Let me be perfectly clear; if indeed there is such a thing as a born leader, it’s definitely not me. I was a shy, unpopular kid – I didn’t play team sports, never led a school activity and came from quite a reserved household and culture. If you had asked one of my teachers to pick the natural leader from the thirty or so kids in my class, I would have been number twenty-nine or thirty. When I started my first ‘business’, the aim was not to be a business leader, but rather to make enough money to pay for flying lessons, so I could follow my dream of becoming an airline pilot. What I didn’t recognize at the time was the passion that would emerge for running a business, for the cut and thrust of negotiating, for delivering products and services to our customers, and for working with brilliant people who I could bring into the business to help it grow. I had to learn to lead ‘on the job’. I realized very quickly that the key was to bring my team with me on our mission to be the best web design agency in Europe, and to deliver the smartest software solutions for our clients.
I didn’t have the business parlance for it at the time, but I was creating what would be more accurately described as a high-performance culture that allowed people to grow and flourish. I had to quickly understand what I was good at (strategy) and not so good at (keeping the trains running on time), and I came to realize that it was perhaps an advantage that I had always been the shy kid – confidence is important, but too much can be dangerous. In my view, there is no endgame with leadership; you learn every single day, and from every single crisis (and we’ve had a few!).
My experience of leadership has been firmly in the world of small and medium enterprise with organizations responsible for staff in the hundreds. While I have been on the board of several entities with many thousands of employees, they have not been my direct responsibility. It is with this in mind that I have always been fascinated by the art and science of great leadership – what it takes to lead some of the largest organizations in the world, and what we as leadership minnows can learn from those at the very top.
In this chapter, we will meet some of the world’s most successful and impactful leaders. Starting with perhaps the most profound area of leadership, the armed forces, I talked to General Stanley McChrystal (former Commander of Joint Special Operations), General Richard Myers (former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and General Sir Richard Shirreff (former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander EU of NATO). I was also lucky enough to speak to Colonel Chris Hadfield, former Commander of the International Space Station, who talked to me about leadership in extreme environments. I learned a lot from my conversation with entrepreneur Tony Hsieh about leading an incredibly fast-scaling business, and with Carlo Ancelotti, one of the world’s most successful football managers.
What does it mean to be a leader?
General Stanley McChrystal: People often define leadership as influencing people to do things. I think it’s a little different than that. Leadership is about creating an environment where people who work with (or for) you can all do better than they would do alone, or in a lesser environment. Leadership is about creating a culture of enablement – that’s not about rubbing everyone on the stomach and being nice, but about helping people make real contributions.
Tony Hsieh: I try to avoid the word leadership. If you imagine a greenhouse as being a metaphor for a typical company, the plants in the greenhouse could be considered the employees, and the tallest, strongest plant that all the other employees aspire to be, that’s the CEO. That’s not how I think of my role; I’m the architect of the greenhouse, and my job is to create an environment that enables growth and flourishment. I see my role more as trying to create the right environment, context and systems to enable employees to really be the best they can be and find that intersection between what they’re passionate about and what they’re good at! I never set out to find a better or worse way to run a business; it was really just more about what works for my personality and what I’m interested in. Years ago, I used to throw lots of events and parties. I would try and think about things like what else was on in town that evening, what bars would be open en route, their opening times, and everything I could in order to get the circulation and flow for my guests. I was never the centre of attention or life of the party. Once the party’s going, I just kind of enjoyed being there in the background and watching the flow. I guess it’s kind of the same way I think about a company.
General Richard Myers: Nothing good really gets done in life without somebody taking a lead and organizing people to do something meaningful for society. To me, a leader is the one who organizes teams to meet a mission or some specific goal. A leader is the one who is able to get people moving in the same direction in a collaborative environment to get things done. A lot of people think that military leaders just bark out orders, and I wish they could have followed me around when I was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I didn’t command anybody, so everything had to be done through persuasion and collaboration.
General Sir Richard Shirreff: Leadership is about getting people to do willingly, and well, what we as leaders want them to do. I was a professional soldier for thirty-seven years and leadership is absolutely at the heart of command, and of commanding soldiers. There are many other aspects to leadership in the army, but if you can’t lead soldiers, you’re never going to be any good as a soldier or as an officer. The selection process for army officers is all about establishing whether or not an individual has the potential to become a leader, and how their natural talent can be combined with the nurture, the training, to ensure their potential is realized.
Stew Friedman: I think about leadership and what it means to be a leader not so much as an aspect of one’s position or role in an organization in a hierarchy, but instead as a quality that anyone can embody. The simple definition I use is that leaders mobilize people towards valued goals. They bring people to a better place. And you can do this either very well, with no one reporting to you in a formal hierarchy, or, conversely, very badly when at the top of a pyramid.
Carlo Ancelotti: Leadership is transmitting your goals and objectives to your team and achieving a collective acceptance and understanding of your vision.
Leadership changes with the times; the style of leadership needed in a crisis is perhaps not the same as that which would be required during peacetime. In each case, it’s a different set of tools, approaches and qualities that are needed to bring people together. To look specifically at the type of leadership we need in today’s world, I talked to Jacqueline Novogratz, one of the world’s foremost social-impact investors, Gary Hamel, ranked as the world’s leading expert on business strategy, and Robert Reich, who has served during several US administrations.
