The Corner Office: How Top CEOs Made It and How You Can Too. Adam Bryant
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everything, but it is possible for us to add value to literally everything,” Huang said. “And the reason for that is, if you’re the CEO, you’re probably better at looking around corners than most. You probably have better intuition than most. You’re probably able to see the forest better than most. You’re probably able to deal with complexity better than most. And so you bring a perspective that is unique. By asking the right questions, you can get to the heart of the issue right away. It’s almost possible now for me to go through a day and do nothing but ask questions and have my sensibility, my perspective and what’s important to me be perfectly clear to everybody without making a statement at all.”
Asking questions. Showing genuine enthusiasm. Being interested in the world. It sounds so simple, yet not everyone displays those qualities, particularly in a business culture that values jutjawed certainty. Top executives who are passionately curious can also spot like-minded people from a mile away. They will pick them out of a crowd, and even hire them on the spot—another sign of how rare this quality is.
“I once hired somebody who wasn’t looking for a job,” said Nell Minow of The Corporate Library. “A guy called to ask me some questions about some corporate governance issue and I just thought he was so bright. I said, ‘I’ll put some materials together for you and put them in the mail.’ And he said, ‘Can I come over and pick them up right now?’ I said, ‘Are you looking for a job?’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m in an internship right now. I just graduated from college and my internship is going to finish up at the end of the summer.’ I told him, ‘If you are looking for a job when the internship ends, I’m going to hire you.’ And I did.”
James J. Schiro, CEO of Zurich Financial Ser vices, said he sometimes picked assistants—to travel with him and help him get things done—just by keeping his eye out for young people who are “smart, bright, energetic.”
“The person who works with me now I met on a road show,” Schiro said. “He was one of the bankers, and I said, ‘I’d like to talk to him.’ He came in, and I said, ‘Philippe, how would you like to work for me?’ He said, ‘Doing what?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I’ve watched you. You understand this industry. You know more about this industry than I do, and you can just work for me for a year, and then after that year, somebody in this organization will hire you.”
Some CEOs worked early on as an assistant—a right-hand man or woman—to a top executive. Did they then ultimately rise to top jobs because of that early experience as an assistant, seeing the world through a CEO’s eyes at a young age? Or were they chosen for those assistant jobs because top executives had a keen eye for people who displayed passionate curiosity? Undoubtedly both are true.
The early career of Ursula M. Burns, the CEO of Xerox, is a case in point. She was noticed by top executives early on, and promoted to a level in the organization that few get to see at a young age.
The sharp inflection point in her career at Xerox came in 1989, when she was working in product development and planning. She was invited to a work-life discussion. Diversity initiatives came up, and somebody asked whether such initiatives lowered hiring standards. Wayland Hicks, a senior Xerox executive running the meeting, patiently explained that that was not true.
“I was stunned,” Burns said. “I actually told him, ‘I was surprised that you gave this assertion any credence.’ ”
After that meeting, she revisited the issue with Hicks, and a few weeks later he asked her to meet with him in his office. She figured that she was about to be reprimanded or fired. Instead, Hicks told her she had been right to be concerned but also wrong for handling it so forcefully. Then he told her he wanted to meet regularly with her.
“She was enormously curious,” Hicks explained. “She wanted to know why we were doing some things at the time, and she was always prepared in a way that I thought was very refreshing.” He offered her a job as his executive assistant in January 1990, when she was thirty-one. She would travel with Hicks, sit in on important meetings, and help him get things done. She accepted, and they talked a lot about leadership during downtime.
Burns continued to speak her mind and ask questions inside Xerox—particularly on an occasion in mid-1991 when the stakes were unusually high. At the time, Paul A. Allaire, Xerox’s president, held monthly meetings with top managers, and Burns and other assistants were invited to sit in, but off to the side.
Burns noticed a pattern. Allaire would announce, “We have to stop hiring.” But then the company would hire a thousand people. The next month, same thing. So she raised her hand. “I’m a little confused, Mr. Allaire,” she said. “If you keep saying, ‘No hiring,’ and we hire a thousand people every month, who can say ‘No hiring’ and make it actually happen?” She remembers that he stared at her with a “Why did you ask that question?” look and then the meeting moved on.
Later, the phone rang. Allaire wanted to see her in his office. She figured that it was not good news. But Allaire wanted to poach her from Hicks, so she could be his executive assistant. They, too, talked often about leadership. Allaire didn’t want to discourage her candor but, like Hicks, he offered tips about how to be more effective—“like giving people credit for ideas that they didn’t have but you sold to them, to give them ownership,” Allaire recalled advising her. Allaire saw in her the right mix of energy, confidence, and curiosity—an eagerness to learn.
Burns was forceful about asking questions on her way to the corner office. “You have to learn and you have to be curious,” her mother always told her.
And how does Burns describe her role today as CEO? “The job is exactly not about having the right answers,” she said. “The job is having great questions asked and great people helping you answer them. Not all the right questions come from you, either. But I have a perspective and a purview that allow me to have a different set of questions. If somebody comes to me with a problem, almost surely I’ll send it back and say, ‘Think about this. How about this? How about that?’ ”
As these CEOs have shown, asking good questions can help at every stage of a career, for people just starting out and for those in charge of an international corporation. It bears repeating. They show interest and enthusiasm, and they ask questions. They focus on being interested rather than trying to be interesting, as the saying goes. People who show this kind of initiative will find that it leads to important relationships—at work and outside of work. That’s how people find mentors, and how they connect with leaders of the company.
Some people in business refer to the 80/20 rule, a variation of a concept called the Pareto Principle. It refers to the idea that 20 percent of the people in any company do 80 percent of the work. Now, think again about those one hundred people in an organization, all at the same rank. If twenty of them are going to be the work horses of the group, there will be an even smaller number who go beyond their assigned tasks, and take an interest in the people and the organization outside their job descriptions. They will stand out.
Show some passionate curiosity—it is a simple rule with an enormous payoff.
“If you give positive vibes, if you show an interest, by and large a lot of people will react,” said Stephen I. Sadove, the CEO of Saks. “Not everybody, but people tend to react. When people show an interest in reaching out, I tend to react to them.”
Chapter 2
BATTLE-HARDENED CONFIDENCE
Consider those one hundred employees again—all vice presidents at the same company. As their bosses size up this group, some qualities are easier to spot than others. Passionate curiosity? It’s there for all to see. There’s an energy, a buzz, from people who have it, and you can pick them out of a crowd.
Other qualities are tougher to discern, especially the ability to handle adversity. Everybody faces challenges of some kind or another in their life, but some people deal with adversity better than others. And then there are those who embrace it, who relish it, who want the tough assignment when the pressure is on. These people have plowed through tough circumstances, and they know what they’re capable of handling. They have a track record of overcoming adversity, of failing