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Tony Leon on lessons in leadershipThis entire feature is based on the assumption that your actions, your conduct, your values and your aptitude will determine the success, or failure, of your leadership role in the future. And I will illustrate some key leadership lessons I have observed in 23 years of public and political engagement, both here and abroad.
But let me start with a cautionary statement: our desire to see history and events through the lives of great men and personal stories of striving for success or even heroic failure, blinds us to the real complexity of politics, business and finance and leads us to find intention and grand design where often there is only chance, circumstance and luck.
It was said that Napoleon chose his generals because they were lucky. He also took the credit for military victories, such as the Battle of Borodino, where none of his commands or instructions was relayed and had no influence on the course of the battle.
Many events in business and politics follow the same kind of sequence, as observed when a clergyman is fortunate to pray for rain just before the unpredicted end of a drought!
If you go through the bookshelves on business models, you can see the same events and organisations described in radically different ways depending only on the time and perspective from which we view them.
Enron, for example, the United States energy organisation, was initially written up as a model of new style of corporate organisation and leadership. That was when its stock price was rising.
It was later described as a hotbed of corporate corruption and its once-admired leadership was handcuffed, indicted and jailed. What changed here were not the facts but our perspective and the timing thereof.
The same is true of Wall Street, where banking chiefs as recently as two years ago were admired and lavishly rewarded as masters of the financial universe, hailed as corporate leaders to be followed and listened to.
Today the same titans are the most hated and despised men in America, dismissed as over-rewarded and foolish incompetents. And that is explained by the largest destruction in asset value since the Great Depression – the Dow Jones industrial average having crashed down by more than 50% since 2007.
You can also think of one or two political leaders who are initially dubbed as intellectual heroes and determined achievers when they commence office, and are despised and reviled as failures when they leave.
The personalities in each case were the same, but perspective, events and performance changed our judgment.
With that cautionary note out of the way, I now want to address the main lessons of leadership.
Barack Obama’s historic presidential win last November is an object lesson in the overcrowded field of leadership studies. He was not elected for his detailed promises and closely costed financial rescue package – although the economic earthquake that imploded the world economy on 16 September 2008 when Lehman Brothers collapsed helped, as did the record unpopularity of the incumbent Republican president.
But this only became true after he won the Democratic primary against the odds-on favourite Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Until that happened, what carried him forward was the potent cocktail of self-belief, self-control, extraordinary articulation skills and the ability to bind them in and motivate people.
In essence, he was nominated and later elected because he ennobles the words of another great inspirational leader – Mahatma Ghandi: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
He did this by a combination: first, providing inspirational presence where his words and bearing created resonance. But more than anything else, it was his second attribute that generated excitement, momentum and support: the mere audacity to hope and to follow that hope with action – this ensured his improbable election.
He dared challenge the old and the known and not listen to fears and anxieties. He dared claim for himself the right to run for a job that the conventional wisdom said he was not ready for, and to which he should not aspire.
People said to him that America was not ready for a black president: the insiders scoffed at the idea that one of the most junior United States senators could aspire to the most powerful office in the world; others said he was both unready and too young.
And every political expert predicted that the Clintons’ mighty political machine was simply too powerful.
In the face of all that and more, he did not falter, showing an incredible ability to follow through, pursue his own dream and his self-belief. And the mantra that became the campaign slogan which inspired a nation: “Yes, we can.”
He could and he did, by employing that self-belief combined with extremely well disciplined hard work and steely perseverance – all of which were backed by competence and great teamwork.
The first lesson of leadership is this: self-belief, faith and courage are crucial and non-negotiable ingredients of successful leadership.
Winston Churchill, arguably the greatest leader of the 20th century, observed as his country overcame the mighty strength of the Nazi Reich that, “Courage is the first of all human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.”
But Obama was not simply a dreamy-eyed visionary; he had no appetite to be remembered as a ‘principled loser’. He set out to win and he did whatever was necessary – organisationally, financially and politically, to do so.
In other words, he realised that while power without principle was dangerous, the flip side was equally true: principles without power are futile.
The second lesson we can gleam is that the art of leadership requires the leader to be a good short-term strategist and a visionary long-term thinker.
It is a case of ‘both and’, not ‘either or’. Obama has until now, at least, demonstrated both those attributes in balanced measure. The success, or failure, of his presidency will be determined on whether he can continue with this winning combination or not.
One of the most enriching experiences of my life was to seek the counsel of the late Harry Oppenheimer, long-time chairperson of Anglo American. He provided me with occasional but indispensable advice from the beginning of my own political leadership in 1994 until his death in 2000.
He was a person of perspicacity. He once observed about South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts – who received world approval for his role in World War 2, yet managed to lose the crucial 1948 general election that ushered in 46 years of National Party rule – that there was a contradiction in his makeup.
