NOTES
1. James Surowiecki, “The Turnaround Trap,” New Yorker, March 25, 2013.
2. Brad Tuttle, “The 5 Big Mistakes That Led to Ron Johnson's Ouster at JCPenney,” Time, April 9, 2013, business.time.com/2013/04/09/the-5-big-mistakes-that-led-to-ron-johnsons-ouster-at-jc-penney.
3. Joann S. Lublin and Dana Mattioli (“Penney CEO Out, Old Boss Back In,” Wall Street Journal, April 8, 2013) state that “Mr. Johnson was unapologetic about his decision not to test his strategy. Asked earlier this year if he would do things differently given a chance to start over, he replied, ‘No, of course not.’”
4. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 2010).
5. Personal story told by Marc Gerstein to the author.
6. Thomas K. McCraw, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 163–164.
7. Thomas J. Watson, Father, Son & Co.: My Life at IBM and Beyond (New York: Bantam, 2000), 28.
8. Robert Frank, “Billionaire Sara Blakely Says Secret to Success Is Failure,” CNBC interview with Sara Blakely, October 16, 2013, http://www.cnbc.com/id/101117470.
9. Evoking T. E. Lawrence: “All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible”; in Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 1997), 7.
10. Theodore Roosevelt, “Citizenship in a Republic,” speech presented at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910, www.leadershipnow.com/tr-citizenship.html. Reproduced from The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 13, 506–529.
1. Adam Lashinsky, “Amazon's Jeff Bezos: The Ultimate Disrupter,” Fortune, November 16, 2012.
2. My point here is related to Kathryn Schulz's description of the benefits of optimism: “Believing that this time we will succeed where in the past we have failed, or failed to try; believing the best of ourselves even when we are intimately familiar with the worst and the merely average; believing that everything in us that is well intentioned will triumph over that is lazy or fickle or indifferent or unkind; this is the wrongness of optimism—an endlessly renewable, overstated faith in our own potential”; in Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (New York: Harper Collins e-books, 2010), 338.
3. See Amy B. Brunell, William Gentry, W. Keith Campbell, Brian Hoffman, Karl W Kuhnert, and Kenneth G. DeMarree, “Leader Emergence: The Case of the Narcissistic Leader,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34, no. 12 (December 2008); also Kenneth E. Clark and Miriam B. Clark, “The Dark Side of Charisma,” in Measures of Leadership, ed. Kenneth. E. Clark and Miriam B. Clark (West Orange, NJ: Leadership Library of America, 1990), 343–354.
4. Noam Wasserman, The Founder's Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 11.
5. Bob Sutton, “Andy Grove Tells the Truth About What Great Leaders Do,” Work Matters (blog), bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/03/andy_grove_tell.html.
6. Robert I. Sutton, “A Great Boss Is Confident, But Not Really Sure,” HBR Blog Network, July 15, 2010, blogs.hbr.org/2010/07/confident-but-not-really-sure.
7. Roy Baumeister, “The Optimal Margin of Illusion,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 8, no. 2 (1989): 176–189.
8. Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science (New York: Picador, 2003).
9. Gawande, Complications, 55.
10. Michael Maccoby, The Productive Narcissist: The Promise and Peril of Visionary Leadership (New York: Broadway Press, 1993).
11. Andy Hertzfeld, Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made (Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media, 2005), 24–25.
12. Triumph of the Nerds (television interview with Steve Jobs), PBS, 1996.
13. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).
14. “Think Different” (Apple advertisement narrated by Steve Jobs), YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rwsuXHA7RA.
15. Andy Hertzfeld, “Quick, Hide in This Closet!” Folklore, August 1983, www.folklore.org/index.py, p. 5.
16. Josh Tyrangiel, “Tim Cook's Freshman Year: The Apple CEO Speaks,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, December 6, 2012, 76.
17. The expression is from Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1993), 102: “Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.”
18. William D. Cohan and Bethany McLean, “Jamie Dimon on the Line,” Vanity Fair, November 2012.
19. That critic was US Senator Carl Levin, quoted in Dawn Kopecki, Clea Benson, and Hugh Son, “JPMorgan Report Piles Pressure on Dimon in Too-Big Debate,” Bloomberg News, March 15, 2013.
