Timeless wisdom and genius clusters

Somehow, the clarion call to leadership today is falling flat. We are certainly in the presence of a historically critical period it seems, with the old-world order seemingly falling away, ecological challenges, terrorism, mass immigration, the unravelling of developing nations, the civil war within Islam, an epochal end of faith in public institutions, the undermining of the middle class in various advanced economies in the midst of technological breakthroughs, and more. Such moments of crisis are often needed to evoke such geniuses. Great crisis creates great opportunity potentially if confronted effectively, mined astutely and transformed creatively

There is almost a desperation for better leadership, in countries, and by extension, companies that are part of the economic engine of progress for most countries. 

The world of management has produced only one real intellectual I am aware of, the late, great, Peter Drucker.

Just as the world of wine appreciation has given us Michael Broadbent in this vein, or Edward Gibbon in the field of historical analysis, Drucker is as seminal as it gets. Drucker writes insightfully, pithily, artfully and impactfully.

A peerless thought leader, an exceptional consultant, a prolific author, he was a student of both organisational and leadership behaviour. Below are some of his best quotes, memorable for their wisdom, their nuance and their simplicity. 

And when he first stated them, they were genuinely remarkable in their insight. If some of them seem a little closer to “common sense” today, it is only because of the uncommon sense rendered mainstream thanks to Drucker’s work.

I have offered underneath each one, a few key applications that may help bring these insights to life.

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

Companies and leaders have to do two things simultaneously. Improve the present and help create the future. They have to excel in both “performance management” and “opportunity management.” The first gets prime time attention, as it naturally clamours for it due to quarterly reporting and more. The second gets short shrift, often until it’s too late. The best companies and leaders liberate and protect time, energy and attention, despite pressures to the contrary, for igniting tomorrow’s wins today.

“Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.”

An ironically apt term: “buron.” It happens when you mate a bureaucrat with a moron. Too often management tries to control, organise and oversee to an extent that leads to it inhibiting, stifling and irritating. Corporate systems become passion killers, and more energy goes into managing our own bureaucracy rather than in connecting with customers and delivering results. Jack Welch suggested going to war on your own bureaucracy. Amen! Citing “policy” as an excuse for mediocrity is genuinely pathetic.

“If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.”

We have to proverbially “empty our cups” ongoingly, to let new stimulus, fresh initiative, or disruptive ideas enter, insinuate themselves, and release the necessary energy. And when our heads are unduly crammed with yesterday’s dogma then even when inspiration does knock on the door, we are likely to chase it away, saying, “Go away, I’m looking for inspiration!”

“There is nothing quite so useless as to do with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”

Efficiency is doing things right, effectiveness is doing the right things. It is easy to succumb to the “activity trap,” to get spurious activity going to provide the illusion of “progress.” However, we have to always ask, as Steven Covey was to suggest, what the “end in mind” is. Only then can we ensure that what we are doing is actually likely to get us there. Pissing customers off efficiently, or undermining corporate effectiveness with quicksilver zeal, is clearly not what we’re after. However, both can be readily achieved, and too often are, in the fog of various ill-considered draconian central organisational initiatives.

“What gets measured gets improved.”

Organisations manage, micromanage and measure just about everything that matters to them. So, if there’s something you don’t consistently measure or follow up on, the subliminal message received is that it doesn’t matter. And therefore, no matter the rousing rhetoric from you to the contrary, people will tend to ignore it. Make improvement performance visible too, visceral, tangible, and give it prime time recurring attention, and it will drive focus, progress, exploration, even collaboration if the quality of that attention seems to mandate it.

“Results are gained by exploiting opportunities not by solving problems.”

You can’t get to the future by constantly peering in the rear-view mirror. Moreover, if much of our time is spent on remedial work (fixing what keeps breaking) and not enough on generative work (creating the basis for uprooting the source of the problem, or inciting innovation, or finding new ways to engage customers and win in the marketplace), then we live in a permanent “panic mode” where we keep putting out fires but don’t kindle fresh possibility.

“Long range planning does not deal with future decisions but the future of current decisions.”

Planning is not strategy. Yet by calling it “strategic planning” we suggest the “planning” aspect is paramount. We often spend inadequate time testing the strategies we are “planning.” Strategies should actually give rise to future decisions about markets, structure, priorities and allocating resources. Then plans can be created. Being planning-led otherwise creates turgidity and torpor or at best, energised wheel spinning. Lead with strategy – essentially what are we (or can we be) best at, where will we play (where can we compete with some differentiated advantage), how will we win?

“The purpose of a business is to create a customer.”