What is the style of leadership we need for our world?
Jacqueline Novogratz: Many of the leaders who run too many of our institutions (political, financial and social) grew up with a world view formed around divisions. Gender division, economic division, social division, the division between giving and taking. It’s perhaps inevitable, therefore, that the tools of leadership we see are command, control and divide rather than collaborate, connect and unite. Today, we’re facing acute global health and social crises, and the only way we will solve them is if we protect the vulnerable and collaborate. We need to build a narrative of hope, and a new kind of leadership that encourages us all to thrive. A true, moral leader is one that leads with transparency, honesty and trust.
Robert Reich: We need leaders in the political and public sector who understand the dangers of inequality and corruption. When you have massive inequality and wealth at the top, you almost invariably get corruption. Money is used and abused, and the political culture begins coming apart – distrust mounts, and the very wealthy secede from society. This threatens the common good; if social trust is sacrificed, and those with means secede from society, you no longer have the commons, there is no longer a good. When social distrust mounts, when people feel like the game is rigged against them, they are especially vulnerable to demagogues who come along and want them to channel their rage, anxiety and distrust towards scapegoats who have nothing to do with the underlying problems, but who become easy targets as methods to deflect blame.
Carlo Ancelotti: An individual’s leadership style is dependent on that person’s character. Leadership style is not learned, but rather an extension of who you are, and there is no ‘faking’ or trying to be something you are not. Those you are leading quickly see who you are and whether you are genuine.
Do we need to redefine leadership?
Gary Hamel: Nobody has anything like a shared definition of what leadership is. During the Industrial Revolution, we started bringing large numbers of people into the workplace, most of them very poorly educated. You therefore needed a new class of ‘uber-employee’ to wrangle with all these people, and so we invented the manager. Wharton was established in 1881, Harvard Business School in 1908, as places to train these new managers. At the time, management was a weird, unique, complicated role, somewhat like a data scientist, AI engineer or geneticist would be today. We now have a huge leadership industry that is mostly founded on bullshit, and there is very little statistical evidence that leadership training makes an economic difference to firms.
Leadership is in dire need of a dramatic rethink and my definition of leadership is simple: a leader is someone who plays a catalytic role in collective accomplishment. We have to become internal activists and change systems from within, and if you think about the people who really make a difference in our world, the people who change things, they’re almost never people with positional authority. How much positional authority is held by Greta Thunberg? Instead, she has the courage to take on problems bigger than she is. She also has contrarian thinking, meaning that she realizes we need a new point of view because the old system of thinking hasn’t yet solved the big problems. Great leaders are also people filled with compassion. They are not in it for themselves, they are not trying to fight their corner and make bureaucratic wins. They are doing it because they feel an ethical and moral responsibility to make a difference and build communities around them. Bureaucracy isn’t going to fall from the top; it will fall from underneath when people start to challenge the idea that it’s the best way to run an organization. You are only as helpless as you choose to be. We’re trained in bureaucracies to hardly wipe our bottoms without first of all asking, ‘Hey, is this OK boss?’ and that’s why you have millions and millions of people who show up every day at work physically, but they’re not there with their passion, initiative or creativity.
Are there any essential characteristics of leadership?
General Sir Richard Shirreff: Different people will draw up different characteristics for what constitutes a great leader. For me, physical courage obviously in a military setting, but I would also highlight moral courage – the courage to make difficult decisions and be prepared to speak truth unto power and to look after your people. Integrity is fundamental along with charisma, that ability to communicate to your people and to understand, almost through intuition, through empathy, through emotional intelligence, their thoughts, their fears, their needs. As a leader, you must be able to reassure your team, and make them believe that you can address and look after their concerns, and therefore they’re more likely to follow you as a result.
Leading your immediate team can be done with some proximity, but at scale, culture is needed as a medium of transmission for mission values and modes of being. Culture is the playbook that every member of your team, whether 100 or 100,000, will refer to in order to determine how they go about their work. Without exception, the most successful companies in the world have culture at their heart; some, such as Netflix, have even turned their culture into iconic status, codifying it into the ‘culture deck’ that has become essential reference material for companies around the world, and it is the checkpoint for practically every decision made within the business.
How do you make excellence a part of company culture?
Stephen Schwarzman: At Blackstone, for example, we have regular weekly meetings with important groups. Whether it’s your immediate area or not – you will have a large group meeting during the week that brings the whole team together and this is led by our senior management (note, we don’t view ourselves as management but rather as players and coaches). The meeting may involve hundreds of people, sometimes via screens all over the world. The group feels like a partnership and ensures people feel they are together looking at the particular opportunities or challenges. Anyone is able to comment on anything, be asked questions and get briefed by key people from economics to government affairs, public relations to legal. To make excellence part of culture, you have to hook everyone into it – and that’s how we do it. You also have to treat everyone as equals – what does that mean? Everyone has a stake in doing the right thing, and you have to show people, through example, every week how to be thinking and acting to live that culture, how to live those values of right and wrong, risk management and so on. It’s very empowering as a twenty-two-year-old to have access to the same information as someone who’s fifty, and been doing the job twenty-five years or longer. The truth is that just because you’re younger, it doesn’t mean you’re not the same in terms of capability or insight – the older people just have a bit more experience. It is techniques like this that have allowed us to grow culture at scale.
