AN INTERVIEW WITH JAMES O’TOOLE
11/16/04
Q: I didn’t know as much about you as I know now when I first asked you to join me on this interview. Mainly what I had focused on was your more recent work, but I discovered that you are a Rhodes Scholar and your Ph.D. at Oxford was in Social Anthropology. How did you get from that to being one of the leading gurus, if you will, on leadership?
A: In the early 70’s, for a brief period of time, business schools were really reaching out to people from different disciplines. It was a golden age for business schools because they were the centers for multi-disciplinary and cross- disciplinary research and teaching. Actually, we even had two anthropologists in the same department at the U.S.C. b-school. We also had people who were philosophers, psychologists, economists and engineers. It was a great mix. It doesn’t work that way today in business schools, unfortunately, but it was well worth it to have been part of it in the 70’s and 80’s.
Q: What do you think caused the shift back?
A: Overspecialization and the constant narrowing that occur in departmentalization, and which has been occurring for years in higher education.
Q: And you yourself left a full-time position at U.S.C. about 1994?
A: Yes, I went to the Aspen Institute for a few years where I ran their leadership seminars.
Q: And this was for corporate leaders?
A: Yes.
Q: Could you tell us a little about that? What kind of programs were you doing, for example?
A: Since 1951, Aspen has had something called The Executive Seminar, which had been the leading leadership preparation for top managers of Fortune 500 companies from about 1951. I had been associated with that program for about 20 years. I ran it for three or four. It isn’t just for business people, although business people pay for it. Seminars include leaders from government and the non-profit sector who take part, as well.
Q: You have some experience in government, I understand. I don’t know what year this must have been, but when you were the Director of Field Investigations for the Nixon Commission on Campus Unrest, it was probably during the years when I was a graduate student at Berkeley.
A: That was 1969 – 1970. In early ‘70 I went to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare where I was the executive director of a study called, “Work in America.”
Q: Right, under Elliot Richardson?
A: Yes. And my colleagues and I at USC are actually repeating that study, doing a 30th year anniversary revisit of Work in America.
Q: You’ve published quite a bit and some of the titles that I’ve been most familiar with have been Vanguard Management, Leading Change and Leadership A to Z and more recently, an article or chapter in the book, The Future of Leadership that was edited by Warren Bennis and Gretchen Spritzer and Tom Cummings. I was looking for a pattern and a theme because it seemed that you moved from focusing on how to support, and develop leaders into changing the whole concept of leadership. How would you summarize that transition, that path that you’ve been on?
A: I view myself as an educator, and so the development of leaders is at the core of what I do. I think that it is the responsibility of someone who’s involved in the education of leaders to develop and educate the right kind of leaders. You develop them to be people who can make an important social contribution because, after all, one can be an effective leader and be a monster.
We have had, in the 20th Century, numerous examples of people who were very effective, but not very nice people and who did a lot of harm--even in the corporate sector. There are many people who have been effective, but have harmed people who worked for them, harmed their companies, and harmed society. So the issue I have wrestled with is how can you make people not only effective, but also ethical human beings – people who are serving a higher moral purpose? I don’t believe that I have changed all that much in my focus. I’m just constantly trying to find new ways of doing that, and new ways of defining what ethical and moral leadership amount to.
Q: It seems to me with the mix of backgrounds that you bring that you’re a natural from an integral perspective, if I may say so. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to look at any of the work I’ve done or not before this.
A: Yes.
Q: Okay, so you have at least a sense of what I mean by an integral perspective or an integrally formed point of view. It has to do with addressing both the internal and behavioral aspects of the individual, as well as the cultural and systemic in the systems that they’re a part. It seems to me that that’s what your work is about. You bring that cultural perspective. You’re concerned about what’s going on for the individual, both internally and in their behaviors, and the systemic supports for effective leadership in organizations.
A: I think that I have accentuated the latter. Being an anthropologist, and not a psychologist, by training, I have focused on the cultural and social organizational milieu in which leaders operate. I have recognized that people are both individuals and members of groups. As individuals there are social pressures on people to misbehave (or behave in ineffective ways) and there are personal motives and reasons why leaders misbehave (or behave in ineffective ways).