And the best way to know if you’re operating strategically is to first assess whether you are clear on what you won’t do. Secondly, it is to ensure that much of what we are doing leads to us nurturing current customers and becoming a more valuable part of their lives, as well as inviting in fresh customers, or “creating” a customer that didn’t exist before, because that offering or niche didn’t exist before. 

“If you have more than five goals, you have none.”

Try this experiment: get the top people in your company to identify the 5 most crucial, critical, strategic imperatives. If they don’t know them, aren’t aligned on them -- as well as the actions and trade-offs they will require -- you have a major issue. Or on the other hand, if you have 5 “strategic” platitudes undergirding the twenty “priorities” you are actually chasing, you again have the basis for the mayhem of organisational confusion and gridlock.

“The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.”

Leaders must excel in being able to give the gift of attention, learning to listen to and actually hear both content and intent. We enable this by asking questions that bridge from what is said as well as exploring that which isn’t mentioned or referred to, or those taboos that we seem allergic to facing. And if a leader can do this in the spirit of exploration and curiosity, rather than as an inquisition, people will line up to give you ideas and insights that will help you win.

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

If a culture is at odds with the strategy, the strategy will be still-born, because we have to ultimately behave our way to our strategy. If a culture kills passion, dampens initiative, breeds division (rather than collaboration), undermines discretionary commitment (rather than fostering it), and produces bureaucracy fascination rather than customer fascination, all the glowing exhortations and all the planning charts will produce only futility and failure.

So these are great nostrums for leadership development in organisational and corporate settings. How about leadership on the national or global stage? And why is it seemingly in such acute short supply at present?

Where are the leaders?

Peggy Noonan wrote in The Wall Street Journal about “genius clusters.” She began by rightfully bemoaning the sorry state of political leadership evident in the world today. Today, as when she wrote alas, largely a tawdry confection of paranoid hucksters and Machiavellian pan handlers.

She said these leaders feel like “placeholders”, and much about them, irrespective of their actual age, seems tired. Actually, I think we’re all just tired of them, their superficial and cynical glibness, and they being indeed “full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”

Peggy thought back on times in history when “genius clusters” seemed to form, in response to a period of great challenge, inflection points of momentous gravitas.

Certainly, the founding of the American Republic gave us such a genius cluster in Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Adams, Franklin, Jay, Monroe and others: an almost dizzying confederation of giants. 

Again, we refer to “genius” not “perfection,” an absurd expectation from a human being and one which has us lifting up those with little distinction, as long as they are not too obviously tarnished by some “superimposed” moral standard -- often tangential if not irrelevant to the job at hand.

The Civil War gave us Lincoln, but also an eminent Cabinet drawn from his “team of rivals”, and a military assemblage of exceptional distinction: Grant, Lee, Stonewall, Sherman, Sheridan, Longstreet.

World War II gave us a remarkable community of extraordinary leaders as well, even if we simply mention Churchill, FDR, de Gaulle. 

In bringing down the Soviet Empire and bringing sanity and progress to the aftermath of the tumultuous 70’s we had Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, and certainly in his own way, Mikhail Gorbachev.

And we can find “genius clusters” throughout history, and in fact in other areas of endeavour at seminal periods of transformation as well: in music, art, literature, philosophy, architecture, science.

However, somehow, the clarion call to leadership today is falling flat. We are certainly in the presence of a historically critical period it seems, with the old-world order seemingly falling away, ecological challenges, terrorism, mass immigration, the unravelling of developing nations, the civil war within Islam, an epochal end of faith in public institutions, the undermining of the middle class in various advanced economies in the midst of technological breakthroughs, and more. 

Such moments of crisis are often needed to evoke such geniuses. Great crisis creates great opportunity potentially if confronted effectively, mined astutely and transformed creatively.

Maybe, Peggy suggests, these potential leaders are off somewhere gathering their resolve, their strength, and their wisdom, while the current clowns debase us to a level where the only way thereafter is up. Surely, surely…

Let’s hope that such evolution or “positive mutation” happens soon for a world clamouring for wisdom, fortitude, vision, the ability to enrol and mobilise and follow through for purposeful, shared goals that enlarge us and advance the human enterprise.

F. Scott Fitzgerald in his novel The Great Gatsby spoke of the discovery of the US continent in these haunting, immortal words: “For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”

Well, history moves on, as it did past Gatsby. We looked at outer space, and into quanta, and our capacity for wonder was extended and renewed. 

In that vein, if we could peer into the heart of leadership and stir it into service, while generating real collaboration as a cultural compass, and if we could “land” this with the best of our current and upcoming generation, that “transitory enchanted moment” might yet be ours again.

(The writer is the founder and CEO of EPL Global and founder of Sensei Lanka, a global consultant with over 30 years strategic leadership experience and now, since March 2020, a globally recognised COVID researcher and commentator.)