The Hands-On Delegator
In October 2012, I sat down with billionaire hedge-fund manager Chase Coleman for an interview in his office at 101 Park Avenue in Manhattan. The waiting room was graciously appointed with white couches and chairs, and an assistant offered me a coffee while I waited. I wasn’t the only visitor that day; Coleman shared his office with several other immensely successful hedge-fund managers, and one of them was receiving a guest whom I knew, the dean of a well-known business school.
He and I chatted, and after a short wait, I was ushered into a glass-enclosed conference room. I interviewed a couple of Coleman’s colleagues first. About an hour later, Coleman himself strolled in wearing a beautifully tailored suit, and I was glad I’d worn my own new Hugo Boss suit that day. He sat down and we began our conversation. As he spoke, what struck me most was his intensity. With a baby face and a shock of sandy brown hair swept across his forehead, Coleman might have passed for a man a decade younger than his thirty-seven years. Yet throughout the forty minutes we spent together, he spoke earnestly, chose his words carefully, and did not once crack a smile. He was polite, for sure, although I suspected he didn’t agree to many interviews, and perhaps was curious about my motives. He answered my questions directly and seriously, without undue elaboration. He kept us on topic—strictly business. Chase Coleman was clearly a formidable professional, and he owed a not insignificant part of his runaway success to the sharp eye of one of the most successful investors in hedge-fund history.
If you didn’t know Coleman, you’d take him for just another successful Wall Street trader. He grew up affluent and went to elite schools—Deerfield Academy, followed by Williams College. He also has an impressive family tree, with a lineage stretching all the way back to Peter Stuyvesant, the seventeenth-century Dutch governor of what became New York.1 In some ways, though, Coleman’s career trajectory is actually quite unexpected. He got his start working for investor Julian Robertson, who just a few years earlier had suffered one of the most high-profile investing flameouts in recent memory. Long one of Wall Street’s most successful hedge-fund titans, Robertson’s Tiger Management lost 4 percent in 1998 and 19 percent the following year.2 By 2000, headlines in financial media were speaking of “Never-Been-Right Robertson,” “Cat Defanged,” and “A Tiger Slaughtered.” Not exactly the most promising place, it would seem, to start a Wall Street career.
In fact, it was. You see, Robertson was not an ordinary hedge-fund manager—he was a superboss whose initial success had grown out of a strict fidelity to his unique vision. Robertson built Tiger Management by embracing the approach of a “value investor”; performing exhaustive research to understand the intrinsic value of a company, buying stocks that were undervalued, and then selling at a profit once their prices had risen. Robertson’s great innovation was to apply this approach to stocks that seemed overvalued as well. He would perform the same research to locate companies that were less valuable than believed, placing bets that they would decline in value (a practice known as “short selling”). This dual approach had been enormously successful, allowing Tiger Management to provide average annual yields of 31 percent from 1980 to 2000.3 But it was also what landed Robertson in serious trouble.
During the late 1990s, as prices of Internet stocks soared to seemingly impossible heights, driven in part by fad and a get-rich-quick mentality, Robertson refused to abandon the tenets of value investing. He would stick with his core vision even if it wasn’t popular. By 1999, it wasn’t—investors were yanking their money from Tiger, shrinking the size of Robertson’s formerly $22 billion fund by nearly 75 percent.4 Still, Robertson refused to budge. Instead of shifting strategy, he shut Tiger down and returned funds to his investors.5 Explaining this decision, he wrote that “the key to Tiger’s success over the years has been a steady commitment to buying the best stocks and shorting the worst. In a rational environment, this strategy functions well. But in an irrational market, where earnings and price considerations take a backseat to mouse clicks and momentum, such logic, as we have learned, does not count for much.”6
The uncompromising visions of superbosses may sometimes cause them to stumble, but it’s a mistake to count them out too quickly. In Robertson’s case, a brilliant second act was in the making, one rooted in his ability to nurture Wall Street’s best talent. Robertson singled out some of the most promising young analysts who lost their jobs when he closed his fund and provided them with seed money to start their own funds. Afterward, he also gave seed money to other young analysts who hadn’t worked for him before but whom he saw as “high potential.” These “tiger seeds,” as they were dubbed (not to be confused with “tiger cubs,” an existing group of former Robertson employees who benefitted from his wisdom and went on to run their own hedge funds, but not necessarily with Robertson seed money), could call on him if they wanted advice, and they could also have access to his Rolodex. In exchange, Robertson got a piece of the action—20 percent of the tiger seeds’ incoming fees. “I was practically seventy years old,” Robertson told me, “and I decided that I could stand being seventy, but I didn’t want to be Methuselah, and I thought I would be if I didn’t have some of these young people around.”7
