Section B

A Passion for Excellence offers stories, quotes, insights, questions and advice in an attempt to cultivate superb, personalized, "back-to-basics" leadership. Its authors recommend that you look for some "first steps" that fit in with your particular needs and style, and start with those. Here are some highlights:

Baltimore Mayor William Donald Schaefer regularly wanders his neighborhoods to get a feel for his city. Wandering is priority. He sees potholes, broken streetlights, dirty parks, abandoned cars, dead trees... and also manages to have his crews do something about them.

The Big Idea: MBWA (Management By Wandering Around) is a "leadership technology" that promises happy customers and co-workers. Its principles are obvious but usually ignored. MBWA is the crucial element of leadership, and the one element emphasized throughout the book.

To eliminate the majority of hairs that stick to the average chicken wing, Frank Perdue, chairman of Perdue Farms, purchased a quarter-of-a-million dollar jet engine to blow them off - "the world's biggest blow dryer."

The Big Idea: Successful businesses put the customer first by providing slavish service, exceptional courtesy and responsive listening.

Almost a dozen years elapsed between the "invention" of 3 M's Post-It Note Pads and their commercial debut. The developer, Art Fry, saw the need when the little bits of paper he used to mark hymns in a church choir kept falling out of the books. Despite the fact office supply distributors thought it was a silly idea and market surveys were negative, once 3 M secretaries started using the pads and were hooked, marketing went smoothly toward a $200 million success.

The Big Idea: Fostering innovative "champions" and workteams, who push their projects through to completion in a minimal amount of time, is better than setting up long- winded committees.

A first-line supervisor - responsible for 25 to 30 people and up to $4 million worth of capital - doesn't have the authority to buy a nine-dollar can of paint to clean up her people's workspace. Do you think she feels in charge or trusted with making decisions?

The Big Idea: Employees need to be given solid responsibility, and to know that as an interested, wandering leader, you respect and support them. People produce; techniques don't.

A Domino's Pizza Store once faced the disaster of running out of pizza dough. What was President Don Vleek's immediate response? "Charter a plane. Get it there!"

During his 57 years as Marriott Corporation's CEO, founder J. Willard Marriott, Sr. read every customer complaint card.

The Big Idea: Leadership is "show business"; it is symbolic and often dramatic. The new leader is no longer a cop, referee, sole decision-maker or dispassionate analyst. The new leader is more of a cheerleader, coach, nurturer of heroes, builder, facilitator and historian.

A Passion for Excellence carries two primary messages:

2.Practice MBWA. Whether your priority is product quality, customer service, innovation, courtesy, autonomy, customer input, or safety, it must revolve around committed people; and the art of MBWA is working with people. It is not socializing, it's finding out. It's talking last, not first. MBWA takes patient effort.

Attila, King of the Huns, united Mongolia's "nomadic, multiracial and multilingual conglomeration of tribes" into a confederation with a common purpose - to plunder and pillage the eastern Roman Empire. Historically known as the "Scourge of God," Attila has been characterized as the incarnation of barbaric rule and ruthless terror. Thus, Attila is an unlikely subject on which to base a book on management. Yet the author of Leadership Secrets, Wess Roberts, formerly of the U.S. Army Combat Arms Training Board, has done just that. In this brief, witty, thought-provoking book, Roberts attempts to describe the essential qualities of leadership in terms of loyalty, courage, decisiveness, competitiveness, self-confidence, accountability, credibility, tenacity and stewardship - all by using a rich, story-telling style.

This book is not a unified thesis on leadership development. In fact, Roberts cautions that "there is no magical formula for [accelerating the development of] leadership abilities... " Rather, he uses the Hun chieftain as a symbolic mouthpiece to toss out - just as Attila himself might have done - various leadership principles. Themes are suggested by fictional story-lines, and followed by maxims hypothetically spoken by Attila to his chosen chieftains and Hun warriors in campfire settings. Here is a sampling of proverbs, listed under assorted headings.

