Leadership by design: Lessons in mentorship success from Project1932 in Saudi Arabia

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

PwC Strategy&/Project1932, June 2025

by Fadi Adra, Dr. Shihab Elborai, Chadi N. Moujaes, and Jana Yamani



As the large-scale transformation initiatives in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries come to fruition, they require newly skilled and expanded workforces and many new leaders. We estimate that economic diversification, advanced technologies, and the shift to knowledge-based work will create the need for an additional 700,000 top and middle managers in the region by 2030, which is 30 percent more than were required in 2024.

GCC governments have prioritized human capital development, principally through education reforms and workforce localization. These efforts have increased workforce participation of GCC nationals and women significantly. However, they are insufficient to equip young professionals with all the practical capabilities and soft skills necessary to meet the coming workforce requirements.

Mentorship programs, which draw upon the Arab world’s historical legacy of apprenticeship, can bridge that gap. When systematically structured and executed, mentoring fosters the functional and industry knowledge of emerging leaders, hones their acumen and soft skills, and prepares them for the technological advances shaping the future of work.

Findings drawn from Project1932, a Saudi-based initiative cultivating emerging leaders by connecting them with experienced mentors, indicate that the design of successful mentorship programs entails five elements and three enablers. The elements are shared purpose, synergistic matchmaking, a structured and relevant curriculum, mentoring for mentors, and community power. Successful programs are enabled by strong leadership, robust monitoring and evaluation systems, and coherent financial sustainability strategy.

Further, surveys and interviews of Project1932 participants have revealed five insights for fostering mentoring success. Successful programs challenge mentees to leave their comfort zones, train mentors in active listening so they can provide tailored guidance, build strong mentor–mentee relationships, encourage calculated risk taking, and empower mentees to question the status quo.

Project1932 demonstrates that systematic mentorship programs conducted at scale can bridge the GCC’s gap between leadership demand and supply. Read the rest here.

Don’t Confuse Ambition With Effective Leadership

Insights by Stanford Business, January 15, 2025

by Theodore Kinni



There’s an old saw — cribbed from Plato and popularized by Douglas Adams — that those people who are most interested in leading others are least suited to the task. That’s not entirely accurate, yet new research has found a grain of truth in this idea: Many leaders have plenty of ambition to lead, but that’s no guarantee others think they’re effective.

“Our society assumes that there is a link between leadership ambition and leadership aptitude,” explains Francis Flynn, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. People seeking power and success step up to take leadership roles, and how we select leaders rewards that ambitiousness. “We largely rely on opt-in mechanisms to populate our pools of potential leaders — the people who apply to business schools like Stanford or seek a promotion to the next level in their organizations,” Flynn says. “That assumes implicitly that those people who want to lead are the ones who should lead. But is that assumption valid?”

Though it is clear that ambition plays a significant role in who becomes a leader, its link to leadership effectiveness has not been extensively studied. So Flynn, with Shilaan Alzahawi and Emily S. Reit, PhD ’22, undertook the first systematic study of that relationship. Read the rest here.

Sustainability in the Spotlight: The Balancing Act of ESG

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

Diligent Institute/ Spencer Stuart, June 2024





This year, sustainability in the corporate world has been defined by flux. The debate in the U.S. around ESG (environmental, social and governance) remains fierce. The global issues that ESG aims to address — climate change, human rights and equity, among others — are enormous and only becoming more complex. This is because, in its broadest definition, ESG reflects a set of objectives common to all companies — from managing risk to playing a role in addressing societal issues to identifying opportunities for growth and value creation. The corporate will and effort to address these opportunities and challenges seems to be growing, not shrinking.

The third annual global Sustainability in the Spotlight survey, conducted by Spencer Stuart and the Diligent Institute, asked public and private company directors across industries and geographies about their companies’ sustainability strategies and oversight. We also asked respondents to provide their perspectives on and involvement in defining their organization’s ESG vision and strategy, as well as their role in overseeing results. Download the report here.

‘I’m Sorry, Dave.’ When AI Writes a CEO’s Apology Letter.

This Week in Leadership, May 8, 2024

by Theodore Kinni




Generative artificial-intelligence programs are already helping professionals write compelling sales presentations, convincing emails, and other difficult business communications. It was only a matter of time before someone tried using it for one of the most sensitive documents of all: an apology from the boss.