Robertson was betting heavily on his ability to impart wisdom to his young analysts, as well as on his ability to determine which of his analysts were ready to step forward in their careers and which ones were not. Coleman seemed confident and competent enough, so in 2000, at the tender age of twenty-five, he was handed a $25 million check and told to go build something. “I viewed it as a huge opportunity,” Coleman told me. “I was highly anxious on what I was setting out to do, given my lack of experience, but I felt confident in my authority to execute because I have a lot of expertise in a lot of things. I was also very appreciative of someone having that level of confidence in me.”8
Coleman has gone on to reward Robertson’s confidence many times over. From its inception in 2001 to 2007, his Tiger Global Fund yielded average annual returns to investors of over 35 percent.9 In 2011, Tiger Global was the best-performing hedge fund of its size, returning 46 percent and beating out a number of funds managed by veteran investors.10 And Coleman (who as of 2015 was worth $2.1 billion11) was only one of a number of successful tiger seeds. By 2015, about thirty tiger seeds were managing $32 billion in assets,12 many of them operating out of Robertson’s own offices in midtown Manhattan.13 Their record was so strong that budding hedge-fund managers were willing to agree to tougher-than-usual terms in exchange for an investment and mentorship from Robertson. “It’s a very good system,” Robertson says, “particularly for me, at my time in life. I’ve gotten reenergized. It’s wonderfully fun.”14 It’s also lucrative. Robertson, who was worth $3.4 billion in 2015, realized a 400 percent return on his own personal capital over several years during the 2000s.15 Not bad for the cat the Internet bubble supposedly defanged.
Traders in Opportunity
How did Julian Robertson know that Coleman was ready for the enormous responsibility of running his own fund? For that matter, how did Roger Corman know when his young directors were ready to take a $1 million investment and come back with their first movies—on budget and on time? How did Tommy Frist know that a young associate administrator in his early thirties was ready to build and run an entire hospital? How did Jay Chiat know that an unproven young writer was ready to oversee the creative work for a major advertising client?
Superboss organizations are widely regarded in their industries as launching pads—places where employees can, in the words of protégés, “find themselves” and become “capable of doing what we were ultimately meant to do.” “To go from a guy building spaceship models to art director to second-unit director in those three steps, that doesn’t happen anywhere else,”16 a confidant of director and Academy Award winner James Cameron, a Corman protégé, marveled. One of Larry Ellison’s acolytes said that “the primary kind of skill you pick up at Oracle is opportunity . . . the one thing Oracle was incredibly good at was on a continual basis throwing new responsibility at people.”17 Protégés often attribute such rapid advancement to intuition on the part of superbosses; these leaders simply have a “knack” for promoting people into the right jobs and, more generally, for providing experiences people need in order to grow. “It was instinctive, in his gut,” one protégé said of Jay Chiat. “He knew how to make people better.”18
There’s more to it than just instinct. First, superbosses practice a keen brand of opportunity spotting. Just as they’re always on the lookout for “diamonds in the rough” to hire and for the next great business opportunity, they’re also consciously prowling for people inside their organizations who are ready and willing to tackle the next great challenge. Rick Pitino put it this way: “I only look for [assistant coaches] who want to be heads. Other than watching your children grow and your players develop, nothing is more thrilling than seeing your assistants move on and do well. But eventually they realize the hard part: They’ve got to come back and try to beat me.”19
Hayden Fry, longtime head coach of college football’s Iowa Hawkeyes, developed a practice of selecting certain players to be “player-coaches” in their positions. Many of these player-coaches have gone on to become assistant coaches and eventually head coaches of other teams, making Fry one of the most successful progenitors of college football coaches in the country. As Fry tells it, this practice originated in his childhood, growing up on his father’s two-thousand-acre ranch in Odessa, Texas. Told to feed the cows, Fry happened on a solution: He’d find the “bell cow,” the member of the herd who led the others. Find the bell cow, you find the herd.20
Like Fry, superbosses are always on the lookout for the “bell cows” among their protégés, and many of them have formal or informal systems for doing so. Jon Stewart, for instance, has worked the identification and showcasing of talent into the very structure of The Daily Show under his watch. Whereas his predecessor Craig Kilborn had other comedians serve as “correspondents” who reported humorously from the field, Stewart broadened these roles when he took over in 1999, bringing the correspondents in for frequent, in-studio exchanges. The upshot: performers work more closely with Stewart and the show’s writers, enabling Stewart to gauge their progress and help them grow organically as on-screen talent.21
Underlying superbosses’ constant opportunity spotting is an expansive view of what people can accomplish. Many bosses place arbitrary limits on the potential of their employees: you have to be a certain age or of a certain background before you can take on more responsibility.22 You’re typecast, relegated to a niche—despite your broader aspirations. Superbosses will have none of this. Their core belief is that the people they hire can and should do anything, and, further, that their protégés should continue to develop rapidly and in new directions throughout their careers. With this mind-set, they’re more than willing to promote deserving people into jobs that may seem crazy to other bosses—jobs that even protégés themselves aren’t sure they can handle.