In Oppenheimer’s opinion, Smuts preferred the long-term view of history and philosophy to the requirements of short-term politics. As Mr Oppenheimer put it: “As a statesman he looked into eternity, yet as a politician he had to think about the next election.”
That is the leader’s job: he/she needs to set the vision, look into history, but also stay in touch with the daily detail and messy compromises that comprise the environment and governing reality of any enterprise which a person has to lead – political, economic or social.
My third leadership lesson, and there are in fact no end of lessons to be drawn here, comes from a presidency much closer to home which ended in failure and dissonance, just as Obama’s has commenced in triumph and optimism.
I refer to Thabo Mbeki’s defeat – first as ANC president in December 2007, and his forced resignation as state president nine months later.
It is perfectly true that Mr Mbeki never sought or heeded any advice when we stood opposite each other in parliament, and doubtless the same applies today.
But I do well remember sitting on a flight to Cape Town in August 2007. I was seated next to a very senior ANC minister, a close confidant of Mbeki. He and I had clashed on several occasions, publicly and quite acrimoniously; I considered him an interesting and by no means isolated example of someone who had suppressed a powerful intellect and ideology to serve power and retain office. He was, accordingly, a firm favourite in the court of King Thabo.
My departure a few months before from frontline leadership had clearly softened attitudes and improved the atmosphere between us. Indeed, he expressed considerable surprise at my decision to step down as party leader voluntarily.
After agreeable banter on the topic of my past immediate plans, I turned the conversation to the more vexed, and intensely contested issue of the succession struggle, and the crisis gripping the ANC.
You will recall that many Zuma backers in the ruling alliance were presenting Mbeki as a figure of preening rectitude and intellectual arrogance: remote from the people, dismissive of his critics and a dangerous manipulator of power. He needed to be stopped.
I actually thought the momentum at that stage was with Zuma, but my airborne companion was having none of it. As we munched on the canapés in pressurised comfort, the Cabinet minister put me to rights.
He was utterly confident in his assessment. He told me: “Look, you people outside the ANC, particularly the press, don’t understand how the ANC works.”
He outlined a visit he had just made to his own constituency. “The youth leaders there had been swayed by the hotheads in the Zuma camp. But after I spoke to them and explained what is at stake, they were smart and disciplined enough to accept the imperatives which necessitate Thabo’s continuance in office.
“Over the next few weeks, the broad collective leadership of the party will spread out across the formations. By the time the conference comes in Polokwane in December, there will be a unified position which will be dramatically different from the sort of stuff you are reading about today.”
Indeed, on conventional wisdom Mbeki appeared to be political master of all he surveyed. The road to Polokwane, where the leadership would gather in December, was to be littered with the political corpses of those who dared to cross him. The ferocity of the battle would also be measured by the number of public institutions and constitutional instruments damaged or manipulated by both sides in the struggle.
As history now records in the northern conclave of Polokwane, Mbeki’s presidency went south. His overwhelming defeat by Zuma – he received a mere four out of every 10 votes cast – was more than decisive rejection. It was a full-scale democratic palace revolution within the ANC.
I also noted that alongside Mbeki’s defeat, the party proceeded to vote off its national executive – no fewer than eight of nine provincial premiers, the country’s deputy president and eight other Cabinet ministers including the person who had informed me of Mbeki’s rosy prospects of electoral success.
Mbeki’s leadership failure and the self-belief that led it to a disastrous precipice was the fact that he silenced critics and contrary voices.
And the third test of leadership in my opinion is to ensure that you surround yourself with people who disagree with you, or at least who are knowledgeable and sometimes even contrarian.
No leader’s office or presidential palace should be a mere echo chamber.
To be an effective leader, you need the best people who are often difficult and, indeed, cause controversy. You must take them on and listen to them, provided they share your sense of enterprise.
It is perfectly true that presidents have few friends. But if we are to learn anything, not only from the failure of our own presidencies but from the much greater and more significant failure of the financial markets, we do need to remember a very important lesson that is allied to the third.
Let us take the latest disaster in the world economy. There were people who worried that sub-prime lending, securitisation, financial opacity, over-leveraging and derivative trading would end in disaster, but there were not many of them, and no one listened.
Extending the bubble was all when the property markets and the financial markets were good for profits and good for the financial services sector. Yet, when disaster strikes, it often turns out that someone had predicted it.
We were reminded that anyone who kept an eye on US flight schools could have forecast that something like the September 11 attacks was about to happen.
In fact, someone actually did – the Federal Bureau of Investigation Supervisor in Minneapolis was told to stop fretting. He said he “was trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Centre.”
