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I recently posted number 6 of my list of 12 Things That Good Bosses Believe over at Harvard Business Review. This post digs into nuances of a theme that I have been writing about for years, attitude of wisdom and the related notion that the best bosses have strong opinions, weakly held. It is called Confident But Not Really Sure, a line from a Tom Petty song. I use a number of examples, but perhaps the most timely and compelling comes from my former student and now colleague in multiple d.school adventures, Bonny Warner-Simi. As I say:
Many of the bosses I admire most — from P&G's AG Lafley, to IDEO's David Kelley, to Pepsi's Indra Nooyi, to venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur Randy Komisar, to Xerox's Anne Mulcahy, to less well-known bosses like JetBlue Director Bonny Simi — seem to have this ability to act confidently on what they know, while doubting their knowledge. Take Bonny, for example, who is a three-time Olympian in the luge and still an active commercial pilot (both excellent metaphors for the need to maintain forward motion while making judicious course corrections!). She recently led JetBlue's successful effort (after a pair of failed ones) to develop procedures for delaying with flight delays and airport shutdowns caused by bad weather. Dealing with such "irregular operations" is crucial to JetBlue's reputation, even its survival. Remember its infamous failure to deal with a winter storm delay, when it kept thousands of passengers packed in planes sitting on socked-in runways for hours and hours? That was February 14th 2007, and the incident not only made for horrible press, it ultimately cost CEO David Neeleman his job. Bonny and her team tackled the challenge through a process of prototyping, identifying all the steps involved in a model shut down and re-opening of airport operations, and then putting their refined system through its paces again and again under different scenarios, looking for the ways it could fail them. Iterative prototyping like this is so powerful because the attitude of wisdom is at its heart. Each iteration represented a decisive act: Bonny's team had arrived at a new approach they felt confident about implementing. But even while believing it would work, they knew their job was to stay atuned to new information coming in, look for signs of problems and imperfections, and find ways to improve upon it further. They were confident, but not really sure. Early signs suggest that the "irregular operations" systems and procedures are a huge improvement; they worked perfectly earlier this year when JetBlue was forced to suspend operations at Kennedy Airport for a day as a result of a bad storm: There were no stranded passengers on planes, operations resumed to nearly normal levels the next day, and it was all so routine that the press didn't write a thing about it. The company, Chip and Dan Heath tell us, now recovers from major delays and setbacks 40% faster than just a year or so ago. That saves it millions of dollars, and buys incalculable amounts of customer goodwill.
Along similar lines, I was quite struck with a recent New York Times article about Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who is generally lauded for handling the meltdown better than any other CEO prior to and during the financial meltdown. The article is interesting because he expresses a a great deal of confidence about things the bank is doing now, but at the same time, is open about things he worries about and cannot control. As theTimes notes:
But taking a victory lap, or even basking in the adulation he has received while his fellow bank chiefs have been pounded, is the last thing Mr. Dimon claims to want. He knows all too well the dangers of swaggering in the footsteps of former Wall Street kings like Sanford I. Weill, his onetime mentor, who helped build Citigroup into an institution so unwieldy it nearly went bankrupt, or Lloyd C. Blankfein, the Goldman Sachs chief whose crown has been tarnished by accusations of double-dealing under his watch.
Many bad things have come of the meltdown, but if it has made Wall Street titans like Mr. Dimon a bit wiser and along related lines, a bit more modest, at least something good has come of it.
This all leads me to some questions: Who are the wisest leaders you can name? Who are the least wise? What explains the difference in your mind?
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