Discover Your True North (eBook)

Bill George (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2015 | 1. Auflage
320 Seiten
Wiley (Verlag)
978-1-119-08295-8 (ISBN)

Infos

One of the 25 Best Leadership Books of All-Time. Soundview The Leadership Classic, Discover Your True North, expanded for today's leaders Discover Your True North is the best-selling leadership classic that enables you to become an authentic leader by discovering your True North. Originally based on first-person interviews with 125 leaders, this book instantly became a must-read business classic when it was introduced in 2007. Now expanded and updated to introduce 48 new leaders and new learning about authentic global leaders, this revisited classic includes more diverse, global, and contemporary leaders of all ages. New case studies include Warren Buffett, Indra Nooyi, Arianna Huffington, Jack Ma, Paul Polman, Mike Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg, and many others. Alongside these studies, former Medtronic CEO Bill George continues to share his personal stories and his wisdom by describing how you can become the leader you want to be, with helpful exercises included throughout the book. Being a leader is about much more than title and management skills it's fundamentally a question of who we are as human beings. Discover Your True North offers a concrete and comprehensive program for becoming an authentic leader, and shows how to chart your path to leadership success. Once you discover the purpose of your leadership, you'll find the true leader inside you. This book shows you how to use your natural leadership abilities to inspire and empower others to excellence in today's complex global world. Discover Your True North enables you to become the leader you were born to be, and stay on track of your True North.

Autor

BILL GEORGE, former CEO of Medtronic, is a Senior Fellow at Harvard Business School (HBS), where he teaches leadership in executive education programs. He was professor of management practice from 2004 to 2014. He is the author of four bestselling books: Authentic Leadership, True North, Finding Your True North, and 7 Lessons for Leading in Crisis, and coauthor of True North Groups with Doug Baker. He serves on the boards of Goldman Sachs, Mayo Clinic, and World Economic Forum, and has served on the board of ExxonMobil, Novartis, and Target. Start your own journey to discover your True North at www.DiscoverYourTrueNorth.org.

Inhalt

Preface The Remarkable Legacy of Warren Bennis vii

Foreword David Gergen xi

Introduction 1

Part One: Your Journey to Leadership 13

1. Your Life Story 15

Lead Story: Howard Schultz, Chair and CEO of Starbucks

2. Losing Your Way 41

Lead Story: Rajat Gupta, Worldwide Managing Director of McKinsey

3. Crucibles 57

Lead Story: Daniel Vasella, Chair and CEO of Novartis

Part Two: Developing as an Authentic Leader 77

4. Self-Awareness 79

Lead Story: Arianna Huffington, Founder of The Huffington Post

5. Values 103

Lead Story: David Gergen, Harvard Professor and Presidential Advisor

6. Sweet Spot 123

Lead Story: Warren Buffett, Founder and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway

7. Support Team 142

Lead Story: Tad Piper, Chair and CEO of Piper Jaffray

8. Integrated Life 159

Lead Story: John Donahoe, CEO of eBay

Part Three: Your True North Meets the World 179

9. I to We 181

Lead Story: Nelson Mandela, President of South Africa

10. Purpose 199

Lead Story: Ken Frazier, Chair and CEO of Merck

11. Empowerment 219

Lead Story: Anne Mulcahy, Chair and CEO of Xerox

12. Global Leadership 243

Lead Story: Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever

Afterword Stakeholders in Society 265

Lead Story: Jack Ma, Founder of Alibaba

New Leaders Featured in Discover Your True North 275

Participants from the Original Research for True North 277

Where Are They Now? 279

References 287

About the Author 293

Acknowledgments 295

Index 297

Textauszug

Introduction

Have you discovered your True North? Do you know what your life and your leadership are all about?

Leadership starts with being authentic, the genuine you. The purpose of Discover Your True North is to enable you to become the leader you want to be. In the process you will discover your True North—the internal compass that guides you successfully through life.

Your True North

True North is your orienting point—your fixed point in a spinning world—that helps you stay on track as a leader. It is derived from your most deeply held beliefs, your values, and the principles you lead by. It is your internal compass, unique to you, that represents who you are at your deepest level.

Just as a compass needle points toward a magnetic pole, your True North pulls you toward the purpose of your leadership. When you follow your internal compass, your leadership will be authentic, and people will naturally want to associate with you. Although others may guide or influence you, your truth is derived from your life story. As Warren Bennis said, “You are the author of your life.”

Discovering your True North takes a lifetime of commitment and learning. As you are tested in the world, you yearn to look at yourself in the mirror and respect the person you see and the life you are leading. Some days will be better than others, but as long as you are true to who you are, you can cope with the most difficult circumstances life presents.

The world may have very different expectations for you than you have for yourself. Whether you are leading a small team or at the top of an organization, you will be pressured by external forces to respond to their needs and seduced by rewards for fulfilling those needs. These pressures and seductions may cause you to detour from your True North. When you get too far off course, your internal compass tells you something is wrong and you need to reorient yourself. It requires courage and resolve to resist the constant pressures and expectations confronting you and to take corrective action when necessary.

As CEO of Sara Lee Brenda Barnes said, “The most important thing about leadership is your character and the values that guide your life.” She added:

If you are guided by an internal compass that represents your character and values, you're going to be fine. Let your values guide your actions and don't ever lose your internal compass. Everything isn't black or white. There are a lot of gray areas in business.