Using the widely available GPT-4, researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) recently built a model they call “Prompt Engineering for CEO Apology.” The model incorporates a number of variables, including type of event, structure and length of previous apologies, audience, delivery method, and the communication styles of the CEO and the company. The researchers used the model to create apologies for some recent high-profile CEO gaffes, and apparently, AI did pretty well: According to the KAIST study, the notes “conveyed empathy” and “mimicked the same structure and emotional language” of CEO apologies produced by human beings. Read the rest here.

The art of the turnaround—circa 27 BC

strategy+business, July 31, 2023

by Theodore Kinni

Photograph by Viacheslav Peretiatko

The ranks of companies that have faced existential crises and succumbed are legion. When industries disappear and markets dry up, turnaround leaders who are charged with picking up the pieces and transforming for the future might find some perspective and inspiration in Virgil’s Aeneid.

“The song of the Aeneid is meant for moments when people desperately need to wrap their heads around an after that is shockingly different from the before they’d always known,” writes Andrea Marcolongo, an Italian journalist and former speechwriter for Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, in her book about the 2,000-year-old epic poem, Starting from Scratch: The Life-Changing Lessons of Aeneas (translated by Will Schutt). “In the parlance of forecasters: The Aeneid is warmly recommended reading for days when you’re in the eye of the storm without an umbrella.”

The Roman emperor Octavian commissioned Virgil to write the Aeneid at just such an unsettling moment. The Roman Republic had disintegrated into a series of civil wars, which eventually resulted in Octavian establishing himself as its first emperor in 27 BC. He wanted Virgil to create a piece of work that reinforced his claim to power and reassured the empire’s subjects about their prospects under his rule. Virgil did this by linking Octavian’s divine authority to the origin story of Rome.

The reluctant hero of this tale is Aeneas, the son of a prince and the goddess Venus, a character Virgil borrowed from Homer. In Homer’s Iliad, Aeneas fights in the Trojan War against the Greeks. In the Aeneid, Troy has fallen after a long siege (that darn horse).

As Aeneas surveys the wreckage, he steels himself for a fight to the death. At this moment, Venus appears and tells him to face reality. The gods have abandoned Troy, she says, Aeneas should salvage what he can and save his family and companions. Her son is still reluctant to give up on Troy, until the ghost of his dead wife prophesizes that in doing so, he will eventually “come to Hesperia’s land, where Lydian Tiber flows in gentle course among the farmers’ rich fields. There, happiness, kingship and a royal wife will be yours.” Finally, Aeneas gets the message. He gathers his compatriots (the Aeneads); they build a fleet of boats and set sail. Therein lies the first lesson for turnaround leaders: when your industry or the markets your company depends upon are in ruins, don’t double down. Move on. Read the rest here.

How to move the needle on innovation

strategy+business, June 5, 2023

by Theodore Kinni


Illustration by Luis Alvarez

As CEOs continue to call employees back to the office, their rationales often include remote work’s deleterious effects on innovation. There is some basis for these claims: a recent study found that the number of email exchanges between research units at MIT dropped by 38% during the pandemic lockdown. Its authors equated email volume with the weak ties that are crucial to the diffusion of information and ideas in networks, and thus concluded from the drop in traffic that remote work hinders innovation. But no matter how much weight you assign this finding, it’s a stretch to peg the success—or failure—of a company’s innovation efforts to the number of rears in seats.

The truth is innovation in large companies is a perennial challenge for leaders, no matter where employees are working. The late Clayton Christensen and other researchers detailed the obstacles to innovation that arise when industry-leading companies confront disruptive technologies. Large companies also struggle to transform innovation investments into financial results: in 2018, consultants from Strategy&, PwC’s global consulting business, examined 15 years of data drawn from the firm’s Global Innovation 1000 research—an annual analysis of the 1,000 publicly held companies that spend the most on R&D—and concluded, “There is no long-term correlation between the amount of money a company spends on its innovation efforts and its overall financial performance.”

So how can leaders move the innovation needle in big companies? I turned to Lorraine Marchand for answers. Marchand served in a variety of executive and board positions, including a former stint as general manager of the life sciences division of IBM’s Watson Health (now Merative), before writing The Innovation Mindset: Eight Essential Steps to Transform Any Industry — a practical guide to building innovation prowess across an organization — and founding her own innovation consultancy.

Here is her list of ways to make your company more innovative. Read the rest here.