How do you build and lead high-performance teams?
Nico Rosberg: First of all, you must realize that a team is always stronger than a single individual. You cannot win a championship by just being a great driver. You must have a very good team behind you. This is the same in every business. In the past year, I have grown a team of about twenty employees working for me permanently and I have taken great care in choosing young people with diverse skills, an innovative mindset and the ability to think outside the box. I learn from them every day and this is an important lesson, too. As a leader, you are not infallible. It is important to be able to admit a lack of expertise in certain areas of your business and to rely on your team’s expertise instead. This also frees up your mind to think about the bigger picture.
Carlo Ancelotti: It has always been important to me to try to establish a personal relationship with each one of my players. To find a place where we communicate and have a mutual exchange. I often try to speak with my players in their native language, as it immediately breaks down barriers.
How did you build a company with deeply embedded values?
Hamdi Ulukaya: I was 100 per cent outside the business environment when I started out. I’d never worked anywhere, I’d never known anyone who started a business, I didn’t know any CEOs, I had no business ‘network’, I’d never studied business. I was just an ordinary person who saw being the CEO of a successful business as being something in the far distance. When I started out, I had one thing on my mind: I didn’t want to be the person I hated when I was growing up. I also had a real passion to bring this factory back to life, to make it sustainable once again. It was closed down by a large food manufacturer, and I saw how much the community suffered and how many people were left behind. This giant company destroyed a community from a distance, and it hit the nerve of everything I hated about the way business was done. I wanted to bring the factory back, but I didn’t want to follow in their footsteps – I wanted to do things better. I had to find a new way, with a new playbook, in my own environment without the world watching.
We were small, we had old equipment, we didn’t even know if it was going to work out. What I did have was a connection to the reality of people. I believed in human qualities, where your handshake meant something, where you could trust your colleague, and they’d have your back, where everyone was in it together with the same spirit. This community was similar to where I grew up, it was the same feeling, and I wanted to start the journey from that place where everybody felt important, everyone felt at home.
Jacqueline Novogratz: Trust is the rarest currency we have, and it’s the most precious. Learning to build and give trust isn’t easy – and takes practice. I started Acumen in April 2001. Six months later, it was 9/11. I had a team of four people – we were moving into our offices, right next door to Ground Zero in New York. I asked my team, ‘What do we do now?’ I really felt this was going to be a moment where the world pulls inwards instead of thinking globally. So, I pulled together a table of the best experts I could find on the Taliban, extremism and terrorism and at the end of the night someone said, ‘If you were king, what would you do?’ Glibly, I said, ‘I would go to the Muslim world and find those individuals who are building civil society institutions that could build trust and opportunity inside the community and show the world outside what was possible too.’ A funder gave us a million-dollar cheque, and I literally went to my team and said, ‘Right, where do we begin?’
Carlo Ancelotti: My relationships are based on mutual respect. I first give respect and then ask for it in return. I also believe in trusting my players to give their best on and off the pitch. However, I must give the group direction and therefore need to be the collective voice. If my respect or trust is violated, there needs to be consequences.
How can leaders effectively change behaviours?
John Kotter: We are in a world that is changing faster than ever, and if the rate of change inside your business is slower than the rate of change outside your business, you’re in trouble. Organizations have to change; the most fundamentally complicated aspect of that is the behaviour of their employees. People get into jobs, habits and cultures that in general are born out of the tendency for organizations to reach equilibrium. Organizations tend to have a lot of hierarchy, policy and procedures, the aim being ‘to get the trains running on time’. Against that backdrop, it’s difficult to figure out how to accommodate changes, from the mundane to the disruptive, from changing train schedules to someone like Uber changing everything.
Leadership is the need to change things for the better and that starts with people. It’s about figuring out how to get a group of people, in particular circumstances, to keep moving forward. It’s about that grand vision for the future, and getting people to move in a single, unified, direction. It’s about creating conditions that engage, empower and energize so you can keep pace with the world outside you. Management is about processes and procedures that keep trains running on time. It’s about planning, systems, budgeting systems, organizational structure, HR and so on. Today’s organizations are struggling to change direction fast and it’s because they just don’t have enough people taking leadership roles throughout their structures. Leadership is a set of actions, it’s a behaviour, and one that can be adopted by anyone in an organization. Leadership helps firms become social movements, but if you said that to most managers, they simply wouldn’t understand it.
What does power mean to leaders?
General Stanley McChrystal: Power can be positional, reputational, financial and so many other things, but the bottom line is this: it gives the leader leverage. It gives the leader the ability to get things done, or to force some things which can cause more people to be willing to interact with them or follow them. If you look at who has the power in today’s world, a certain percentage will be people with money, and many others will have created a persona, or have resources that create a following. Power is much more subtle than simply the ability to give orders. Leaders have the ability to create a shared consciousness built on consensus. That’s the strongest power there is – it creates a multiplier effect.
