvard Business School’s John Quelch in a recently published article, marketing driven companies can learn from the lessons of the past and realise that when the going gets tough the tough get going – in a marketing sense.

MARKETING THROUGH TOUGH TIMES – PULL BACK OR PUSH FORWARD?

At BrandQuest we provide the following recommendations as suggestions that will see you come out the other side of the current ‘tough times’ in a much better position than you may be now – and certainly better than your competitors who may take the ‘retreat’ option:
1. Don’t invest less on marketing – invest smarter
2. Get closer to your customers - they need reassurance
3. Focus on core customers
4. Reassess your pricing tactics
5. Reinforce your core values

Without reducing your marketing spending you can improve the yield and effectiveness of your marketing by concentrating your efforts in the areas of known (marketing) productivity. Even better, your more ‘panic stricken’ competitors will more than likely ‘cut’ their budgets so you get a double whammy marketing effect by being more judiciously focused.

An added benefit is that you may find yourself in a stronger negotiating position when dealing with media, printers and other marketing suppliers who will be keener than ever to win your business and bank your revenue.

2. Get close to your customers – they too want reassurance. During recessionary or tough times, customers are more likely to postpone purchases, trade down to a lesser quality, or simply buy less. The ‘must-have’ features of yesterday’s good times are today's ‘can-do-withouts’.

Talk to your customers about providing testimonials or developing case studies that demonstrate their importance to you. It’s important to remember that your customers are also feeling the tougher times – so offer them a reward for their custom, discount the price slightly in recognition of their on-going support or better still, find ways to ‘bundle’ your product or offer to them in order to provide them with better value in return for a larger sales transaction. And make sure the offer is seen as ‘specially’ prepared for them and based on the ‘past partnership’ and their loyalty.

You might even consider a direct sales campaign that offers these loyal customers rewards (ie: lower prices, bonus product) for any introduction to a ‘new’ customer that results in a sale to you.

3. Focus on your core customers. These are your most precious tangible (marketing) asset and you need to nurture them through these times.But remember, they’re going through the same tough times also and are facing similar financial and operating pressures.

Find ways to get even closer and how you might be able to assist them even more. Brainstorm with your team ways that you might further demonstrate your appreciation and how to build an even stronger relationship with them. Deferred payments, improved ‘fast-track’ delivery, better terms, bonus ‘added values’, tiered discounts etc. Importantly play the game of ‘the other team’ – think like your competitor ie: If you were your competitor what offer or approach might you make to this customer that light lure them away from your company? This may well provide you with what you need to do to ensure they stay your customer.

To simply continue to do what you’ve always done for these customers may not be enough when the going gets tough. Remember Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again with the expectation of different results.

There is no worse inquisition in business than the ‘if only we had done XYZ they wouldn’t have left us!

4. Reassess your pricing tactics. Don’t deceive yourself. Even the most loyal of customers will become promiscuous during tough times. Make no mistake they will be shopping around for the best deals – not necessarily the lowest price. This doesn’t mean you have to cut your prices, but you may want to offer more temporary price promotions, implement quantity discounts, extend credit to long-standing customers, create ‘bundled services’ or ‘buy two and save even more’ type of pricing tactics.

Importantly, look outside your industry or category to see what pricing tactics other marketers are deploying in their respective categories – ask yourself how you might adapt similar tactics?

5. Reinforce your core values. Reinforce in your marketing the core capabilities and values that have got your company to where it is today. In tough times like these Companies (just like people) need reinforcement that “even though the economy is toughening up” some things never change.

Don’t scare or frighten your customer by showing signs of panic. Especially don’t (visibly) cut corners in any way, shape or fashion that a customer might perceive you to be ‘reducing your service’. At times such as these your current customer base is paramount and your service and core values (customer support, warranty, on-time delivery) may be the very reasons that a customer feels reassured and comfortable – and stays with you.

Deploying the above strategies and uniting your marketing and sales (and admin) teams across the board to emerge stronger than others will place your company or organisation at a distinct advantage when the current cyclical climate is over.

Information supplied by BrandQuest 

Many dismiss marketing as manipulative, deceptive, and intrusive. Marketing, they argue, focuses too much of our attention on material consumption. More recently, Benjamin Barber, in his 2007 book Consumed, claims that marketing is "sucking up the air from every other domain to sustain the sector devoted to consumption." He is correct. Coca-Cola, Nike, and Starbucks command more loyalty among many consumers than any political party, trade union, church, or mosque. Indeed, Starbucks founder Howard Schultz sought to make his coffee shops the "third place" in our lives, after home and work.

Marketing is an American success story. No country on earth is better at marketing than the United States. The latest Interbrand listing of the most valuable global brands reveals seven American brands in the top ten and sixty in the top hundred, more than twice the expected numbers based on the United States' command of 28 percent of the world economy.

"In most product categories in most countries, there are strong local brands reflecting local tastes that coexist alongside global brands."

Marketing by producers to consumers is as old as the bazaar. But modern marketing is more than just selling. It involves the design of products and services in response to consumer needs, latent or explicit. It involves branding these products and services, communicating their benefits to intermediaries and end consumers, and distributing them. All of these activities involve value creation. In return, producers extract value through the prices they set in the marketplace. The advent of commercial radio and, after World War II, commercial television enabled marketers to drive home the benefits of their national brands and to announce quickly the launch of new products and services to a nationwide audience. The willingness of producers to build their brands through advertising supported the emergence of a diverse array of media for the American consumer to enjoy. Moreover, these investments in marketing attracted talented businesspeople into the marketing field. Best practices in marketing were documented so its effectiveness improved over time.

