Management, Leadership, and Mark Hurd: Why Top Teams are More Important than Individual CEOs

My last posts here and at Harvard Business Review were about the unintended dangers of the distinction between leadership and management.  I argued that leadership is too often over-glorified and management is too often under-appreciated, which results in management being treated as a second class activity.  The discussion these posts provoked, a total of about 30 comments in total, yielded great examples and details.  I especially liked Rick's statement that "there is an ebb and flow in what is required, the mix of leadership (inspiration) and management (perspiration) which best matches the in-the-moment need of the entity which is being managed and led." Good stuff. This very consistent with the notion that the best bosses are in tune with others, and skilled at making the right adjustments in response. 

I was thinking about all this when I read a fascinating editorial by Joe Nocera in The New York Times about the Mark Hurd story,  where he makes the argument that perhaps HP wanted to get rid of Hurd for other reasons, and used sex/misuse of funds scandal as an excuse. The editorial contained a lot of quotes from ex-HP executive Chuck House (an amazing guy, once given an award by David Packard for "Exceptional Defiance and Contempt Beyond the Usual Call of Engineering").   It ended with this assertion:

What H.P. needs in its next leader, Mr. House told me, is “someone with Carly’s strategic sense, Mark’s operational skills, and Lew’s emotional intelligence.” (Lewis E. Platt preceded Ms. Fiorina as C.E.O.)

Nocera described this as a tall order but not an impossible one.  My first reaction was, well, it is impossible, no one boss can do that.  My second reaction OH it is possible -- so long as we make some different assumptions.  In Chuck's quote, and in some of the ways I was talking about connecting management to leadership, there was an implicit and I think inaccurate assumption that there are single magical leaders who can do everything.  This is called the romance of leadership, something researchers have studied a lot and I write about in Good Boss, Bad Boss.  The best bosses --and the best companies, including the best boards -- don't fall prey to this cognitive error and look for an all powerful and flawless CEO who can do everything. Rather they look for a boss who can build and properly lead a team with the right range and balance of skills.  Note that Carly's inability to delegate operations to others and try to do too much of it herself is one reason she lost her job.  And if Nocera is right, HP's emerging troubles with innovation and morale are things that were not being handled well enough by his team.

The upshot of all this is that the best bosses aren't all powerful and all knowing, but by understanding their own limits and developing the wisdom to rely on others who can compensate for them, they can have a team that applies the right blend of management and leadership skills to achieve greatness.  This is one of the reasons that I emphasize wisdom so much in Good Boss, Bad Boss, which includes the ability to recognize one's weaknesses and blind spots and find ways to dampen or reverse the negative effects.  You can see this quality in some of the greatest companies of our time, at Pixar under Ed Catmull, P&G under AG Lafley, and it appears, at Apple with the blend of Steve Jobs visionary brilliance and Tim Cook's operational excellence.  Indeed, I think Job's deserves more credit than he gets for building a team that compensates for his weaknesses.

In the case of HP, I don't think it is possible to find the one superwoman or superman that Nocera and Chuck House hope might exist.  But I do believe it is possible to find a CEO with skill and wisdom to build a team with Carly's strategic ability, Hurd's operational skill, and Lew's EQ.  As a final note, when you take this perspective on leadership as team sport -- which is especially crucial in a big company -- you can see why academics have become increasingly convinced that the dynamics of top teams have such strong effects on performance, probably stronger than the characteristics and actions of the CEO alone.

Comments

[Matt_solis]

It’s easier to work towards your own interests than working together as a group to solve a problem. It's even harder to unite other countries with different global agendas towards a common goal.

There's a lot of thought provoking video clips regarding complexity and how global problems become almost impossible to solve on a Facebook community page
http://www.facebook.com/thewatchmansrattle

Why do we have a tendency to fight one another when we know sharing results in the most optimum outcome for everyone? Why does our biology cause us to hurt the ones we love, hoard resources and compete with one another?

Heres the link to the video
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1493017207106

[Matt_solis]

The individual is smart and insightful.

Humans in groups are dumb, act under peer pressure and towards social conformity.

Without great leadership, people in groups are stupid, violent, competitive and selfish. And only if those groups of people are listening to good advice from their leaders or role models.

[Joseph Lira]

I like this post and agree with it, good managers are led by their objectives and the common good, I believe the balanced Scorecard discussed by Kaplan is a valuable tool for this kind of managers (the alignment), great post,
I will tell my friends about it.

[Wally Bock]

Congratulations! This post was selected as one of the five best independent business blog posts of the week in my Three Star Leadership Midweek Review of the Business Blogs.

http://blog.threestarleadership.com/2010/08/18/81810-midweek-look-at-the-independent-business-blogs.aspx

Wally Bock

[Wally Bock]

Thanks for highlighting Joe Nocera's column and for adding other details and thoughts, Bob. There's a lot here to chew on.

No matter what size team you lead, you've got two objectives. You must accomplish the mission. And you must care for your people. To add a challenge, you also have to consider both the present and the future.

Managers like Mark Hurd concentrate on accomplishing the mission in the present and precious little else. One reason that they act that way is that the rewards are stacked that way. The big rewards and Fortune covers go to CEOs whose companies deliver a success of excellent financial results measured quarter by quarter.

Neither my father nor my mother were especially interested in business. So one day when I was visiting them and we were watching TV news, my mother turned to me and ask, "Why do they call it the 'Business Report' when it's only about the stock market?"

That's a good question for all of us today when we consider performance and compensation. Is business only about the stock market or is it something more?

[Jeff Shattuck]

Bob,

Just getting to know your blog, love it.

A few thoughts:

Why is Carly Fiorina seen as "strategic"? I mean, creating consolidation through an acquisition hardly seems strategic. What else did she do?

And Hurd, I agree with Michael Webster, Hurd was Chainsaw Al reborn, at least from everything I've read and from conversations I've had with HPeople.

Last, on the whole management vs. leadership debate, I guess I would just say that leaders lead managers and sometime you want a big vision dude (Larry Ellison, Lou Gerstner, Jeff Bezos, Reed Hastings) while other times you want a operational wonk (Jack Welch, whoever runs P&G, maybe the guy who runs Flextronics). To try to blend the two into one person, however, is a fool's game, you are very, very right on that.

Personally, I think HP needs the visions thing right now. There is no sense of excitement around the company, it is a slow, slog toward higher earnings and where is the fun in that? Honestly, it kills me to see what has happened to HP in terms of its soul. Sure, it's more competitive now but what will sustain it?

Jeff

[Rodney Johnson]

Doesn't this simply go back to the notion that leaders need to surround themselves with people that are smarter than themselves?

Can't managers be as bright, charasmatic... as the leader?

In many respects, strong managers are probably more indispensable than a strong leader. However when strong leaders are surrounded by mediocre managers, this is not the case.

[corey j. tronchin]

Hp need to find a leader which can provide collective action opportunities to revive the culture of their company.
That's the only way management will prosper a whole new agenda with intrinsic motivation as one entity.

[michael webster]

Bob;

Isn't this the Al Dunlop model all over again?

Steal from the short term future to make the present look better.