Humility Aside, Here's Food for Thought

Review: Authentic Leadership by Bill George

Reviewed by Don Blohowiak, Lead Well Institute, www.LeadWell.com

Part memoir, part social commentary, part company case study, the book Authentic Leadership is Bill George's wide angle take on, and prescription for, the current state of corporate leadership.

George, lauded former CEO of the medical technology company Medtronic (who tells us that he fantasized about becoming a big company CEO when he was a teenager), clearly has stepped back and reflected on what's wrong with modern corporate leadership. There are ample examples from George's own career, anecdotes from apparent elbow-rubbing with other top execs, and a smattering of bits from contemporary business books and articles. Bill George serves up many thought-provoking perspectives worth reading and heeding, especially for top leaders of enterprises—and those who earnestly aspire to such rare roles.

To his credit, George doesn't claim any breakthrough management panaceas. The subtitle of the book discloses George's interest in solid if out of fashion ideas, proclaiming a focus on "Rediscovering the Secrets to Creating Lasting Value." And the book mostly makes good on that promise.

Sample Bill George observations:

• "Many people in the business and academic communities believe that missions, values, visions, empowerment, and customer satisfaction represent the 'soft side' of business. They see expense reductions, layoffs, divestitures, creative financial management, and write-downs as the 'hard side.' In my career I have had to lay off thousands of workers, divest failing businesses, take major write-offs, and make large expense cuts. As painful as the consequences of actions like these are, the decision itself is usually obvious and the leader has but few options. On the other hand, meeting the demanding needs of your customers and motivating thousands of employees toward a common mission and values is much more difficult."
  
• "Competitors will eventually copy an innovative idea for a product or service, but an organization of highly motivated people is very hard to duplicate. The motivation will last if it is deeply rooted in employees' commitment to the intrinsic purpose of their work."
  
• "You cannot inspire employees by urging them to help management get the company's stock price up.... Typically employees respond with cynicism when they believe management is just using them to enhance its own wealth, not theirs."
  
• "Shooting Stars move up [through promotions] so rapidly they never take time to learn from their mistakes or look at themselves in the mirror. A year of two into any job, they are ready to move on, long before they have to pass the test of living with their decisions."
  
• "Many leaders—men in particular—fear having their weaknesses and vulnerabilities exposed. So they create distance from employees and a sense of aloofness. Instead of being authentic, they are creating a persona for themselves."
  
• "What appears to be a compromise of values in a single instance is usually the final act in a series of compromises."
  
• "Having wielded power, it is very difficult to yield it."

These pithy quotables belie the book's uneven tone. One suspects that Mr. George wrote this collection of recollections and observations himself; laudable for its authenticity and notable for its inconsistent results.

Many times Authentic Leadership has the flavor of a tightly constructed, passionate argument. Other times, the less-well-crafted prose (particularly in earlier chapters) comes across like a verbatim transcript of off-the-cuff remarks that an old salt might offer a young protégé over a one-white wine lunch. ("If we sell our souls to the company, at the end of the day we may find we have little to show for our efforts.")

Interestingly, equally prosaic is George's accounts of his personal life even when it's infused with the utmost potential pathos of literal life-and-death drama. Perhaps years of repressing the pain of personal tragedies so neutered their recall as to yield only bland recounting rather than inspired story-telling.

I Am Humble!

Though George characterizes himself as humble (a few times), it may well be that humility cannot sit comfortably in the seat of power running a multi-billion dollar corporation. Throughout George's book (with the exception of an uncharacteristically wistful Epilogue), a reader gets what one assumes is an unintended glimpse into his CEO-ego. George often holds up his own record as exemplary and he almost always is the hero of his own stories with but a few scant accounts of his blunders.

His self-reporting on verbal exchanges with colleagues inevitably (albeit unintentionally) reveals George's decided penchant for having the last word. Interestingly, when George finds himself disagreeing with his bosses his grand finale retorts are always only unspoken thoughts. On the other hand, George's voiced clinchers for trumping the opinions of his employees so clearly zing and sting that there's just no need to add "Ha! Take that!" (Another peek under the top executive scalp: George's example of his "connecting" with employees—using his CEO platform to broadcast emails to all his employees about the status of his wife's breast cancer, and then reading some sympathetic emails in return.)

Our Read on this Read

In critically assessing this work, we can forgive Mr. George his indulgences. His plentiful insights and instructive lessons—about everything from executive isolation from customers, to viewing shareholder interests as third behind customers and employees, to ethical standards around the globe, to corporate governance and succession planning—are certainly worth the effort of plowing past some personal aggrandizement and occasional first-draft quality prose.

Authentic Leadership is a good book that likely would have been a great one with a little more humility, ardent editing and re-writing.

Buy this thought-provoking book here.

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