Lust for Leadership: "You've Got to Want to Be in Charge"

Peace in the Camp: "Morale and Discipline"

The Fury of Internal Battles: "Cunning in the Tribes"

The Tribute: "Paying and Receiving Deference"

Battle Dress and Armament: "Chieftains Are as they Appear to Their Huns"

Leading the Charge: "Responsibilities of the Chieftain"

The Omen of Aquileia: "The Essentials of Decisiveness"

Booty: "Rewarding Your Huns"

Attila and the Pope: "The Art of Negotiation"

Surviving Defeat: "There is Another Day"

The Bones of Caravans Past: "Lessons Learned"

The book ends with a selection of "Attilaisms." Consider these:

"Corporate Chieftains" - and others who are called on to lead - will find Roberts' Attila both helpful and highly entertaining.

In 1982 Tom Peters co-authored a much heralded book titled, In Search of Excellence. A sequel, A Passion for Excellence, came out in 1985. Both best sellers extolled the principles of managerial excellence and cited examples of companies that employ these principles. But Thriving on Chaos opens with the radical thesis, "There are no excellent companies."

Unlike Peters' previous upbeat books, Thriving on Chaos begins with a foreboding view of the nation's business climate. Peters, the guru of managerial excellence, now argues that even the paradigm cases of well-managed companies - from Citicorp to IBM, from Intell to Hewlett Packard - are undergoing economic trauma. Decline in the national savings rate, drops in industrial productivity, a large trade deficit, the current "merger mania," and a trend towards exporting major segments of manufacturing to low labor-cost countries, all hint toward the fact that the emerging global economy does not favor America's large-scale, standardized, mass-production systems of manufacturing.

In order to promote a "competitive resurgence," Peters offers his step-by-step prescriptions as a "handbook for a management revolution."

Peters emphasizes a leadership that "loves change," embraces quality consciousness, perceives human resources (personnel) as assets, seeks market fragmentation (differentiation through market niche- orientation), and fosters short-run specialization manufacturing. Sections 2 through 6 of the book contain various prescriptive strategies titled "Capability Building Blocks," which promote the "guiding premise" of each section. Some of these strategies are summarized herein.

Launch a customer revolution. Respond to customer needs and wants by specializing or expanding into a niche that may never even have been noticed before. Remember that if customer responsiveness is the superordinate objective of a firm, then both awareness of customer needs and innovative response to those needs should be central concerns. As consultant Mike Kami is prone to shout: "What's so special about your company?... How are you different from your competitors?... What is your uniqueness in the marketplace?"

Implement these strategies by practicing "purposeful impatience," working to turn adversaries into partners, and setting quantitative innovation goals. Yawn at even the good performance that doesn't carry with it a timely and innovative approach. Your firm's "new look" will soon include an innate, comfortable "corporate capacity for innovation."

"... Genuinely invite wholesale participation and commitment necessary for survival." Increase flexibility by empowering, celebrating, and listening to others. Ironically, greater employee participation will ultimately give a manager greater overall "control." Retrain all employees to enhance their own skills and to make your business a smoother, more well-rounded, upbeat entity.

"Master paradox," counsels Peters. As defined by Webster's New World Dictionary, a paradox is "a statement that seems contradictory, unbelievable or absurd but that may actually be true in fact." Managers often carry around with them a fear of change - change is threatening; the status quo is the only safe road. But, paradoxically, if leaders attentively seek change and make testing and improvement part of the status quo by delegating, deferring problems to their front-line people, and "bashing bureaucracy" through "horizonal" management systems, they will be rewarded by greater progress and production.

Measuring only what's necessary will foster among employees a real respect for the organization; they will see it as a thoughtful and professional business that wants to make sense out of our frequently topsy-turvy world (an all too infrequent goal these days).

As a "true handbook to guide managers through the turbulent markets and economic climates of our times," Thriving on Chaos provocatively and systematically treats those problems that the author contends managers will have no choice but to face - or to flail away at - in the 90`s.

A weekend fisherman looked over the side of his boat and saw a snake with a frog in its mouth. Feeling sorry for the frog, he reached down, gently removed it from the snake's mouth and let it go free. But now he felt sorry for the hungry snake. Having no food, he took out a flask of bourbon and poured a few drops into the snake's mouth. The snake swam away happy, the frog was happy, and the fisherman was happy for having performed such good deeds. He thought all was well until a few minutes passed and he heard something knock against the side of his boat. The fisherman looked down and, with stunned disbelief, saw the snake was back - this time with two frogs!

