Iconoclasts, Glorious Bastards, and Nurturers
A nondescript white truck chugged through the streets of downtown Philadelphia, passing the Beaux-Arts Rodin Museum building and the Community College of Philadelphia before arriving at the iconic structure located at 400 North Broad Street. The front of this building, known locally as the “Tower of Truth,” bore the insignia of the town’s leading newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer.1 Eighteen stories tall, it housed editorial offices and, at one time, giant newspaper presses whose operation sent vibrations coursing through the entire building.2 On this day in 1978, the van skirted the front entrance and continued around the building to the back. Normally trucks came here to load newspapers hot off the presses, but not this van. It was there to unload.
The driver and other workers walked around to open the van’s rear door. Out came a long, spindly leg. Then another. In the end there were four legs, as well as a hump, a sizable torso, and a serenely smiling face: a camel, rented from a local circus.3 More legs followed, shorter ones—a goat, thrown in by the circus, an Inquirer employee remembers, “at no additional charge.”4
The animals’ handlers and Inquirer staff who had come to meet the creatures led them through a door to a freight elevator that unfortunately went no higher than the fourth floor. When the doors opened, the animals were led through the building—through the cafeteria, in fact—onto a passenger elevator and up to another floor. Employees in the cafeteria stared in astonishment. Some got up to follow the animals, eager to see what was going on (these were reporters, after all).5
A gaggle of spectators darted up the stairs, arriving in time to see the camel exit the passenger elevator and cross the newsroom. At the time, editor in chief Gene Roberts was meeting with architects and interior decorators, discussing plans for the “newsroom of the future” to be built for the Inquirer. Roberts didn’t jump or shriek or laugh as the animals entered. “Without batting an eye,” former associate managing editor–news editor Jim Naughton recalls, “he turned to these experts and said, ‘Oh, yes, we’ll need the newsroom to be near the freight elevator.’”6
Longtime staffers told this story thirty years later, gathering together in 2008 to celebrate their time working for Roberts. The camel was meant to celebrate the recent Pulitzer awarded to Inquirer journalist Richard Ben Kramer for his Middle East reporting, as well as Roberts’s ability to parley that success into increased corporate funding from the Inquirer’s owners for foreign correspondents. Any number of other colorful stories also revealed how the Inquirer, led by Roberts, pulsed with energy and creativity. On his forty-sixth birthday, Roberts came into the bathroom by his office to find forty-six frogs croaking in his honor. On an employee’s birthday, Roberts arranged for a live elephant to show up at his house. On Roberts’s fiftieth birthday, a number of people on staff got together to plan something really memorable. A staff member explains: “A clandestine committee plotted how to suitably call maximum attention to the event. Yes, we could put together a kazoo band from within our ranks. Yes, we could get the city to barricade the 1000 block of Clinton Street on which Gene and Sue Roberts had an elegant old brownstone.” The committee also arranged for a Goodyear blimp to fly over Roberts’s house with its giant electronic sign proclaiming, “The Frog Is 50.”7
What’s with the frogs? It was Roberts’s nickname, bestowed on account of his distinctly amphibian facial features. It was meant affectionately, not derisively. When I spoke with Roberts’s protégés, I discovered that they didn’t merely respect and admire him as a leader—they revered him. Every person I contacted immediately got back in touch and said they’d love to share stories about the Roberts era. Working for Gene Roberts clearly wasn’t just another job for them. It was the job of a lifetime. And Roberts wasn’t just another boss. He was one of a kind. A force of nature. The Frog. As investigative reporter Don Barlett put it, “If you were a reporter and you didn’t love him, there was something wrong with you.”8
There may also have been something wrong with you if, upon leaving Roberts’s nest, you didn’t claim a place for yourself at the apex of American journalism. At the reunion, attended by more than three hundred people, there were sixteen Pulitzer Prize winners, a National Book Award winner, and the authors of the bestselling books Friday Night Lights and Black Hawk Down.9 Other former staffers of Roberts’s have gone on to head the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, the Akron Beacon Journal, and the Poynter Institute (the leading in-service school for journalists). Not to mention others who became investigative reporters for top papers and magazines across the country.
Every industry has its leading lights, its superstars, its innovators. Gene Roberts fell into this group. But unlike other equally successful and prominent peers, Roberts had something special: he knew how to help talented people accomplish more than they ever dreamed was possible, and in the process developed a talent machine that made almost everyone who entered his orbit a star. Roberts was that rare boss who made it his business to push people out of their comfort zones with new and challenging assignments; who provided personal guidance and support that made a difference; and who demanded that his staff make their own creative decisions rather than rely on him. Reporters and editors in his employ came away transformed. They put out their best work, and had fun doing it. During Roberts’s eighteen years at the Inquirer, the paper won an incredible seventeen Pulitzer Prizes.10 Today, in newsrooms across America, insiders know him as the man who produced a generation of world-class journalists.
