Special Issue of Strategy & Leadership – Bad Leaders: Cures and Preventions
ISBN: 978-1-84663-444-4
Edited by: Robert Randall
Most of us have watched a number of bad leaders up close. If you are lucky you may have experienced just one, and learned from it. It's worthwhile to observe a bad leader in action and vow, “I’ll never behave like that.” However, in the past few years, a lot of managers have had the traumatic experience of working for a “celebrity” bad leader. While news reports of bad leaders imploding rightfully point to dramatic loss of shareholder value, they rarely mention the thousands of subordinates’ careers derailed and resumes blemished.
This timely special issue offers feature articles that look at bad leadership and suggest remedies and preventions. They offer lessons that will be helpful to current and potential leaders, their followers and boards.
Contents:
Why leaders lose their way
Bill George and Andrew McLean
The former CEO of Medtronic, now a Harvard professor asks, “Why do so many developing leaders either fail to reach their full potential or cross the line into destructive or even unethical actions?” Studies of successful and unsuccessful leaders reveal the five hidden perils of the leadership journey, distinctive destructive behaviours that tend to occur in the hero stage of managers’ early careers.
Bad Leaders: how they get that way and what to do about them
Robert J. Allio
All too often, the visionary leader, seduced by power and a growing sense of certitude, first becomes isolated and then gets lost. When plans fail, the leader grows tyrannical, wields power wrongly, and devolves into a fallen star and self-serving “decider.” There’s a way to cure and prevent this.
Exploring the distinctions between a high performance culture and a cult
Bert Spector and Henry Lane
When managing corporate culture, leaders must tread a surprisingly fine line between promoting a high performance organization and one that is cultish. To illustrate the difference between the two, the authors compare high-performing General Electric with Enron, a failed organization that had many characteristics of a cult.
Guidelines for CEO-speak: editing the language of corporate leadership
Joel H. Amernic and Russell J. Craig
Unless the organization’s top management plays a significant role in monitoring, weighing, and offering commentary on the style of the language and content of what CEOs say, stakeholder communications can produce a distorted or unintentionally revealing picture of what is going on in an organization.
Special section – Customer loyalty: two new strategic models
Winning new customers using loyalty-based segmentation
Rob Markey, John Ott and Gerard du Toit
Smart marketers study consumer needs and wants in detail to develop insights about a small, attractive customer set that becomes the focus of their product development, a group Bain strategists call the Design Target. They’re the customers your company has the capabilities to serve better than your competitors.
Emotional interactions: the frontier of the customer-focused enterprise
Robert Heffernan and Steve LaValle
In the future, the real progress in shaping the customer experience will come from addressing the emotional aspects of transactions say IBM consultants. To succeed, first understand customers’ needs and expectations, then identify the most important interactions and how customers feel about these key “moments of truth.” Use them to prioritize delivery.
CEO advisory
The offline imperative
Jean-Louis Barsoux and Preston Bottger
Many executives are trapped in an endless action and reaction race. They have difficulty taking themselves off-line to review what has happened, to see what it’s adding up to and to refocus their efforts. These IMD researchers show how executives can break the cycle and put more reflection into decision making.
The strategist’s bookshelf
Toxic and egotistical leaders and their followers
Robert J. Allio
Reviews of The Allure of Toxic Leaders by Jean Lipman-Blumen and Ego Check: Why Executive Hubris is Wrecking Companies and Careers and How to Avoid the Trap by Mathew Howard.
CEO advisory
Periscopic media tour
Craig Henry
Strategy & Leadership’s intrepid media adventurer collected these sightings of strategic management in action around the world.
Quick takes
Catherine Gorrell
Brief summaries highlight the key points and action steps in the feature articles in this issue of Strategy & Leadership.
About Strategy & Leadership
Strategy & Leadership gives you insight into your own leadership abilities without wasting your time. Each issue brings you informed opinion from leading specialists, gives you professional support and looks at strategies, tools and techniques from an objective position. Strategy & Leadership explains the how and why in order to keep you clearly focused. Its thoughtful, in-depth analysis and advice tells you where you should be going and what to avoid on your journey.
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