Many of us can well remember those moments when someone important saw something in us, a potential that even we may not have been aware of. Superbosses are the kind of people who are always on the lookout for that possibility. As a protégé said of Coach Hayden Fry, “He knew more about what we could do than we knew. You can’t imagine the kind of confidence and motivation that gives you. It makes you feel like you can’t let him down.”23 Working for superbosses is almost like getting a chance to perform on America’s Got Talent—anyone can be plucked out and groomed for greatness. At HCA under Tommy Frist, physical therapists would sometimes become senior executives, simply because Frist saw something that others didn’t. Employee number twelve at Oracle, Anneke Seley, started as a receptionist, but after Larry Ellison personally taught her the SQL programming language, she went on to occupy management positions in customer relations and later started Oracle’s inside sales department—a multibillion-dollar operation now.24
What superbosses give protégés, then, is something quite rare in professional life, an opportunity to rebrand themselves. The career of actor Ron Howard is a great example. Beloved by many TV watchers as Opie in The Andy Griffith Show and later as Richie Cunningham in the sitcom Happy Days, Howard wanted to move away from acting and instead direct films. Enter Roger Corman, who struck a deal whereby Howard would star in one movie (Eat My Dust!) in return for directing another (Grand Theft Auto). Corman would get the Ron Howard name on two properties; Ron Howard would get the opportunity to direct his first movie. It worked. Later, Howard went on to win an Academy Award for Best Director (for A Beautiful Mind, in 2001), as well as direct several other well-known movies, including the Academy Award–winning Apollo 13.
On a day-to-day basis, superbosses also customize their general teaching style to fit the individual. “He didn’t react the same way to everyone,” saxophonist Bill Evans said of Miles Davis. “Everyone was different and personal to him, and that is one of the things that he was able to do . . . get to know each person and what each person needed. Some people he would be harder on than others. He was interesting in that way.” Of Julian Robertson, Chase Coleman said, “He was very good at understanding some combination of what motivated people and how to extract maximum performance out of people. . . . For some people, that was encouraging them, and for other people, it was making them feel less comfortable. He would adjust his feedback.”25
While other bosses will certainly go the extra mile for their reports on occasion, superbosses’ clear commitment to personal and informal career development is far from the norm. Many large companies conceptualize careers in terms of “ladders” that define a standardized upward path for employees and managers. To get to a certain point on the ladder, you have to go through the intermediary rungs one by one. Sophisticated companies go even further, deploying rigid “competency models” to help groom executives for advancement; they figure out the key skills required for a given position, evaluate whether employees have these competencies, and provide training or coaching to “fill in the gaps.” On one level, ladders and competency models make a good deal of sense, as it’s obviously helpful to advance people in a graduated, orderly way. The superboss approach is a bit messier and more chaotic, yet as we’ve seen, it can give worthy employees opportunities to advance rapidly, in line with their true capabilities.