A goal isn’t a mission

strategy+business, January 30, 2023

by Theodore Kinni

Illustration by VectorInspiration

There are missions, and then there are missions. One type of mission is an achievable task with a fixed goal that is often tactical and short-term in nature. The other mission is a high-level aspiration that provides direction and motivation to an organization over a long period of time. Leaders who mix up the two can put the future of their companies at risk.

The distinction between the two types of missions is dramatically illustrated in the recording of a White House meeting held on 21 November 1962. During the meeting, President John F. Kennedy and NASA’s chief administrator, James Webb, whom Kennedy appointed, had a heated argument about NASA’s proper mission.

It had been 18 months since Kennedy had called out a piloted moon landing as one of his top priorities in a special address to Congress, declaring, “First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” Now, Kennedy was considering whether he could move the target date for the first lunar landing from 1967 to 1966, and he was grilling NASA’s leaders about the feasibility and costs of doing so.

As they wrangled over the size of the special appropriation that would be needed to fund an accelerated schedule, Kennedy suddenly tacked. “Do you think this program is the top-priority program of the agency?” he asked Webb.

“No, sir, I do not,” answered Webb. “I think it is one of the top-priority programs….” With that, an argument began that revealed the chasm between Kennedy’s view of NASA’s mission and Webb’s view. Read the rest here

Can bossless management work?

strategy+business, January 10, 2023

by Theodore Kinni

Photograph by Tom Werner

If you’ve been feeling like your leadership contributions are underappreciated, add a copy of Why Managers Matter to your reading list. In it, Nicolai Foss, a strategy professor at the Copenhagen Business School, and Peter Klein, the W.W. Caruth Chair and professor of entrepreneurship at the Hankamer School of Business, Baylor University, examine the various iterations of manager-free organizations that have been proposed—and occasionally adopted—over the past 50 years or so. Their conclusion: nonsense!

Foss and Klein lump the ideas of management thinkers, such as Gary Hamel, Michele Zanini, and Frederic Laloux, and approaches to decentralized management, such as holacracy and agile, into what they call the bossless company narrative. “The basic thrust of the genre is that while bosses are still around, the less control they exercise the better,” they write. “What the Harvard historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr. called the ‘visible hand’ of management should give way to worker autonomy, self-organizing teams, outsourcing, and an egalitarian office culture.”

Then the duo bales the entire genre into something resembling a straw man and puts a match to it. “The near-bossless companies—and there aren’t many of them—with their self-managing teams, empowered knowledge workers, and ultra-flat organizations are not generally or demonstrably better than traditionally organized ones,” declare Foss and Klein. “Bosses matter, not just as figureheads but as designers, organizers, encouragers, and enforcers.”

Foss and Klein make a detailed and extended case against the bossless company narrative with which it is hard to take issue, especially in the realm of large enterprises. Schemes like holacracy, in which decisions are made by teams, may work for small companies with distributed ownership, such as boutique consultancies and other kinds of partnerships, but they haven’t worked in large companies like Zappos, which have many more employees and require far more coordination. Agility, too, tends to work better for running projects than for running whole companies. In short, hierarchical management structures are, as the authors put it, “the worst form of organization—except for all the others.” Read the rest here.

Bad Apples or Bad Leaders?

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

MIT Sloan Management Review, January 3, 2023

by Charn P. McAllister, Jeremy D. Mackey, B. Parker Ellen III, and Katherine C. Alexander

Leaders typically take responsibility when employees perform poorly but not when employees behave badly. It’s like there’s an unwritten rule that protects leaders when employees engage in deviant workplace behavior. Perhaps this protection stems from the notion that it isn’t fair to hold leaders accountable for the actions of a few bad apples.

Our research suggests that surprisingly often, this view of workplace deviance is misguided. We’ve found that leaders have a strong effect on whether employees engage in deviant behaviors. Thus, when employees act badly, their leaders would be wise to take a step back and consider whether and how they may be complicit in that behavior.

Workplace deviance includes employee behaviors that violate organizational norms in ways that threaten the well-being of companies and their employees. Sometimes these behaviors are directed toward individuals, such as when an employee physically or verbally lashes out at a colleague or gossips with coworkers. Other times, deviant behaviors are directed toward an organization, such as when an employee steals workplace property or leaks confidential company information. The consequences of workplace deviance include productivity and inventory losses, as well as a host of other expenses that ultimately cost organizations billions of dollars annually.

