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The business section of your average metro daily newspaper isn’t the home of hard-hitting investigative journalism. For the most part, it’s a place for cheerleading. So I shouldn’t be too hard on the guy who wrote the column.

It was a fairly typical fluff piece about two entrepreneurs who had built their dream into a thriving business. They were making maybe a hundred million in revenue, with a bunch of locations in several states. They started out focused on growth, then woke up one day and recognized the importance of being more disciplined in how they operate. And so on.

They sounded like very strong, perceptive businessmen. So I can forgive the writer for failing to ask the obvious question: “You two did all this yourselves?”

Like “When did you stop beating your spouse?” there’s no right answer. Unlike it, it’s a fair question.

Had the journalist asked and the two heroes answered no, a reasonable person might wonder why they were taking all the credit anyway. But if they’d responded in the affirmative, they’d be lousy businessmen and awful leaders. When you’re running a business that size, you’d better hire a bunch of very strong people to handle its various parts. Because no matter how smart you are, there are only two ways you can come up with all of the good ideas you implement in your organization: Either hire people who have no good ideas; or ignore every voice other than your own.

Imagine another news story, also about an entrepreneurship-made-good. Only instead of the proprietors talking about everything they had done to make their business a success they’d said something like this:

“We realized early that marketing would be the key to our success, so we hired Andy Anderson, who’s an absolute genius at it. He put a program together that really made the difference between our sales and those of our competitors.

“We also knew we’d need several rounds of venture capital. Several friends of ours mentioned a woman named Jill Johnson, so we just kept after her until she agreed to join us. The fact of the matter is, investors love her — she talks straight and answers their questions in ways that give them confidence in us. And she knows the process inside and out. The one round of financing we handled ourselves was utter chaos. Once she took it over, it ran like clockwork.

“Then there’s Steve Smith. Neither of us is particularly disciplined in how we go about things. So as soon as we could afford to do it we brought in Steve as our Chief Operating Officer. He’s the one who recognized just how much money was walking out the door because we were being sloppy and really turned the place around.”

Individual contributors succeed by some combination of being smarter, selling ideas better, and working harder and longer hours than anyone else. Too many business leaders think they’re supposed to succeed the same way. Their egos are out in front. It’s a bad place for their egos to be, because it makes them easy to manipulate.

Nothing about this is a matter of ethics. It’s about you as leader of an organization and what will make you more successful. More, it’s about your ability to market yourself as a leader. “What I’m good at is recognizing talented people, recruiting them, and creating conditions that let them do important things,” is simply a better marketing message for the product that is you than “I’m the smartest person in the room.”

To prove the point, ask yourself which message — “Here’s how smart we are” or “Here are the great people who created our success” — sound like it comes from better leaders and businessmen. Not much of a contest, is it?

And if, by some strange chance, you also care about motivating the people who work for you to excel, re-read the two alternatives and ask yourself which pair of entrepreneurs you’d work harder for. The ones who take credit for your great ideas and hard work?

Or the two who give you credit for theirs.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Worthy of note:

Item #1: Last week I accidentally denigrated the WWF when I said business leaders are, metaphorically, “… trapped in a cage match without the script.” Unbeknownst to yours truly the World Wildlife Fund successfully sued the World Wrestling Federation and the wrestlers are now WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment). Allan West, who informed me of this, did like the mental image of panda bears in a ring jumping off the ropes to smash one another. I find it disturbing.

Item #2: Some additional correspondence solved the mystery. A reader who had complained about my apparent bias two weeks ago explained that in the 2000 election, many commentators described George W. Bush as the candidate you’d rather have a beer with. I recommended that you not choose who to vote for based on who you’d rather have a beer with. His conclusion? I was covertly suggesting you vote against Bush.

For the record: Don’t vote for the guy with whom you’d most like to have a beer. Don’t vote against him, either. When you choose who to vote for, leave the beer out of it.

You’ll need it after you vote.

Item #3: Last week’s column, about making ethical choices when none of your choices are particularly good, generated quite a bit of mail.

A couple of readers contested the main point — that when all of the choices available to you are bad, you should hold your nose and choose the least wrong among them. One said I was “playing the victim” because we can always say no and walk away, or stand up for what’s right and take the consequences.

We can. That doesn’t make these good choices. Maybe they’re less wrong than the alternatives, but even that assessment is uncertain. For those who have families to feed in a shaky economy, for example, walking away or getting fired for standing on principle can be downright irresponsible.

Keep in mind that while for some, “getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to me,” many more end up unemployed or underemployed for months and even years. I know. Some contact Advice Line for suggestions.

They just aren’t the ones in a position to write inspirational books.

Item #4: Okay, don’t call it the Vince Lombardi syndrome.

Few contested my suggestion last week that we’ve changed from a society that values fair play above all to one that values winning above all.

But many wrote to defend Vince Lombardi, who, it appears, never said, “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.” Brad Mitchell was the first to provide Lombardi’s actually statement. It’s “Winning isn’t everything — but wanting to win is,” an admirable sentiment.

So it isn’t the Vince Lombardi syndrome. Call it the Bobby Knight syndrome instead. He deserves it.

Not that winning is a bad thing. Even if the game is a stupid one, if you have to play, winning is better than losing.

Which brings us the OODA loop, mentioned here before.

A military theorist named Colonel John Boyd developed this formulation for winning at maneuver warfare: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA). Then do it again.

According to Boyd, whichever side has the faster OODA loops wins. The faster you can observe a situation, orient yourself to it (which includes recognizing your own biases and how they affect your perceptions), make a decision on how to proceed, then act on that decision — and then go through it again — the more likely you are to win.

There’s a fascinating consequence: According to OODA theory, thoughtful analysis loses to quick decisions and disciplined execution. It’s an unsettling proposition for those of us who consider careful thought to be a worthwhile investment of time and energy.

OODA still values thinking, but quick thinking: Observe, Orient, and Decide. Speed beats perfection. When, that is, you’re engaged in a contest to be won in real time — OODA’s domain. OODA is the wrong tool for (for example) good science, good policy, or even good chess. But like the guy with a hammer who sees a world filled with nails, many who excel at OODA loops limit their view of the world to a succession of battles, which is to say, time-constrained transactions with one winner and one loser.

OODA masters win the battles they fight. That gives them a tremendous advantage and confers tremendous power. It also creates a very real danger: They’re unlikely to make sure they should be fighting in the first place. They’re winning, after all.

So why should they care? Winning is, after all, the only thing.

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