Why marketing developed in the U.S.

By the 1960s, American brands had benefited from so much cumulative investment in marketing that they were unquestionably the strongest brands in the world. There were three reasons why marketing developed in the United States ahead of Europe. First, the sheer size of the U.S. demanded it. Second, the ambitions of American inventors and entrepreneurs demanded the broadest possible distribution. The Wal-Mart mission, for example, is to lower the cost of living for everyone everywhere. Third, American society was open to marketing while, in Europe, business or "trade" was viewed as less worthy a profession. Marketing in the United States benefited mightily from the endorsement of management guru Peter Drucker, who famously stated: "Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two—and only these two—basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs." Warren Buffett, America's most celebrated investor, has religiously invested in companies with strong brand names such as Coca-Cola and American Express. To this day, the proportion of company chief executives who have risen through the marketing ranks is much higher in the United States than Europe.

The marketers at Wal-Mart, Google, and Lenovo are in the best tradition of Henry Ford and his Model T. They seek to democratize access to their products by bringing good quality to the mass market at an affordable price. And not just the domestic mass market, the global mass market. In his landmark 1983 article "The Globalization of Markets," Harvard Business School's Theodore Levitt wrote of "the one great thing all markets have in common is an overwhelming desire for dependable, world-standard modernity in all things, at aggressively low prices." With the fall of communism in the 1980s and 1990s, American brands, ambitious, confident, and flush with capital soon established beachheads in the emerging economies. Local consumers, long denied access to Western brands and often victims of shoddy local imitations, were quick to try and adopt the former forbidden fruit.

Was this democratization of access to American brands a Trojan horse for American cultural imperialism? No. In most product categories in most countries, there are strong local brands reflecting local tastes that coexist alongside global brands. Retailing and distribution remain largely local. And American consumers show a desire for increasing cultural variety in their life experiences, eating more often at ethnic restaurants and vacationing more often in faraway places. In many categories, increased global demand drove costs and retail prices down, prompting global production to shift to economies with lower input costs. The manufacture of personal computer components is now concentrated in Asia and manufacturers are constantly seeking to drive costs lower still in order to hit retail price points that will enable additional millions of poor people to buy in. As prices have fallen, Asian brands such as Asus and Acer of Taiwan have gained share while IBM sold its PC business to Lenovo.

"Critics of marketing tend to overestimate the level of intentional deception and the vulnerability of consumers."

In addition to globalization, a second force enabling marketing to bring good quality to the masses is technology. Today, the Internet, supported like most of the diverse media that preceded it by brand advertising rather than subscription, is further democratizing access to markets. The ability of consumers to compare prices over the web irons out cross-border price differences and expands trade. A poor farmer in India can check commodity prices on the Internet before he sells his crop to the local buyer. Thanks to a progressive decline in data processing and storage costs, technology now enables marketers to offer consumers much more choice including the ability to tailor solutions to individual needs at only slightly greater cost. American Express and Harrah's Entertainment, both heavy investors in IT, now tailor their marketing communications to the buying patterns or sales potential of tightly defined consumer segments or, indeed, of individual consumers.

Engaged consumers

The interactive nature of the Internet means that customers are now engaged more than ever in the co-creation of brand meaning and the development of marketplace offerings. Procter & Gamble recently invited consumers to vote on suggested new flavors for Crest toothpaste. H.J. Heinz worked with Google to invite submissions of thirty-second video ads for Heinz ketchup; over 2,000 entries were received. Then-Senator Obama's website was an impressive vehicle for engaging voters, many of them new to politics, as donors, volunteers, and idea generators. Marketers aim to satisfy the needs of consumers at all levels of income wherever they live in the world, surely a worthy goal. Why then is marketing criticized so often? And why do marketers offer such little resistance? There are two main reasons. First, marketing is not a profession. Second, marketing is not a science.

Unlike accounting or the law, marketing is not a profession. Anyone can call himself or herself a marketer. The absence of entry barriers allows for greater creativity, imagination, and new ideas. But the flip side is that manipulation and deception of consumers by irresponsible marketers is all too common. Absent professional exams and codes of conduct, abusers of the marketing toolkit are subject only to the sanctions of the marketplace and the law. The vast majority of marketers are honest and respect their customers but, collectively, they need to work harder to expose and shut down the charlatans.

At the same time, critics of marketing conflate their objection to harmful products such as tobacco with hostility towards the marketing toolkit harnessed to present them to the public. They also tend to overestimate the level of intentional deception and the vulnerability of consumers. As advertising icon David Ogilvy famously said in an earlier era: "The consumer is not a moron. She is your wife."

Perhaps marketers would be more self-confident about their contributions if marketing were a science with clear dos and don'ts. In fact, marketing is as much art as science, as much right brain as left brain. Many chief financial officers might still agree with John Wanamaker's famous adage: "Half my advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half." But our understanding of what works in marketing, how and why, has advanced greatly in the last twenty years. Low-cost data analysis enables marketers to understand what level and mix of incentives will produce behavior change, even down to the level of the individual consumer. Marketers have no interest in annoying consumers by delivering messages to those who are not interested in their products or services. It is now possible for chief marketing officers to calculate return on marketing investment and to report regularly to the corporate board progress against three or four brand and consumer health metrics that can predict subsequent business performance.