That’s the key point: superbosses deploy an approach to development that is closely tailored to the individual needs of each protégé. It’s the difference between buying a car off the dealer’s lot and customizing your Mini Cooper online. The customized car fits your life better because it’s made for you—it has exactly the features you want, and nothing you don’t want. Customized development of talent requires a lot more effort. As one former player noted of Bill Walsh, he “put in the extra work to figure out each of [his player’s] personalities and what drove each.”26 Customized development also requires fearlessness, a willingness to depart from the fixed “road map” and make an unorthodox decision that might just be perfect for this particular employee.
The Mini Cooper comparison is apt. Superbosses regard protégés not as generic employees but as individual customers whose needs must be served. Imagine an organization where leaders take it upon themselves to identify exactly what customers need and then create appropriate ways of delivering it. Imagine an organization where the CEO stays close to the customer and feels connected. Replace “customer” with “employee,” and that’s just what superbosses do to help people advance in their careers. To a much greater extent than other bosses, superbosses create suitable opportunities for employees that fit their developmental needs, rather than slotting employees mindlessly into an existing, bureaucratic system. The employee as customer—what a strange idea!
Hire People and Get Out of the Way
As a young writer, comic book legend Stan Lee once worked on a comic strip that used the phrase pogo stick in the punch line. His editor told him that the phrase wouldn’t resonate with rural audiences, and instructed Lee to change the gag so that the punch line had the phrase roller skates instead. In Lee’s opinion, this was a big mistake; roller skates deflated the entire joke. Lee changed it anyway, though, to please his boss.
Lee wasn’t happy to have made the change, in the end, and it taught him a valuable lesson: the importance of effective, fearless delegation. As a boss, you need to give subordinates real responsibility, and you can’t stand over them, second-guessing and editing. “When you hire an artist to do a job, you let him do the job,” Lee said.27 At Marvel Comics, Lee would take a largely hands-off approach; like other superbosses, he would be quick to hand real responsibility to enterprising young people. One writer, Jim Shooter, was made editor in chief of Marvel comics at the age of twenty-seven.28
Superbosses are able to constantly and rapidly propel their protégés to new heights because they are the consummate delegators, relinquishing a degree of authority and oversight that would make many ordinary bosses cringe. Gene Roberts allowed writers and editors absolute freedom to follow stories as long as they adhered to certain quality standards. On one occasion during the mid-1980s, reporter Don Drake hatched a plan to cover the rising risk of AIDS in a story called “AIDS: A Day with a Global Killer.” Drake’s idea was to send reporters all around the world—to Thailand, an African village, a pharmaceutical company, a factory manufacturing prophylactics—to show what was going on with the disease of AIDS at a particular moment in time. Roberts’s response? Go for it! He authorized a dozen reporters and half a dozen photographers to travel around the world for the story. On the appointed day, the stories rolled in, and Drake and a fellow reporter found themselves unexpectedly overwhelmed. Without direction from Roberts, the entire newsroom stopped what it was doing and spontaneously pitched in, enabling the story to make deadline with seconds to spare. When an entire team pitches in to solve a pressing problem, and when the response is unprovoked by an edict from up top, you know you’ve got an incredible culture coursing through the business, shaped by a superboss.29
Superbosses possess the deep, underlying trust that is essential to effective delegation. “Norman Brinker gave us incredible autonomy,” one former senior manager told me. “We definitely had the ability to fail.”30 Ron Gilbert, who worked in the games division of Lucasfilm during the late 1980s and 1990s, agreed: “One of the best things George Lucas did for us was to leave us alone. He just kind of gave us the resources to go off and create and come up with things.”31 As a group, superbosses believe that their people are fully capable of arriving at solutions themselves and that the experience of doing so supports their development. “Every conductor has his own solution and must look for it,” Jorma Panula once said. “It’s a longer way to go, but worth it. You have to have the courage to jump into the water before you learn to swim. I don’t throw in the life belt until someone is really drowning.”32
Scot Sellers, the chairman and CEO of Archstone, told me of a special assignment Bill Sanders gave him early in his career. Major investors were coming to town, and they were considering whether to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into a brand-new residential property development Sanders was envisioning. With only two days’ notice, Sanders asked Sellers to create a compelling strategy and vision for the development. Sellers and his colleagues had only just begun thinking about the concept, but that didn’t seem to matter. Sanders “believed that if he gave me those marching orders, I would come back with something that was close enough to what he envisioned, that we would be able to sell it together.”33 Sanders was right. Sellers buried himself in research and by the next afternoon, he had a draft presentation on Sanders’s desk. Sanders made only a few adjustments, and when Sellers made the pitch, it was a home run. Imagine how great Sellers felt to secure this win—and to have even been given a shot in the first place.
