The Corner Office: How Top CEOs Made It and How You Can Too. Adam Bryant
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in some cases, with a private elevator down to a reserved parking space, and in more subtle ways. Now they want to mix it up. “I love that people push back on me, and it gets to better ideas,” said Sheila Lirio Marcelo, CEO of Care .com. “I’m really focused on pushing people to gain the confidence to logically debate with a CEO.”
Many successful CEOs reward honesty and input, and show their interest in learning what others think, by holding town-hall meetings, seeking the advice of people at all levels of the company, and asking employees what they would do if they were in charge. “The best ideas or important ideas or new ideas can come from anywhere in an organization,” said Tim Brown, the CEO of the design consulting firm IDEO, recalling how a boss valued his opinions when Brown was in his early twenties. “So you’d better do a good job of spotting and promoting them when they come, and not let people’s positions dictate how influential their ideas are.”
These CEOs also try to create a culture of learning in their organizations, so that, collectively, employees can adjust to the constant changes and challenges of business. The global business environment requires collaborative learning. No single person has the answer anymore, and smart companies try to harness the multiplier effect of bringing people together to share their unique experiences and perspectives on a problem.
“I like building teams with people who come from very different backgrounds and have very different experiences,” said Susan Docherty, a vice president of General Motors. “I don’t just mean diverse teams, in terms of men and women or people of different color or origin. I like people who have worked in different places in the world than I have, because they bring a lot more context to the discussion. That’s something that I value a tremendous amount. I make sure that when I’m looking at people for my team, it’s not just what’s on their résumé—their strengths or weaknesses or what they’ve accomplished—but it’s the way they think. I can learn twice as much, twice as quickly, if I’ve got people who think differently than I do around the table.”
This book is meant to be that meta phorical table, at which dozens of CEOs, from vastly different backgrounds, countries, and industries, share their insights on how they lead and manage and the best lessons they’ve learned. These executives don’t live up to their own ideals every day—nobody does—and at times some of them have fallen well short. But that doesn’t diminish the value of their specific insights or the benefits from hearing them discuss their goals for their companies, and for themselves as leaders. The conversations that inform this book are a kind of time-out from the weekly churn of business—earnings, strategy statements, PowerPoint presentations, SEC filings—and are designed instead to reveal more about CEOs as people, not just as the faces of their companies.
In the chapters that follow, I have tried to play the role of dinner-party host, encouraging lively discussion and pointing out connections among the people gathered. My goal is to frame the conversations but not to dominate them, and to let the people around the table share their stories in their own voices. It’s not just what they say that’s important—how they say it is revealing, too.
Everybody will read this book differently. Some passages will resonate more than others, and some readers will connect more closely with the experiences and insights of certain executives. That’s the nature of collaborative learning. There is no single way to lead or to manage. We all have to figure out what makes sense on our own, and develop our own story lines as leaders. The insights offered by the CEOs in these pages can help speed the learning pro cess for those coming after them and offer fresh approaches to peers looking for new ideas. It doesn’t have to be so lonely at the top, or during the climb along the way.
PART ONE
SUCCEEDING
Chapter 1
PASSIONATE CURIOSITY
Imagine one hundred people working in a large company. They’re roughly the same age, around thirty-five. They’re all vice presidents and share many of the same qualities that got them where they are. They’re smart, collegial, and hardworking. They consider themselves team players. They have positive attitudes and they’re good communicators. They’re conscientious about their jobs. They have integrity.
If everyone shares these qualities, what is going to determine who gets the next promotion? Who is going to move up not just one level, but the one after that, and the one after that? As they move up near the peak of their companies and the ranks thin out, the competition for the top spots is even tougher. Who will land the jobs that report directly to the CEO? What will set them apart from the crowd? When it’s time for the CEO to move on, who will get the nod from the board to move into the corner office?
In other words, what does it take to lead an organization—whether it’s an athletic team, a nonprofit, a start-up, or a multinational corporation? What, at the end of the day, are the keys, the x-factors, to achieving the highest levels of success?
Interviews with CEOs and other leading executives point to five essentials for success—qualities that most of the CEOs share, and which they look for in others when they hire.
The good news: these keys to success are not genetic. It’s not as if you have to be tall or left-handed. You don’t have to be born into the kind of family that has you swinging a golf club or playing chess not long after you’re out of diapers. These qualities are developed through attitude, habit, and discipline—factors that are within everyone’s control. They will make you stand out in any setting or organization. They will make you a better employee, manager, and leader. They will lift the trajectory of your career and speed your progress along it.
The qualities these executives share: Passionate curiosity. Battle-hardened confidence. Team smarts. A simple mindset. Fearlessness.
These aren’t theories. They come from decades of collective experience of top executives who have shared their perspectives and stories about their own rise through the ranks, and why they promote some executives over others in their organizations. Each of these qualities is important and multifaceted enough to have a chapter of its own, starting with passionate curiosity.
Many successful CEOs are passionately curious people.
It is a side of them rarely seen in the media and in investor meetings, and there is a reason for that. In business, CEOs are supposed to project calm confidence and breezy authority as they take an audience through presentations filled with charts predicting steady gains in revenue and profit. Certainty is the game face they wear. They are paid to have answers, to see around corners, and to have a firm grasp of the competitive landscape. When they are right, their pictures appear on the covers of glossy business magazines. The message is, they’ve got it figured out. They’ve cracked the code.
But get them away from these familiar scripts and settings and ask them instead about important lessons they’ve learned over the course of their lives, how they lead and manage day-to-day, and a different side emerges. They wrestle with tough issues. They share stories about failures and doubts and mistakes. They ask big-picture questions. They seem like eager students who devour insights and lessons, and are genuinely, enthusiastically interested in everything going on around them. Take them away from balance sheets and strategy and they seem more like natural teachers with agile minds. They wonder why things work the way they do and whether those things can be improved upon. They want to know people’s stories, and what they do.
It’s this relentless questioning that leads entrepreneurs to spot new opportunities and helps managers understand the people who work for them, and how to get them to work together effectively. It is no coincidence that more than one executive uttered the same phrase when describing what, ultimately, is the CEO’s job: “I am a student of human nature.”
The same mental agility enables a CEO to engage with every one of his or her direct reports—in marketing, finance, operations, R&D—and be able to grasp the key issues, without the specialized experience of each of their subordinates. The CEOs are not necessarily the smartest people in the room, but they are the best students—the letters could just as easily stand for Chief Education Officer. They learn, they teach, and they understand people and the business world, and