Even with these advances, marketers still do a surprisingly poor job of marketing Marketing. They do not appreciate, let alone articulate, the economic and social benefits of marketing. Marketplace exchanges are based on mutual trust between buyers and sellers. They create value for both parties. The billions of successful daily marketplace transactions are an important part of the glue that holds our society together. Good marketers offer consumers choices. Choice stimulates consumption and economic growth and facilitates personal expression. Good marketers provide consumers with information about new products and services, thereby accelerating their adoption. All these benefits are routinely overlooked as the 17 million Americans engaged in marketing, selling, and customer service routinely try to fly under the radar of social critics and go about their daily work contributing brilliantly but often unknowingly to our quality of life.

Author:      John Quelch

Source

Economic difficulties need not mean that we lower our standards for leadership. If anything, we should raise our sights.

New work by HBS professor Michael Beer and colleagues shows that there is still a place for what they term uncompromising leadership. Due out this summer, the book High Commitment, High Performance: How to Build a Resilient Organization for Sustained Advantage describes organizations that, Beer says, "are diametrically opposite to the firms we saw fail on Wall Street. The book's perspective also leads to answers to the question of how to manage in tough times in a way that avoids liquidation of human and cultural assets."

The book looks broadly at what it takes to build a high commitment, high performance (HCHP) system inside companies. It asks and answers questions such as: What outcomes must such an organization achieve in order to sustain commitment and performance? What are principled choices its leaders must make if they are serious about building such a firm? What are the means for changing an average company into a HCHP company? What are the key design features of such a firm?

In our email Q&A, Beer reflected on what he is learning from a long-term study of successful CEOs, some of them outlined in the August 2008 Harvard Business Review article, "The Uncompromising Leader," cowritten with Russell A. Eisenstat, Nathaniel Foote, Tobias Fredberg, and Flemming Norrgren. He also offers HBS Working Knowledge readers a preview of the ideas in High Commitment, High Performance: How to Build a Resilient Organization for Sustained Advantage. Says Beer, "CEOs of HCHP companies think very differently about their employees. They see them as an asset and care about them as people." As a result they manage downturns differently from the norm, too.

Martha Lagace: What observations or experiences have driven you and your colleagues to study uncompromising leadership? How and why did you select the CEOs in your study?

Michael Beer: My colleagues and I have been working with many companies to help their leaders improve the effectiveness, commitment, and performance of their organizations over the years. We have realized that the leader can be a limiting factor in a journey to transform an organization into a high commitment, high performance (HCHP) organization. We therefore wanted to study leaders who had demonstrated their capacity to build a HCHP firm and to study them more formally.

My own interest in HCHP companies began at Corning, Inc. I started my career there, after earning my Ph.D. in organizational Psychology, as an internal management researcher and consultant. Shortly after arriving at Corning I received a call from a small manufacturing plant in Medfield, Massachusetts. They had read Douglas McGregor's now classic book The Human Side of Enterprise and wanted to implement, in their relatively new plant, his ideas about how people's energies could be unleashed. Over several years of working with them we were able to create a very different organization—less top down, more participative, one that offered more challenging jobs and informed people about results of the business on a regular basis. That began my intellectual journey.

For this present study we selected CEOs on the basis of two criteria. The company had to have performed in the top half of its industry for a decade before the inception of the study, and we had to have evidence that these leaders had created a high commitment culture. We decided about the latter from articles and informed observers. If our interviews disconfirmed our initial estimate, we dropped the CEO from our sample.

Q: What made these leaders unusual?

A: The CEOs were quite different in personality, background, and leadership style. But they were similar in what they saw as the purpose of the firm. They shared the view that a firm has a larger purpose than simply profit and increasing stock price, though they were all laser-focused on profitability and saw it as essential to achieving their larger purpose for the firm. They had a multi-stakeholder view of the firm as opposed as a shareholder view. The purpose was to add value to employees, customers, community, and society—not just shareholders.

These CEOs operate from deep beliefs and values. Their purpose is to leave a legacy of a great firm. Some were founders but most had arrived in the CEO role much later in the lifecycle of the firm. If they were insiders they had to find a way to carry on the tradition of the firm in changed circumstances. Perhaps the competition was more intense than it had been. In some cases the business was really challenged. In other cases the firm had become global and they had to figure out how to make integrate a much larger company spread over different cultures. In all cases they had to find a way to deal with these circumstances in a way that conformed to their values and high purpose.

By and large the CEOs had a diverse career experience. They had cross-functional and cross-business experience (within their company or at other companies).

Most CEOs rose in their company but a few came from outside. If they came from outside it was generally because the firm was in trouble and needed a turnaround. For example, Allan Leighton took over as chairman of the Royal Mail and materially improved its performance. Doug Conant took over Campbell Soup when it was in trouble and turned it around and sustained improvements over seven or more years.

Q: Firms are economic organizations as well as social institutions, as you write. These days, most every company is hurting as an economic organization. What pressures are subsequently placed on the social institution? How can good leadership strengthen morale as well as the economic side of the organization in times of uncertainty?