The personal motives that I have been most concerned with have to do with ethical questions. Some people are greedy and want money. Others want power. Or they want influence over people, or they are just plain egotistical in terms of enjoying the perks of power where people pay obeisance and respect to a leader by virtue of their position. So, some things that get in the way of great leadership are personal. Indeed, in almost every case in corporate America that where businesses have gone wrong it has been because the ego of the leader is out of control. Or, it is because of internal power struggles or external pressures to respond to unnatural demands for short-term profits and the like. So, I think that there are both personal and public factors. But, being an anthropologist, I’m most comfortable speaking about the external and systemic organizational issues.
Q: That’s really the point of the chapter, “When Leadership is an Organization Trait” in the Future of Leadership. You make reference to a database that you’ve been developing. Is that a project that’s still underway and what is the status of it?
A: Actually, Booz•Allen & Hamilton owns the database. We were up to about 3,000 or 4,000 people in the database as of about a year and a half ago. I don’t know exactly where that stands right now, but we had sufficient numbers of leaders to draw conclusions that had some validity. They were from about 10 different companies in different countries. We had leaders from India, Korea, France, Japan, as well as the United States, in the sample. Because we had a good international sample, the database had more than the narrow validity of looking at a small number of people in one company.
Q: One thing from your writing is the idea that the focus on the heroic notion of leadership is destructive. Would you care to comment on that?
A: I don’t use the word ‘heroic,’ but I think it is dangerous to focus on leadership as an individual trait. It is also based on the fiction that in any one organization there is a ‘leader,’ the person who is at the top of the organization. I think, in fact, when you look at the greatest leaders they were always surrounded by a group of other outstanding leaders. These other people were every bit as responsible for the success of the organization, movement, company, or country as was the one leader at the top.
You can start with Jesus Christ. Christianity would not have survived if it had not been for his disciples, who were pretty good leaders themselves. You can move forward to the founders of this country and see that there wasn’t just one, there wasn’t just Washington. There were about a half dozen people around him who were almost as effective and as important as Washington was in terms of founding the country. When you look at the Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr., it wasn’t just King. There was also Andy Young, Ralph Abernathy, Jesse Jackson, and about a half dozen other people who were like a ‘Who’s Who’ of African American leaders. They were all working very, very closely with King.
And it’s also true when you look at corporations. The first corporation that I dealt with in the sense of digging into and observing it was Motorola in the early 1980s. If you read the newspapers at the time, Motorola was all Bob Galvin. In fact, when you talked to Galvin you saw that the kind of leadership that he practiced was based on sharing of power. He tried to surround himself with people who were more talented and smarter than he was so that the company wouldn’t be limited by his own abilities. It was never about him. It was always about the company. It was about building the leadership capacity of Motorola. You can talk about literally dozens of people at Motorola who legitimately can be credited with the success of that company starting in the late 70’s and throughout the 80’s during Galvin’s time there.
The same can be said about almost every other major corporation in the U.S. If you look at the great turnaround at Ford at the time of team Taurus, and if you interview the people inside Ford and ask who was responsible, they’ll cite about a half dozen leaders. The more you push you would find that leadership went down to the plant level. It wasn’t just at the very top.
I think that it is always overly simplified to talk about leadership as an individual trait. Whenever you dig into the organization, you find that many people being leaders.
Q: It’s really not just one individual; it’s collections of individuals. But they don’t act without of a context. There’s a context that I think you would say is very important, is that right?
A: Yes. You have to have the right culture, the right systems, the right processes, and the right rewards, everything in place so that all of those leaders can be effective. There are many organizations in which there are potential leaders, people who could be making a tremendous difference. But their hands are tied because they don’t have the authority. They don’t have the information. They don’t have the resources needed to be effective.
So, it isn’t just a question of having the talent on board, or even the willingness to lead. There also has to be the opportunity. The opportunity is really the environment in which you’re working, the organization or the system, depending whatever word you’re most comfortable with. But in the research that we did with Booz•Allen we looked at the various aspects in the system, one of the most important of which is rewards. If people are not rewarded for doing things to help advance the organization, or if they’re rewarded for the wrong things, there will be forces of misdirection or obstacles that prevent people from exerting initiative in terms of their own leadership.