20. Susan Dominus, “The Woman Who Took the Fall for JPMorgan Chase,” New York Times, October 3, 2012.
21. Polya Lesova, “Dimon: London Whale Issues ‘Tempest in a Teapot.’” Market Pulse Archives, http://www.marketwatch.com/story/dimon-london-whale-issues-tempest-in-a-teapot-2012-04-13-937450.
22. JPMorgan Chase & Co., Annual Report: 2012, investor.shareholder.com/jpmorganchase/annual.cfm, 10.
23. Susan Dominus, “Ina Drew Takes Risk, Goes on the Defensive,” New York Times, March 18, 2013.
24. JPMorgan Chase, Annual Report: 2012, 10.
25. Cohan and McLean, “Jamie Dimon on the Line.”
26. This quotation from the internal report appears in David Benoit, “London Whale Report: Dimon Could Have Done Better; CEO's Salary Slashed,” Deal Journal (Wall Street Journal blog), January 16, 2013.
27. Richard S. Tedlow, “The Struggle for Dominance in the Automobile Market: The Early Years of Ford and General Motors,” Business and Economic History 17 (1988): 49–62.
28. David Halberstam, The Reckoning (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 94.
29. Ed Catmull, “How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity,” Harvard Business Review (online), September 2008.
30. John Markoff, “Michael Dell Should Eat His Words, Apple Chief Suggests,” New York Times, January 16, 2006.
31. This executive stated that the “VAX [minicomputer] took over the company, and what it allowed them to do was not think. No one had to think from 1981 to ’88 because the VAX was so dominant”; quoted in Ronald Rosenberg and Aaron Zitner, “The War Long Lost, Digital Surrenders,” Boston Globe, January 2, 1998, c1.
32. Yann Martel, Life of Pi (New York: Mariner Books, 2001).
1. Donald Rumsfeld, who has held a host of political and business roles over his career, noted this point in a slightly different manner at a 2002 Department of Defense press briefing when he was US secretary of defense, saying, “There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns—there are things we do not know we don't know.” Rumsfeld's model is slightly different from what I propose, in focusing on only what is known versus unknown; he does not address the strengths and weaknesses of a leader. Charles M. Blow, “Rumsfeld Quotes in Knowns, Unknowns and Unknowables,” September 26, 2012, http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/26/blow-knowns-unknowns-and-unknowables/.
2. Whitehead's full statement is, “Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge.”
3. Robert E. Kaplan and Robert B. Kaiser, Fear Your Strengths: What You Are Best at Could Be Your Biggest Problem (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2013).
4. Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, “Three Myths About Your Strengths,” HBR Blog Network, July 10, 2013, http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/07/three-myths-about-your-strengths/.
5. For an overview of the Johari Window model, see www.businessballs.com/johariwindowmodel.htm.
6. Paul M. Barrett, “Jim Rogers, the CEO Who Wouldn't Leave,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, September 20, 2012.
7. Barrett, “Jim Rogers, the CEO Who Wouldn't Leave.”
8. Bruce Henderson, “Emails on Duke Energy Merger Reveal Outrage: Duke Board Members from Progress React to Ouster in 2,195 Pages Released Monday,” Charlotte Observer, November 6, 2012.
9. Richard S. Tedlow, Denial: Why Business Leaders Fail to Look Facts in the Face—and What to Do About It (New York: Portfolio, 2010).
10. Marc Gerstein and Robert Shaw, “Organizational Bystanders,” People and Strategy, June 2009, 31–31.
11. Gerstein and Shaw, “Organizational Bystanders.”
12. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 2010).
13. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 201.
14. Daniel Kahneman, Jack L. Knetsch, and Richard H. Thaler, “Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion and Status Quo Bias,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 5, no. 1 (1991): 193–206.
15. Douglas Smith and Robert Alexander, Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 1999); also see Paul Kedrosky, “Xerox's Long History of Management Ineptitude,” National Post, November 25, 2000, and Jagdish N. Sheth, The Self-Destructive Habits of Good Companies … and How to Break Them (Philadelphia: Wharton School Publishing, 2007).