A: We interviewed the CEOs before the financial meltdown, so I cannot say how these CEOs have dealt with this crisis. We know from other research, however, that CEOs of HCHP companies think very differently about their employees. They see them as an asset, and care about them as people and work hard to frame the mission of the firm in a way that creates meaning. Consequently they manage downturns very differently. Tom Solso, CEO of Cummings Engine, started the turnaround of the company by first working on values—redefining them and communicating them widely.

First, they do not merely focus on cost cutting and layoffs when a crisis arrives. While they may lay off employees (though with a different process than average companies), they continue to develop the organization and its people. So they do not cut all training and education. Nor do they cut employment without a lot of open communication about why they are doing it, often traveling to all parts of the company to communicate about these matters personally. Some keep people when others are firing and take lower profits, thereby gaining the advantage when the economy turns around.

Below is a short section from my forthcoming book, High Commitment, High Performance: How to Build a Resilient Organization for Sustained Advantage, which describes the attitude and means many such companies employ:

Managing the Inevitable Crisis

The journey to HCHP is not a straight line up. At various stages of the journey the company will face a crisis in performance. How that crisis is dealt with will determine the organization's future HCHP trajectory. Will the company liquidate its investment in high commitment culture and the talented people it took years to develop and impregnate with the company's DNA? Or will the HCHP organization be able to negotiate the crisis without liquidating its social and human capital? These moments of truth define the organization's future much more powerfully than speeches, appeals for better teamwork, and mission or value statements.

Consider the case of Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream, a $1 billion company, whose story was researched and reported by Professor Jennifer Chatman at the University of California, Berkeley.1 In June 1988, unexpected events coincided to make it the most difficult period in the company's history. Investments in the company's expansion took longer, cost more than anticipated, and expected profits were delayed. The price of butterfat, the key ingredient in ice cream, rose to a record level. The company could not raise prices because of aggressive discounting by its chief competitor. Revenue in one of Dreyer's new product lines began to drop. And one of its customers threatened to terminate its long-term distribution contract.

"CEOs recognize that they have to be able to stay objective about the key people so that they can evaluate them and take proper action if they are not performing."

Under these pressures from capital markets, most executives would begin restructuring and cutting costs immediately. Dryer's senior management began with honest and open communication. Gary Rogers and Richard Cronk had spent many years building an open team based culture, one in which they had made themselves accessible, so employees believed them. When they were prepared to announce their restructuring to the financial community, executive committee members were on airplanes to talk with every one of their 400 employees. Cronk observed, "We know our limits and understand the law, but we tend to be very open with our employees, we communicate a lot." "They reassured us," said an account executive, "by calling it straight... they informed us of their game plan and that they needed us... you looked and these [senior managers] and thought, you'd run through a wall for this guy."2

The story does not end there. A 1-800 number was set up so employees could call to hear CEO Rogers's pre-recorded speech about the situation and his plans. The speech was honest and owned up to problems, but also was upbeat. Senior management continued to invest in the Dreyer Leadership University [DLU], demonstrating that they cared about employee development. Cronk and others in senior management thought this was an investment in the future that would pay off. "When people heard that we were investing another million dollars into the [culture] and DLU it created a high degree of comfort and confidence that we're focused on what really matters," observed the VP of Sales."3

The company's revenue, profits and stock price rebounded from this dire situation. By 2001 Dreyer's stock had risen from 9.88 in 1988 to 36. In January 2003 the stock price rose to 71.23. Reflecting on how they handled the crisis, Cronk said, "It was a common trust and of sharing the facts—openness ... we weren't sugarcoating anything, putting a Hollywood spin on anything ... we were honest and clear ... people believed the story and they understood ... there was an enormous amount of pride and optimism."4

In addition to open and honest communication and continued investment in HCHP management practices, corporations need to develop an a priori set of policies in advance of the crisis that will minimize damage from restructuring and downsizing and maintain employee dignity and commitment. Wayne Cascio, who has studied companies with a record of stable long-term employment contracts, lists the following policies to preserve the dignity and relationship with survivors and departing employees.5

• "Use downsizing as a last resort; at the same time, reinvent your business." There are several ways companies have done this.

  – Rely on attrition to right size.
  – Use redeployment and make layoffs a last resort. Hewlett Packard used this strategy extensively throughout the 1980s as it faced intensified competition. Employees were given three months to find a job in HP and were helped to do so. If they could not find an equivalent level job, they were offered a lower level job. If they preferred not to take that job, they were given generous severance packages.
  – Ask for volunteers who want to take extended vacations, a sabbatical, leaves of absence, or a shorter work week.
  – Ask everyone to share the pain by taking a pay cut. Senior management should take a larger one. Hewlett Packard used this approach several times in its early history.
  – Shorten work weeks and offer stock options in return.
  – Lend employees to not-for-profit firms and pay the difference in their wages.

• "Do everything you can to manage survivors well." Tell survivors exactly how departed employees are being treated.
• "Generate goodwill, even loyalty, among departing employees" by taking great care with how they are separated. Generous severance packages, outplacement services, and retraining are typical strategies.