Almost all of these major systems have to be consistent, or aligned. One of the real values of anthropology, or at least the social anthropology in which I was trained, is that it views organizations as systems, as complex wholes, all parts of which need to be mutually reinforcing if the overall system is to be effective. What you often get in business organizations is that some of those systems will be aligned, but some aren’t. So people get mixed signals, or they actually have obstacles thrown in their path even though they may be clearly told by the leader, “Here’s what we want to do.” But when they try to do it, they can’t because the systems aren’t aligned.
Q: What does it take to align the systems?
A: If you’re lucky, you inherit it as the organization builds under an entrepreneur or from the ground up organically. Things will fall into place just through trial and error; but most organizations don’t develop that way. They are designed or redesigned by individuals who make mistakes. So I think the first thing that has to happen is that leaders, and I say plural leaders, have to be conscious of the fact that they have systems that need to be aligned. They have to start measuring the systems and start thinking about them consciously.
There are very, very few leaders who are capable of consciously thinking about all the systems that need alignment. They tend to think about them piecemeal, responding as problems arise. So they work on them one at a time, rather than seeing how they all mutually interact with each other. Admittedly, that’s a very difficult thing to do. People are not trained to deal with a dozen variables in their heads at one time. Some people can think systemically like that, but for most of us, it’s a real stretch. We have to keep reminding ourselves to go back and to check when we start tinkering with one part of the system to make sure that it is going to line up with the other parts.
Q: In a way, what you’re speaking about now is the kind of behavior and organizational coherence that you focus on. You also talk about behavior and organizational agility. Do you want to comment on that?
A: Well, there is a lot of work in the last couple of years that shows that organizations have to be both aligned and adaptive. You have to have coherence, but at the same time an organizations needs the ability to innovate. People talk about such organizations as being ambidextrous. That’s hard to achieve because the more you try to get things aligned, the more you are viewed as limiting people’s options, their freedom and ability to take risks and to try new things. On the other hand, the more you encourage people to try new things, to take risks and to be innovative and entrepreneurial, the more it looks like you’re breaking down the coherence or the structure of the organization. In fact, great leaders are able to do both at the same time. Again, to be able to do that requires a leader to be conscious about doing so. One needs to be able to understand how to build an organization that has a coherent structure and, at the same time, encourages healthy innovation, entrepreneurial behavior, and risk-taking.
The person who is probably best at that in American corporate history was Bill Gore, CEO of W.L. Gore and Associates, makers of Gore-Tex. He was one of the few business leaders who I’ve ever read about who consciously—and what I mean by consciously is every single day in his life––thought about the issues of structure: How to structure his people in a way that would encourage them to be innovative, but innovative in an effective way that advanced the organization’s goals. Most business people are not organizationally creative in that way. Gore was really an exception. Not only did he think about it, he was successful at doing what he set out to do.
Q: While he had the focus on what needed to be done, rather than looking to himself to do it, he built a cadre of leaders around him who could help him accomplish that?
A: He not only built a cadre of leaders, he created a system in which they could succeed. That system was very consciously built. He saw that if you have people in large groups, they tend to become bureaucratic. So even though he had 10,000 employees, he tried to keep them in groups of 100 or maybe 200 at most so that they could be self managing. They could all know each other. They could behave as teams and not feel that they were lost in a large bureaucracy. When you start breaking up 10,000 people into groups of 100 or 200, you can create quite a managerial headache for yourself in terms of control. Gore’s genius was that he was able to focus the efforts of those people while at the same time giving them an incredible amount of freedom.
I don’t know if you know the work of E.F. Schumacher, who wrote Small is Beautiful. Schumacher says that the effective leader is like a balloon man who is holding onto the strings of a bunch of helium-filled balloons. You have seen them at circuses: They’ll be holding as many as 50 or a 100 really big balloons, each filled with helium and ready to float away. The total control the balloon man has is exerted simply by holding the strings the bottom. To Schumacher, that was the kind of leadership that one wants. You want all your people to be free to bounce around on their own, but nonetheless to be tethered to the organization in a positive way so they just don’t float off and become lost. I think that that’s what Bill Gore accomplished.