What superbosses also do to support the learning experience is to hold protégés strictly accountable for their performance. In superboss organizations, the rule is clear: Sink or swim. “You just knew when you were around Brinker expectations and accountability were givens because of the way he conducted himself,” one member of his inner circle recalled.34 That said, superbosses aren’t unfeeling tyrants; they will let you fail once—but you better learn from that mistake. “The only people that don’t make mistakes are people who don’t do anything,” Michael Miles told me, “so in saying that we wanted action, we also said that we have to be tolerant of mistakes.”35 Superbosses will also tolerate it when you admit you don’t know something, as long as you make it your business to find out the answer—and quickly.
With so much responsibility on their shoulders and a clear sense of accountability, not to mention the trust of their superboss, protégés come away feeling a sense of their own power and worth, as if they are more like partners than subordinates. Ralph Lauren “made you feel you were so much a part of it,” Sal Cesarani related.36 Bill Walsh made a point of emphasizing to each player how he contributed to the team’s overall success. He would tell players that “at some point, [you] will be in a position to win or lose a game,” and that each player had “to be prepared both mentally and physically to play that role.”37
Enhancing protégés’ sense of partnership also comes from superbosses who really listen. Many superbosses I studied were known not merely as founts of knowledge but as great listeners—bosses who took seriously what employees had to say, even if they didn’t wind up agreeing. Bob Noyce had a distinctive way of listening that involved staring and never blinking or swallowing. “He absorbed everything you said and then answered very levelly in a soft baritone voice, and often with a smile.”38 Gene Roberts zoned out when others were talking, entering what his managing editor Jim Naughton termed his “fugue state.”39 At least he seemed to be zoning out; every now and then, he’d chime in with an incisive question and they realized he’d been listening all along.
Superbosses don’t merely listen; they relentlessly ask employees their opinions as well. When facing decisions big and small, Ralph Lauren would ask even the receptionist’s and cleaning staff’s opinions. Robert Green, former fashion editor at Playboy, remembered that Lauren “would ask your opinion as though he couldn’t make a move without it.”40 According to Raleigh Glassberg, a former buyer at Bloomingdale’s, you would “sit in [Lauren’s] office, you’d go through things together, he’d listen to ideas. It was very much a partnership. You didn’t influence his style, but you’d talk about what would be commercial and what wasn’t, in terms of timing and certain shapes. . . . You’d go for the afternoon to look at preliminaries and work on the line, and it was as much a family relationship as you can have in business.”41
Even better, basketball coach Rick Pitino is known for calling upon his assistants to give scouting reports without notes. Courtside fans have heard him turning to his assistants at key moments in games and shouting, “I need a play! Gimme something!”42 The mere fact that he would solicit their advice suggests to all those within earshot just how much he values their abilities.
We’re back to a point we saw earlier—the relatively egalitarian nature of superboss organizations. Most employees would find it refreshing to work in an organization where what they do really counts, where people are paying attention. Under these circumstances, employees’ career goals cease to be abstractions that may or may not materialize at some undetermined future date. Like their boss’s own aspirations, they’re in play right now. They either rise to the challenge or they don’t. It’s easy to see why protégés of superbosses progress so much more quickly than their peers at more traditional organizations—their bosses have the guts to let them see what they’re really made of.
The Big Personality Paradox
How could superbosses be such strong delegators at the same time that they are deeply involved in the substance of the work, to an extent that verges on that famous evil of leadership, micromanaging? Working in the trenches with their apprentices, immersed in the action, superbosses will not hesitate to make their opinions known about relatively small matters. As journalist Stanley Gellers told me, Ralph Lauren was “the original micromanager. Nothing leaves that office without passing his eye. He is the one to put clothes on a mannequin if a major retailer is about to look at the line. He is the one who personally inspects his own stores. He is the ultimate detail man.”43 George Lucas, Alice Waters, Lorne Michaels, Jorma Panula—all were described by their protégés as, if not micromanagers, at least deeply engrossed with tiny, seemingly random details.