A profit sharing compensation policy increases the capability of a HCHP company to retain its employees in a time of crisis. Because 25 percent of employee pay in Japanese companies is based on company profits, a crisis in performance automatically reduces their cost structure and allows them to avoid layoffs. The global economic crisis of 2008, the worst since the Great Depression, may make such policies more attractive to employees as job security becomes more salient for a generation of workers, just as it did after the Great Depression.

Q: Maintaining a professional distance from work, a full life outside of work, and a sense of humor all helped the CEOs in your study. Could you discuss the inevitable tension between commitment to work and the necessity of maintaining a little distance as well, as demonstrated by these CEOs?

A: When we describe maintaining distance while staying close, we are saying that the CEOs recognize that they have to be able to stay objective about the key people so that they can evaluate them and take proper action if they are not performing. This prevents cronyism, the enemy of high performance. To do this they recognize they have to maintain some social distance. But they also know they have to build a tight team. So they manage this paradox.

The question of work-life balance is a different one. Personally we learned that most of them do practice work-life balance within the context of a very demanding job. Their life is not all about work. So they protect some time to be with their family.

As for employees at large, there is a danger that commitment to the organization can undermine work-life balance. Some years ago I studied a HCHP manufacturing plant and found that commitment was so high that there was a rise in family tensions and divorce. This was an organization at the very high end of the commitment continuum. So HCHP firms must work to avoid this. SAS Institute, a software company, limits people to 35 hours a week. In others CEOs go out of their way to let employees know that their own personal goals are to manage work-life balance, thus being a role model others now feel free to emulate. We recently interviewed a CEO who told us that he took his wife and kids to company meetings during the summer when the children were off from school. He told us that managers took note of this and realized that it was now okay from them to manage their work-life balance.

Q: What are you working on next?

A: I am now working with my colleagues to write a book that will go into detail about what HCHP leaders say, think, and do. We have just created a not-for-profit organization called the TruePoint Center for High Commitment and High Performance. This will be a research and education institute intended to increase our understanding of these organizations and educating leaders through conferences and other means. We are funding the Center by contributing 2 percent of TruePoint's revenue to fund the Center. Finally, I plan yet another book that will present the theory and method leading an honest, collective (organization-wide) and public conversation (key people in the company are either involved or are informed about it and the results) about the strengths of the company and barriers to commitment and performance. Such a learning and governance process is essential for building a HCHP organization.

Q&A with:      Michael Beer       

Author:      Martha Lagace

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The 3rd McKinsey executive concept in 2008 has a lot of value...

A new approach to leadership can help women become more self-confident and effective business leaders.

Women start careers in business and other professions with the same level of intelligence, education, and commitment as men. Yet comparatively few reach the top echelons.

This gap matters not only because the familiar glass ceiling is unfair, but also because the world has an increasingly urgent need for more leaders. All men and women with the brains, the desire, and the perseverance to lead should be encouraged to fulfill their potential and leave their mark.

With all this in mind, the McKinsey Leadership Project—an initiative to help professional women at McKinsey and elsewhere—set out four years ago to learn what drives and sustains successful female leaders. We wanted to help younger women navigate the paths to leadership and, at the same time, to learn how organizations could get the best out of this talented group.

To that end, we have interviewed more than 85 women around the world (and a few good men) who are successful in diverse fields. Some lead 10,000 people or more, others 5 or even fewer. While the specifics of their lives vary, each one shares the goal of making a difference in the wider world. All were willing to discuss their personal experiences and to provide insights into what it takes to stay the leadership course. We have also studied the academic literature; consulted experts in leadership, psychology, organizational behavior, and biology; and sifted through the experiences of hundreds of colleagues at McKinsey.

From the interviews and other research, we have distilled a leadership model comprising five broad and interrelated dimensions (exhibit): meaning, or finding your strengths and putting them to work in the service of an inspiring purpose; managing energy, or knowing where your energy comes from, where it goes, and what you can do to manage it; positive framing, or adopting a more constructive way to view your world, expand your horizons, and gain the resilience to move ahead even when bad things happen; connecting, or identifying who can help you grow, building stronger relationships, and increasing your sense of belonging; and engaging, or finding your voice, becoming self-reliant and confident by accepting opportunities and the inherent risks they bring, and collaborating with others.

We call this model centered leadership. As the name implies, it’s about having a well of physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual strength that drives personal achievement and, in turn, inspires others to follow. What’s particularly exciting is that we are starting to discover ways women can actively build the skills to become more self-confident and effective leaders. Centered leadership also works for men, though we have found that the model resonates particularly well with women because we have built it on a foundation of research into their specific needs and experiences.

Centered leadership emphasizes the role of positive emotions. A few characteristics particularly distinguish women from their male counterparts in the workplace. First, women can more often opt out of it than men can. Second, their double burden—motherhood and management—drains energy in a particularly challenging way. Third, they tend to experience emotional ups and downs more often and more intensely than most men do. Given these potentially negative emotions, centered leadership consciously draws on positive psychology, a discipline that seeks to identify what makes healthy people thrive. Although none of the women we interviewed articulated her ideas in precisely those terms, when we dived into the literature and interviewed leading academics, we found strong echoes of what our female leaders had been telling us.

Meaning

‘To love what you do and feel that it matters—how could anything be more fun?’