General Richard Myers: As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it meant that I was the highest-ranking individual in the US military, a position which people assume has great power. I never thought about power, though. I didn’t dream about it, think about it. My job was fulfilling our responsibilities to the security of our nation, our friends and allies. It was collaborating, generating better ideas, better plans and better strategies. It was about looking after our people and getting the mission done. When the law says you’re the most senior military person in the United States, people respect that – you don’t need to say anything about it, you just have to get the job done. If people over emphasize power, they will forget a lot of things which make leaders effective, including the most critical relationships. Who wants to follow some leader on a power trip? Nobody! Good leaders have to find ways to put their ego way off to the side and work on building relationships, building credibility, building trust.
Mark Cuban: When I negotiate, I don’t try to win, I try to get to my goal. The best deal is the one where everyone feels like they’ve left something on the table; and I’m good with that. When I negotiate, I try to look at the business I’m negotiating with and think, ‘If I were them, if I owned their business, what would I be looking for? What’s important to me? What do their numbers tell me? What’s the culture of their organization?’ I try to put myself in their shoes to understand their position. On Shark Tank, you get ten minutes of it as a viewer, but in real time those sessions can be two hours long, so it gives you time to lift the lid. One of the things I’m good at is getting to the heart of the matter quickly. I can walk into any type of business, get to know it after a few questions, and can understand how to improve it – usually with technology. Shark Tank is the same thing – I listen to the entrepreneurs, get to the core of their business, and understand their position. In my mind, I need to understand who they are, what they need, what’s important to them and what their perspectives are. Knowing that allows me to understand where I think they can or can’t draw the line.
Running a business is a paradox; it’s simultaneously the best and worst career choice you could possibly make. Every single day is an adventure. It’s a cliché, but rarely do you have two days that are the same and it’s opened doors and opportunities for me that I could never have expected. Running a business can also be one of the loneliest, most challenging, soul-destroying and stressful jobs, particularly when a business fails – it hurts, no two ways about it. But when it’s going well, I wouldn’t change it for the world. In my own career, I have almost certainly failed more than I’ve succeeded in terms of numbers of projects, but as an entrepreneur you hope that the successes return you more than your failures have absorbed. It’s not just an entrepreneurship reality, it’s a leadership reality: the higher you go in any career, the more complex your decision-making environment is, the more relationships, stakeholders and dependencies each decision will impact on, and, often, the more gravity each decision carries. To expect failure not to occur is therefore a fallacy; the most important thing is to put failure in context and to learn from it.
What is the role of failure in leadership?
Mark Cuban: Failure is painful. You have to learn from it. I’ve learned more from the jobs I’ve got fired from than the jobs that I liked. Every company I’ve failed, I’ve learned. It doesn’t matter how many times you fail – you only have to be right once. That’s all it takes to be an overnight success. People don’t remember your failures. When it happens, you feel like you can’t walk outside, you feel like people are staring at you every day, questioning you, judging you. You think you are a failure. That’s never the case. Let me tell you the honest-to-God truth about how your friends and stakeholders see your failure. Within thirty days, they’ve forgotten about it. Ask yourself about all your friends, all the entrepreneurs that you’ve ever met, all the businesses you’ve ever seen that failed. You can barely remember them. You certainly don’t have any strong opinions about them. You don’t really care! It’s like breaking up with a significant other: it’s painful – but you’ll get over it.
General Stanley McChrystal: I was recently with a group who asked me, ‘In wartime, are people scared of failure?’ and the answer sometimes surprises people. In wartime, people are much more afraid of failure than physical harm. For leaders, fear of failure is hugely important. If you look at the negative behaviours of many organizations and people, they are as a result of dodging responsibilities and decisions through a fear of failure. Fear of failing limits organizations. A little bit of fear is good, it generates a creative tension and gets people to respect the task at hand, but as soon as you’re more scared of failure than you are excited about succeeding, that’s when fear becomes a problem. Organizations have to train and condition people to understand what the risks really are, and how to not be terrified by them. You have to look at risk as individuals, teams, organizations and even at the existential. You have to make sure people in your organization are not scared of failing, and don’t feel there’s a checklist of who’s failed X amount of times. You have to look at who accomplishes, who succeeds, and realize that there will be a percentage of failure needed to get there. You have to focus on who makes a difference, and that’s not always measured by money.
Colonel Chris Hadfield: The role of failure depends on the purpose of your team. If you’re on a chess team, losing a match may cause disappointment for you and your team, but it will not cause a tragedy. If you’re a team of astronauts trying to dock with a space station, failure most likely means death or, at best, significant financial and mission consequences. The higher the stakes, the more important it is to realize that failure is inevitable and so we have to anticipate it, prepare for it, minimize it and, ideally, avert it. We have to embrace failure into our practice of leadership; it is inevitable and, frankly, if everything went right, we wouldn’t need leaders! It’s important too that we look at our language around it; perhaps instead of calling it failure, it makes more sense to call it the opposite of going right, i.e. going wrong. Understanding failure means practising when consequences are low. For example, if a fireman messes up during a real fire, there could be loss of life. This is why they use realistic simulations to practise processes, prevent errors happening and understand the real world more accurately. Ultimately, even if you practise a complex task dozens of times, you may not be perfect, but you will significantly increase your chances of succeeding when things go wrong. In our day-to-day lives this happens too. Think about heart attacks; they are a common medical emergency. There’s a chance that many of us will, at some point in our lives, come across someone having a heart attack, but if you did, do you know what you would do in that situation? This is something we can all practically prepare for, perhaps with some online research, or by taking a first-aid course.