Talent spawners like Roberts aren’t exclusive to the newspaper business. If you’ve been paying attention to the movers and shakers in your industry, you may have noticed that a surprising number of them, at some point, have all worked for the same person. You may also have noticed that colleagues and others in the industry mention this name with a strange mixture of familiarity and awe, and that some even make a habit of referring to this person in passing, expecting listeners to know whom they mean, and treating them as if they have failed a test if they don’t. Gradually, you come to realize that having contact with this person, especially if you’ve worked for him or her, seems to put people on a fast track to success. Log some time with this person, and you’re likely to go places. Remain far away, and you will forever be at a disadvantage, compared with those who were close.
It’s important to recognize how absolutely extraordinary this “superboss effect” is. Most bosses have trouble ensuring a steady stream of talent for their own teams and companies, even with the assistance of world-class human resources. By contrast, superbosses fuel the talent pool for an entire industry. Likewise, most employees are not holding twenty-year reunions to reminisce about the good ol’ days. If recent surveys serve as any indication, they’re happy to forget working for their bosses.11 Superbosses are looked upon by protégés as pivotal figures in their careers and, indeed, their lives.
Superbosses are the great coaches, the igniters of talent, and the teachers of leadership in most industries. In effect, superbosses have mastered something most bosses miss—a path to extraordinary success founded on making other people successful. That such a path exists is surprising, even counterintuitive, but it’s also wonderful news for anyone trying to live a life of impact. What does this path look like? Who are these superbosses? What makes them tick? And where have they been all this time?
The Makings of a Superboss
One paradox of superbosses (one of many we’ll encounter in this book) is that these bosses, although frequently overlooked for their talent-spawning prowess, don’t hide in the background. On the contrary, they practically scream out for our attention. By the time of the camel incident, Gene Roberts was already attracting serious notice in the newspaper industry for having turned around the Inquirer.12 The paper he inherited when he took it over in 1972 hardly merited offices in the “Tower of Truth”; it was corrupt through and through. Previous owner Walter Annenberg reportedly had a curious rule: if he didn’t like you, you didn’t make it into the paper.13 Every photo in which certain local leaders appeared had to be cropped to eliminate Annenberg’s antagonists. Further, the paper’s chief investigative reporter, Harry Karafin, was unmasked by Philadelphia magazine as blackmailing subjects of his reporting. He was convicted of extortion and sent to prison.14 The Inquirer was clearly the number two paper in the city behind the Philadelphia Bulletin—it had less staff, less budget, and less clout. It also wasn’t making any money.15
Roberts, a former bureau chief and editor at the New York Times, was energized by the challenge of turning the Inquirer around. He wanted to make it one of the top papers in the country and truly his own. He succeeded brilliantly, beating the Bulletin in a competition so fierce it was covered by Time magazine.16 After effectively putting the Bulletin out of print in 1982, the Inquirer’s daily circulation rose to over 500,000 and its Sunday circulation soared to well over a million.17 The paper became known nationally for its investigative journalism. Even today, numerous stories that the Inquirer produced are astonishing—like the one about crooked homicide detectives who put phone books on the heads of suspects and then beat the books with baseball bats until a confession was proffered, a method that accounted for two-thirds of the resolved murder cases in Philadelphia.18 Or the one about blood donation in which a reporter discovered that a pint of blood donated in Philadelphia would be sold in Miami for $700. The fallout from stories like these helped elevate the profile of the Inquirer far higher than what it had been before.19
As impressive as Roberts’s success was, you couldn’t as an industry outsider simply look at it and know instantly that a superboss’s hand was at work. Early on, Roberts was successful at luring some established journalists to work for him—Steve Lovelady of the Wall Street Journal, Gene Foreman of Newsday, and others from the Boston Globe and Washington Post.20 Later, as word spread of the paper’s quality and work environment (and all those Pulitzers), the Inquirer became inundated with applications. Clearly, Roberts was doing something right. Yet unless you worked in the newspaper business or closely followed it, you likely wouldn’t have noticed any of this. You wouldn’t have known about all the successful reporters at other publications who had started with Roberts, and you certainly wouldn’t have known about those who had grown up inside Roberts’s organization and stayed there for much of their careers. All you would have seen was a successful paper fronted by a determined, inventive, highly regarded leader.
Identifying and studying superbosses can be a subtle art. If you’re on the hunt for superbosses, you can sometimes create comparative quantitative analyses that demonstrate clearly who the superboss of an industry is. In football, for instance, a quick count reveals that, as of 2015, Bill Walsh produced almost twice as many active NFL coaches as the next most prolific talent spawner.