How can this be? How can a boss be both an extreme delegator and a micromanager? Life would be simple (and not in a good way) if not for the endless capacity of people—well, at least some people—to internalize two seemingly incompatible behaviors. And that is the case here. Superbosses have found a third path between micromanagers, who are afraid to delegate because they don’t trust their subordinates, and free riders, who delegate without control because they are lazy or incompetent. Let’s just call them Hands-On Delegators. It’s because superbosses exert such command over details that they are able to delegate effectively and create opportunities for their protégés. They know exactly what’s going on in their businesses. They know who is performing well and who isn’t. They know the strengths and weaknesses of their reports. They know the latest trends impacting the marketplace. All this know-how gives them the confidence to delegate, as does a practical grasp of when, how, and to whom to delegate. Meanwhile, the clarity of their vision and its dissemination throughout their organizations further assure them that team members will get the basics right without needing constant supervision.
According to protégés, superbosses skillfully oversee and exert control without stepping on toes. They articulate their absolute vision to others, set specific work goals, and then step back to see what happens. When all goes well, they let it ride, while still paying close attention to what’s happening under their watch. If they don’t like what’s going on, they don’t hesitate to step in and change it. As comedian Andy Samberg told me, Lorne Michaels chooses to be more involved on some days and less involved on others, depending on his assessment of what’s needed. “There will be weeks where you have a scene where you don’t really hear from him at all about it—it just goes as it’s going to go. And then there are some weeks where he’ll take a very strong interest and have a lot of thoughts.”44
One thing superbosses are definitely willing to do—and that a pure delegator might not—is jump in to help protégés with unforeseen crises. Chef Michael Sullivan recalls spending an afternoon cooking an important meal with several Chez Panisse alumni. The roasted pigs didn’t come out right; they were raw inside. Although Waters was working the front room and was nicely dressed, she came to the kitchen to help the team figure out what to do. “We were all looking at each other and watching Alice kind of orchestrate the whole emergency recovery situation. She was able to do that better than anybody; her attention to detail in a crisis was something to behold.”45 We’re so used to thinking of delegation as an either-or proposition. It doesn’t have to be—it can be both-and.
Running parallel to the “hands-on delegation” paradox is what I like to call the Big Personality paradox. It’s easy to find big bosses who hog the limelight, leaving everyone else in the shadows. Some other bosses seem content to shrink into the background, sometimes more passive than anything else. Superbosses are neither of these. They can have enormous, larger-than-life personalities. They’re opinionated, zealous about their beliefs, aggressive, and competitive. They’re often type-A people who love to win. They’re the last people we would expect to step aside so that younger talent can claim the spotlight—yet that’s exactly what they do. Miles Davis believed that each band member deserved his “moment in the sun,” even if he was the concert’s headline attraction. Norman Brinker operated on a similar principle: “Norman has accomplished, and is as successful as he is, but he never has to be the only guy in the room,” former Burger King CEO Jeff Campbell told me.46 Some superbosses would make a practice of moving on quickly to the next project or business issue, leaving team members clearly in charge of doing what they do. Multiple protégés shared stories of how their superbosses purposely left room for others to take on leadership roles.
Unlike many other bosses, superbosses are so confident, they don’t need to constantly dominate others. This frees them up to enjoy other big personalities and to even take responsibility for helping younger colleagues rise up and become big personalities themselves. As longtime coach and athletic director Ted Leland recalled, his superboss Bill Walsh “used to say, ‘Part of your job as manager is to make sure that the people under you are successful.’”47 Larry Ellison was no different; he once commented that Oracle had a great succession plan, as it has always been full of employees who have gone on to become CEOs.48 At Kraft, Michael Miles created an annual development process in which senior managers from all divisions would discuss every person in the organization and what they needed next in their career. “It was very rigorous and it was something that everyone paid attention to . . . something you put a lot of time and effort into because it was important that you demonstrate you were good at developing people.”49 We tend to think that people with authority and a commanding presence can’t also behave in ways that nurture others. As tough as superbosses can be, isn’t it refreshing to know that some of the biggest personalities of all will also purposely build people up?
The Protégé’s Responsibility
Dr. Karl VanDevender, personal physician to Tommy Frist and his family, told me of a time when Frist was piloting his plane and VanDevender was serving as copilot.50 The skies were clear and beautiful. VanDevender turned to Frist and asked him an (interesting) question: “Tommy, you’re not a brilliant guy in the sense of being a National Merit Scholar or something like that, but you have accomplished so much with your life. How did you do it?”