What do success and failure mean to you?
Nico Rosberg: My whole life was dominated by success and the fear of failure. Success is like a drug. Once you have tasted it, you want more. Fear, on the other hand, is a huge mind blocker as it kills your self-confidence and creativity. So, I have learned to deal with these emotions through meditation and psychological coaching during my time in F1. It is important to find a balance, become aware of negative thought patterns and control your mind more proactively. I have become much better at that and, of course, today I define success differently. I have proven that I can win a Formula One World Championship. This feeling will carry me for ever.
Carlo Ancelotti: Success for me is when my team plays in unison and is one. When there is cohesion in the style of play, I have done my job in transmitting my ideas to my players. However, there are many extraneous factors necessary for success in football and whether the team plays well or not can be seen as less important when winning is paramount. Regardless, I believe that with a collective understanding of what is expected of each player, the chances of success are higher. Failure is an important tool with which one can reassess and reconstruct an idea or process. It is an essential element of the feedback loop. Failure should be used to step back and question your method and weaknesses. To recognize failure early can ultimately make one much stronger down the road.
Do we need to redefine success?
Jacqueline Novogratz: Our notion of success, set by our parents, our families, our friends and educational institutions, can hold us back. The whole world has defined success as being money, fame and power. And while that has enabled a few people to get very wealthy, famous and powerful – it has not worked for the many. In the late 1990s, I was in Bangladesh and I was speaking to an older man about the tools of business, and how they can create change. He said, ‘I find this challenging – I come from a lineage of poets.’ At the time it was the poets, storytellers and intellectuals who were praised by society; those in business were seen as a little ‘dirty’ and so, for him, the shift in culture from business being seen as dirty to being primary for success was a big deal. Today, at this time of Covid, in parts of the world where business is everything, we’re seeing a resurgence of poetry and art as speaking to us. It’s easy to forget, but the system isn’t something else – we are the system, we define the system. And we will only build systems in which all of us can flourish if we redefine what success means in terms of a shared humanity and sustainability, and not money, power and fame.
How do you bring a culture of being ‘in it together’ across success and failure?
Stephen Schwarzman: Whenever you look at creating anything, whether that’s a new investment or organization, there will be risks. The key to having something succeed is to make sure you know and manage those risks. In an ideal world, you don’t want to be taking risks. There is a common myth that entrepreneurs are risk-takers. If you ask entrepreneurs, they tell you they’re not – why would you take a risk on something you didn’t think was going to work? Smart entrepreneurs create processes that virtually eliminate risk to the extent that it would be taken. In our world, it’s very common that organizations have one great person interrogating a team or idea to determine if something is worth pursuing. The outcome of this is that you’re hostage to one person’s views – and they could be wrong. At Blackstone, we’ve built a model that we feel is optimized around managing risk in decision-making. We have a team of around, say, eight people around the table. They have written materials that describe the situation and risks, and have a value that says that if you eliminate all risk, the upside takes care of itself. The principle is that everyone at the table participates, there are no dominant people. Each person has to discuss the risks of losing money, and how not to. I’m a great believer in not losing money – it’s not profound, but it’s enduring.
The team itself is not responsible for the success or failure of the project. Everyone has discussed it, everyone is aware of the risks, and if something goes wrong, 90 per cent it will be one of the risks that has been identified, and that means that all of us have mis-assessed that risk. By having an objective process, you support your people, avoid blame culture and give a very secure environment to have intellectual, analytical engagement. In life, your response to failure is much more important than your response to success. It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s not. Your job as a manager or a leader is to figure out what went wrong, and to fix it, and make sure it doesn’t happen again. That’s how you build great organizations, not by burying mistakes but by talking openly about them.
These days, I’m largely OK, but I have battled with anxiety and depression for decades. At times I have been sufficiently low to contemplate (and attempt) ending it all. I know I’m not alone in feeling this way – every forty seconds someone, somewhere, tries to take their own life. By the time you get to the end of this sentence, three people will most likely have tried, and one will most likely have succeeded. For me, it was severe anxiety – probably caused by work – which resulted in depression, which I avoided tackling because, as a CEO and founder, you are expected to display almost superhuman strength and endurance at all times, and mental fortitude a degree beyond what mere mortals could muster – or so I thought. Only when it was close to being too late did I reach out, get help, and begin a journey of recovery that I should have started a decade sooner. As I tell my MBA students each and every year, the single most important life skill they can deploy is resilience.
What is the role of resilience in leadership?
Jocko Willink: Is resilience important to leaders? Of course it is. You’re going to fail, you’re going to fall flat on your face, you’re going to get rejected, you will go off course. All of those things are going to happen, and if you don’t have resilience, you are not going to be able to do the necessary to accomplish whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish. Listen, I was never that good at anything – I wasn’t a great athlete, I wasn’t the smartest guy, and so once I got into the SEAL team, the only way for me to perform well was to work hard. I was going to fail, and I had to keep trying and keep working hard – that was the habit that would make me able to do whatever I wanted to do. Building resilience is a decision. You got rejected – what’s your decision? You can decide to go knock on another door, or to curl up in a little ball and cry. My recommendation is that you go knock on another door, and you try again. I’m not saying that you won’t feel like you want to curl up and cry – and if you want to, go do that, and once you’ve finished crying, get up, go knock on another door and keep trying. That’s resilience. I’m sure there’s some philosophical esoteric speech that somebody could find about how to build resilience. Here’s how you build resilience: get up and go do what you need to do to get this job done.
