The Corner Office: How Top CEOs Made It and How You Can Too. Adam Bryant
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wanted to learn everything, to understand anybody that I was around—why they thought what they did, why they did what they did, what worked for them, what didn’t work.”
Dawn Lepore, the CEO of Drugstore .com, took advantage of her role as the chief technology officer at Schwab to learn from other CEOs about leadership.
“I had the benefit of being able to interact with a lot of technology CEOs, because they would come to sell to me,” Lepore said. “So I got to meet with Scott McNealy, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, John Chambers, and others. And I would always say to them, ‘Let’s talk about your product, but I’d really love to hear more about your company, your culture, your leadership.’ So I really picked their brains. I learned something from every single one of them. And I’ve served on a bunch of different boards, and I’ve had an opportunity to just learn from the CEO of the company as well as all the other board members.”
Some people consider themselves more left-brained, analytical thinkers, while others see themselves as more creative, right-brained types. But not these executives. Nothing is ruled out. Everything can be important and interesting, a new area to be studied and grasped.
“I’m not a high numbers person and I’m not a high emotional person,” said Carol Smith, senior vice president and chief brand officer for the Elle Group, which publishes Elle magazine. “I’m a total combination of the two. I definitely have a middle brain, which I think might be a very nice brain to have in this position. I think it’s served me well.”
David C. Novak, the CEO of Yum Brands, which operates fast-food chains like Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC, likes to hire people who have this balance.
“In the best of all worlds,” Novak said, “you want someone who’s whole-brained—someone who is analytical and can also be creative enough to come up with the ideas and galvanize the organization around a direction that’s going to take us to someplace that we might not have known we could go to. I think it’s easier to find left-brained people than it is to find truly creative people. I think what we need in our leaders, the people who ultimately run our companies and run our functions, is whole-brained people—people who can be analytical but also have that creativity, the right-brain side of the equation. There’s more and more of a premium on that today than ever before.”
Jen-Hsun Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, the computer graphics company, said both sides of his brain play important roles in finding new opportunities.
“I don’t like making decisions with analytics,” he said. “I actually like making decisions with intuition. I like to validate the decision with analytics. I don’t believe you can analyze your way into success. I think it’s too complicated. You have to use intuition, which is everything—your artistic sensibility, your intellectual sensibility, experience. Now once you pick a direction, you want to try to validate it as often as you can. I think successful people have wonderful capabilities with both.”
Why “passionate curiosity”? The phrase is more than the sum of its parts. Many CEOs will cite passion or curiosity as an important trait in the people they look to hire.
They make persuasive cases for why each is important.
“What I really want to know is what kind of person I’m dealing with,” said Joseph J. Plumeri, the CEO of Willis Group Holdings, an insurance broker. “So I only ask one question. I say, ‘Tell me what you’re passionate about.’ That’s it. What ever you want to talk about. Tell me what you’re passionate about. Digging holes. Riding bikes. I’m looking to see if they’ve got a passion. I’m looking to see if there’s anything inside, other than what they do. And how passionate could they be, therefore, about being here? And how excited and involved could they be? I’m not looking for a mirror image of me. I’m just looking for somebody who gets turned on about something. If you find that kind of person, then these are the people you want to climb hills with and climb mountains with.”
Robert Iger, the CEO of Disney, said curiosity was a key quality he looked for in job candidates.
“I love curiosity, particularly in our business—being curious about the world, but also being curious about your business, new business models, new technology,” he said. “If you’re not curious about technology and its potential impact on your life, then you’ll have no clue what its impact might be on someone else’s life.”
Passion. Curiosity. Both are important. But those words, separately, fall short of capturing the quality that sets these CEOs apart. There are plenty of people who are passionate, but many of their passions are focused on just one area. There are a lot of curious people in the world, but they can also be wallflowers.
But “passionate curiosity”—a phrase used by Nell Minow, the co-founder of The Corporate Library—is a better description of the quality that helps set CEOs apart: an infectious sense of fascination with everything around them.
Passionate curiosity, Minow said, “is indispensable, no matter what the job is. You want somebody who is just alert and very awake and engaged with the world and wanting to know more.”
People with this quality are sponges for information, for insights, wherever they are, what ever they’re doing.
“I think that the best leaders are really pattern thinkers,” said David Novak of Yum Brands. “They want to get better. Are they continually trying to better themselves? Are they looking outside for ideas that will help them grow the business? I look at it in the context of their own personal development. They’re constantly trying to learn how they can become better leaders and they’re constantly trying to learn how they can build a better business. They soak up everything they can possibly soak up so that they can become the best possible leaders they can be. And then they share that with others.”
Though CEOs are paid to have answers, their greatest contribution to their organizations may be asking the right questions—a skill that starts with passionate curiosity.
They recognize that they can’t have the answer to everything—that’s why they hire specialists to handle different parts of their organization—but they can push their company in the right direction and marshal the collective energy of their employees by asking the right questions. That, after all, is where the new opportunities are.
“In business, the big prizes are found when you can ask a question that challenges the corporate orthodoxy that exists in every business,” said Andrew Cosslett, the CEO of InterContinental Hotels Group. “In every business I’ve worked in, there’s been a lot of cost and value locked up in things that are deemed to be ‘the way we do things around here,’ or they’re deemed to be critical to—in the hotel world—a guest experience. So you have to talk to people and ask questions. I just keep asking people, ‘Why do you do that?’ ”
It’s an important lesson. For all the furrowed-brow seriousness and certainty that you often encounter in the business world, some of the most important advances come from asking, much like a per sis tent five-year-old, the simplest questions. Why do you do that? How come it’s done this way? Is there a better way?
“I do think that’s something we forget,” said Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, the design consulting firm. “As leaders, probably the most important role we can play is asking the right questions. But the bit we forget is that it is, in itself, a creative pro cess. Those right questions aren’t just kind of lying around on the ground to be picked up and asked. When I go back and look at the great leaders—Roosevelt, Churchill—one of the things that occur to me is they somehow had the ability to frame the question in a way that nobody else would have thought about. In design, that’s everything, right? If you don’t ask the right questions, then you’re never going to get the right solution. I spent too much of my career feeling like I’d done a really good job answering the wrong question. And that was because I was letting other people give me the question. One of the things that I’ve tried to do more and more—and I obviously have the opportunity to do as a leader—is to take ownership of the question. And so I’m much more interested these days in having debates about what the questions should be than I necessarily am about the solutions.”
Jen-Hsun