16. “IBM's Sam Palmisano: ‘Always Put the Enterprise Ahead of the Individual’” (interview with Wharton management professor Michael Useem), January 18, 2012, knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/ibms-sam-palmisano-always-put-the-enterprise-ahead-of-the-individual.
17. W. L. Gore & Associates, “What We Believe.” www.gore.com/en_xx/careers/whoweare/whatwebelieve/gore-culture.html; also cited by Jim Collins, “How the Mighty Fall: A Primer on the Warning Signs” (book excerpt), Bloomberg BusinessWeek, May 14, 2009.
18. Jim Collins, How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In (New York: HarperCollins, 2009).
19. George Anders, “Meg Whitman Jolts HP as Its Reluctant Savior,” Forbes, June 10, 2013.
1. See Christie Aschwanden, “Which Lance Armstrong?: The Emotions, Impulses and Mysterious Drives That Might Have Fueled the Cheating Tour Champion—and the Honest One,” Bicycling, n.d., www.bicycling.com/news/featured-stories/which-lance-armstrong.
2. “Lance Armstrong & Oprah Winfrey: Cyclist Sorry for Doping” (interview), BBC Sport (radio), January 18, 2013.
3. Gretchen Reynolds, “Phys Ed: Will Olympic Athletes Dope If They Know It Might Kill Them?,” New York Times, January 20, 2010.
4. Robert I. Sutton, in “12 Things Good Bosses Believe,” describes this belief as, “How I do things is as important as what I do.” HBR Blog Network, May 28, 2010, http://blogs.hbr.org/2010/05/12-things-that-good-bosses-bel/.
5. Conversely, Sutton, in “12 Things Good Bosses Believe,” describes the need for the good leader to recognize that “I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for me.”
6. Charlie Gasparino, “John Thain's $87,000 Rug,” Daily Beast, January 22, 2009, www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2009/01/22/john-thains-87000-rug.html.
7. Jim Collins believes great leaders are dedicated to a larger cause: “The central question is, What are you in it for? … leaders can be bland or colorful, uncharismatic or magnetic, understated or flamboyant, normal to the point of dull, or just flat-out weird—none of this really matters, as long as they're passionately driven for a cause beyond themselves”; in Great by Choice (New York: HarperBusiness, 2011), 33.
8. For a further example, see Dan Lovallo and Daniel Kahneman, “Delusions of Success: How Optimism Undermines Executives’ Decisions,” Harvard Business Review, July 2003.
9. Joe Roth remarks on the consequences of hubris, in this instance in the movie industry, in “Going After the Big One,” Los Angeles Times, December 31, 1996.
10. Kurt Eichenwald, “Microsoft's Lost Decade,” Vanity Fair, August 2012, 3.
11. Lovallo and Kahneman, “Delusions of Success.”
12. Sydney Finkelstein, “The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives,” Forbes, January 2, 2012; see Habit #6: “They underestimate obstacles.”
1. “Parallel Worlds: Interview” (with Michael Bloomberg), The Focus 13, no. 1 (2009), www.egonzehnder.com/the-focus-magazine/archive.html?volume=162.
2. Amy Westfeldt and Jennifer Peltz, “With Can-Do Stance on Marathon, Mayor Misreads NYC,” Associated Press, November 3, 2012.
3. Justin Stangel, “Worst Storm Ever” (tweet), Outcry over New York Marathon Leads to Cancellation, November 2, 2012, storify.com/cbccommunity/new-yorkers-rage-over-decision-to-hold-marathon.
4. Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2011).
5. David McRaney, You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (New York: Gotham, 2012), 29.
6. Sydney Finkelstein, Why Smart Executives Fail (New York: Portfolio, 2003).
7. Max Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel, Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do About It (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 11.
8. Mark Maremont and Tom McGinty, “Mylan Chief Flies Firm's Jet to Side Gig: Son's Concerts,” Wall Street Journal, December 17, 2012.
9. Barry M. Staw, “The Escalation of Commitment to a Course of Action,” Academy of Management Review 6, no. 4 (1981): 577–587.
