Larry Bossidy on Leadership
In his book, Execution, Larry Bossidy mentions that Leadership is not about strategizing and creating vision then dispensing it on managers to do the grunt work. Leadership is not about presiding. Leadership is about being actively involved in the business.
Joe and Wanda?
Joe Kerr: Nonsense! Bossidy ignores the enormous difference between managers and leaders. When I first started, I was a task master, and a perfectly good one. I’ve evolved over the years to become more of a creative thinker. Let me give you an example. Yesterday one of my guys told me that we were out of plastic forks in the break room and that Sam, the gal that normally does the ordering, was out of the office. “Green Manager Joe” would have probably had his admin dial Sam’s manager to get some other gal do the needful. Problem solved. A perfectly reasonable approach and solution for a rookie earning his stripes.
What did “Seasoned Leader Joe” do instead? Well, it’s natural for me to look outside the box. It’s an instinct at this point in my career. I looked at the big picture. I said to myself. How many boxes of these things do we go through in a month and how much is it setting us back? We have a couple dozen break rooms in our 4 locations and they probably go through forks like butter. I decided to start a pilot program to have the employees bring in their own forks from home. I had my admin send out an email to the masses. That’s all it took to implement. Then I added it to the agenda for our next leadership meeting. If the pilot is successful, which I have no doubt it will be, we can roll it out across the region. We’ll be saving some much needed cash, and we’ll never run out of forks again!
Wanda B. Goode: It seems as managers climb the ladder of success (some only a rung or two), they tend to forget their role. They like to think of themselves as these grand, exalted cerebral thinkers that are above the tasks of mere managers, to include supporting the people in their organizations and getting things done. Anecdotal evidence indicates that it must be easy to fall into this trap.
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Comments
Comment from Administrator
Time: November 3, 2009, 11:04 pm
Joe is not much for reading. He attended the school of hard knocks.
Comment from body shapers
Time: November 27, 2009, 2:41 pm
Leadership is about guiding the herd through tough times. It means being a living examples to your subordinates too.
Comment from Administrator
Time: November 28, 2009, 11:02 pm
Amen.
Comment from Burr coffee grinders
Time: January 9, 2010, 5:39 pm
Larry Bossidy is clearly a five-star leader, and Ram Charan is a gifted consultant and teacher. It surprised me that their book didn’t work as well as I had hoped.
Execution’s title confused me. Hopefully, you won’t have that problem. I thought Execution would be all about how to take a strategy and operating plan and implement them well. Instead, Part III makes it clear that Execution is about meeting overall financial objectives through being an effective organization in setting strategies and operating plans to serve customers well while building an organization that can implement the plans for outperforming competitors. Part I, by contrast, makes it sound like Execution is only about implementation, noting that almost all organizations have the same strategies (or can quickly get them from consultants), access the same top talent and can easily acquire and employ competitively effective innovation.
Comment from Administrator
Time: January 10, 2010, 9:45 pm
Good point. I think it all depends the interpretation of execution. I did enjoy
“Execution” overall and was pleased that the focus was on getting things done and holding people accountable for doing so.
Comment from faheem
Time: November 3, 2009, 8:51 am
Hi Joe, did you read the book????