Some leaders dismiss workplace deviance as an unavoidable side effect of apathetic or rebellious employees who either don’t care for or actively dislike their colleagues or employers. These bad apples do exist. Research shows that employees low in the personality traits of conscientiousness and agreeableness are more prone to workplace deviance. So are employees who exhibit socially malevolent personality markers referred to as the dark triad: Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy.

Given these findings, it’s easy to conclude that the “bad apple” argument makes sense. The problem is, research into the role of personality in workplace deviance does not consider the role that leaders play in employee behavior. Read the rest here.

Preparing Your Company for the Next Recession

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

MIT Sloan Management Review, December 6, 2022

by Donald Sull and Charles Sull

Winter is coming: Inverted yield curves, rising interest rates, and a rash of layoff announcements have convinced many economists that the global economy is headed for a downturn. Recessions are bad for business, but downturns are not destiny.

The worst of times for the economy as a whole can be the best of times for individual companies to improve their fortunes. One study found that lagging companies are twice as likely to overtake industry leaders during a recession, relative to nonrecessionary periods. Another study, of nearly 4,000 global companies before, during, and after the Great Recession, found that the top decile of companies grew earnings by 17% per year during the downturn, while the laggards saw profits stagnate or decline. The difference between the companies in the two groups translated into $6 billion in enterprise value on average.

How can the same recession cause some corporate empires to rise and others to fall? The short answer is that uncertainty surges dramatically during recessions — increasing roughly threefold at the company level compared with the relative calm before or after a downturn.

“Chaos isn’t a pit,” explains Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish in Game of Thrones. “Chaos is a ladder.” The chaos of a recession, however, is both a pit and a ladder. In the face of uncertainty, some companies retrench. They abandon attractive customers and promising markets, offload valuable assets at fire sales, cut prices, and seek new partners to bolster cash flow. Others start climbing. They seize opportunities and improve their fortunes.

Our research has identified three fundamental ways to manage uncertainty: resilience, local agility, and portfolio agility. Leaders can take a series of steps, such as building a strong balance sheet or diversifying cash flows, to boost an organization’s resilience and ability to withstand environmental shocks. Local agility is the ability of individual business units, functions, product teams, and geographies to respond quickly and effectively to changes in their specific circumstances.

Portfolio agility is an organization’s capability to quickly and effectively shift resources across different parts of the business. While local agility enables individual teams to spot and seize opportunities, portfolio agility enables the company as a whole to double down on its most promising investments. Portfolio agility is, by some estimates, the largest single driver of revenue growth and total shareholder returns for large companies. Quickly and effectively reallocating resources is valuable at any point in the business cycle, but it’s decisive during downturns, when internal cash flows dwindle and access to external funding dries up.

Resilience and agility are effective in isolation, but in combination, their impact is turbocharged. In the midst of a downturn, resilient companies can weather the storm to wait for opportunities to arise. Having a high level of resilience — by building a war chest of cash or obtaining secure access to funding — provides an organization with the wherewithal to fund emerging opportunities, but only if it is agile enough to seize those opportunities. Resilience without agility may ensure survival but will not position a company for future growth. Agile companies without resilience, in contrast, often lack the resources to exploit the opportunities they spot. Read the rest here.

In search of clarity

strategy+business, November 15, 2022

by Theodore Kinni

Photograph by Klaus Vedfelt

I’ve never envied CEOs for the hard decisions they must make. There are the career choices that threaten their work­–life balance and families, and the strategic decisions that put companies and employees at risk. And increasingly, there are a broad range of ethical conundrums related to social justice and equity, political ideology and conflict, and environmental sustainability. 

For lucky leaders, these decisions arise infrequently. But when they do, they often require introspection as much as—or more than—algorithmic analysis. After all, how much can AI-powered analytics tell a leader about how to frame a personal and organizational response to the war in Ukraine, Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act, or the Black Lives Matter movement?

The inherent difficulty of crafting responses to such events is compounded by a couple of conditions. There’s the mantle of power and authority that can make some top leaders reluctant to reach out for help for fear of revealing their vulnerability or appearing indecisive or uninformed. There is the issue of trust, too: even in the most collaborative corporate cultures, senior management team members and other executives have their own agendas and ambitions that can skew their advice to the CEO.

Clearness committees offer leaders a way around these obstacles and through their most difficult decisions. The concept is rooted in the values of the Quakers, the Protestant sect that emerged in England in the 17th century. It has been adapted for a more secular context in the past half-century or so, a process in which Parker J. Palmer, cofounder and senior partner emeritus of the South Carolina–based Center for Courage & Renewal, was instrumental. Read the rest here.