10. Mark Dowie, “Pinto Madness,” Mother Jones, September/October 1977.
11. See Daniel Goleman's book Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence (New York: Harper, 2013), 123–126. He cites several studies that examine the relationship between power and status and the degree to which people focus on others.
12. See Michael W. Kraus and Dacher Keltner, “Signs of Socioeconomic Status: A Thin Slicing Approach,” Psychological Science 20, no. 1 (2000), 99–106.
13. David Dunning, Self-Insight: Roadblocks and Detours on the Path to Knowing Thyself (New York: Psychology Press, 2005), 6.
14. The poll was conducted by the College Board in conjunction with the SAT examination process. One could question whether the results were skewed by the desire of those completing the survey to be seen in a positive light, given that they were taking college entrance exams. However, other studies in different settings confirm the bias toward seeing ourselves in a positive light. See Mark D. Alicke and Olesya Govorun, “The Better-Than-Average Effect,” in The Self in Social Judgment, ed. Mark D. Alicke, David A. Dunning, and Joachim I. Krueger (New York: Psychology Press, 2005), 85–106.
15. Fabio Sala, It's Lonely at the Top: Executives’ Emotional Intelligence Self [Mis] Perceptions (Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, 2001), www.eiconsortium.org.
16. See Malcolm Gladwell, “Cocksure: Banks, Battles, and the Psychology of Overconfidence,” New Yorker, July 27, 2009, for a wonderful treatment of leadership arrogance.
17. Michael Maccoby, The Productive Narcissist: The Promise and Peril of Visionary Leadership (New York: Broadway Press, 1993).
18. Gates is quoted in Alina Tugend, “Success Is a Lousy Teacher,” Daily Beast, March 30, 2011, www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/03/30/have-we-learned-from-our-financial-crisis-mistakes-by-alina-tugend.html.
19. Frank Rich, “Suckers for Superheroes,” New York Magazine, December 9, 2012.
21. Ray Hyman, “Why and When Are Smart People Stupid,” in Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid, ed. Robert Sternberg (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).
22. Carmine Gallo, “How to Run a Meeting Like Google,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, September 26, 2006. Also see Nicholas Carlson, “The Truth About Marissa Mayer: She Has Two Contrasting Reputations,” Business Insider, July 17, 2012, www.businessinsider.com. He quotes a former colleague of Mayer's as saying, “She used to make people line up outside of her office, sit on couches and sign up with office hours with her. Then everybody had to publicly sit outside her office and she would see people in five minute increments. She would make VPs at Google wait for her. It's like you've got to be kidding.”
23. Rutgers Case Study and Recommendations. Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP for the Board of the Governors of Rutgers, July 22, 2013. Cited in Kelly Heyboer, “Rutgers Releases Independent Investigator's Report on Basketball Scandal,” Star-Ledger, July 22, 2013, NJ.com. Also, see Thomas Fox, “The Rutgers Basketball Scandal—Some Questions for the Compliance Practitioner to Ask,” June 12, 2013, www.CorporateComplianceinsights.com, and Dan Loumena, “Rutgers Basketball Scandal: Tim Pernetti Is the Wrong Fall Guy,” Los Angles Times, April 6, 2013.
1. Robert Jordan. “A Desk Is a Dangerous Place from Which to View the World,” Forbes, November 1, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertjordan/2012/11/01/how-to-be-a-better-leader-ditch-your-desk/.
2. McKinsey Quarterly staff, “McKinsey Conversations with Global Leaders: Andrew Gould of Schlumberger,” McKinsey Quarterly, April 2010.
3. Michael Useem, “IBM's Sam Palmisano: Always Put the Enterprise Ahead of the Individual,” Knowledge@Wharton. January 18, 2012, http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/ibms-sam-palmisano-always-put-the-enterprise-ahead-of-the-individual/.
4. Steve Lohr, “Can Apple Find More Hits Without Its Tastemaker?” New York Times, January 18, 2011.
5. Adam Lashinsky, “Amazon's Jeff Bezos: The Ultimate Disrupter,” Fortune, November 16, 2012.
6. Michael Schrage, “Invest in Your Customers More Than Your Brand,” HBR Blog Network, February 25, 2013. http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/02/invest-in-your-customers-more-than-your-brand/.
