Becoming your most charismatic self

strategy+business, November 27, 2019

by Theodore Kinni



Photograph by Klaus Vedfelt

Peter Drucker, my favorite managerial touchstone, didn’t think much of leadership charisma. You can almost hear him grinding his teeth as he describes, in his 1992 book, Managing for the Future, being asked to run a seminar on “how one acquires charisma” by a vice president of HR at a big bank.

It’s the prelude to a bit of a rant. “History knows no more charismatic leaders than [the 20th] century’s triad of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao — the misleaders who inflicted as much evil and suffering on humanity as have ever been recorded,” Drucker fumes. “But effective leadership doesn’t depend on charisma. Dwight Eisenhower, [former Secretary of State] George Marshall, and Harry Truman were singularly effective leaders, yet none possessed any more charisma than a dead mackerel.”

Drucker’s antipathy toward charisma is understandable. An Austrian working in Germany, he witnessed the rise of Adolf Hitler, and he was forced to flee to London a few months after Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933. But Drucker may have gotten this one wrong: He seems to be conflating the effects of charisma with the ends to which it is applied.

It appears, upon further reflection, that charisma does contribute to leadership effectiveness. “A meta-analysis of data spanning close to a quarter of a century has shown that charismatic leaders not only possess an ability to inspire their troops to ever higher levels of performance, but also simultaneously embed deeper levels of commitment in their psyche,” report academics Stephen Martin and Joseph Marks in their book, Messengers: Who We Listen To, Who We Don’t, and Why.

Sounds promising. But what if a leader indeed possesses no more charisma than a dead mackerel? Can it be cultivated? Read the rest here

How to build a great experience

strategy+business, November 15, 2019

by Theodore Kinni



Illustration by Paula Daniëlse

In 2017, the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young University announced that henceforth the Department of Recreational Management would be known as the Department of Experience Design and Management. The idea that immersive and engaging experiences produce value and deliver competitive advantage has come a long way in the 20 years since Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore welcomed us to something they called the “experience economy.”

Designing Experiences is the latest in a long line of books that have appeared on the subject. In it, J. Robert Rossman, a professor at Illinois State University, and Mathew Duerden, an associate professor in the aforementioned department at the Marriott School, touch on many of its predecessors (including one in which I had a hand, Be Our Guest) in a concise textbook that serves as both a theoretical foundation and a how-to guide for experience design.

The theoretical foundation, which appears mostly in the first two chapters, bogs down a bit in explaining what constitutes an experience. This murk stems from Pine and Gilmore’s positioning of experiences as an economic activity unique from products and services. Rossman and Duerden carry this forward by arguing that experiences differ from products and services because the person on the receiving end of an experience must be actively co-creating it. “Experience demands conscious attention, engagement, and action — in a word, participation,” they write.

This distinction isn’t clear to me. Is there any product or service we can buy and consume that doesn’t require our participation in some form or other? And even if it were possible not to participate in the acquisition and use of certain products or services (say, buying groceries or cutting the lawn), mightn’t that count as a very good experience for some of us? Read the rest here.

Best Business Books 2019: Management

strategy+business, November 5, 2019

by Theodore Kinni



Illustration by Harry Campbell

Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall
Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World (Harvard Business Review Press, 2019)

Stephen Martin and Joseph Marks
Messengers: Who We Listen To, Who We Don’t, and Why (PublicAffairs, 2019)

Roger Dooley
Friction: The Untapped Force That Can Be Your Most Powerful Advantage (McGraw-Hill, 2019)

In 1954, the discipline of management was neatly encapsulated by Peter Drucker in the pages of a single book, The Practice of Management. This year’s best business books on management reflect how much the discipline has changed in the past 65 years, and how fuzzy the boundaries separating fields have become.

Nine Lies About Work, by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall, the year’s best management book, challenges the assumptions that underlie contemporary managerial practices, many of which date back to Drucker’s day. In doing so, the book offers a glimpse of a new management paradigm that may prove to be better suited to the times. Messengers, by Stephen Martin and Joseph Marks, prompts us to see managers as a living, breathing communication medium — and it describes the traits that can ensure the messages they deliver will be heard. And Friction, by Roger Dooley, suggests that if managers turn their attention to simplifying anything customers and employees need to do, they’ll happily do more of it. Read the rest here.

Lucky You!

strategy+business, November 1, 2019

by Theodore Kinni



Photograph by Elizabeth Fernandez

Recently, on a social media site for professionals, I suggested that luck plays a significant role in leadership and business success. This didn’t sit well with several commentors, who argued that successful people become that way largely by dint of merit — they work hard and use their brains and hone their ability to identify and exploit opportunities. People like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett make their own luck, I was told.

Hogwash. This is not to detract from the monumental business achievements of two of America’s wealthiest (and most philanthropic) men. But we should acknowledge that Gates and Buffett both drew winning tickets in the birth lottery.

Gates’s dad co-founded a law firm and served as president of the Washington State Bar Association; his mom, who came from a family of bankers, held prominent board positions. They sent their son to one of the best prep schools in the nation and then to Harvard, where, with their assent and support, he dropped out to start a computer software company. Mary Gates helped her son’s fledgling company get the IBM contract that led to MS-DOS. Warren Buffett was the son of a U.S. congressman — Howard Buffett represented Nebraska in the House of Representatives for four terms, and founded a brokerage firm. Warren’s parents sent him to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Nebraska, and Columbia Business School, where he studied with and was mentored by Benjamin Graham, the father of value investing. Buffett’s first job was in his father’s firm and then he went to work for Graham. Nobody gave Gates or Buffett their billions, or even their first tens of millions. But when they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, the climb wasn’t as far as it would be for most of us.

Once leaders attain positions of power, luck continues to play a powerful role in their success. Take Jack Welch, who was named “manager of the century” by Fortune in 1999. Read the rest here.