Even before Covid-19 forced millions of employees to shelter at home and employers to padlock their doors, business leaders didn’t have to look far for their next worry.
Customers and employees were getting restive amid increasing social tensions. Many countries were erecting new trade barriers, threatening to undermine globalization and erase decades of political cooperation and economic liberalization. Relentless advances in technology were changing the way people work, play, shop, design, manufacture, socialize and communicate. Upstart digital firms were threatening famous marquee brands. Many longstanding business practices no longer seemed to click. “What is,” in the blink of an eye, was becoming “what was.”
Though U.S. unemployment was at record lows and the economy was chugging along in obvious good health as 2020 progressed from winter to spring, these and other concerns were simmering behind the scenes. Even great companies were finding that much of what they’ve been doing to achieve success was no longer good enough. Executives were fully aware of this new reality; transformation programs in many cases already were underway.
Then the coronavirus arrived.
It’s against this backdrop that I recommend a new book, released this week: “Beyond Great: Nine Strategies for Thriving in an Era of Social Tension, Economic Nationalism, and Technological Revolution” (New York, Public Affairs, 288 pages).
In the spirit of full transparency, you should know that the authors—Arindam Bhattacharaya, Nikolaus Lang and Jim Hemerling (who, for convenience, I’ll refer to as BL&H)—are colleagues and good friends of mine.
But that’s not why the book is worth your time. It’s worth your time because the authors tap into the wisdom of some of the most accomplished men and women in business. Although you may not be familiar with some of them, these are people who have been extraordinarily adept at keeping their businesses successfully moving forward while juggling the myriad challenges I described above. One such example is Roberto Marques.
Marques, if you’re unfamiliar with the name, is Executive Chairman and Group CEO of Natura & Co Holding SA, a multinational personal care and cosmetic company headquartered in Brazil, best known in the United States, perhaps, for two of the brands it owns: The Body Shop, which began life in the United Kingdom in 1976, and Avon, founded 90 years earlier in New York.
Marques offers BL&H his thoughts on a number of topics, but there’s one thing he told them in particular that every current and aspiring C Suite occupant on the planet should commit to memory. It’s worldly wisdom that too many highly ambitious people too often ignore. As the authors paraphrased it: “Leadership today entails having the self-awareness to acknowledge you don’t even know what you don’t know, and the humility to listen to others.”
That’s the holy grail of successful leadership: being aware of how much you really don’t know and seeking the counsel and help of others.
Counter to the comic-bookish Master-of-the-Universe version of leadership—the all-powerful swordsman who can slay any dragon and overcome any obstacle—top leaders today, the authors stress, need to be team players and collaborate with others (including competitors at times, India’s Tata Group chairman Natarajan Chandrasekaran told the authors).
Those in leadership positions can only base their decisions on what they know at a given time. Even with the help of supercomputers, AI, advanced modeling and other technologies, there’s always a very real possibility in our constantly changing world that the information they have not only may be incomplete or biased, but it might even be based on asking the wrong questions. In other words, as Marques suggested, they may not know what they don’t know. To leaders who embrace that reality, the humility to listen to others will come easy.
What other leadership characteristics are explored in the book?
One is the willingness to embrace a more expansive view of their organizations: to pivot from narrowly focused shareholder capitalism to more-broadly focused stakeholder capitalism, as the Business Roundtable suggested last year in its updated statement on the purpose of corporations. In this era of high volatility and heightened social awareness, Hemerling told me, companies no longer can be content merely to provide great returns for their shareholders; they need to go beyond that, delivering benefits for their employees and society as well. This is not the abandonment of shareholder capitalism; leaders still have a fiduciary duty to produce the best results possible for the company’s owners. But that alone is not enough.
In fact, that introduces one of BL&H’s main themes: that leaders looking to move successful companies beyond great shouldn’t abandon what got them where they are; they should build on their existing strengths with new capabilities.
If there’s one exception to this rule it’s the nature of leadership itself. That often has to change. “For centuries,” they write, “leadership has largely entailed some form of command-and-control.”
But the changed circumstances companies face today mean the command-and-control mentality and practices have to end. “Because going beyond great requires speed in a volatile world, leaders must break with the past and take a much more open and collaborative approach. Rather than trying to exert control at every turn, leaders must focus on gaining alignment and then granting autonomy. They must empower and coach, pursuing pace over perfection.”
At almost every turn, the authors say, today’s leaders must deal with three disruptive forces: ambiguity, tension, and paradox.
To succeed in such an environment, they must “steer their organizations to learn, rethink, and experiment”—and to do so agilely and quickly—while remaining firmly grounded in the products, policies, processes and other “stable and unchanging” elements of the business that have enabled the company to excel.
The great strength of the book is not just what the authors have to say about continuous transformation, what it takes to be both local and global, attending to the wants and needs of the new generation of employees, collaborating with competitors and other topics—it’s the insights you’ll glean from the leaders of a slew of top-performing companies.
When you read it you’ll probably realize, as I did, that there’s a lot here that you didn’t know you didn’t know.