7. From Amazon.com, Selling at Amazon.com > Feedback & Performance > Customer Metrics (which lists some of the company's performance measures), http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200205140.
8. A. G. Lafley, “What Only the CEO Can Do,” Harvard Business Review, May 2009.
9. This customer interaction is described in Nick Paumgarten's article “The Merchant: It's All About the Eye—and the Numbers,” New Yorker, September 20, 2010. For another profile of Drexler's management style, see Tina Gaudoin's “Mickey Drexler: Retail Therapist?” WSJ. Magazine, June 2010.
10. Comments made at the Women's Wear Daily CEO Summit and quoted in Lauren Sherman, “J. Crew's Mickey Drexler on Secrets to His Success,” Fashionista, January 7, 2013, fashionista.com/2013/01/j-crew-mickey-drexler-wwdceo-summit.
11. Emily Bryson York, “Starbucks Gets Its Business Brewing Again with Social Media: How the Company Turned Around Sales by Finding ‘Intersection Between Digital and Physical,’” Advertising Age, February 22, 2010.
12. Darren Heitner, “NASCAR and Hewlett-Packard Are Driving Innovation with New Fan and Media Engagement Center,” Forbes, January 14, 2013.
13. “Joint Chiefs Chairman's Tough Task Ahead,” 60 Minutes, CBS News, February 11, 2009.
14. Ken Favaro, Per-Ola Karlsson, and Gary L. Neilson, “Navigating the First Year: Advice from 18 Chief Executives,” Strategy+Business, May 24, 2012.
15. Endre Holen and Allen Webb, “My Transition Story,” McKinsey Quarterly, June 2010.
16. Michael A. Roberto, Know What You Don't Know: How Great Leaders Prevent Problems Before They Happen (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009).
17. Adam Bryant, “Knock Knock: It's the CEO,” New York Times, April 11, 2009.
18. Gaudoin, “Mickey Drexler.”
19. Wal-Mart, “A Look Inside Lee's Garage,” news.walmart.com/news-archive/2006/02/17/a-look-inside-lees-garage.
20. Gary Hamel and Lisa Välikangas, “The Quest for Resilience,” Harvard Business Review, September 2003.
21. Jeff Immelt, “Renewing American Leadership,” speech presented at West Point, New York, December 2009. GE Reports, http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/90304-2-JRI-Speech-Reprint1-557.qxd_8.5x11.pdf.
22. Joel Kurtzman, “An Interview with Gary Hamel,” Strategy+Business, October 1, 1997.
23 David A. Price, The Pixar Touch (New York: Vintage Press, 2009).
24. Verne Harnish and the Editors of Fortune, The Greatest Business Decisions of All Time (New York: Time Home Entertainment, 2012).
25. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).
26. The overall approach discussed here is based on the tools outlined by Dorothy Leonard, Gavin Barton, and Michelle Barton in “Make Yourself an Expert,” Harvard Business Review, April 2013, 127.
1. Raymond S. Nickerson, “Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises,” Review of General Psychology 2, no. 2 (1998): 175–220.
2. Tim Weiner, “Robert S. McNamara, Architect of a Futile War, Dies at 93,” New York Times, July 6, 2009.
3. Carl Lavin, “The Flawed Legacy of Robert McNamara,” Forbes, July 6, 2009.
4. Errol Morris (director), The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (New York: Sony Classics, 2003), film.
5. Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (New York: HarperCollins e-books, 2010), 4.
6. Jim Collins, foreword to The Greatest Business Decisions of All Time, by Verne Harnish and the Editors of Fortune (New York: Time Home Entertainment, 2012).
7. A number of authors provide advice on asking effective questions, which I draw on in my own treatment of this topic. See Marilee Goldberg, The Art of the Question (New York: Wiley, 1998), and Michael Marquardt, Leading with Questions (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005). See also Michael Hyatt's “7 Suggestions for Asking More Powerful Questions,” at michaelhyatt.com/asking-more-powerful-questions.html.