This fable, told in LeBoeuf's first chapter of The Greatest Management Principle (GMP), carries two important messages:

LeBoeuf insists that the single greatest management principle is this:

Is your company, organization, or family ignoring this principle?

The author uses "magic questions" in an attempt to simplify the process by which leaders go about "rewarding" behavior, desirable or undesirable. He then proposes practical advice on how leaders can effectively reward their followers.

In typical organizations, leaders reward busy-work, long hours, massive reports, paper-shuffling, risk avoidance and "good" excuses. Short-term profits - and the requisite short-term reports, that "better be encouraging, or else!" - are emphasized over long-term, steady growth, and responsible action.

Quick fixes (doing things the quick, easy, cheap way) often override solid solutions, which focus on long-range investing, planning and commitment.

Depending on the organization, magic questions might include: What behaviors do I want to see out of my staff (club members, salespeople, family members... )? How will I recognize hard and smart work (and other expected behaviors)? And how shall I reward those behaviors? Straightforward questions like these help a manager or leader gain a better "feel" for what behaviors he wants from his workers, and to determine possible ways of eliciting desired behaviors.

Here are the ten best ways to reward good performance - in order of most powerful to least powerful motivator:

LeBoeuf asserts that people and ideas are an organization's most important capital "assets." Therefore, the successful company must hold on to these assets and foster their growth by rewarding productivity. The key is to identify, together with each employee, specific productivity goals, and then to provide rewards commensurate with (1) the merits of the behavior, (2) the nature of the organization, and (3) the particular worker involved.

The "fundamental task" of a successful leader or manager is to make people feel excited about the activity at hand. To make this happen, it is vital to establish some sort of Goals/Reward Contract (outlined in the book) with each group member. Clear and effective contracts share four ingredients:

While visiting with workers or team members, openly communicate these concepts. Confer responsibility, require results, allow freedom, and, finally, reward success.

A "Manager's Action Plan," outlined below, makes reward-giving the natural culmination of a chain of behaviors elicited by four management actions:

When the time comes for evaluation, the manager sits down with the worker and determines if the desired behaviors were shown. Were the desired results achieved? If not, you must both revaluate and clarify the goal, and try again, renewing the process. If the answer is yes, you dispense the promised rewards, bask in success for a few moments, and then set new goals; the cycle is set in motion once more.

GMP's many questions, charts and examples outline a process that can help you as a manager, parent, president - any kind of leader - to more operatively establish, advertise, review, reformulate, and achieve goals you wish your group members to achieve. And, most importantly, the book delineates practical, positive reward systems that can motivate your people to initiate suitable goals and to act consistently in order to attain them.

The One Minute Manager's purpose is to help people "produce valuable results, and feel good about themselves... " The book's concepts are developed within a storyline featuring the adventures of a bright young man (you) as he discovers and applies management principles. As the story opens, this young man has sought out his mentor, the One Minute Manager, for an interview. He is on a modern-day quest to find and implement management skills that will make him successful both in production and with people.

"Effective managers manage themselves and the people they work with so that both the organization and the people profit from their presence," the Manager instructs. He teaches his disciple some other basic principles, then ushers him into his organization, to watch and visit with others who model the same techniques of leadership.

Does it really take just a minute to do all the things managers do? No; "One Minute Management" represents a philosophy and a group of tools that demonstrate that being a manager "is not as complicated as people would have you believe. And... managing people doesn't take as long as you think."

A "One Minute Manager" can achieve big results from his people in very little time. You, as a manager, must learn to delegate authority and tasks. Then you must ensure that the people who accept these delegated responsibilities set goals, make decisions, and report to you on progress.

Secret 1 - One Minute Goal Setting: At the beginning of a new assignment, spend some time making it clear what each person will be accountable for. Have him describe what he would like to see happen. Then, write out the selected goals on a single sheet of paper using less than 250 words - so that anyone can read them in one minute. Retain a copy of the list so that you can help him check periodically on progress and identify actions that promote his goals.

The "80-20 rule" applies to goal-setting: "80% of your really important results will come from 20% of your goals." Concentrate with each worker on those goals that include the person's primary responsibilities - maybe 3 to 6 goals in all. With specific objectives established, everyone knows right from the beginning what he is trying to accomplish and what the standard is for performance.