|
WALSH |
PARCELLS |
JOHNSON |
GIBBS |
LEVY |
|
|
2008 |
26 |
20 |
6 |
11 |
15 |
|
2009 |
25 |
21 |
8 |
10 |
17 |
|
2010 |
25 |
19 |
10 |
10 |
14 |
|
2011 |
27 |
17 |
12 |
8 |
12 |
|
2012 |
27 |
15 |
14 |
10 |
10 |
|
2013 |
22 |
12 |
10 |
8 |
9 |
|
2014 |
21 |
13 |
10 |
5 |
9 |
|
2015 |
20 |
13 |
10 |
5 |
10 |
Count of how many coaches in the entire NFL came from five top legendary coaches (2008–2015). Football fans will notice that the totals in any given year will inevitably exceed the number of teams in the league. That’s because some coaches worked on multiple coaching staffs.21
It would be nice if we could perform such a straightforward analysis in every industry to tease out the superboss figures, but football is actually a fairly special case. Football teams are all the same size and they compete in highly structured ways, allowing for meaningful comparisons between coaches. Also, there are tons of public data in football and clear ways to measure success. Most other industries aren’t so neat and tidy. Often companies generate more talent in absolute terms on account of their size, culture, or pedigree; it may have nothing to do with specific leaders in those companies. For instance, Roberts achieved an outsize level of talent production, but more distinguished and much larger papers, such as the New York Times, spawned more talent. Of course, the New York Times might also have produced lots of underperformers. If we could calculate the “hit rate” of Gene Roberts and the Inquirer in producing great talent, it would almost certainly dwarf that of the New York Times.
In general, the size and scope of industry goliaths do confer certain advantages as far as talent spawning goes. Most notably, great talent will often seek to work at such places simply because of their reputation. Yet superbosses can make any organization attractive as a talent magnet, not just those blessed with size, scope, and prestige. Most of the things superbosses unleash to develop all-star talent—motivation, inspiration, innovation, opportunity creation, apprenticeships, coaching—are often not available to the same extent in the largest, most prestigious organizations. An industry-leading paper such as the New York Times may not have to work so hard to attract great talent, but if it did have a superboss at the helm, it would do even better.
In any case, because of the complexities of analyzing and comparing organizations, the most reliable way to identify a superboss required attending to both quantitative measures (e.g., tallying successful protégés) and qualitative indicators (e.g., assessing the boss’s reputation). This is also the most credible way, since the insiders in any industry are the ones who really know what’s going on. As this method revealed, Roberts was definitely the superboss of newspapers in a way that nobody else was. I first became aware of Roberts in 2010 during a conversation with journalist Rob Gurwitt, a longtime writer for Governing magazine. Gurwitt said Roberts not only attracted a lot of talented writers and editors but was known for allowing writers to develop areas of expertise and to report on them as they saw fit. My research team and I followed up, interviewing other industry insiders. Again and again, people referenced Roberts—and nobody else—as a key progenitor of talent in the newspaper industry. Insiders also explicitly distinguished between Roberts and other contemporaries, such as Abe Rosenthal of the New York Times, who had not had the same impact on their staffs.
Identifying a superboss, then, requires that we proceed inductively, amassing insider stories and other evidence while counting as many of their successful protégés as possible. In some cases, I became curious about an industry and then worked from there to find the main talent spawners. Other times, I became interested in a prominent person, wondered if he or she was a superboss, and followed up with exploratory research. On still more occasions, I got a hot lead on a talent spawner from a protégé and decided to map out the industry in depth. Regardless of what industry I studied, the identity of superbosses became indisputably clear as the evidence accumulated.
I eventually identified the eighteen primary superbosses listed in the introduction, as well as two to three dozen other likely superbosses. To my surprise and delight, I found these figures everywhere, not just in corporate contexts. I’m sure you’ve already thought of superbosses in your own industry who match my definition. You may also have spotted them in the middle management of organizations for which you’ve worked. Many superbosses assuredly do exist at the middle levels, but since they are not in the media spotlight, they’re much more difficult to identify and document than those at the highest levels. For this reason, I resolved early on to limit my study to superbosses who lead organizations, as well as to their protégés.
For each of the superbosses, I compiled a partial list of successful protégés the superboss has nurtured. These protégés usually succeeded in the superboss’s industry, although not always in the specific niche the superboss had carved out. Take Hollywood filmmaker Roger Corman. Over the course of some five decades, Corman produced dozens of sexploitation movies based on a well-worn and proven formula of gratuitous nudity, excessive violence, and a roller-coaster plot. But the man who became known as “King of the B’s” became famous for another, and perhaps even more fascinating, reason: he produced an impressive list of world-class directors and actors. There was Robert De Niro, who as a young man played the part of drug addict Lloyd Baker in Corman’s 1970 small-budget flick Bloody Mama, a full three years before he came to fame in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets.22 And there were also Jack Nicholson, Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron, Ron Howard, Gale Ann Hurd, Jonathan Demme, and literally dozens of others.
