Peter Drucker was the quintessential management visionary. Often decades ahead of his time, he developed concepts like the knowledge worker and management by objectives long before they were on anybody else’s radar. It was for good reason that the corporate elite hung on his every word as if they were supplicants granted an audience with an ancient oracle.
Yet when Drucker first met Thomas J. Watson, IBM’s CEO, he was somewhat taken aback. “He began talking about something called data processing,” Drucker recalled, “and it made absolutely no sense to me. I took it back and told my editor, and he said that Watson was a nut, and threw the interview away.”
Yet Watson built that idea into one of the great businesses of the 20th century. We tend to think that if an idea is good enough, others will immediately recognize it. But that’s almost never true. Ideas that change the world always arrive out of context, for the simple reason that the world hasn’t changed yet. It’s what you do after you have one that matters.
There’s an old joke I used to hear in Poland. A manager wants to hire a new employee and asks his assistant to collect resumes. A week later, she proudly carries a stack of resumes into his office and hands them to him. He takes half, throws them in the trash and then says, “We don’t want people who are unlucky!”
In an oddly similar vein, Silicon Valley pundits are obsessed with the concept of high agency, popularized by Eric Weinstein, who described it this way: “When you’re told that something is impossible, is that the end of the conversation, or does that start a second dialogue in your mind about how to get around whoever just told you that you can’t do something?”
Elon Musk is the prototypical “high-agency” person and became the world’s richest man. But tragic failures like Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried fit the definition as well. So does Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Feeling the power to make choices is not the same thing as making good ones and, eventually, overconfidence tends to lead to bad ones.
One of the most frustrating things I hear from leaders is, “We had a great strategy, but just couldn’t execute it.” Actually, no you didn’t. Clearly, if it was a great strategy, you would be able to execute it. If you couldn’t, you made bad assumptions about your capabilities, the competition, the marketplace or something else.
This is related to an insight from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. He argued that we cannot have a private language that exists only inside our own minds. Unless we can articulate an idea in a public context, it is merely a feeling that we have not yet defined, little more than an impulse.
That’s why a leader’s first responsibility is to communicate clearly. Every enterprise is an exercise in collective action, and success depends on others understanding where you want to take them. A strategy can only succeed if people can execute it. Here are three core principles that will help you communicate effectively and lead with clarity and strength.
In October 1956, when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to crush the nascent Hungarian Revolution and the national aspirations it represented, the communist empire seemed at its apex. With brutal leadership, a command economy and an iron will, it seemed undeniable that the West, with all its messy deliberation, would be unable to compete.
Yet Zbigniew Brzezinski, then a young Harvard scholar, saw things differently. Fluent in Russian, he had travelled throughout the Soviet Union and was struck by its underlying weakness. In particular, he noticed that barely half the crowd at a soccer game in Soviet Georgia bothered to rise for the national anthem.
Great leaders understand that people need to feel they are part of something bigger than themselves. Some seek symbols, like holding spectacles at the Colosseum or triumphal arches. But it is not enough to merely command action and get people to do what you want. You need to inspire them to want what you want. They need to see your cause as their own.
Traditionally change has been viewed through a strategic lens, as in the legendary case at Intel, when Gordon Moore and Andy Grove made the fateful decision to move out of memory chips and bet the company on microprocessors. Leaders were advised to form a strategic vision, build a coalition, then communicate and institute the change.
Yet today, there’s rarely time for all that. We are going through an era of unprecedented disruption. When tariffs are leveled, a pandemic hits or a new technology changes the game entirely, behaviors throughout the organization need to shift quickly—sometimes within days or even hours—and those changes need to be adopted at scale.
That’s what confronted the leadership of Alberta’s Ministry of Communication and Public Engagement. The pandemic made it clear that resources needed to be centralized for rapid deployment in a crisis, but operations had become proudly decentralized over the years. Change couldn’t simply be mandated. It needed to be embedded into the fabric of the culture.