Meaning is the motivation that moves us. It enables people to discover what interests them and to push themselves to the limit. It makes the heart beat faster, provides energy, and inspires passion. Without meaning, work is a slog between weekends. With meaning, any job can become a calling.

It starts with happiness. Positive psychologists (including Tal Ben-Shahar, Jonathan Haidt, and Martin Seligman) have defined a progression of happiness that leads from pleasure to engagement to meaning. Researchers have demonstrated, for example, that an ice cream break provides only short-lived pleasure; in contrast, the satisfaction derived from an act of kindness or gratitude lasts much longer. Katharine Graham, the first female CEO of a Fortune 500 enterprise (the Washington Post Company), famously said, “To love what you do and feel that it matters—how could anything be more fun?”

Why is meaning important for leaders? Studies have shown that among professionals, it translates into greater job satisfaction, higher productivity, lower turnover, and increased loyalty.¹ The benefits also include feelings of transcendence—in other words, contributing to something bigger than yourself generates a deeper sense of meaning, thereby creating a virtuous cycle. Finding meaning in life helped some of the women leaders we interviewed take new paths and accept the personal risks implicit in their goals.

Shelly Lazarus, the chairman and CEO of the advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, described how she “just followed [her] heart, doing the things that [she] loved to do.” This sense of meaning inspired her, early in her career, to jump from Clairol to Ogilvy. Lazarus commented that everyone she knew thought that her decision to go from the client side to the agency side was a strategic move. But “it wasn’t really like that,” she says. “I just loved the interaction with the agency because that was the moment I could see where the ideas came to life.”

People seeking to define what is meaningful can start, as one interviewee put it, by “being honest with yourself about what you’re good at and what you enjoy doing.” Building these signature strengths into everyday activities at work makes you happier, in part by making these activities more meaningful. Although there is no simple formula for matching your strengths to any single industry or function, you can look for patterns in jobs that have and haven’t worked out and talk with others about your experiences.

The connection between signature strengths and work can change because priorities do; sometimes, for example, a job is better than a calling, especially for young mothers. Our interviews show that this ebb and flow is natural and that the key to success is being aware of the shifts—and making conscious choices about them—in the context of bigger goals, personal or professional.

To read more on meaning:

Tal Ben-Shahar, Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007.

Martin E. P. Seligman, Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment, New York: Free Press, 2004.

Sonja Lyubomirsky, The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want, New York: Penguin, 2007.

Managing energy

‘Flow’—a sense of being so engaged by activities that you don’t notice the passage of time Actively managing energy levels is crucial to leaders. Today’s executives work hard: 60 percent of the senior executives toil more than 50 hours a week, and 10 percent more than 80 hours a week.² What’s more, many women come home from work only to sign onto a “second shift”—92 percent of them still manage all household tasks, such as meal preparation and child care.³

We’ve found that work–life balance is a myth—so the only hope women have is to balance their energy flows. This means basing your priorities on the activities that energize you, both at work and at home, and actively managing your resources to avoid dipping into reserves. Burnout is a reality for men and women alike, but for women who can opt out, so too is throwing in the towel.

But work doesn’t have to be exhausting. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, a founder of positive psychology, studied thousands of people, from sculptors to factory workers. He found that those who frequently experienced what he called “flow”—a sense of being so engaged by activities that you don’t notice the passage of time—were more productive and derived greater satisfaction from their work than those who did not. Further, it energized rather than drained them.

Zia Mody, a top litigator in India, described how she gained energy from a life that most people would see as exhausting. Even when her three daughters were young, she put in 16-hour days to prepare her cases. A woman among thousands of men at court, she lit up as she told us, “I love it! I love winning. I love being in court. . . . It excites me—I cannot tell you how much.”

One useful tactic is to identify the conditions and situations that replenish your energy and those that sap it. Self-awareness lets you deliberately incorporate restorative elements into your day. It can also help you to space out your energy-sapping tasks throughout the day, instead of bundling them all into a single morning or afternoon. A particularly useful tip, we have found, is to give yourself time during the day to focus without distractions such as blinking lights and buzzing phones. Your productivity will benefit several times over.

To read more on managing energy:

Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, New York: HarperPerennial, 1991.

Edy Greenblatt, “Work/Life Balance: Wisdom or Whining,” Organizational Dynamics, 2002, Volume 31, Number 2, pp. 177–93.

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal, New York: Free Press, 2003.

Positive framing

No matter how pessimistic you are by nature, you can learn to view situations as optimists do The frames people use to view the world and process experiences can make a critical difference to professional outcomes. Many studies suggest that optimists see life more realistically than pessimists do, a frame of mind that can be crucial to making the right business decisions. That insight may be particularly critical for women, who are twice as likely to become depressed, according to one study.⁴ Optimists, research shows, are not afraid to frame the world as it actually is—they are confident that they can manage its challenges and move their teams quickly to action. By contrast, pessimists are more likely to feel helpless and to get stuck in downward spirals that lead to energy-depleting rumination.

Martin Seligman, a psychologist who was an early proponent of positive psychology, found, for example, that optimists are better able to deal with the news that they have cancer. Confident that they can handle the prognosis, they immediately start to gather facts and dive into treatment plans; pessimists, on the other hand, become paralyzed with fear. Seligman also shows that optimism can be learned—an important insight that underlies positive framing.