Real estate offers another example. Mogul Bill Sanders is often considered the personal-contact cornerstone for the industry, as his network extends to a near majority of real estate’s big players. One magazine, remarking on how many industry figures Sanders had spawned, spoke of a “six degrees of Bill Sanders” theory.23 R. Scot Sellers, chairman and CEO of Archstone, worked with Sanders as a senior vice president. Constance Moore, president and CEO of Broadway Real Estate Properties (BRE), served as a former managing director for Sanders. C. Ronald Blankenship, president and CEO of the Verde Group since 2003, served as vice chairman for one of Sanders’s companies from 1998 to 2003. Mary Lou Fiala, president and COO of Regency Centers Corporation, was formerly managing director at another of Sanders’s companies. And the list goes on. Ask people who worked for Sanders, and like Roberts’s protégés, you’ll find that they credit their former boss for providing them with a tremendous training ground. Sanders’s protégés still keep in touch, both professionally and personally; some have even teamed up to form their own companies.
In the early days of my research, I never anticipated just how widespread the fundamental pattern of the superboss would turn out to be. Indeed, as the years passed, I even found new superbosses popping up in industries I’d already studied. In comedy, Steve Carell delighted fans as a not-so-great boss in the TV show The Office, and later had them cringing as he had his chest-hair forcibly removed in the movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin. But before all of this, Carell worked for an extended period on Jon Stewart’s hit program The Daily Show. Stephen Colbert created his conservative alter ego for Stewart as well, leaving to host his own show The Colbert Report before taking over in 2015 as host of CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (Stewart departed the show himself in 2015). A surprising number of other Daily Show alums have also gone on to successful careers in comedy and acting, including John Oliver (who left to host HBO’s Last Week Tonight), two-time Emmy winner Rob Corddry (who appears in the hit TV show Happy Endings), and Ed Helms (star of the Hangover movies and another regular on The Office). Lorne Michaels may still sit atop the most prolific talent-spawning machine in comedy, but in a relatively short time Stewart has emerged as a superboss in his own right. His example suggests that the terrain of talent is fluid and new superbosses are always evolving, and can evolve, even in fields where dynamic superbosses already exist.
Regardless of where you are in your career or what you do in and out of work, superbosses are the people whose businesses you should study, not least because the protégés of a superboss will usually determine where the industry is going next. If you’re tasked with managing talent, these are the role models whose example will guide you to become good at producing, finding, and developing all-stars yourself. If you’re a senior leader interested in creating a never-ending pipeline of world-class employees, these are the kinds of bosses you want to seek out, support, and multiply in your organization. If it’s early in your career, these are the people whom you want to work for. If you’re an investor, these are the people whose ventures you want to keep an eye on. If you’re going to participate in an industry, superbosses will matter—whether you like it or not.
Miles Apart
Imagine you’re in a high-end jazz club in a large metropolitan city. It’s a small, intimate place with seating for perhaps fifty or sixty people. Well-heeled patrons sit clustered around small, round cocktail tables, taking sips from their martini glasses and tapping their feet to the rhythm. They’re listening with rapt attention as a quintet performs, led by a trumpet player who turns his back to the audience and seems primarily engaged with the other musicians. The music tonight is incredible, the groove intense. These world-class musicians are utterly locked in with one another, finishing one another’s phrases, building off one another’s musical ideas.
As the group continues to play, you notice that the drummer, bassist, saxophonist, and pianist all seem to take most of their cues from the trumpet player. They’re listening intently to every note he plays and watching every gesture. He’s not just their leader; he’s a dominant, almost entrancing presence. When he deems it appropriate to pay special attention to one of them, whether by a glance or by echoing a musical phrase, they seem to spark up. Throughout the show, his energy brings out their energy.
This scene was repeated hundreds of times, over many years, by legendary trumpeter Miles Davis and his band. As a creator of modern jazz, Davis is widely regarded as one of the most important musical influences of the twentieth century. He developed a generation of top talent, including John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Cannonball Adderley, Lee Konitz, J. J. Johnson, Dave Holland, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, and Tony Williams.
Contrast Miles Davis with Michael Miles, who was considered one of the leading executives in the food industry in the late twentieth century. As CEO of Kraft Foods, he was credited with turning around the largest American food company through new product introductions, aggressive marketing, and cost cutting. Executives who worked for Miles went on to become the CEOs of Nabisco, Campbell Soup, Mattel, Young & Rubicam, Gillette, and other top consumer-facing organizations.
Here are two revered innovators and prolific talent spawners from entirely different worlds, yet they are both superbosses. In fact, considering the social context of mid – to late-twentieth-century America, it’s hard to think of two figures more different than a marketing titan and a jazz artist. The jazz subculture of the 1950s to the 1970s explicitly defined itself against corporate America, seeing itself as a countercultural, largely African American art form. Meanwhile, African Americans were few and far between in the corporate boardrooms that Michael Miles dominated.