A while back we had Stanford Professor Bob Sutton on our podcast. Bob is someone who I’ve long admired and he didn’t disappoint. He’s had a brilliant career and written groundbreaking management books, but what makes him unique is his ability to forge decades-long relationships with legendary CEOs.
He told us a great story about one of them, Ed Catmull, CEO of Pixar. Shortly after the launch of Catmull’s bestselling memoir, Creativity Inc, Bob went to an event at Pixar’s corporate headquarters. While he was there, one of Pixar’s movie directors said to him, “That’s a great book… I wish I worked at that company.”
Even at a company as successful as Pixar, with all of its legendary accomplishments, there is still a gap between theory and practice. A quarter century ago Bob documented this phenomenon in the bestselling book he wrote with Jeffrey Pfeffer, The Knowing-Doing Gap. It’s never enough to identify the right strategy, you also have to ensure that it gets carried out.
One of the first things I noticed when I went to live in former Eastern Bloc countries was how often conspiracy theories came up in everyday conversation. The institutions of society had lost trust long ago, so the official version of anything was always in doubt. People formed their own narratives to explain nearly everything.
Today we’re seeing something similar. An annual Gallup survey finds very little trust across almost every institutional class, including businesses. For example, when asked which institutions they trust “a great deal” or “quite a lot,” only 15% say they trust large corporations, 11% trust television news, and just 10% trust Congress.
This is more than a perception problem. It’s a breakdown in how society functions. Trust is what makes collective action possible. Without it, people don’t just disagree on solutions, they stop agreeing on what’s real. That’s what we’re seeing now. If we want to lead effectively, whether in society or organizations, we need to rethink how trust is actually created.
There is a powerful narrative arc called the Hero’s Journey that is employed in stories like Star Wars. A hero, like Luke Skywalker, receives a call to adventure. He or she has doubts at first, but meets a mentor, crosses the first threshold, undergoes an ordeal and, once successful, receives a reward and returns home changed for the better.
Franz Kafka offers a very different and less happy narrative in his unfinished novel, The Castle. The hero, “K.” receives a call from the mysterious castle that looms above the town. No one can confirm his authority, role or even what he’s supposed to accomplish. Every effort to make sense of his situation results in more confusion. He gets lost in the machine, and is left feeling alienated and powerless.
The ugly truth about the corporate world today is that while transformation is sold as the former, it usually ends up looking like the latter. It starts with a big launch and lots of fanfare. But after the initial excitement, things get bogged down and eventually stall altogether before being abandoned. It’s a sad story. It’s also completely avoidable. We can do things differently.
Teaching undergraduates gives you a different perspective on things. For many, they see their life already laid out: An analyst position at a prestigious bank or consulting firm after graduation, then graduate school and a string of impressive jobs at important institutions. Then family, travel, and maybe a board seat or two.
We all know that life is messier than that, but that’s the type of thing you really have to learn for yourself. The management professor Henry Mintzberg once observed that we expect management to be like a conductor with an orchestra, with the leader on a pedestal directing each movement with expert precision.
“But,” he argues, “management is more like orchestra conducting during rehearsals, when everything is going wrong.” The truth is that you don’t want things to go exactly as planned. It’s the off-key notes that you learn from most and lead to your biggest opportunities. Here are four things I’ve learned from a very messy career that produced wonderful surprises.
Fifteen years ago, tech investor Marc Andreessen published his famous essay,Why Software Is Eating the World. He predicted at the time that technology companies were tremendously undervalued, and that low startup costs and almost infinite scalability would lead software-based companies to dominate every industry.
You can see what he means. Today the “Mag 7” stocks dominate the S&P 500 with market capitalizations in the trillions. Even startups like Anthropic and OpenAI are valued at hundreds of billions of dollars. Meanwhile, massive investment in data centers is reshaping industries from construction to energy.
But not so fast. While the advances in machine learning are exciting, it’s still unclear how much real value is being created. The truth is that we still live our lives largely in the realm of atoms and that isn’t changing. That’s why software is unlikely to ever eat the world and why many of the most exciting technologies of the future will be rooted in physical space.
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