Did Jack Welch Blow Up the Business World?

MIT Sloan Management Review, October 18, 2022

by Theodore Kinni



“The history of the world is but the biography of great men,” wrote 19th-century Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle. With The Man Who Broke Capitalism, New York Times business reporter David Gelles attempts to resuscitate the hoary “great man” theory of leadership in a backhanded sort of way. He calls out the late Jack Welch, the General Electric CEO whom Fortune magazine anointed “manager of the century” in 1999, as the evil mastermind behind the litany of economic woes rooted in shareholder capitalism gone wild, but he pays scant attention to their root causes.

When Welch took up the reins at GE in 1981, it was not a prosperous time in America’s economic history. The post-World War II boom was on its last legs: America’s industrial giants were sinking under their own weight, and foreign companies, especially those from Japan and Germany, were making inroads the size of superhighways into the U.S. consumer market. GE, then one of the nation’s leading companies, was languishing in the slow growth environment too.

If you were in business in the 1980s and ’90s, Gelles’s recounting of Welch’s tenure at GE will be a familiar story. “Neutron Jack” cut head count and instituted an annual employee ranking scheme that required that employees in the lowest decile be fired. The company’s business units had to be No. 1 or 2 in their market or they were jettisoned. Meanwhile, Welch chased new growth opportunities in financial services and media — soon, GE Capital alone accounted for more than half of the company’s profits.

The results? “During [Welch’s] tenure, GE posted annualized share price growth of about 21% a year, far outpacing the S&P 500 even during a historic bull market,” writes Gelles. “When Welch took over, GE was worth $14 billion. Two decades later, the company was worth $600 billion — the most valuable company in the world.” Read the rest here.

When it comes to changing culture, think small

strategy+business, August 11, 2022

by Theodore Kinni


Illustration by PM Images

Effective leaders know that long-term corporate success requires a strong organizational culture that is well aligned with a company’s purpose and strategy. As Lou Gerstner wrote, describing the turnaround he orchestrated at IBM in the 1990s, “I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game—it is the game.” Nevertheless, it remains commonplace for corporate transformations, mergers and acquisitions, and other large-scale initiatives to lose momentum after running headlong into cultural barriers. What gives?

This is a question that Roger Martin, a CEO advisor and the professor emeritus of strategic management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School, has been mulling for 30 years. In his latest book, A New Way to Think: Your Guide to Superior Management Effectiveness, a compendium of his writings for the Harvard Business Review, he observes that leaders typically approach culture change in one of two indirect ways.

Most often, Martin told me in an interview, they attempt to change the culture by edict. “They say something like, ‘I’m CEO, and this is a very bureaucratic organization. Everything takes too long. This will be a nonbureaucratic company because I say so.’”

The other commonly used approach relies on structural changes, Martin explains. “The CEO says, ‘This place is bureaucratic because the finance department is overbearing. So, the CFO will now report to the COO, and the COO has a mandate to keep finance from getting involved in things in which it shouldn’t get involved.’”

Unfortunately, neither approach is powerful enough to successfully change an organizational culture on its own. “They don’t work, because they don’t change the shared interpretations and norms within an organization,” says Martin. “The truth about culture is that the only way you can change it is by changing the way individuals work with one another. If you can change that, then you will find the culture has changed.” Read the rest here.

To improve management, build a decision factory

strategy+business, June 21, 2022

by Theodore Kinni


Illustration by Lava4images

Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

by Don A. Moore and Max H. Bazerman, Yale University Press, 2022

“We think of organizations as decision factories,” write professors Don A. Moore and Max H. Bazerman in their new book, Decision Leadership. It’s an apt simile. Knowledge workers, whose output is typically decision-driven, now number more than 1 billion worldwide. Moreover, as the number of rote tasks that are automated increases, many more employees are being freed for higher-level work that entails decision-making.

Given this reality, it’s no surprise that boosting the decision intelligence of the workforce is moving up the leadership agenda. But Moore and Bazerman, holders of endowed chairs at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and Harvard Business School, respectively, take an even more expansive position on decision leadership—a stance that sets up a formidable ambition for this relatively short book.