The successful manager uses a direct approach in dealing with employees. If there is a problem, she first asks that it be described in behavioral terms.

After discussing the actual and desired situations, the manager responds:

Secret 2 - One Minute Praisings: Catch people "doing something right." Tell them up front that you are going to let them know how they are doing; that you'll provide them with frequent, crystal-clear feedback. This requires careful observation by you, the manager, plus frequent interviews and/or detailed progress reports with each employee. Progress reports provide fodder for frequent praisings; workers don't have to wait for an annual performance review to get a pat on the back.

Praise good performance immediately. You can see in a very short time the progress or mistakes a person is making. Tell people specifically what they did right. Speaking and responding in open, direct terms may be uncomfortable at first for some people. Encourage everyone to communicate in a close, direct, one-on-one way.

She can do this because she has already been quick to praise your good work and has explained beforehand that she will let you know when you are performing well and when you are not.

Give necessary reprimands immediately after seeing a problem. "Gunnysacking" negative feelings and letting them out only because the sack is full, is a "leave alone--zap!" form of discipline employed by many managers. Early intervention doesn't overwhelm people; it only helps them realize that "performance review" is an ongoing process of education.

First, confirm the facts. Then, get close to the employee, look him straight in the eye, and indicate exactly what the mistake was without any hint of personal attack. Tell him how it makes you feel (embarrassed, annoyed, frustrated... ), then be silent for a moment "to let [him] feel how you feel."

The purpose of a One Minute Reprimand "is to eliminate the behavior and keep the person." ... You have to care enough to be tough.... I am very tough on the poor performance - but only on the performance. I am never tough on the person.

A successful reprimand has three basic ingredients: (1) Telling the person what she did wrong; (2) Telling her how you feel about it; and (3) Reminding her that she is valuable and worthwhile.

Why not praise first and then reprimand? Because, says the manager, the most successful manager would be termed "Tough 'n' Nice" rather than "Nice 'n' Tough," as illustrated by an "ancient Chinese story":

... An emperor appointed a second in command. He called this prime minister in and, in effect, said to him, "Why don't we divide up the tasks? Why don't you do all the punishing and I'll do all the rewarding?" The prime minister said, "Fine. I'll do all the punishing and you do all the rewarding."

The second half of the reprimand begins with touching - shaking hands, a pat on the arm - to let the employee know you're on her side. Remind her of how valuable she is to the company. Leave her feeling that "the only reason he is angry with me is that he has so much respect for me." Then, exit; "When the reprimand is over, it's over."

On budgets and training: "It's ironic. Most companies spend 50% to 70% of their money on people's salaries. And yet they spend less than 1% of their budget to train their people... ."

On direct communication and goal-setting: "In most of the organizations I worked in before, I often didn't know what I was supposed to be doing. No one bothered to tell me. If you asked me whether I was doing a good job, I would say either 'I don't know' or 'I think so'.... My main motivation was to avoid punishment."

On motivation: "Feedback is the Breakfast of Champions. Feedback keeps us going.... Feedback on results is the number one motivator of people. [Many managers] don't tell their people what they expect of them; they just leave them alone and then 'zap' them when they don't perform at the desired level."

On winners and losers: "Everyone is a potential winner. Some are disguised as losers; don't let their appearances fool you."

On creating winners: A manager has three choices: either hire winners (hard to do, and costly), hire potential winners and systematically train them to win, or pray ("I hope this person works out").

On punishment: If a dog had an "accident" and we shoved his nose in it, beat him with a newspaper, then threw him out the window, we would be focusing not on the behavior we wanted, but on what we didn't want. "After about three days the dog would poop on the floor and jump out the window... " Rather than punish an employee, return to One Minute Goal Setting to clarify your expectations and help him see "what good performance looks like."

On One Minute Praising: "The key to training someone to do a new task is... to catch them doing something approximately right until they can eventually learn to do it exactly right." Training and goal setting, however, must be done with great amounts of respect and no trace of manipulation.

At the end of Blanchard and Johnson's book, the bright young protagonist - you - finally does become a One Minute Manager, "not because he thought like one, or talked like one, but because he behaved like one." He set goals, praised frequently, and used timely, informative reprimands.