Fumbling in his left shirt pocket, Frist pulled out a 3x5-inch note card with phrases penciled on it. “Karl, do you see this?”
“Yes,” VanDevender replied.
“Every day, I look at my near-term goals, my intermediate-term goals, and my long-term goals. I do it from a health point of view, a moral point of view, and a financial point of view. I polish these goals every day. I’ve been surprised to see that most people don’t write down their goals. May I see yours?”
Frist’s note card brings up a major theme of this book: What happens to people in their careers, and in their lives, is seldom random. Frist’s question—“May I see yours?”—suggests the deeper challenge that superbosses level at all protégés. Yes, superbosses are willing to advance people, even when protégés don’t think they’re ready. Yes, they will purposefully step back so their protégés can shine. Yes, they will organize their entire enterprise so that informal, apprenticeship-style learning can take place. But they will ultimately push protégés to step up and take responsibility for their own development by cultivating an everyday focus on learning and growth.
Superbosses aren’t about to sit there spewing wisdom for their protégés to collect and marvel at passively; they expect their people to ask questions, seek out knowledge, try to get better, and actively jump toward the next stages of their careers. Many bosses have an unspoken rule: Be compliant, don’t rock the boat, do what I do, and you’ll move up. Compliant employees are the last thing superbosses want. On the contrary, they like to take protégés to task, and they value those who don’t cave and especially those who have the guts to push back. Jay Chiat’s writers and artists had to withstand his frank critiques without crumbling—remembering that it was about the work, not them. Robert Noyce “could be a very, very tough taskmaster,” Gordon Moore remembered. “It’s not personal, it’s all business, so if you were up for the challenge, you could be very successful.”51
More broadly, superbosses expect protégés to fully step up, to confidently go after responsibility rather than wait for it to be dangled in front of them. Superbosses are 100 percent committed and always pushing forward—protégés have to be, too. If you waited to ask Larry Ellison what to do when facing a particular decision, you waited too long; those who asked permission were like grapes that “kind of died on the vine,” as former Oracle senior executive Gary Bloom put it to me in an interview.52 The metaphor went further: some employees had the attitude that “if you don’t spray water on me, I’m not going to grow,” and there were others who would “suck whatever water they can out of the vine and continue to grow.”53 The latter were the ones who did well at Oracle; Ellison frequently lost interest in people who were timid or hesitant or who didn’t have a firm viewpoint.
Superbosses have a selfish motivation for expecting protégés to step up: they want protégés to teach them a thing or two. Recall that Julian Robertson funded his “tiger seeds” because he reveled in being surrounded by youthful energy and insight (not to mention that he also wanted to make lots of money!). Reminiscing about his Second Great Quintet, Miles Davis said, “Those were all young guys and although they were learning from me, I was learning from them, too.”54 A former colleague of Ralph Lauren put it this way: “Ralph is great but he also feeds off greatness as well.”55 Since superbosses are always learning and growing themselves, they see interactions with their people as an irreplaceable opportunity to freshen their perspectives and continue to innovate. The apprentice relationship we introduced in the last chapter thus turns out to be very much a two-way street: protégés get an unforgettable, career-making experience, while superbosses, who realize they can’t achieve their visions alone, get to move their life’s work just a bit further. Pretty good deal all around, if you ask me.
The Crazy, Intense, Beautiful Pressure Cooker
Looking back on his career, Chase Coleman reflected that Robertson “was good at making people feel that sense of ownership and opportunity . . . and then providing a path, sort of a steep learning curve for people who excelled at their first task.”56 This learning curve in turn translated into an extremely intense work environment. Think of how ferociously Coleman must have worked for Robertson right after college, not to mention during those early years of his fund—and how much he learned.