In hindsight, the path of disaster seems clear and the lone voices vindicated – although rarely thanked. People do not like being reminded how wrong they were. Yet it is precisely these ‘canaries in the coal mine’ who are indispensable to successful modern and complex leadership.
The fourth lesson of leadership is the ability to make hard choices and to live with the consequences.
As General Colin Powell reminded us: “Being responsible for a group means some people will get angry at your actions and decisions, but that is inevitable because you are honourable. Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity; you’ll avoid the tough decisions, you’ll avoid confronting the people who need to be confronted and you will avoid offering differential rewards based on differential performance because some people might get upset.
“Ironically, by procrastinating on the difficult choices, by trying not to get anyone mad and by treating everyone equally ‘nicely’ regardless of their contributions, will simply ensure that the only people you end up angering are the most creative and productive people in the organisation.”
Thus we need a balance between remaining in touch, being consensual but, equally, being prepared to take up hard choices and avoiding soft options or easy landings.
Whether you are the CEO or the temporary head of a project team, the buck stops with you. You can encourage participative management and bottom-up involvement, but ultimately the essence of leadership is the willingness to make the tough, unambiguous choices that will have impact on the fate of the organisation.
But people who flinch from this responsibility are actually non-leaders. Therefore another lesson of leadership is that you have to be prepared to be lonely in the execution of difficult decisions.
This then goes to the question of judgment. There is unfortunately no particular school or theory, or PhD provided for judgment, for judgment and common sense are indispensable for effective leadership.
Coping with failure is our fifth lesson: indeed, often the inspiration from defeat can create better judgments because of difficult circumstances and the hard lessons they teach.
Let me remind you of one of the great inspirational stories from modern sport.
Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player ever, had the following to say on success: “I’ve missed more than 9 000 shots in my career; I’ve lost almost 300 games; 26 times, I have been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.”
You have heard all the words and wisdom about failure being the flip side of success, but I actually think there is a hugely important lesson to be learned from the fundamental truth that the secret of the success is the capacity to survive failure. And I know from my own political career that failure can hurt so much. But unlike heartbreak, which really is a dead loss, failure has a function.
I had the great privilege of being in residence as a Fellow at one of the great universities of the world, Harvard in the US, in the fall
2007 period.
Shortly after my time there, the world’s most successful novelist, the one who sold more books than anyone else, addressed the students at Harvard on their graduation, or as the Americans say, gave the commencement address.
She told the successful students of one of the great universities of the world, whose DNA is wired for high achievement, that what they really needed to learn was the lessons from failure, with which obviously no graduating student from Harvard was well acquainted.
This is what she said in one of the most remarkable speeches I’ve ever read:
“Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it is fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale.
“An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
“Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy-tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was hope rather than a reality.
“So why do I talk about the benefits of failure?
“Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.
“Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged.
“I was set free because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
“You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live too cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.
“Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.
“The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity.
“Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.”
This, from a woman whose books have sold more than 400 million copies and who today is estimated to be worth more than R8 billion, ranking her as the 12th richest woman in Britain, is a lesson well worth, and profitably, applying!
JK Rowling’s stirring speech and personal example leads us to the next lesson: we are not very good at predicting the future.
The oracle at Delphi was vague for a reason.
You will know the recent work of Nassim Taleb of the Black Swan effect – how the unexpected and the unknown, such as an earthquake or a hurricane, or the latest financial crisis, can wipe out your wealth, your home or even your life.
Because we cannot know the future, except for the ultimate certainty in death, the sixth lesson is to lead your life at the peak and practise your leadership at the beginning by determining how you wish to be remembered at the end.
Simply put, you will achieve this happy and society-rewarding situation if you believe in something greater than yourself.
In other words, when you act in the general interest and welfare, you can very often achieve mightily for yourself, but leave behind something greater and more beneficial at the end of the day.
This brings me to the story of Dr Alfred Nobel. He was the inventor of dynamite and the owner of one of the major armaments manufacturers in Sweden, Bofor. He died in December 1896.
But the erroneous publication in 1888 of a premature obituary of Nobel by a French newspaper, condemning him for his invention of dynamite and describing him as “the Merchant of Death”, is said to have brought about his decision to leave a better legacy after his death.
And so, a short while after reading his premature death notice, Nobel signed a new last will and testament and set aside the bulk of his estate to establish a Nobel Prize to be awarded annually without distinction of nationality.
We know from our own history that four great South Africans – Albert Luthuli, Nelson Mandela, FW de Klerk and Archbishop Desmond Tutu – have been the recipients of this coveted award.
But if Nobel had not actually decided how he wished to be remembered after his life was lived in a more positive way than it might otherwise have been, there would be no such legacy, only, indeed – in the words of his critical and premature obituary writer – “a legacy of death”.
