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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

What follows started life as a well-circulated opinion piece, authored by Lee Iacocca as a summary of his and Catherine Whitney’s new book, Where Have All The Leaders Gone? (thanks to Bruce Herrington for bringing it to my attention).

In it, Iacocca provides a useful list of the character traits required of successful leaders. If you’re interested in what the architect of the K-Car, huge government loan guarantees and an ad campaign featuring himself instead of his products has to say about our current political leaders, you’ll find it here: http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/iacocca.asp.

If, instead, you want his framework without a political essay attached, here are Iacocca’s alliterative “Nine Cs of Leadership.”

  • Curiosity: Leaders need to know What’s Going On Out There. Even more important, they need to need to know. No, that isn’t a typo. Curiosity is recognizing the importance of knowing What’s Going On Out There. Here in KJR-ville, we call the skill organizational listening. Those who don’t do it well are easily manipulated by their information sources. Or else they’re just ignorant.
  • Creativity: Leaders, according to Iacocca, must be able to think outside the box — to entertain unconventional notions and develop new and innovative solutions. Opinion: He’s wrong, but not badly wrong. While leaders do have to be able to think in unconventional terms and give new ideas an honest shot, finding those ideas through curiosity is more important than developing them through creativity. The best leaders are brokers of great ideas. Developing them is optional, and risks the Not Invented Here syndrome.
  • Communication: By “communication” Iacocca means telling people what they need to hear rather than what they want to hear. Again, he’s mostly right. Telling people what they need to hear instead of what they want to hear is one of the differences between leading and pandering.Add this: Effective communication is the result of planning, not blurting. It focuses on the audience’s vocabulary and cares, not the leader’s. Anything else is self-indulgence.
  • Character: In Iacocca’s book, character is knowing the difference between right and wrong and having the courage to do what’s right. Regular KJR readers know my position: Leaders must have clear values, and they must recognize that others have equally strong sets of values that differ in important respects. Values, that is, are personal, not universal, subjective rather than objective, and are therefore beliefs rather than facts.Leaders must have the character — the courage — to lead according to their values, not because they are “right” in any absolute sense, but because, as leaders, they take responsibility for their own moral code.

    They draw a clear boundary between what they will and won’t accept, on no authority beyond their own. They also have the courage to know when to allow others to act according to their own values, even when those values are different.

  • Courage: As Iacocca defines courage, it’s pretty much the same thing as character.
  • Conviction: Conviction is the fire in the belly that drives someone to accomplish uncommon and important results through force of will. Leadership is about making intentional change happen. That’s always an unlikely outcome. If you don’t care about achieving something … a lot (passionately, if you’ll excuse the soon-to-be-a-cliche adverb) … it won’t happen at all.
  • Charisma: Iacocca defines charisma as the ability to inspire, not as personal magnetism. But really, when you have conviction and the ability to communicate, the ability to inspire is automatic.
  • Competence: Thank you, thank you, thank you. KJR recently covered the same point (“Join the party,” 5/7/2007). You can lead without being competent or insisting on it in your organization. Accomplishing anything useful or sustainable is a very different matter.
  • Common sense: Oh, dear. Whether you call it common sense, good instincts, or trusting your gut, the notion is a dangerous one. Too often, “common sense” is nothing more than personal bias, and prevents the very openness to new ideas Iacocca values. What’s really necessary is a pair of essential traits that masquerade as common sense: Having the experience to understand a situation in depth, and the ability to recognize when your experience is irrelevant to what you’re facing.

Sadly, after the Nine Cs, Iacocca couldn’t resist. He added Crisis — the popular myth that this is the true test and measure of a leader.

It isn’t. Leadership is easiest in a crisis. Not easy, but easiest, because crisis provides direction, motivation, clarity, and a general willingness in others to accept leadership without all those annoying questions and challenges that arise in more relaxed situations.

It’s why bad leaders so often manufacture crises.