Q: Many commentators talk about what has happened in the last twenty years in American business in terms of the kinds of things that used to historically tether people to businesses where lifetime employment was the norm, or at least career time employment was the norm. There has been a shift to organizations like Apple saying you are not here for the long term as well as all reengineering, downsizing and all the actions related to that. What is the leadership challenge in the face of the kinds of systemic changes that have been taking place in American business culture?
A: I agree with you 100%. A main theme of the new study of Work in America that we’re doing, “The New American Workplace,” is exactly the issue you have identified: How can leaders go about creating a sense of community that will hold people together and give them the sense of commitment that was destroyed in many companies and industries in the 1990’s?
Of course, you can say that there is now a new employment contract that reads: “Come to work for us on a temporary, part-time, or short time basis, and we’ll give you training and pay you well, but there will be no long-term relationship.” That sounds well and good, but it broke down around 2000-2001. Now, I think most corporate executives, at least those who are paying attention, understand that they went far too far in destroying the sense of community that held people together and created commitment to task. In our study we are looking at ways that sense of community can be recreated. I wish I could tell you more, but the research is in progress.
Q: Maybe we could at least talk a little bit about some of the assumptions underlying this line of thinking. There may be a set of values and longing to cling to the past on the part of those who think having a strong corporate culture, the systems for organizational memory and knowledge perpetuation and so forth, is important. In the face of globalization and the challenges of business in the world today it means that we can’t cling to those old models. What would you say to that?
A: If you went to Silicon Valley in the 1990’s and you used words like “commitment, security, community,” they would laugh at you. They would say you were old fashioned and fuddy-duddy. But all you have to do is just look at the performance of those companies over the last four years. Few are doing very well. If you look inside them now, the ones doing well are trying to find ways to create the community, loyalty, and a sense of security among their people that they pooh-poohed just yesterday.
In essence, in the 90’s it was assumed that we were living in a completely new world in which human nature and the nature of organizations had changed thanks to the technological breakthroughs of the computer age. The people in Silicon Valley were saying, “Oh, it’s a new world. Human nature has changed, everything has changed, and nothing that was in the past will ever be the same again.” Their problem was that they were either self-centered or unaware of the resilience of human nature that has not changed over thousands of years. Just because they quickly came up with a new device, a new machine, doesn’t mean people can change that fast. It is starting to dawn on the brighter of the leaders in Silicon Valley that they oversold the human extent of their technological revolution.
If you read the things Bill Gates said in the early 90’s, and compare it to what he is saying now, the difference is night and day. When he was younger he said a lot of silly things about organizations, people, and technology, about what people wanted and the way the world was changing. He made embarrassing predictions about life in the near future. He’s backed off of them, to his credit. He now admits he was naïve to think that the largest facing the world are purely technological. I think he now sees the broader social and political context in which he has to work. He’s become a lot wiser as a result of growing older and gaining some experience. Unfortunately, there are some people in Silicon Valley who still are talking about the “gee whiz” stuff—how the world is a new place and nothing anybody ever said, or did, or learned in the past has any relevance. That’s just silly.
Q: Maybe we’ll expect a new book from Bill Gates.
A: Well, he knows more about doing good than he does about writing profound things. That’s fine: I’d rather have him spending his money in Africa treating malaria than writing another book. He may not be a great writer, but he may end up being a great philanthropist.
Q: What do you see as the most important themes for leadership education and business today?
A: I think they have to do with questions of purpose and values. Always, it’s the basics that trip people up: leaders don’t make fatal mistakes having to do with technical problems, technical glitches, state-of-the-art kind of issues, or things that are mechanical. When they fail it is because they lose sight of the big picture. That’s why they must constantly be reminded of the purpose of the organization and why they are in business: Why are we doing what we’re doing? What are our principles, and what are our values? How do we focus our people on the things that really count?