8. John McLaughlin, quoted in Bernard T. Ferrari, “The Executive's Guide to Better Listening,” McKinsey Quarterly, February 2012.
9. Jason Zweig, “A Lesson from Buffett: Doubt Yourself,” Money Beat (Wall Street Journal blog), May 5, 2013, blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2013/05/05/a-lesson-from-buffett-doubt-yourself.
10. Michael A. Roberto, Why Great Leaders Don't Take Yes for an Answer: Managing for Conflict and Consensus (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005).
11. Peter Drucker, “Managing Oneself,” Harvard Business Review, January 2005.
12. Anthony Tijan, “Watch Yourself and Learn: How Leaders Become Self-Aware,” HBR Blog Network, July 19, 2012, blogs.hbr.org/2012/07/how-leaders-become-self-aware.
13. See Marshall Goldsmith, What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful (New York: Hyperion, 2007).
14. David Kiley, “Alan Mulally: The Outsider at Ford,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, March 4, 2009.
15. Bryce Hoffman, American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company (New York: Crown Business, 2012).
16. Catmull, “How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity.”
17. Panos Mourdoukoutas, “Why Is Mr. Buffett Inviting a Heretic to Berkshire Hathaway's Annual Shareholder Meeting?” Forbes, May 4, 2013.
18. McKinsey Quarterly staff, “McKinsey Conversations with Global Leaders: Dan Vasella of Novartis,” McKinsey Quarterly, July 2009.
19. Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel, “Blind Spots: The Roots of Unethical Behaviour at Work,” Rotman, Spring 2011, 56.
20. Howard Yu and Joseph L. Bower, “Taking a Deep Dive: What Only a Top Leader Can Do,” Working Paper, Harvard Business School, May 6, 2010.
21. Catmull, “How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity.”
22. Ed Catmull, “Pixar: Keep Your Crises Small,” YouTube video, from a speech at Stanford Business School, recorded January 31, 2007, posted July 28, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc.
23. Drawing on Adélaïde-Édouard le Lièvre de La Grange's aphorism, “When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.”
24. Bernard T. Ferrari, “The Executive's Guide to Better Listening,” McKinsey Quarterly, February 2012.
25. Matthew DiLallo, “What Would Your Replacement Do?,” Motley Fool Blog Network, May 7, 2012, beta.fool.com/latimerburned/2012/05/07/what-would-your-replacement-do/4310.
26. Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science (New York: Picador, 2003).
27. Department of the Army, A Leader's Guide to After-Action Reviews (Training Circular 2520), September 1993, www.acq.osd.mil/dpap/ccap/cc/jcchb/Files/Topical/After_Action_Report/resources/tc25-20.pdf.
28. McKinsey Quarterly staff, “Strategic Decisions: When Can You Trust Your Gut?” (interview with Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein), McKinsey Quarterly, March 2010.
1. Or as novelist Gilbert Chesterton puts it: “It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.”
2. Mark H. Ronald and Robert B. Shaw, “Developing Peripheral Vision,” Leader to Leader 48 (Spring 2008), http://www.hesselbeininstitute.org/knowledgecenter/journal.aspx?ArticleID=718.
3. Joann S. Lublin and Christopher Weaver, “CEO Sought Nod for Romance,” Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2012.
4. Joann S. Lublin, “So You Want to Be CEO: Start Here,” Wall Street Journal, September 16, 2013.
5. Patricia Sellers, “Lessons of the Fall,” Fortune, May 29, 2008.
6. James Manyika, “Google's View on the Future of Business: An Interview with CEO Eric Schmidt,” McKinsey Quarterly, November 2008, 5.
7. Ronald and Shaw, “Developing Peripheral Vision.”
8. Rik Kirkland, “Leading in the 21st Century: An Interview with Carlos Ghosn,” McKinsey Quarterly, September 2012, http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/leading_in_the_21st_century/an_interview_with_carlos_ghosn.
9. Kevin Sharer, “Why I'm a Listener: Amgen CEO Kevin Sharer,” McKinsey Quarterly, April 2012.
10. Shane Snow, “The One Conversational Tool That Will Make You Better at Absolutely Everything,” Fast Company, December 17, 2012.