Glancing briefly at the lives of these two men brings to life the sharp differences between them. Davis had a string of tumultuous relationships and marriages, served jail time for domestic violence, and suffered periods of depression. Like other jazz musicians of his day, he struggled with drug addiction—heroin, alcohol, cocaine, and prescription drugs.24 In contrast, Michael Miles enjoyed a relatively stable personal life. At the time of his death in 2013, he had been married to his college sweetheart, Pamela, for fifty-two years.25 His daily habits were also unusually disciplined. John Tucker, who served as senior vice president of human resources at Kraft under Miles, recalls that early on in his tenure, he would come into work at six thirty in the morning. Miles, whose office was a couple of doors down, would already be there with a cup of coffee ready for Tucker. “I said to myself, Jesus Christ, I’ve got to beat this guy to work,” Tucker remembered. One morning, he arrived at five—only to find Miles’s car already in the parking lot and he had already made coffee. The day after that, Tucker arrived at four thirty. He didn’t see Miles’s car and thought he had beaten him. But as he stepped out of his car, he saw a pair of headlights. It was Michael Miles. “He got out of the car and just smiled at me. Both of us knew exactly what was going on.”26
Miles Davis was going to bed during these predawn hours, not beginning his day. Consider, too, the trademark way he performed—his back turned away from the audience, his attention firmly fixed on his fellow musicians. Davis was concerned with the music itself, not with its reception by audiences or critics. He didn’t particularly care if anyone loved what he was playing.27 His mind-set and self-awareness were in fact the opposite of those of a marketer such as Michael Miles.
Compare Davis and Miles with other superbosses, and you’ll find yourself similarly struck by the disparity of their personalities and backgrounds. The food magnate and jazz artist seem miles apart from the New Jersey native who went to France, experienced a “sensual awakening,” and devoted her life to the cause of locally grown, sustainably produced food (Alice Waters).28 Or the Jewish kid from the Bronx who cut his teeth in fashion after a stint in the military, and became, in the words of one journalist, the “American Gatsby-dream designer” (Ralph Lauren).29 Or the Vietnam War correspondent from North Carolina who, as we’ve seen, created a newsroom with as many exotic animals roaming around as world-class journalists (Gene Roberts). If you could magically compare the Twitter feeds of any of these superbosses (leaving aside the fact that Twitter didn’t exist in those days), you’d find they followed vastly different people. If you monitored their television habits, you’d find that some watched PBS while others favored the most lurid reality television. This is not a group of people who would necessarily hit it off with one another at a dinner party.
To put the diversity of superbosses in perspective, think of the different personalities of executives you’ve come across in your industry. Superbosses, by comparison, exist in different industries, and many aren’t even operating in the traditional business world. In addition, they come from different countries and have different social and ethnic backgrounds. Aside from their basic humanity and their uncanny ability to innovate while also developing all-star performers, we might wonder if superbosses have much of anything in common at all.
Iconoclasts, Glorious Bastards, and Nurturers
But superbosses do have certain characteristics in common. After several years studying these talent spawners, I was struck that, despite personal differences, their motivations as bosses fall into three distinct patterns, distributed more or less equally among industries. Some superbosses, such as Miles Davis, don’t set out to inspire or teach others, although that is precisely what they end up doing. What they care about is their work, their passion. The single-minded pursuit of this passion naturally contributes to their success as a boss. These Iconoclasts, as I call them, are so wholly fixated on their vision that they are able to teach in an intuitive, organic way, as a natural outgrowth of their passion and in service to it, rather than consciously or methodically. These are the artists among the superbosses, the people we would most immediately think of as creative geniuses. Among the superbosses I studied, Alice Waters, George Lucas, Lorne Michaels, Ralph Lauren, Jorma Panula, and Robert Noyce all appear as strong Iconoclasts. Their mission in life is to express what is inside them: to let the rest of us in on what they see, feel, or hear. Younger colleagues flock around these superbosses to learn how to be creative artists, and Iconoclasts welcome their presence because it helps them keep their art fresh and relevant.
Miles Davis was single-mindedly focused on music—his music. Nothing gave him more pleasure than those transcendent, almost miraculous nights when he and his musicians were clicking: “The music that we were playing together was just unbelievable,” he said of his first great quintet. “It was so bad that it used to send chills through me at night, and it did the same thing to the audiences, too.”30 As his friend Quincy Troupe related, Davis had an almost childlike fascination with his art, what in Buddhism is called beginner’s mind. Because he was constantly seeing music with fresh eyes, he was able to remain open to creative possibilities and he directed his energies toward constant growth as a musician.31 “I have to change,” Davis said. “It’s like a curse.”32 Talented young musicians crowded around Davis, eager to learn how to develop their own creative vision and capacity for expression. Davis collaborated with them, but not primarily to help them get better; rather he collaborated with them because he hoped they would help him get better: “because to be and stay a great musician you’ve got to always be open to what’s new, what’s happening at the moment,” he said. “You have to be able to absorb it if you’re going to continue to grow.”33
Davis was never especially invested in the success or failure of his younger musicians. He found it “flattering” that he had gained a reputation as a generator of top jazz talent, but noted that it “was also something that I didn’t ask for.”34 He certainly didn’t feel obligated to play teacher and lead young guns like John Coltrane or Herbie Hancock by the hand. As he saw it, these musicians were professionals with their own technical ability and vision; it was up to them to find their own voice in the context of the group. The saxophonist Bill Evans, who played with Davis when he was just twenty-two, remembered that Davis didn’t “tell you anything about what to play. As far as he was concerned, you’re supposed to already know how to play . . . he’s just there to shape his band, his music, you are just another color on his easel.”35 And if you were smart, you wanted to claim one of those colors for yourself, eyes wide open, learning everything you could.