“We aim to define leadership in a new way, one grounded in the belief that leaders’ success depends not only on their ability to make good decisions but also on their ability to help others make wise decisions,” they write. “In our view, great leaders create the norms, structures, incentives, and systems that allow their direct reports, the broader organization, consumers, investors, and other stakeholders to make decisions that maximize collective benefit through value creation.” To support their new definition of leadership, Moore and Bazerman seek to weave together the various threads of behavioral economics that pertain to decision-making and then translate them into practical advice for leaders who want to both improve the quality of their own decisions and bolster the decision prowess of their companies. Read the rest here.

Persuasion, Hollywood style

strategy+business, May 23, 2022

by Theodore Kinni


Photograph by Archive Holdings Inc.

I usually associate pitching with characters like the late inventor and pitchman Ron Popeil, who earned a spot in America’s cultural history—and a small fortune—hawking products such as the Chop-O-Matic, the Pocket Fisherman, spray-on hair, and the Showtime Rotisserie and BBQ oven on late night TV. (“Set it, and forget it!”) But that’s a reductionist view, at best. Pitching is a form of interactive selling that business leaders at all levels need to master.

“We define a pitch as a scheduled meeting for the specific intention of trying to promote an idea, business project, or script,” write Peter Desberg and Jeffrey Davis in their new book, Pitch Like Hollywood. As the title suggests, Desberg, a clinical psychologist and a professor emeritus at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and Davis, a screenwriter and professor at Loyola Marymount University School of Film and Television, look to the film industry for lessons in pitching. And rightly so. Movies and TV shows are typically sold on the strength of a pitch to studio executives that can take anywhere from an hour to several days, depending on the size of the project.

Though CEOs tend to be polished presenters, pitching a new strategy to the board or an acquisition offer to the founders of a promising startup is not the same thing as making a presentation. “The biggest difference is the interactivity. Pitching is not a one-way presentation—it’s not, ‘I’m gonna tell you, and you’re gonna sit and listen to me,’” Davis told me during a video interview with the two authors. “A pitch is less controlled. If your pitch is good, you’re involving the people you’re pitching. You are trying to get their opinions, to get to what’s important to them, and to get them to help you shape your pitch to really make it work.”

This interactivity gets to the root cause of many failed pitches—mishandling criticism. “If a catcher asks a pitcher a hostile question or points out a flaw, and the pitcher gets defensive or counterattacks, the conversation dies,” said Desberg.

For their pitch to avoid this fate, leaders should take a lesson from a story the authors relate about a creative director at an ad agency who pitched six potential campaigns to a tire company executive. When he’d finished, the exec looked at him and said, “I hate everything you’ve shown me.” Unflustered, the creative director asked, “Which one do you hate the least?” That question led to a conversation that ended in a successful campaign.

Like the creative director, good pitchers see criticism as a green light. “They’re thinking, ‘This person is trying to enter a creative collaboration with me. I’ve got to nurture the heck out of that,’” said Davis. “Show business, like all business, is more collaborative than ever. If you’re not a collaborator, you have no future in business.” Read the rest here

Getting and staying motivated

strategy+business, May 5, 2022

by Theodore Kinni


Photograph by ATU Images

Get It Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation
by Ayelet Fishbach, Little, Brown Spark, 2022

In the early years of the last century, Hanoi had a rat problem. To solve it, the French colonial government placed a one-cent bounty on the rodents, which could be claimed by anyone who delivered a rat’s tail. Thousands of tails were tendered, but Hanoi’s rat population didn’t shrink. Instead, tailless rats were running through streets, and rat farms were discovered. To make money selling rats’ tails, you need lots of rats breeding more rats. The moral of the story: be careful which behaviors you reward.

Ayelet Fishbach, the Jeffrey Breakenridge Keller Professor of Behavioral Science and Marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, tells the tale of Hanoi’s rats in Get It Done. The book is a deep dive into a veritable ocean of behavioral research, including a substantial number of studies conducted by the author. This area of scholarship is so full of codicils and complications that it’s a wonder that managers can motivate themselves, let alone the people in their charge.

Consider the role that progress plays in motivation. Will you be more motivated if you focus on how far you’ve already traveled toward a goal or if you keep your attention trained on how far you have left to go? The not-so-simple answer, explains Fishbach in chapter 5, is: it depends. What’s your emotional predilection—are you a glass-half-empty or glass-half-full kind of person? Is the goal you are pursuing a conditional one with all-or-nothing benefits that are paid on completion or an accumulative one from which you derive benefits as you go? And how far along on the path are you: how close are you to reaching your goal? Your answers to those questions determine how you should use progress as a motivational force. What’s more, if you don’t ask those questions and answer them properly, the progress that you’ve made toward your goal could become a demoralizing force and an obstacle to its achievement.