Positive framing and positive thinking, we would emphasize, are two different notions. The latter tries to replace adversity with positive beliefs. The former accepts the facts of adversity and counters them with action. Talking yourself into a view contrary to the facts has a temporary effect at best.

The experience of Andrea Jung, the chairman and CEO of Avon, suggests how useful positive framing can be. In late 2005, Jung recalls, she found her company in a decline that temporary factors could not explain. Recognizing that she was the leader who had created the strategies and the team responsible for the downturn, she listened to the counsel of her executive coach and promptly “fired herself” on a Friday night. The following Monday, Andrea showed up at work as the “new” turnaround CEO. She proved herself to be a “glass half full” optimist, and the recovery plan her management team adopted after a quick diagnosis led to a steady improvement and a return to growth.

No matter how pessimistic you are by nature, you can learn to view situations as optimists do. The key is self-awareness. If a meeting goes badly, for example, you should limit your thoughts about it to its temporary and specific impact and keep them impersonal. It helps to talk with trusted colleagues about the reasons for the poor meeting and ways to do better next time. These discussions should take place quickly enough for you to make a specific plan and act on it. You should also undertake some activity that will restore both your energy and your faith in yourself—perhaps having a hard workout, going out with friends, or spending time with your children.

To read more on positive framing:

Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, New York: Basic Books, 2006.

Martin E. P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life, New York: Pocket Books, 1998.

Connecting

‘We were supporting each other, and there was power in the many’ People with strong networks and good mentors enjoy more promotions, higher pay, and greater career satisfaction.⁵ They feel a sense of belonging, which makes their lives meaningful. As Mark Hunter and Herminia Ibarra have noted in the Harvard Business Review, what differentiates a leader from a manager “is the ability to figure out where to go and to enlist the people and groups necessary to get there.”⁶ Yet not all networks are equal. Roy Baumeister, a social psychologist who studies social belonging and rejection, believes that men tend to build broader, shallower networks than women do and that the networks of men give them a wider range of resources for gaining knowledge and professional opportunities.⁷ This theory is a matter of substantial debate among academics. Our experience with hundreds of women at McKinsey, however, offers additional evidence that women’s networks tend to be narrower but deeper than men’s.

The experience of Dame Stella Rimington, who in the late 1960s joined MI5, the UK’s domestic intelligence organization, offers an example of the power of broad networks to get things done. Rimington, later the agency’s director general, says that “women were definitely second-class citizens” in those days. They weren’t allowed to do fieldwork, for example, yet “many of the women were completely indistinguishable from the men: they had the same kind of education.”

She continues: “So we women—there were quite a few of us by then—we sort of ganged up and did a kind of round-robin thing and said, ‘Why is it that we have a completely different career than men who are exactly like us?’ And for the first time, the powers that be started to scratch their heads because they suddenly had to find an answer. . . . And in the end, of course, they decided that they would have to promote a few women.” She later concluded that “no one of us would have asked that question on her own. We were supporting each other, and there was power in the many.”

The leaders we interviewed also talked about the importance of having individual relationships with senior colleagues willing to go beyond the role of mentor—someone willing to stick out his or her own neck to create opportunity for or help a protégée. Such a person is what Ruth Porat, a vice chairwoman at Morgan Stanley, called a “sponsor.”

A number of studies have shown that women who promote their own interests vigorously are seen as aggressive, uncooperative, and selfish. An equal number of studies show that the failure of women to promote their own interests results in a lack of female leaders. Until one of these conditions changes, sponsors, we believe, are the key to helping women gain access to opportunities they merit and need to develop.

Porat explained how a managing director took a chance on her when she was a second-year associate, asking her to present to a client’s board of directors. “The consumer client wanted a woman to be present. I had never been in a boardroom, let alone presented in a boardroom. ‘Sink or swim,’ he told me. ‘You’re in.’ I still remember to this day a mistake I made and that it was, overall, a good presentation. He took a real chance on me.”

One surprising thing we learned as a result of talking with female leaders was that they often fail to reciprocate and find expectations that they should do so distasteful. A senior partner at McKinsey noted that men naturally understand that you must “give before you get,” but women don’t. This tendency—which other leaders have described to us as well—combined with the sometimes awkward sexual politics, real or perceived, between senior men and younger women, makes it harder for women to find sponsors.

Yet women can learn reciprocity. To start, it’s important to assess your comfort level with the people you know through work, as well as how influential they are professionally. Most women we’ve worked with typically find that the colleagues they are close to are not influential—and vice versa. Explicit planning and some risk taking are needed to change this.

One approach is to provide and ask for help on a regular basis. Finding ways to forge connections through interests outside of work is another. Over and over, we heard, “Make it personal,” in the sense that others will get along with you more easily if they see your human side. You can express this in all kinds of ways at work, without inappropriately blending your professional and personal lives. The female leaders we interviewed acted on this insight both to find sponsors and to build networks.

To read more on connecting:

Catalyst, Creating Women’s Networks: A How-To Guide for Women and Companies, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999.

Monica Higgins and Kathy Kram, “Reconceptualizing Mentoring at Work: A Developmental Network Perspective,” Academy of Management Review, 2001, Volume 26, Number 2, pp. 264–68.

Lois J. Zachary, The Mentor’s Guide: Facilitating Effective Learning Relationships, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000.