Then there are the Glorious Bastards, superbosses less attuned to developing others than they are to winning, no matter what. For a Glorious Bastard, nothing counts except winning—nothing. A Glorious Bastard may push his staff to work until three a.m. several days a week. He might be merciless in chastising people when they make mistakes. How could such harsh behavior possibly help people? Indeed, Glorious Bastards seem similar to some of the unpleasant and spectacularly unsuccessful bosses I described in my previous book Why Smart Executives Fail. They can be every bit as selfish, every bit as unfeeling, every bit as unpleasant. Yet Glorious Bastards spawn all-star talent, while these other bosses don’t.
Glorious Bastards have something about them that makes them “glorious”: they understand that in order to win, they need the best people and the best teams. They may be egoists, they may want fame and glory for themselves, but they perceive the success of those around them as the pathway to that glory. As a result, they teach their people how to win, inspire them with examples of what winning feels like, and push them to ever higher levels of performance. Glorious Bastards could not care less about the personal development of their staffs, but, perhaps surprisingly, they don’t need to care in order to create stellar performers. Self-interested attention to people is enough. As an employee, you might not love a Glorious Bastard—in fact, you might swear at him under your breath—but you will absolutely respect him. And since Glorious Bastards put your career on the fast track, you’ll thank your lucky stars you had the chance to work for them. Ambitious young talent will notice your success, and they’ll line up to work for him, too.
Larry Ellison, Michael Milken, Roger Corman, Bonnie Fuller, Julian Robertson, and Jay Chiat all had elements of the Glorious Bastard in them. Of these, Oracle founder Larry Ellison is by far the most extreme example. Ellison is known as a huge spawner of talent in the technology field; as Oracle grad and Salesforce.com senior executive Steve Garnett said, “I think half of Silicon Valley is run by former Oracle people.”36 Top executives who once worked for Ellison include Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, Siebel Systems founder and former CEO Tom Siebel, EMC Corporation’s executive vice president Harry You, and veteran tech CEO and board member Mike Seashols. Ellison has been named by BusinessWeek as one of the most competitive people on the planet.37 As a former senior executive told me, “He enjoys the losing of the other guy. He enjoys it, and that’s kind of sick. . . . It’s who he is. It’s just who he is.”38 Although Ellison often discussed the importance of chemistry and teamwork, in reality he led more by intimidation. As he himself noted, “I invented my own style of management called MBR. MBR stands for ‘management by ridicule.’”39 One former Oracle executive described the result of this management style: “I think Larry was excellent at motivating people when it came to articulating the company’s strategy and where he wanted the company to go. But the rest of his motivation was based upon people’s fear and greed.”40 Despite Ellison’s hard-driving style, or in some ways perhaps because of it, he had an indisputable knack for boosting people’s careers. Gary Bloom, a longtime Oracle employee who has held senior leadership positions at many top technology companies, remembered, “What ends up happening for a large number of people is they end up in positions within Oracle probably years in advance of where they thought they’d be at that level in their career.”41
Most Glorious Bastards are not quite as outrageous as Ellison, but neither do they seem as nice or empathetic as we might wish our bosses to be. The superboss playbook is not about being nice or empathetic. It’s about giving protégés the motivation, guidance, wisdom, creative license, and other elements they need to learn and grow. After all, just because you have a nice boss doesn’t necessarily mean you have a good boss, let alone one who will turbocharge your career.
Of course, some superbosses—probably the majority—would never dream of employing MBR. Unlike both Iconoclasts and Glorious Bastards, they truly, deeply care about the success of their protégés and pride themselves on their ability to develop others. These leaders represent a third type of superboss: the benevolent Nurturer. In using the word nurturer, I mean to sharply distinguish these superbosses from the mentors we usually see in corporate contexts. Most business mentors don’t maintain deep, intense relationships with their younger, less experienced mentees. They may meet occasionally, dispense a few helpful tips, or help a mentee make helpful personal contacts, but that’s about it. Nurturers are what I’d call “activist bosses.” They are consistently present to guide and teach their protégées, and they actively engage with employees to help them reach great heights. Would your typical corporate mentor check in with you at one in the morning to see how your big project is going? A Nurturer would. Would your typical corporate mentor give you the exact feedback you need to hear, when you need to hear it? A Nurturer would. Would your typical mentor sit ten feet away from you, taking time to comment on the nuances of your work so that you literally learned at the feet of a master? A Nurturer would. It is this intense, sustained effort that allows Nurturers to play such a big part in the success of others.