Every chapter in Get It Done reiterates the multifaceted nature of self-motivation and underscores the critical nuances in the kind of advice found in sound bites on social media... read the rest here

It’s not enough for CEOs to empathize with employees

strategy+business, April 19, 2022

by Theodore Kinni


Illustration by Klaus Vedfelt

In the novel City of God, E.L. Doctorow wrote, “You find invariably among CEOs that life is business. There is an operative cruelty which is seen as an entitlement.” The three-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction delivers this judgment as an aside, but it is a particularly disturbing indictment of business leaders.

I asked Rasmus Hougaard, founder and CEO of the leadership training consultancy Potential Project, what he thought of Doctorow’s observation during a recent video interview. He immediately pointed to J. Willard Marriott, founder of Marriott International, as a notable exception. Marriott reputedly lived the hotel business sans cruelty, and his famous dictate “Take care of associates and they will take care of the customers” remains a mainstay of the company’s culture after nearly 100 years.

And yet, admitted Hougaard, “there are a lot of CEOs in other companies [about whom] you could say the absolute opposite. It is almost as if they think, ‘Now that I’m a senior executive, I don’t have to be nice anymore.’” It is those CEOs who might find his new book, Compassionate Leadership: How to Do Hard Things in a Human Way, most valuable.

Hougaard and coauthor Jacqueline Carter, director of Potential Project North America, argue that the hard-nosed people management once espoused by CEOs like “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap and “Neutron Jack” Welch is a loser’s game. “It’s clear that entitlement is dying and for good reason,” Hougaard told me. “Anybody who says, ‘I can be mean, because now I have the power,’ gets punished, because people won’t work with them.” CEOs who live up to Doctorow’s caricature by shutting down their emotions and coldly making decisions that harm people also incur a personal cost. Hougaard adds: “You turn into someone who you probably won’t like.”

Often, empathy is touted as the antidote to mean business. But Hougaard thinks that an approach to leadership based solely on empathy has its own adverse side effects. Read the rest here.

A Field Guide for Human Capital Decision Intelligence

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand on this field guide:

Deloitte, March 22, 2022

By Dan Roddy, David Mallon, and Marc Solow

Organizations everywhere are standing on the threshold of a new era in decision-making. A global mining company uses data captured from the work itself to sense changes in worker skills needed over time, inform workforce development investments, and guide individual employee career choices. A logistics company anticipates truck repair needs, ensuring people and parts are at the ready. A consumer products company uses real-time visualizations of their distribution channels to identify the root causes of customer service issues within minutes and assign resources to solve them. A high tech company tracks the markers of company culture across a virtual workforce, ensuring their “secret sauce” isn’t diluted by distance.

So here companies stand, with a newfound capability for making better work, workplace, and workforce decisions within their reach and yet, just beyond their grasp. In Deloitte’s 2020 Global Human Capital Trends survey, conducted a few months before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a mere 3% of nearly 9,000 respondents—only 3 in 100 globally—told us they had all the information needed to make people decisions.

The situation hasn’t improved in the COVID-19 context. If anything, people issues are murkier—and the ability to respond to them more urgent—today than before the pandemic struck. Witness the many business headlines featuring managerial missteps, even among the world’s most sophisticated companies. For most, the decision intelligence necessary to align and optimize work, workplace, and workforce in pursuit of mission and strategy remains at best an unfulfilled promise.

The technological enablers needed to consistently deliver actionable insights to leaders at all levels of the organization are at hand. They promise to support a new decision intelligence—to help leaders make sound and timely decisions—from the strategic-level choices made in the C-suite to the myriad tactical choices made by supervisors and teams every day.

The disconnect between the means of decision intelligence, such as data and sophisticated analytics, and the motivation and ability to wield them in a coherent, consistent manner across an organization is a serious challenge. In a world moving ever faster, employee and corporate performance are at stake, and financial results along with them. The success—and sometimes, the survival—of many companies hinges on their ability to navigate in what John Seely Brown, former cochair of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge, calls a “whitewater world.” To do this, leaders must be able to continuously and quickly identify and respond to internal and external challenges and opportunities arising at the intersection of the workforce, the workplace and work itself. 