He decided, after having the unusual advantage of reading his own death notice while alive, to actually change his legacy and that the world would, as it does today, remember him as a person who stood up and financed one of the world’s great prizes.
My seventh and final leadership lesson in principle may be entitled “Character overcomes Qualifications”.
There is much concern about the fact that the new president of South Africa only had primary school education. There may be other reasons to express concern about the new president, but actually his educational disadvantage seems to be utterly irrelevant.
One of the most successful presidents of the US, Harry Truman, was also under-educated by conventional standards and was a failed haberdasher from a small town in an insignificant state.
He went on to be one of the greatest presidents of the 20th century and made some of the most decisive and controversial decisions in the history of the world. From the detonation of the atom bomb to the invocation of the Marshall Plan that reclaimed Europe for peace and prosperity; to his decision to fire the all-popular General MacArthur.
John Major, former prime minister of Great Britain, could not pass Grade 10.
And Winston Churchill, as has been recorded elsewhere, who famously flunked his school-leaving exams, went on to provide the most intellectual and inspirational leadership the world has ever known.
All these men, like Zuma incidentally, actually were comfortable in their own skins. They were people who knew themselves and their limitations and therefore they were able to make the right judgment calls.
I have no idea whether Zuma will fulfil this requirement, but I do know that Harry Truman was right: “The buck stops with the president.”
In contrast, Jimmy Carter, with an IQ of 156 and a slew of qualifications, was one of the most intelligent men to serve in the White House. Yet his 1976-1980 presidency was a failure: it is remembered for its poor judgments and irresolution on a wide variety of fronts at home and abroad.
He was swept out of office, after a mere four years, by a landslide in favour of the much less educated but far more effective Ronald Reagan.
The flip side of this is that very often adverse circumstances, educational, environmental and economic hardship can, in fact, be the character-forming foundations of future success.
I have learned in my recent stay in America that Americans love the self-made man. Andrew Carnegie, whose legacy to history has been the endowment of one of the most noted philanthropic institutions in the world, had a personal history that was the defining self-made man narrative of the 19th century.
In fact, he insisted that there was an advantage to being “cradled, nursed and reared in the stimulating school of poverty.”
According to Carnegie, it is not from the sons of the millionaire or the noble that the world receives its teachers, its martyrs, its inventors, statesmen, its poets or even its business leaders. “It is from the cottage of the poor that all these spring”.
Whether this is true or not is no doubt hotly contested. But history is littered with examples of people who have overcome adversity, humble beginnings and deep prejudice to achieve great success.
I was reading a fascinating article by Malcolm Gladwell recently, which dealt with the curious fact that many successful entrepreneurs suffer from serious learning disabilities.
Paul Orfalea, the founder of the Kinko’s chain, was a D-student who failed two grades, was expelled from four schools and graduated at the bottom of his high school class.
Richard Branson, the British billionaire who established the Virgin empire, dropped out of school at the age of 15 after struggling with reading and writing. “I was always bottom of the class”, he has said.
John Chambers, who built the Silicon Valley firm Cisco into a $100-billion corporation, has trouble reading e-mail.
One of the pioneers of the cellular phone industry, Craig McCaw, is dyslexic. As is Charles Schwab, the founder of the chief American brokerage house that bears his name.
When business school Professor Julie Logan surveyed a group of American small business owners recently, she found that 35% of them self-identified as dyslexic.
That is a remarkable statistic. Dyslexia affects the very skills that lie at the centre of an individual’s ability to manage the modern world.
The business titans I have mentioned seem to have made up for their disabilities in the same way that the poor, in Carnegie’s view, can make up for their poverty.
Because of their difficulty with reading and writing, they are forced to develop superior oral communication and problem-solving skills. Because they had to rely on others to help them navigate the written word, they became adept at delegating authority.
In one study conducted in Britain, 80% of dyslexic entrepreneurs were found to have held the position of captain in a high school sport versus 27% of non-dyslexic entrepreneurs.
In other words, they compensated for their academic shortcomings by developing superior social skills and, when they reached the workplace, those compensatory skills gave them an enormous head start.
This example can only be taken so far because there are many reverse cases of people with learning difficulties or economic deprivation who remain mired in a situation of disadvantage.
But what I think it tells us is very plain and simple: that in the right environment, with strong commitment and with steely determination, we can indeed overcome.
May your lives and careers be blessed with success and the most important thing is to keep trying: just remember that there is no traffic jam on the extra mile! ▲
Speech by Tony Leon at the Tomorrow’s Leaders Convention
Tomorrow’s Leaders is proudly hosted by “Leadership” Magazine in partnership with the University of Pretoria