From a talent generation standpoint, Nurturers are not any better than the other two kinds of superbosses on account of their “nice guy” sensibility; all three types of superbosses are extraordinary at spawning talent, and that’s ultimately what counts. Among the primary and secondary superbosses we’ll discuss in this book, many are Nurturers—including Bill Walsh, Michael Miles, Norman Brinker, Tommy Frist, Mary Kay Ash, Gregg Popovich, David Swensen, Jon Stewart, and Archie Norman. As Brinker once said, “I nurtured people. Over the years, I’ve employed about 1.4 million people and I’ve watched these people grow. Some, who worked in the kitchen, became managers, then store managers, and then executives. There are about seventeen or eighteen heads of major restaurant chains now who worked for me. That’s really thrilling. I never liked having someone leave. But I was excited to see people take the risk and do something successful.”42
Memorable Bosses
Finding three superboss “types” was an eye-opener, but as my research proceeded, I was amazed to find even more patterns coming to the fore among individuals who otherwise seemed so eclectic and disparate. All of the superbosses I identified seemed to hold in common a set of basic character traits. Each trait was not equally pronounced in every superboss, but in general they were strikingly, intriguingly evident, and helped define at least the outlines of what might be called a “superboss personality.” In mapping out this personality, I felt I had gotten somewhat closer to what I was ultimately after in my investigation: the key behind superbosses’ greatness as leaders.
Superbosses all possess extreme confidence, even fearlessness, when it comes to furthering their agendas and ideas. They almost universally embrace the axiom that “there are no problems, only solutions.” This fearlessness bleeds into their private lives as well. Oracle founder Larry Ellison loves racing sailboats, a dangerous sport that has claimed the lives of multiple competitors.43 Restaurant magnate Norman Brinker was an Olympian, and even played polo until it almost killed him.44 Intel cofounder Robert Noyce was even more out there—a pilot, an active heli-skier, and a motorcycle enthusiast known to race through Bali streets in a monsoon. His favorite jacket read, “No guts, no glory.”45
Another important attribute that all superbosses share is competitiveness. When we look at superbosses, we sense competitive blood running through their veins. They thrive on it, they seek it out, and they create it. Financier Michael Milken’s competitive streak was obvious to his fraternity brothers in college; as one former roommate remarked, “I don’t think I’ve seen anybody more competitive than Mike. If we were doing the dishes in our apartment, he always liked to time how long it took and said he could do them faster.”46 Robert Noyce made sure to hit the very first pitch at a father-son baseball game out of the park: “My poor father couldn’t help himself,” recalls his daughter Penny, who was in the stands that day. “He always threw himself entirely into the activity at hand.”47
A third, vitally important character trait shared by superbosses—and one central to their innovation—is their imaginative nature. Superbosses are visionaries. They think intensely about what could be and are fired up to turn their dreams into reality. As one of Alice Waters’s protégés said: “I think Alice has been a woman on a mission all of her life. Once she went into food, she wanted the best produce, the healthiest produce. Every bag of little greens that you see in your supermarket, you can send her a thank-you note. She changed the notion of produce and also the notion of raising animals and farming sustainably.”48 Marty Staff, a former marketing and sales executive for Ralph Lauren, had similar memories of his boss: “I remember when I would go to dinner with Ralph we would never talk about business. We would talk about dreams. The dreams were if you were skiing in Aspen what would you wear, what kind of comforter would you have, what kind of car would you drive? You know, would you wear sunglasses? Would they be mirrored? He would construct this world and then he would simply fill in the blanks.”49
A fourth characteristic that superbosses universally manifest is integrity. I use the word not primarily to mean “honesty” in the colloquial sense, but rather strict adherence to a core vision or sense of self. Superbosses don’t play games like some leaders do; unlike Bossy Bosses, they’re not distracted by the need to satisfy their big egos. They remain consistently true to themselves, their beliefs, and their values. As maestro Charles Prince, music director of Wiener Operettensommer (Vienna’s summer operetta festival), told me, his superboss Jorma Panula “is not interested in all the traffic. He’s just interested in making music the best that he can; he’s not interested in all the nonsense that goes on around a career as a conductor. . . . He only cares about the art, about the work. It’s stupendous.”50 Even a leader like Ellison, who was known to do anything to win, always stayed true to his vision for his business, and in this sense showed unusual integrity.