And, I suppose, it’s why Iacocca manufactured the K-Car and bragged about it.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

The award for best two-layer play on words in a book title goes to How to Feed Friends and Influence People: The Carnegie Deli (Milton Parker and Allyn Freeman, 2005).

It’s the tale of the best deli in New York — a place that makes its own corned beef and pastrami and turns them into sandwiches the size of your head.

It’s a nice little book, and valuable besides, since interspersed with the deli’s history are recipes — including the formulas for knishes, stuffed cabbage, and of course matzoh balls.

And, it describes the ten business principles that have made the Carnegie Deli a huge success. Regular readers of Keep the Joint Running know the difference between running IT as a business (bad idea) and running IT in a businesslike way (great idea). That being the case I have an excuse for: Listing the ten principles, offering my own comments, and counting the cost of the book as a business expense.

1. Keep it simple. The Carnegie Deli sells delicatessen food. That’s it.

That isn’t it, of course. There’s a lot of complexity supporting that simplicity. As CIO your organization has a lot of moving parts, too (138 — we’ve counted them). See if you can develop a formulation as simple as the Carnegie’s for what you do.

2. Do one thing better than anyone else. The Carnegie Deli sells customers phenomenal food in generous portions at a great price. It’s why, with lots of New York delis to choose from, they eat at the Carnegie.

You run IT, not an independent business. You still need to give your boss and your peers a reason to work with you and your department instead of ignoring you, or wishing you were someone different. What is it?

3. Create a family atmosphere among the staff. This isn’t fake. As I watched Sol Levine, the Carnegie Deli’s manager, schmoozing with his customers our server told me, unasked, “We love that guy!”

When employees trust each other … and you … it’s easy to make great things happen. When they don’t you have no chance.

4. Promote from within. Sometimes you’ll need new blood, especially when your old ideas have run out of steam. More often, managers hire from the outside because they failed to prepare anyone on the inside.

5. Have an open ear to staff and customer comments. The twenty-buck term is “organizational listening.” Managers who don’t listen to everyone they can don’t know What’s Going On Out There. That makes them ignorant — poor preparation for making good decisions.

6. Make it yourself. This is far easier when your products are corned beef, pastrami and pickled tongue than when your products are software and data repositories. Few IT shops can build everything internally. What you can do, though, is make it all your own. Once you select (for example) SAP and implement it in your company, it’s your unique implementation. You’d better have gurus who know it inside and out.

7. Own the premises. The Carnegie Deli owns its own building. As CIO, this principle should make you think hard about the consequences of, for example, rented data center space in a co-location facility. The benefits are well-known. The hazards are all related to loss of control, and you shouldn’t take them lightly.

8. Management is always responsible. The book says it best: “There’s no finger-pointing. If something goes wrong or is mishandled, management is at fault.”

More to the point: If something goes wrong or is mishandled, the manager in charge should be asking, “How could I have prevented this, and how am I going to prevent it from happening again.”

Blame is for schmucks.

9. Do not be greedy. Greed is a strategy that works in the short term but almost always crashes and burns in the long term. Greed makes managers adopt unsustainable business practices. This is true of the company you serve. It’s also true for departments with grandiose plans. Make it one step at a time, and do each step well.

10. Have fun working. Some CIOs have problems with absenteeism, and with employees who hide in their cubicles, uninterested in doing their jobs.

They should ask themselves what it is about the department they lead that makes employees want to be somewhere else.

The last time I ate at the Carnegie Deli Sol Levine told me, “We’ve been doing this for 75 years and we still don’t know what we’re doing.”

If I didn’t know what I was doing as well as Sol and his colleagues don’t know what they’re doing, I’d be a much better consultant than I am today.

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At last! Many have asked, most have been patient. You can finally subscribe to KJR as an RSS feed. The URL is https://issurvivor.com/?feed=rss2. Thanks for waiting.
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