How are our lifestyles impacting on our mental health?
Professor Green: Life is high pressure, and the stresses we are all under are getting more and more. We’re only designed to have two responses to stress – fight or flight – and that’s because we evolved from our ancestors, the hunter-gatherers. Now we have relationship stress, work stress, stress about our friends, about our families, financial stress, mortgage stress, stress about our food. There’s a lot that people need to cope with now, and people don’t take time to deal with the stress they’re going through, even though that stress can cause serious health problems now, and in the future.
Why do our business cultures dismiss sleep?
Arianna Huffington: The glamorization of sleep deprivation is deeply embedded in our culture. Everywhere you turn, sleep deprivation is celebrated, from ‘You snooze, you lose’ to highly burned-out people boasting, ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead.’ The combination of a deeply misguided definition of what it means to be successful in today’s world – that it can come only through burnout and stress – along with the distractions and temptations of a 24/7-wired world, has imperilled our sleep as never before. It goes back to the Industrial Revolution when sleep became just another commodity to be exploited as much as possible.
Our workdays, especially in the afternoon, have a way of taking on a survivalist tinge – how, we ask ourselves, are we going to make it through the rest of the day, trekking with flagging energy through enemy territory mined with meetings, emails and expanding to-do lists? So we squirrel away provisions – usually unhealthy ones – and, like addicts, we think about where that next shot of caffeine or that next sugar bomb is going to come from. But there are other options. Rather than reach for our fifth cup of coffee or third doughnut to deal with the usual post-lunch lull, consider a twenty- or thirty-minute nap. Perhaps those in the world of business who equate sleep with laziness or lack of dedication can be convinced of the benefits of sleep by looking at what’s going on in a world that is the ultimate in pragmatism, where performance and winning are everything: sports. To professional athletes, sleep is not about spirituality, work–life balance, or even health and wellbeing; it’s all about performance. It’s about what works, about using every available tool to increase the chances of winning.
What did you learn about resilience, focus, competition and success from your career in F1, and how does that apply to the business world?
Nico Rosberg: I have learned a lot in F1 that I can apply to the business world. The biggest lesson is certainly the ability to get the most out of myself and reach my potential. Since my athletic career, I have dealt a lot with methods of personal self-optimization and self-development, be it through mental training, nutrition, meditation or course fitness. This is also very useful outside of competitive sports. For example, since my retirement I have rediscovered meditation. Meditation played a huge role in my World Cup title, but then I stopped because I lacked motivation. The mental intensity was completely gone and will never be there again in the same form. But I have slowly reintroduced the discipline for meditation again into my daily routine and I can feel the benefits. We know that it’s good. As a racing driver, I was always extremely structured, and so are our days now. At 8.30 a.m. today I had an hour doing my homework with my daughter; before that, I had meditated and exercised for an hour. These are all lessons that I have learned from my time in Formula One for my life.
How do you begin to learn from adversity and challenges?
Sheryl Sandberg: We have to acknowledge our adversities, raise problems and admit them. If challenges and hardships are something we never talk about, we’re never going to take any learnings from them. Things are wrong all the time in companies and often everyone’s instincts are to brush things under the rug. Our culture as individuals and companies is to hide problems, and many of our innovations and technologies enable us to do this. We have to fight hard to stop the behaviour.
How does adversity shape who we are?
Sheryl Sandberg: When I’m giving talks, I always say to the audience, ‘Raise your hand if you have heard of post-traumatic stress.’ Every hand goes up, but when I say, ‘Raise your hand if you’ve heard of post-traumatic growth,’ no hands go up. The data are pretty compelling that there is more post-traumatic growth than there is post-traumatic stress.
The need for resilience is completely unavoidable. We all face challenges big and small in our lives. Even companies are constantly facing the need for resilience as they change shape and form. The real question is: how do we build the muscles for resilience within ourselves, and each other? Businesses too have to realize that resilience is something we build together. We can do it, we have to do it – and we must be methodical and explicit.
Why is it important to hold opposing moral or cultural values in tension?
Jacqueline Novogratz: Throughout history, the moral code in society was often handed down from some higher authority. That may have created strong communities, but it comes at the cost of individuality. Today, we have so much individualism that we’ve lost a sense of belonging. We’ve lost a sense of what we share and that’s why we have to apply moral imagination to be open to understanding the belief systems and cultures of others, not to instantly assume one is better than the other. We have to navigate moral and cultural differences and make principled decisions against the immutable values of our shared human dignity and the understanding that my actions have an impact on who you are, and what your situation is – and could become. This is not moral relativism where you may say that a culture honours ‘honour’ more than honesty, and so corruption is morally accepted. In an interdependent world, certain actions such as corruption must be universally not accepted. But in other areas you will find values that are held up as important by a community and which you have to navigate.
Right now, we as a society are choosing between health and the economy. It is not an either/or. We must get above that wall – we have to transcend it and look at how we hold opposing truths in such a way that we can make hard decisions, be transparent, authentic and supportive. This is not about you being right, or me being wrong; it’s about finding a truth we can agree on.
Are leaders born or made?