Engaging

‘You did the work, so you’ve got to talk about it’ Many people think that hard work will eventually be noticed and rewarded. That can indeed happen—but usually doesn’t. Women, our interviewees repeatedly told us, need to “create their own luck.” To engage with opportunities by taking ownership of them, you must first find your own voice, literally. Julie Daum, a prominent Spencer Stuart recruiter who specializes in board placements, told us that even senior women on boards still lose out by not speaking up: they hang back if they think that they have nothing new to say or that their ideas fall short of profound.

One senior woman we interviewed told us how she learned to join in: “Every Monday, we had a senior-management meeting. In the beginning, I just listened. I learned from the guys because they were all there. And after a while I started to speak up. You did the work, so you’ve got to talk about it. And I did.”

Women who want to grow as leaders should also take ownership of their professional development. Mary Ma, Lenovo’s former chief financial officer, said that she drew inspiration from using the Japanese auto industry as a metaphor, reshaping herself to become more competitive by identifying what she had to change and then actually changing it. As Ma noted, she didn’t complain to her boss or to her colleagues but rather looked inward to see how she could be a more effective leader. Instead of waiting for someone to tell her what to do, she took a systematic approach to self-improvement.

Engagement is equally about risk taking. The women we interviewed accept risk as a part of opportunity. Some have the confidence and courage to dive in; others use analytic problem solving to assess risks and then proceed to action. Psychologist Daniel Gilbert says his research indicates that people who make a choice for risk and work with it, rather than avoid it, report a greater degree of happiness than others do.

Shona Brown, Google’s senior vice president of business operations, described how she handles opportunities and the risks that accompany them. “I’ll use a skiing analogy because I like to jump off cliffs,” she says. “But I generally jump off cliffs from which I’m relatively confident I’m going to land—or if I don’t, it’s not dangerous.” Brown said she enjoys risk. “I like to be at that point where you’re about to jump. Your stomach is kind of going ‘woo’! It’s not so simple that you’re sure you’ll succeed. But you’re not in a life-threatening situation.”

Our interviews have shown us that to embrace opportunity, people must often take sharp detours and that the risks of unexpected changes commonly seem more obvious than the benefits. Reaching out to others—not to avoid making decisions yourself but to learn the best outcome from change can often help you see opportunities in the right frame and decide whether to go for them.

To read more on engaging:

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling On Happiness, New York: Knopf, 2006.

Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, Women Don’t Ask: The High Cost of Avoiding Negotiation—and Positive Strategies for Change, New York: Bantam, 2007.

Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, Encinitas, CA: Puddledancer Press, 2003.

Within McKinsey and in the corporate world, our work on centered leadership continues (see sidebar, “Initial results”). To understand how men and women practice it across tenures, industries, and regions, we are interviewing more female and male leaders and launching large-scale surveys—again, with female and male respondents.

Our research is exploring the hypothesis that today’s leaders can become even more effective through the model of centered leadership: a shared purpose with deep meaning for the people involved, explicit awareness and management of energy, positive framing, strong informal and formal networks, and the collaborative creation of opportunities. In time, we hope to help increase the number of female leaders significantly by giving them the tools to build leadership skills for any playing field.

Initial results

McKinsey has been hard at work for more than a decade developing female leaders. Centered leadership is a simple yet powerful model that has infused tremendous energy into our efforts. We are now beginning to see the power that comes from putting all the pieces together. Since March, we’ve introduced the centered-leadership model to a thousand women and half as many men in regional and global learning programs. Work on building the skills at its core has unleashed collective and individual energy. Some participants quickly reached out to people who might sponsor them; others began to give their career focus greater meaning right away by asking to be involved in new projects that reflect their specific interests. Many of the women reported a tremendous increase in their energy and motivation. Indeed, more than 100 of them signed onto an interest group to compare notes about how they are applying centered leadership.

It’s early days for centered leadership, but like a grassroots movement it is proliferating organically. Interestingly, we initially rolled out these ideas only to women but were immediately approached by many men who wanted “what the women were having.”

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About the Author

Joanna Barsh is a director in McKinsey’s New York office.

About the Authors

Joanna Barsh is a director in McKinsey’s New York office, where Rebecca Craske is an associate principal; Susie Cranston is a consultant in the San Francisco office.

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Notes

¹Martin E. P. Seligman, Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment, New York: Free Press, 2004.

²Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Carolyn Buck Luce, “Extreme jobs: The dangerous allure of the 70-hour workweek,” Harvard Business Review, 2006, Volume 84, Number 12, pp. 49–59.

³Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007.

⁴See Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain, New York: Morgan Road Books, 2006.

⁵See George Dreher and Ronald Ash, “A comparative study of mentoring among men and women in managerial, professional, and technical positions,” Journal of Applied Psychology, 1990, Volume 75, Number 5, pp. 539–46; and Terri Scandura, “Mentorship and career mobility: An empirical investigation,” Journal of Organizational Behavior, 1992, Volume 13, Number 2, pp. 169–74.

⁶Mark Hunter and Herminia Ibarra, “How leaders create and use networks,” Harvard Business Review, 2007, Volume 85, Number 1, pp. 40–7.

⁷Roy F. Baumeister, “Is there anything good about men?” American Psychological Association, invited address, 2007. The full speech can be found online.

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