11. Robert S. Kaplan, “Top Executives Need Feedback—Here's How They Can Get It,” McKinsey Quarterly, September 2011.
12. John Kelly, “NASA's Procedures, Culture Under Fire: Striving for Accountability,” Florida Today, July 7, 2005.
1. Robert S. Kaplan, “Top Executives Need Feedback—Here's How They Can Get It,” McKinsey Quarterly, September 2011.
2. Dan Ciampa was one of the first to write about the skill of leaders in taking advice. See his Taking Advice: How Leaders Get Good Counsel and Use It Wisely (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2006). My treatment of this topic draws on his work, particularly his distinction between types of advice and kinds of advisors.
3. John Baldoni, “Do You Have a Rahm Emanuel on Your Staff?” HBR Blog Network, November 7, 2008.
4. Saj-nicole Joni, “Chairman Rx: The Need for Perspective,” Forbes, October 27, 2006.
5. Michael Watkins, The First 90 Days (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2013).
6. Dominic Barton, Andrew Grant, and Michelle Horn, “Leading in the 21st Century,” McKinsey Quarterly, June 2012.
7. See Herminia Ibarra and Mark Huner, “How Leaders Create and Use Networks,” Harvard Business Review, January 2007. They propose three types of networks: operational, personal, and strategic. Dan Ciampa's model, discussed in Taking Advice, outlines four areas in which advice is needed: strategic, operational, political, and personal.
8. Leslie Kwoh, “Reverse Mentoring Cracks Workplace,” Wall Street Journal, November 28, 2011.
9. “The Great Pepsi Panic,” Newsweek, June 27, 1993.
10. Dakin Campbell and Dawn Kopecki, “Dimon Says JPMorgan Executives ‘Acted Like Children’ on Loss,” Bloomberg News, January 9, 2013, http://www.bloom berg.com/news/2013-01-08/dimon-says-some-jpmorgan-leaders-acted-like-children-on-loss.html.
11. Different consultants use different categories to think about advisors. Dan Ciampa, for example, talks about advisors who are either an expert, experienced, sounding board, or partner. See his Taking Advice: How Leaders Get Good Counsel and Use It Wisely (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2006).
12. Joseph Jimenez, “The CEO of Novartis on Growing After a Patent Cliff,” Harvard Business Review, December 2012.
13. Kaplan, “Top Executives Need Feedback.”
14. See Saj-nicole Joni, The Third Opinion (New York: Portfolio, 2004).
16. Hugh Sidey, “The Lesson John Kennedy Learned from the Bay of Pigs,” Time, April 16, 2001, http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,106537,00.html#ixzz2lmYiJtKi.
17. Michael Bloomberg, Bloomberg on Bloomberg (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2001), 251.
18. Michael Maccoby, “Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons,” Harvard Business Review, January 2004.
1. Jobs noted, “John kept Paul from being a teenybopper and Paul kept John from drifting out into the cosmos,” in Brent Schlender, “Exclusive: New Wisdom from Steve Jobs on Technology, Hollywood, and How Good Management Is Like the Beatles,” Fast Company, April 17, 2012.
2. Jagdish N. Sheth, The Self-Destructive Habits of Good Companies: … and How to Break Them (Philadelphia: Wharton School Publishing, 2007), 70.
3. McKinsey Quarterly staff, “Strategic Decisions: When Can You Trust Your Gut?” (interview with Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein), McKinsey Quarterly, March 2010, http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/strategy/strategic_decisions_when_can_you_trust_your_gut.
4. Hayagreeva Rao, Robert Sutton, and Allen P. Webb, “Innovation Lessons from Pixar: An Interview with Oscar-Winning Director Brad Bird,” McKinsey Quarterly, April 2008.
5. Bill George, “Leadership Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara” (posted on Bill George's website), July 13, 2009, www.billgeorge.org/page/leadership-lessons-from-the-life-of-robert-mcnamara.