Colonel Chris Hadfield: The randomness of evolution means that everyone is born with strengths and weaknesses; every human being, every dog, every tree. It’s certainly true that some people may have a predisposition to want to take some sort of leadership role while others don’t, but nobody is perfect at leading, or uniquely born into it. All of us are raw material, and that means we can improve and get better at leading. You often find that in extreme situations, perhaps a fire, or where someone may have a medical emergency. In those situations we find leadership skills we perhaps never knew we had. Leadership is about being willing to enact change – it means saying, ‘OK, I’m going to take responsibility for changing something,’ and that may be something singular within your own life, or something that affects countless people.
I was just a teenager when I first became interested in leadership. I realized it’s the art of influencing human behaviour to accomplish a mission in a manner desired by the leader. I was not born to become a leader by any means. Like all of us, I was born with the raw material to read and observe, and it’s almost entirely due to the training I’ve had, through observing good and bad leaders, and through making room for introspection to decide the things in my life that were worth taking a stand on, that I became a leader. We all have the capacity to lead within us, that’s the beauty of leadership – you can do this aged eight or eighty-eight, there’s no limit.
As I write this, the world is facing one of its greatest economic and social challenges in peacetime: the Covid-19 pandemic. From a commercial perspective, domestic and global markets have ground to a halt, and the majority of businesses are facing uncertainty, stress and extraordinary volatility. As a leader, it is impossible for you to make long-term strategic decisions during a time like this – you have to adapt your leadership posture to deal with a crisis, and make the next best decision you can with your team – rather than the best strategic decisions for your team.
How do leaders deal with incomplete information?
Jocko Willink: Instead of making big giant decisions, I try to make the smallest decision I possibly can that is in the right direction – my best guess. If I want to know whether someone’s behind the door, instead of just blasting it open I’d take a step back, crack the door open a little, shine a light in and look. Did I see movement? If not, I’ll maybe open the door some more. Eventually, I’ll get to a point where I can look inside almost the entire room, and I haven’t stepped in yet. Then I can look and see if there are any traps, tripwires, and finally – when I’ve done everything I can – I can step in the room and see what’s there.
Making the smallest decisions I can makes me seem super-decisive, but I’m actually just making really small decisions. It’s the same in the business world. If you’re wanting to go explore a new market, you don’t just go in and buy three buildings and a hundred people. You start with a kiosk, then maybe two, then maybe three, then maybe you lease a building, and then maybe you buy a building. You don’t just jump in. To succeed at decision-making, make iterative decisions and small decisions. The smallest decisions you can in your direction of travel.
Colonel Chris Hadfield: Leaders work with insufficient and incomplete information. Nobody ever has all the information they need to make a decision, and so your own personal competence is key; you need to have the ability to make judgement calls with incomplete information. Take the captain of an aircraft carrier. At any given moment in time, they will not have all the information they need, but they also weren’t randomly given the job of commanding that ship. By the time they command a multibillion-dollar aircraft carrier with so many lives on the line, they will have already had a lifetime gaining the practical, technical and academic experience to be able to make decisions when they need to – whether to change course, whether to recover aircraft, whether there is a threat.
As a leader, you have to have a relentless dissatisfaction with your own levels of competence, and a relentless wish to learn and self-improve. We can all learn and score 100 per cent on a test, but if you do that same test six months from now, you will not get that score; you may have forgotten, the system will have changed, the rules may have changed, or you may have changed. No system is fixed, and the more senior you are, the more important it is to be relentless in your approach to self-improvement around your technical knowledge and leadership competence.
During my time on the space station, I remember an incident where we started rapidly spewing liquid ammonia out into space. We had a very limited time to make lots of decisions and to fix this before we ran out of the main coolant needed for the ship. We didn’t have enough information, and so we had to go with our hastily assembled plan, based on years of preparation and experience. Every single person on the ship was spacewalk qualified. We’d been studying systems for our entire careers and so we had the mix of understanding and small delicate skills needed to solve a major problem that was not inevitable to solve. Even with all our training, there was absolutely no guarantee of being able to fix this problem – it was not one we had ever simulated – but it was because of our training and professional preparation that we made the repair in record time.
General Sir Richard Shirreff: One of the core pillars of command is that you have to make the right decisions, in a timely manner, when faced with incomplete information. This is something you develop as a leader through training, through education and, most of all, experience. You develop intuition, that gut sense that now is the moment. The military has a principle that you don’t move on to the next level of leadership and responsibility until you’ve proved yourself out of subordinate level. So as an officer, your first appointment is to command a platoon of thirty men or women. You then, after more experience, more training, more education, perhaps command a company which has got four platoons. In time, you might command a battalion or regiment which has got four or five companies. And if you prove yourself at that, you might go on to be a brigade commander which has got again four or five regiments. You’re always having to prove yourself at different levels. As leaders we need to have the thinking, training and education, but the practice is critical and that’s as relevant to a great business leader as it is to a soldier or anybody in any sector, I think.
What is the role of business in society?
Hamdi Ulukaya: I think the role of business is to lift humanity and push it forward. I truly believe that; not just because of the innovations and products that businesses create, but because of the communities they impact, the people they interact with, and the environment they exist in. I grew up thinking businesses just make money for shareholders and everyone else suffers; whether that is their employees, community or the environment. I grew up hating that idea and I didn’t want to be the thing I hated. My own experience in the last ten to twelve years has been that business is an amazing platform to make the world better, from every aspect.