When you discover your True North, you find coherence between your life story and your leadership. A century ago psychologist William James wrote:

I have often thought that the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which…he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: “This is the real me!”

Can you recall a time when you felt most intensely alive and could say with confidence, “This is the real me”? Professionally, I had that feeling from the first time I walked into Medtronic in 1989 and joined a group of talented people dedicated to the mission to “alleviate pain, restore health, and extend life.” I felt I could be myself and be appreciated for who I was and what I could contribute. I sensed immediately that my values aligned with the organization's values.

The Rise of Authentic Leaders

When I wrote Authentic Leadership in 2003, the most common question I received was “What do you mean by authenticity?” To me, being authentic was the natural way of leading, but many people in that era of charismatic leaders considered leading authentically a new idea.

Today authenticity is seen as the gold standard for leadership. No longer is leadership about developing charisma, emulating other leaders, looking good externally, and acting in one's self-interest, as was so often the case in the late twentieth century. Nor should leadership be conflated with your leadership style, managerial skills, or competencies. These capabilities are very important, but they are the outward manifestation of who you are as a person. You cannot fake it to make it, because people sense intuitively whether you are genuine.

The hierarchical, directive leadership style so prevalent in the past century is fading fast in favor of today's collaborative leaders, who believe in distributed leadership at all levels. The old notion of leaders as the smartest guys in the room—as Enron CEO Jeff Skilling typified—has been replaced by leaders with high levels of emotional intelligence (EQ).

Because of this move toward greater authenticity, we are blessed with much higher caliber leaders today. In discovering their True North, they have committed to leading with purpose to make a difference in the world and leave behind lasting legacies. The quality of today's leaders is reflected in the lasting results they are achieving within their organizations.

For this all-new edition, my colleague Zach Clayton and I interviewed and studied 47 authentic leaders that represent the diversity of the new generation of global leaders—among them, Unilever's Paul Polman, PepsiCo's Indra Nooyi, Alibaba's Jack Ma, the Huffington Post's Arianna Huffington, Merck's Ken Frazier, and Sojourners' Jim Wallis.

Before writing True North in 2007, our research team of Peter Sims, Diana Mayer, Andrew McLean, and I set out to get definitive answers to the question of how to develop authentic leaders. We interviewed 125 authentic leaders to learn the secrets of their leadership. This research constitutes the largest in-depth study ever undertaken on how business leaders develop.

We circled back to most of the leaders interviewed for the first edition to get updated on their progress as leaders. Much to our pleasure, we found that the vast majority of them are doing exceptionally well. Some have moved to new positions, some have retired from their organizations and taken on new challenges, but almost all of them continue to make vital contributions to business and society. Only a handful have failed.

In Discover Your True North, we retain the structure of the first edition, but go much deeper into what we have learned about leadership in the past decade. It includes many insights that my Harvard Business School colleagues and I, as well as practitioners and scholars around the world, have learned about leaders: how they discovered their True North, developed as authentic leaders, became global leaders, and stayed on the course of their True North throughout their lifetimes.

Although the 47 new leaders included in Discover Your True North are more international and more diverse than the first group, their stories and beliefs about leadership showed a high level of congruence with the earlier interviewees. (The back of the book contains the list of interviewees for this updated edition.)

Rather than waiting to get to the top to become leaders, they looked for every opportunity to lead and to develop themselves. Every one of them faced trials, some of them severe. Many cited these experiences, along with the people who helped them develop, as primary reasons for their success. Without exception, these leaders believed being authentic made them more effective and successful.

As the result of our research into these leaders, we have a clearer understanding of what constitutes an effective and authentic leader. We know that each leader is unique, just as each human being is. The reality is that no one can be authentic by trying to be like someone else. You can learn from others' experiences, but you cannot be successful trying to be like them. People will only trust you when you are genuine and authentic.

If you create a false persona or wear a mask, people will quickly see through you. As Reatha Clark King, chair of the National Association of Corporate Directors, said:

If you're aiming to be like somebody else, you're being a copycat because you think that's what people want you to do. You'll never be a star with that kind of thinking. But you might be a star—unreplicable—by following your passion.

Amgen chairman and CEO Kevin Sharer, who gained priceless experience at the beginning of his career by working as Jack Welch's assistant, saw the downside of General Electric's cult of personality in those days. “Everyone wanted to be like Jack,” he explained. “Leadership has many voices. You need to be who you are, not try to emulate somebody else.”

The Leadership Transformation

What has caused this dramatic change in today's leaders?

As CEO of Medtronic in the 1990s, I witnessed firsthand many corporations choose the wrong people as CEO. Under pressure from Wall Street to maximize short-term earnings, boards of directors frequently selected leaders for their image, style, and charisma rather than their substance and character. Many of these leaders put their companies at risk by focusing on the trappings and spoils of leadership instead of building their organizations for the long term. When those who failed walked away with enormous financial settlements, confidence in business leaders further eroded.

These stock market pressures boomeranged in the...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 10.7.2015
• Vorwort: David Gergen
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Unternehmensführung / Management
• Schlagworte: Business & Management • Führung • Führung • Management f. Führungskräfte • Management f. Führungskräfte • Management / Leadership • Wirtschaft u. Management
• ISBN-10: 1-119-08295-1 / 1119082951
• ISBN-13: 978-1-119-08295-8 / 9781119082958