6. John Baldoni, “Hire People Who Disagree with You,” HBR Blog Network, July 27, 2009, http://blogs.hbr.org/2009/07/hire-people-who-disagree/.
7. Michael Kruyl, Judy Malan, and Rachel Tuffield, “Three Steps to Building a Better Leadership Team,” McKinsey Quarterly, February 2011, http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/organization/three_steps_to_building_a_better_top_team.
8. David A. Nadler, “Executive Team Effectiveness: Leading at the Top,” in Executive Teams, by David A. Nadler, Janet L. Spencer, and Associates (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997), 21–39; see also David Nadler, “Managing the Team at the Top,” Strategy+Business, January 1, 1996.
9. Michael Hilzik, Dealers of Lightning (New York: HarperCollins e-books, 2009).
10. Robert I. Sutton, “It's Up to You to Start a Good Fight,” HBR Blog Network, August 3, 2010, http://blogs.hbr.org/2010/08/its-up-to-you-to-start-a-good/.
11. McKinsey Quarterly staff, “Strategic Decisions.”
12. McKinsey Quarterly staff, “Strategic Decisions.”
13. Michael A. Roberto, Why Great Leaders Don't Take Yes for an Answer: Managing for Conflict and Consensus (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005).
14. Sutton, “It's Up to You to Start a Good Fight.”
15. George Packer, “Team Effort,” New Yorker, July 5, 2010.
16. Jim Collins, foreword to The Greatest Business Decisions of All Time, by Verne Harnish and the editors of Fortune (New York: Time Home Entertainment, 2012).
17. Martin Sorrell, Randy Komisar, and Anne Mulcahy, “How We Do It: Three Executives Reflect on Strategic Decision Making,” McKinsey Quarterly, March 2010.
1. Business Lessons from American Express CEO Ken Chenault, Kissmetrics, a blog about analytics, marketing, and testing, May 2013, http://blog.kissmetrics.com/lessons-from-ken-chenault/.
2. Stefan Stern, “Should Your Next CEO Be an Inside Outsider?” HBR Blog Network, December 3, 2012, http://blogs.hbr.org/2012/12/should-your-next-ceo-be-an-insid/
3. This comment by Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite, is quoted in Quentin Hardy, “Young Tech Sees Itself in Microsoft's Ballmer,” New York Times, August 25, 2013.
4. Alexandra Wolfe, “Howard Schultz: What Next, Starbucks?” Wall Street Journal, September 27, 2013.
5. Danielle Sacks, “How Jenna Lyons Transformed J. Crew into a Cult Brand,” Fast Company, May 2013.
6. Interview with Sandy Weil on CNBC's Squawk Box, September 10, 2013.
7. In brief, the research found that people's expectations of those in positions of authority (students' views of teachers in these studies) affect performance, an outcome some call a reverse Pygmalion effect. See, for example, Robert S. Feldman and Thomas Prohaska, “The Student as Pygmalion: Effect of Student Expectation on the Teacher,” Journal of Educational Psychology 71, no. 4 (1979): 485–493.
8. W. B. Swann Jr., “To Be Adored or to Be Known: The Interplay of Self-Enhancement and Self-Verification,” in Foundations of Social Behavior, ed. R. M. Sorrentino and E. T. Higgins, vol. 2 (New York: Guilford Press, 1990), 408–448.
9. Marshall Goldsmith, What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful (New York: Hyperion, 2007), 111.
10. See Kathy Caprino, “Busting the Myth That Women Aren't as Ambitious as Men,” Forbes, November 28, 2011, and Sheryl Sanberg, “Now Is Our Time,” Harvard Business Review, April 2013.
11. McKinsey Quarterly staff, “Strategic Decisions: When Can You Trust Your Gut?” (interview with Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein), McKinsey Quarterly, March 2010.
12. McKinsey Quarterly staff, “Strategic Decisions,” 6.
13. Thomas Fuller observed, centuries ago, that “great and good are seldom the same man.”
14. Robert I. Sutton takes a contrary view of Steve Jobs; see The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't (New York: Business Plus, 2010).
15. For a provocative articulation of this point, see Kevin Dutton, The Wisdom of Psychopaths (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).