Leadership is not about standing at the front shouting orders; it’s about enablement and growth of a team. In many ways, leaders are the glue that holds a team together as it moves towards a goal or objective, or indeed navigates a crisis. The greatest leaders also have a level of humility and self-awareness that allows them to understand their strengths and weaknesses, respond constructively to failure and, perhaps most importantly, work to build resilient teams.
As John Kotter explains, leadership is that essence that brings together a group of people, in a circumstance or context, to move forward towards a vision in a unified manner. It sounds simple, but it is truly remarkable. The fact that we as individuals place our trust in a small group of people to lead us is an incredible by-product of evolution, without which it would have been practically impossible for us to move on from being small groups of nomads into civilizations.
To truly understand leadership, however, we must come back to that difficult realization that we are highly intelligent, yet tribal animals. We have the ability to act and direct our own behaviours, but live in a society with complex structures that require us to cooperate as groups, often at scale. Several of the military professionals in this chapter have seen leadership at work in one of the most extreme environments – war – and described not only how essential leadership is to the human condition, but how essential it is for leaders to deeply understand the individuals and groups for whom they are responsible, so that they can be sure in their communication, and sure in what those under their leadership will do next. The most effective way we have found to counter the disintegration that could arise from us all pursuing our own ends is the existence of centres of authority as leaders.
Thus, the paradox between our need for individual agency and our nature as social animals is resolved. Our plurality means we are not members of a single tribe or group, but rather we are members of families, ethnicities, economic organizations, universities, businesses, friendship circles, sports teams and many more assemblies, all driven around shared goals, visions and interests. It is this nature of our ability to form, lead and direct that has been at the heart of every single major advance – and backwards step – of our species, from our scientific and cultural leaps, to wars and atrocities. It is under leadership that we have been able to walk on the moon, fight disease and improve the living standards of billions; and it is also under leadership that millions exist under brutal regimes.
Biographies
Carlo Ancelotti OSI is an Italian former professional footballer, now manager of English Premier League football club Everton. He is one of only three managers to have won the UEFA Champions League three times, and one of only two to have managed teams in four finals.
Mark Cuban is an American entrepreneur and television personality. He is one of the main investors on the reality television series Shark Tank, and is the owner of the NBA team the Dallas Mavericks.
Professor Stew Friedman is the founding director of the Wharton Leadership Program and Wharton’s Work/Life Integration Project. He is also a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and hosts a weekly radio show on Sirius XM.
Professor Green (real name Stephen Manderson) is an English rapper, songwriter and television personality. He co-hosts Lip Sync Battle UK, has written a bestselling autobiography and is the patron of Calm, a suicide prevention charity.
Colonel Chris Hadfield is a retired astronaut and was the first Canadian to walk in space. He was NASA’s Director in Russia, flew three space missions and served as Commander of the International Space Station.
Gary Hamel is an American management speaker, author and celebrated business thinker. He has worked with the London Business School for over thirty years and his books have been translated into over twenty-five languages.
Tony Hsieh is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist and CEO of the online clothing company Zappos. He also co-founded the internet advertising network LinkExchange, which he sold to Microsoft for $265 million in 1998, when he was twenty-five.
Arianna Huffington is an author, columnist and founder of The Huffington Post, as well as founder and CEO of Thrive Global, a leading behaviour change tech company.
Professor John Kotter is a professor at Harvard Business School, a bestselling author and founder of the management consulting firm Kotter International.
General Stanley McChrystal is a retired United States Army general and founder of the McChrystal Group. Since his retirement he has taught International Relations at Yale University.
General Richard Myers is a retired four-star general in the United States Air Force and currently serves as the fourteenth president of Kansas State University. In his previous role as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he was the highest-ranking uniformed officer of the US military.
Jacqueline Novogratz is a bestselling author, founder and CEO of Acumen, a non-profit organization that invests in leaders and businesses who are enabling people living in poverty to transform their lives, and was named one of the world’s 100 Greatest Living Business Minds by Forbes.
Professor Robert Bernard Reich is an American economist, bestselling author and political commentator, who served in the administrations of presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and was a member of President Barack Obama’s economic transition advisory board.
Nico Rosberg is a German-Finnish former racing driver and entrepreneur. He won the 2016 Formula One World Championship and was inducted into the FIA Hall of Fame in 2017.
Sheryl Sandberg is Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, founder of LeanIn.Org, and a philanthropist. She was also the first woman to serve on Facebook’s board and has been named by Time magazine as one of the most influential people in the world.
Stephen Schwarzman is an American businessman, investor and philanthropist. He is the Chairman and CEO of The Blackstone Group, a global private equity firm and ranked one hundredth on the Forbes list of billionaires.
General Sir Richard Shirreff is a retired senior British Army officer and author, who served as Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe from 2011 to 2014.
Hamdi Ulukaya is founder, Chairman and CEO of Chobani, one of the fastest-growing food companies in the last decade and a pioneer for the natural food movement.
Jocko Willink is a retired officer of the United States Navy, who served in the Navy SEALs for twenty years. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts a weekly podcast: the Jocko Podcast.