All superbosses compress learning and growth, which is why some protégés don’t need to work for them very long to get that potentially career-altering impact. Gayle Ortiz worked at Chez Panisse for only two months during the summer of 1976, on her way to a long career as a pastry chef. When I asked her what she possibly could have picked up from such a short sojourn with Alice Waters, she said, “It shaped the whole way I run my business, really.” In particular, Ortiz learned the principle of never compromising on her vision or on the quality of her food. “I learned to pay attention to detail and demand perfection in the way that things were not only made, but also how they were served, the way the dining room looks, the way the front of the house looks. It was my main focus, the way that I looked at business.”57
Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers presented an intriguing notion that successful people become successful because they train for a cumulative total of ten thousand hours. But plenty of people get their ten thousand hours and don’t become successful. It is the quality of those ten thousand hours that surely matters. At most companies, you’re able to settle in and relax after spending a period of time on the job. In a superboss organization, there’s no settling in—success in one position leads to even more responsibility. One well-known Oracle alumnus recalled that colleagues used to count their time at the company in “dog years”—one year working at Oracle was like seven years working anywhere else.58
Shaping Career Growth like a Superboss
How does your work experience compare? Are you constantly being pushed to your limits? Is your boss looking for opportunities for you to stretch your wings—and does she have a sixth sense for what you need? Is she giving you that blend of guidance and freedom to make the most of the responsibility already delegated to you? How fast are your most promising colleagues really moving up? Are some people pigeonholed into certain tracks and not others? Many top organizations today tout themselves as “career destinations,” emphasizing the great opportunities they offer for advancement, but those opportunities may not be as attractive as they seem if they’re not tailored to you and your true capabilities. If you’re talented, ambitious, and energized to succeed, don’t settle for ordinary. Look for a superboss of your own to work for. When you find one (because, remember, they’re out there, in greater numbers than you might think), be prepared to take risks and be placed on the hot seat.
If you’re a boss who has always operated within a traditional “career ladder”–type system, making “safe” promotions based on indicated employee skill sets and past experiences, don’t assume there’s nothing you can do. Give a younger person a try—someone who shows great promise and has a growth mind-set. Or consider, as an experiment, promoting an incredibly talented person of any age who can bring an unusual background to the position. Think about your direct reports and what each of them needs, and then consider possible ways within your organization to help them to the next level. Perform this analysis regularly—on an annual basis, at least, and perhaps more often. If applicable, ask your reports to do this for their reports. We all know about the challenge of managing up, getting your boss to see things your way, at least some of the time, and we also understand that this is often a key element in moving forward in a company. Well, how about also “managing down,” embracing the notion that your success as a manager in large part hinges on your ability to make your own people successful.
Watch, too, how you delegate responsibility. I regularly coach senior executives on how they can best deal with critical leadership challenges. As they describe their problems, it’s amazing how often it boils down to a failure to delegate effectively. It’s hard to get people in line behind a big idea if they had no part in generating it. When you can’t find the “right people” for the team, it may be more about you than it is about them. After all, the right people don’t stick around when their boss has all the answers. Whatever you do, you don’t want to fall into the vicious cycle some managers find themselves in, where they don’t trust their employees to get the job done, so they do it themselves. The more they take on team members’ work, the less capable team members become. You’re working 24/7 and you don’t understand why. Ask yourself whether you meddle too often and in the wrong ways. How would your reports answer these questions? Learn to trust your team members, and if you don’t, ask yourself: Why not? You hired them!
You might also work institutionally to make your organization an unparalleled place to grow careers. Some companies are especially strong at setting up succession plans for employees—General Electric and Google being great old world and new world examples. At pharmaceutical company Baxter, longtime legendary CEO Bill Graham created a talent machine by quickly and consistently moving young managers to greater and greater responsibilities. The result was the deepest bench in the industry in his day, and employees who went on to become CEOs at numerous biotech companies, including Covidien, Genzyme, and others.59 If your organization extends across business units or geographies, you can also exploit this structure to help generate growth experiences for employees.
Jeff Campbell recalled for me a fourteen-month period during the early 1980s when he worked closely with Norman Brinker and was promoted twice. First, he was made president of Burger King’s worldwide operations. Then, perhaps six months later, Brinker came in and “dropped the bomb” that, thanks to some business developments, Campbell was being named Burger King’s new chairman and CEO. “I exploded into a thousand pieces. . . . It was a little bit of a stretch going from region manager to CEO—and this was in, like, fourteen months. It was pretty scary.”60 Think of how it may have felt—the nervous knot in your stomach at knowing you’re being called to do something big, something you’ve never done before, something perhaps you’ve wanted all your life. Do you have it in you? Can you pull it off? But this is what superbosses give you: the chance to succeed. They open the door to opportunity. And who wouldn’t want that shot?