A fifth and final attribute of superbosses, a natural extension of integrity, is authenticity. So many bosses cultivate an image for the benefit of their reports. They keep a tight lid on their personalities, saving their “true” selves for when they’re away from the office. Not superbosses. In their daily interactions with others, they let their personalities hang out. Tommy Frist, founder of Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), has spawned hundreds of administrators at for-profit hospitals. “If you look around the industry, almost everybody has crossed paths with Tommy at one point or another,” said Russell Carson, chairman of Ardent Health Services in Nashville, Tennessee.51 Notable “offspring” of Frist’s include Gene Nelson, founder of Quality Data Management (QDM); Edward Stack, founder, president, and CEO of Behavioral Centers of America; Joe Fisher, a CEO and chief pharmacist at various hospitals; and Sylvester Reeder, founder, former chairman, and CEO of World Healthcare Systems, Inc. As former employees and associates told me, Frist was a family man, and he didn’t hide it from colleagues. Victor Campbell, senior vice president at HCA, related how every day during business trips to Europe, Frist would write a short letter to his college-age child and mail it. “He is just so close to his children, his wife, and his family that he prided himself on it and wanted to keep that close contact.” Campbell also remembers Frist’s constant eagerness to talk about family. “He’ll probably be in my office before the day is over asking me how my son’s football game went last night.”52
Other superbosses are also refreshingly authentic and free with themselves—and not just at work. In an interview, Finnish conductor Atso Almila told me about a time when he was with conductor Jorma Panula at a restaurant where music was playing in the background. Panula, no fan of any music without precision and passion, asked the waiter if he could turn the music down. The waiter said no, claiming that some restaurant patrons liked it. Panula was undeterred. “So he stands up immediately and shouts to the whole restaurant, ‘Is there anyone who wants to hear?’” When nobody answered, Panula said to the waiter, “‘No, there aren’t. You can shut it.’”53
Thanks to their unrestrained personalities, superbosses typically come across as memorable people—“unique,” “one of a kind,” even “mysterious.” A journalistic insider said of Gene Roberts, “Jim Naughton summed it up best: Gene Roberts, he said, cannot be explained. And unless you were there, it isn’t easy to explain the challenge, chutzpah, and camel found in the glory days of the Philadelphia Inquirer newsroom in the 1970s and 1980s.”54 Of Miles Davis, bassist Dave Holland said, “There was a tremendous amount of focus coming from him that influenced everybody. We were all drawn in by it; it was almost like a vortex. Once you were in its sphere of influence, there was a certain magic that seemed to be happening.”55 Superbosses possess an energy about them. They are spicy, interesting, and exuberant—all because they make no pretenses. When you’re around people like this, you can’t help but be energized.
The Superboss Playbook
To the questions I posed at the outset of this chapter—who are these superbosses and what makes them tick?—we can now offer some partial answers. No two superbosses are alike. They are ethnically, socially, and geographically diverse and they pursue widely different passions in life. Despite these differences, some common themes become evident. Superbosses are innovative visionaries who compete to win. They are strong-minded, imaginative, authentic people. They aren’t all nurturing souls who give others the warm and fuzzies, or fun-loving people who don’t blink an eye when camels traipse through their offices. But they are all fully committed to their businesses and to the people who help them succeed. What they say and do sticks with their younger colleagues.
Yet superbosses don’t only help others succeed; as a result of their unequaled ability to nurture talent, they achieve tremendous personal and career success. Bill Walsh won three Super Bowls. Ralph Lauren became one of the richest men in the world, with a personal fortune in 2015 estimated at more than $7 billion.56 At the time of his death at age sixty-five, Miles Davis had won three Grammy Hall of Fame awards and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.57 By 2015, Larry Ellison had amassed a fortune exceeding $54 billion, making him the fifth-wealthiest person in the world.58
Take a moment to reflect on just how extraordinary this track record is. If you’re like many people I’ve met, you’re probably looking at your own career and field a little differently now. You might wonder if any of the people you work for are true superbosses. If they aren’t, do they show at least some of the stuff that makes superbosses such compelling talent spawners? What other leading lights in your industry have accounted for a disproportionate share of talent? And to what extent are you a superboss? How do you match up? Do you inspire the people around you to raise their sights on what is possible?
You might also be wondering how to explain the superboss effect—and what you can learn from superbosses. How exactly do superbosses do it? Is it possible for us to achieve some or all of what they achieve? In my study of superbosses, “how” and “why” questions energized me from the beginning. Despite all the differences visible among superbosses, what truly united them more than anything were their actions. Superbosses achieved seemingly impossible results because they didn’t hire, motivate, inspire, coach, develop, or fire their employees the way other bosses do. They had their own unique and often counterintuitive behaviors—a clear, powerful “playbook” that allowed them to help others thrive. The great secret of superbosses ultimately wasn’t who they were. It was what they did.
Since actions and behaviors were the superbosses’ ultimate differentiator, that meant the superboss effect was teachable. Though superbosses usually came to their practices naturally, anyone could learn and adopt these practices to dramatically improve how they develop their people. Many of their behaviors ran counter to what most individuals and organizations did—but this could change. All that was required was an open mind and a willingness to revise conventional practices and what we think we know about managing and influencing others.
Developing world-class talent is on everyone’s agenda, as it is the only way to survive and prosper. Yet study after study reveals that managers have the most trouble helping others to thrive. It’s time to think about this differently, and to start doing some things differently. Imagine you had access to the Bill Walsh playbook or the Alice Waters playbook or the Gene Roberts playbook or more than a dozen after that. Wouldn’t that be great?
The chapters that follow offer precisely that. They share the common habits and practices of the people who have produced the world’s greatest talent. And they begin by tackling a subject that stymies and befuddles so many businesses today: attracting, selecting, and hiring the very best raw talent.