The Real Work Of Leaders: A Report From The Front Lines Of Management - Hardcover

Laurie, Donald L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0738202495 ISBN 13: 9780738202495

Publisher: Basic Books, 2000

Synopsis

Today's leaders are faced with more complex and critical challenges than ever before. Inspirational charisma, financial acumen, and strategic thinking are all prerequisites for the job but are not enough to build-or, more important, sustain-vibrant and successful organizations. In The Real Work of Leaders , Don Laurie digs beneath the surface to explore the "act of leadership," the essence of what leaders need to do on a daily basis to frame challenges, mobilize people, and adapt to constant change. Based on fifteen years experience advising dozens of the world's most progressive and influential business leaders, including Lew Platt of Hewlett-Packard and Ralph Larsen of Johnson & Johnson, The Real Work of Leaders offers a fresh and energizing perspective on the craft of leadership-establishing cultural values, promoting continuous learning, managing conflicting goals simultaneously, building trust, incubating new ideas, and seeing as far into the future as possible.

About this title

Review

If you're ever favored enough to catch a few minutes of a corporate CEO's time, and feel bold enough to ask what their job entails, chances are you'll hear something lofty about developing strategy, empowering employees, seeing the big picture. But if you ask to see their calendar for the past month, you'll probably find they've spent very little, if any, time doing those things.

The look-at-last-month's-calendar trick was devised by Donald Laurie, a Boston-based management consultant, to help top executives figure out how best to lead their companies. Laurie sees a leader as the person who climbs out on the balcony and sees the company from above, the one who sees how all the parts connect to make a smoothly running machine. At the same time, if the leader stays up on that balcony for too much of the day, he or she can't hear the grumbling below. And what's being grumbled about is often the information that could save the CEO's job. As an example of this, Laurie relates the story of Xerox Corp. when it was trying to compete with Japanese companies in the affordable-copier market. The Xerox product didn't work very well, and the company took an embarrassing tumble. But any of the line employees could have told the top executives that the machine wasn't up to snuff; there just wasn't a mechanism for them to do so.

Besides exhorting them to stand on the balcony and promote dialogue after they get back down, Laurie urges today's executives to undertake the real work of: communicating what's real; clarifying competing values; supporting changes in values; regulating distress; and making everyone in the company collectively responsible.

He peppers the book with real-world examples of those imperatives, quoting executives at Chase Manhattan Bank, General Electric, Nordstrom, Johnson & Johnson, the postal service, airlines--so many, in fact, that the specific examples he cites all take on a universality. Whether it's at a post office, a high-tech startup, or a corporate conglomerate, the person at the top has the same job to do, Laurie argues. Yet, chances are, very little time is spent actually doing it. --Lou Schuler

About the Author

Donald L. Laurie is founder and managing director of Laurie International Limited, advising industry leaders worldwide. He is also founder and general partner of Oyster International Limited, which manages dedicated corporate venture funds. Co-author of the Harvard Business Review article, "The Work of Leadership," he lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0738202495
• ISBN 13: 9780738202495
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224