What, then, is holding companies back? Read the rest or download free here.

Pay attention to your attention

strategy+business, February 10, 2022

by Theodore Kinni


Illustration by Sean Gladwell

Once upon a time, the Segway was going to revolutionize the transportation industry. Steve Jobs reportedly said that Dean Kamen’s invention had the transformative potential of the personal computer, and venture capitalist John Doerr predicted that Kamen’s startup would reach US$1 billion in sales—a lot of money in 2001, when nobody but tweens believed in unicorns—at record speed. Instead, sightseeing tours and mall cop beats were nearly the only things the two-wheeled, self-balancing personal transporter transformed.

There are many reasons why the Segway never achieved its purported promise, but a lot of them track back to the misplaced focus of Dean Kamen. He didn’t see the forest for the trees. He was so intently focused on one narrow aspect of the Segway—the innovative technology that enabled its intuitive, automatic balance and operation—that he and his early boosters were unaware that its markets were extremely limited. Where in a nation of cities and towns that considered skateboards too dangerous for the sidewalks would hundreds of thousands of Segway riders be allowed to zip around? And short of that, who was going to pay $5,000 to take a Segway for a spin in the driveway?

An overly intense focus on a goal can lead to what cognitive psychologists call goal neglect. That may seem counterintuitive to the average goal-oriented MBA or entrepreneur, but take, for example, the dynamic at work in micromanagement. Often, when leaders micromanage employees, an intense focus on task performance distracts those leaders from the larger goals of the company. They obsess over the trees and neglect the forest—and drive employees crazy while they’re at it.

Where you direct your focus is a function of the brain’s attention system. This system has three subsystems, which Amishi Jha, a professor and the director of contemplative neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative at the University of Miami, describes as the flashlight (or orienting system), which enables you to selectively direct and concentrate your attention; the floodlight (or alerting system), which enables you to take in the larger picture; and the juggler (or executive function), which enables you to align your actions to your aims. “What happens with goal neglect is that the flashlight is pointed very intently, but the floodlight is not quite working,” she told me in a recent Zoom interview.

There is nothing inherently wrong with using the flashlight or the floodlight—leaders need both. In both cases, writes Jha in her new book, Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day, “we are paying attention. But our attention is too narrow or too wide, too stable or too unstable. You’re paying attention in some way successfully—but it’s not appropriate for the moment.”

This cognitive error arises from using the flashlight or the floodlight in an unconscious way. An Australian helicopter rappeller gave Jha a dramatic example of this when he told her about fighting one section of bush fire with such intensive focus that he lost track of the rest of the fire until he heard the air being sucked up behind him. The fire had nearly engulfed him. “There is a very enticing emotional quality to dominating something in that way, and so, it pulls you in,” said Jha. “It’s even hard to pull yourself back.”

The feeling of intense focus—of being fully and productively engrossed in a task—is a good indicator that it is time to take a step back and assess if your attention is properly directed. Even better, and more proactively, according to Jha’s research, you can hone your meta-awareness. Read the rest here.

A leader’s handbook for managing culture

strategy+business, January 21, 2022

by Theodore Kinni


Photography by Paul Bradbury

Win from Within: Build Organizational Culture for Competitive Advantage
by James Heskett, Columbia Business School Publishing, 2022

One of the first business books I reviewed, back in 1992, was Corporate Culture and Performance, by Harvard Business School professors James Heskett and John Kotter. A few books explored organizational culture before it, most notably In Search of Excellence, by Tom Peters and the late Robert Waterman, but Corporate Culture and Performance was the first to try to quantify the economic returns of culture in a rigorous way. Thirty years later, Heskett, now 88 and professor emeritus, is still making the business case for corporate culture.

His new book, Win from Within, is a master class in building culture. It’s the kind of book that you can read in a few hours and then apply throughout your leadership career—which gets to Heskett’s thesis: most leaders don’t devote nearly enough time to managing the culture of their companies, and the time that they do spend on it is often wasted.

Heskett pins both problems to a flawed understanding of culture. “Strategy is hard; culture is soft,” he writes, beginning a list of common misconceptions. “The impact of a strategy on growth and profit can be measured, but that of a culture cannot. If you get the core values shared by everyone right, the rest will take care of itself. A strong culture helps assure good performance. To change an organization’s culture requires a long time. All of these assertions have been passed around in management circles over the years. And all of them are essentially wrong.” Read the rest here.