Because of day-to-day pressures of putting out fires, dealing with technical problems, and trying to deliver a product to a customer, leaders get sucked into the mundane, over-technical and -practical kinds of questions. They lose sight of broader principles and values. Some of them never come back up again. They can’t return to them. That’s why I think leadership education is all about reminding people of the basics.
Q: When you think about feeding the pipeline, about developing leaders out of high potentials and others inside of organizations, it’s probably about education, but it’s about other things as well. What is required? What kind of approaches do you see being used that are effective in trying to develop leaders in organizations?
A: I don’t see any. As for companies that have formal leadership education programs, we’ve been studying those for about five years and there’s not much new out there, and not much that’s effective. When I talked about Motorola in the past, I talked about the way Bob Galvin developed leaders: he simply went out and hired the best people he could get. The he gave them opportunities to develop He didn’t get in their way; he let nature takes its course. Later at Motorola they tried to formalize leadership education and they were a lot less productive than when Galvin did it himself in the course of doing business. What he did was significant in terms of being a role model, in terms of putting his ego aside. That had greater impact on developing leaders than all the formal training programs, formal recruiting programs, and other stuff like 360s. The more you look at formal programs having to do with recruitment, selection, development, career planning, 360s, it’s very hard to demonstrate that those things have positive effect.
Q: As Jim Collins and others are talking about––hiring the right people?
A: Hiring the right people is a good start, but it depends how you hire them. If hiring the right people means using a lot of these formalized systems, I’m not so sure that’s it. If hiring the right people means going out the way Bob Galvin did and looking for really smart people, people who were willing to take initiative, people whom he felt he could trust, then allowing them to grow by providing them with the resources they needed so that they could learn from their mistakes, if that’s what’s meant by it, yes.
Q: Have you been looking at the use of coaching for leadership development and executive performance?
A: Yes. Apparently it’s even a bigger trend than we’ve read about because, when you look inside almost any company, it seems that almost every leader or would-be leader has coach. But their fees don’t show up in budgets: Mangers try to hide the fact that they have a coach. So it seems to be a growing phenomenon. But I have no idea whether it’s working or not. My guess is that it probably works to the extent that coach is qualified coach. But the kinds of coaches that I have met have some real weaknesses. A large number of them are psychologists, who may know a lot about interpersonal skills, but they don’t know much about leadership, and they don’t know much about business. I would guess that their value is limited. The same would apply to coaches who are experienced business executives who may know a lot about business, but again, may not know about leadership or about psychology.
To find a coach who is wise enough to do the job may not be as simple as it seems. By definition, I think there is a shortage of people who are qualified as there is a shortage of people who can teach you how to hit a baseball. You need somebody who not only knows how to hit a baseball, but also one who knows how to tell you how to do it, and one who can keep an eye on you and spot the subtle mistakes you are making. There are very few people who can do that, although it would seem to be an easier thing to teach somebody to hit a baseball than teach people how to lead. After all, leadership is one of the hardest of all social tasks. My bottom line on this is that if all these coaches were good at what they do, we would expect the quality of leadership in American business to have improved, but it hasn’t.
Q: What is an important thing you have learned about dealing with business leaders?
A: What have I learned over 30 or 40 years dealing with business leaders is that it doesn’t matter what they say, it’s what they do. Most corporate leaders talk a good game. They are eloquent bout how important their people are, about the centrality of their values, mission statements, culture, and the like. Almost all of them have learned how to talk convincingly about such things. But the only way you can find out if a leader truly is effective is by going into the organization and observing the behavior of people at all levels.
To speak confidently about the effectiveness of any leader, you need a tremendous amount of information. You have to be able to talk to a lot of people, which I was able to do in the past in Motorola, Herman Miller, Atlantic Richfield, and other companies where I was able to dig down deeply enough to satisfy myself about the quality of the leadership at the top. Where I have gone wrong in assessing the quality of leadership, I have had inadequate amounts of information and inadequate time in the organization nosing around to get a real feel for the culture, a real feel for the behavior of the followers.
Q: Anything you care to add before we close?
A: No, it was fun talking to you.
Q: Thank you so very much.