June 2002

Innovation Tips

…ideas to help you foster collaborative genius

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Humility and an Iron Will

Who comes to mind when you think of effective leaders? In business, those who gain the most attention—the charismatic, conspicuous executives like Jack Welch, Stanley Gault, Al Dunlap or Lee Iacocca—tend to be the ones we think of first. But recent research suggests that we might be better off considering a different model, one closer to the attributes of Abraham Lincoln—leaders who possess humility and an iron will.

In the important and exhaustive research for his recent book, Good to Great, Jim Collins and a team of researchers noticed a striking anomaly among those companies that had been successfully transformed from mediocre organizations into companies producing astounding rates of return: The leaders in these companies were not illustrious.

Their chief executives were not among those frequently interviewed by the prominent business journals. Their names were scarcely recognizable—Darwin Smith, Colman Mockler, David Maxwell, George Cain and others. They were more intent on building the living architecture of an enduring enterprise than on building a name for themselves. They were humble, often self-effacing, yet firmly committed to the central purposes of their organizations.

They gathered bright, highly talented people around them and had the humility to give those people largely free reign to attain the organizational purpose. These leaders held to that purpose, once they discovered it, with an iron will. Like Lincoln, they could be humble and self-effacing, but—also like Lincoln—they were unyielding about the central purpose of the organization’s work.

But companies must aspire to the kinds of financial returns for which Iacocca, Welch and others are famous. And that’s the rub. The companies Collins studied DID outperform the G.E.s and Chryslers of the world, and often outperformed them by a wide margin. Companies in rather unspectacular industries like groceries, steel, and consumer products attained spectacular rates of return and outperformed the stars that were drawing most of the media attention. All the companies in the study generated rates of financial return that were three to eighteen times greater than the stock market as a whole.

Among all eleven companies generating these remarkable returns, the research team found similar characteristics among the top leadership. These leaders engendered the collaborative genius of their organizations by building the enduring architecture of a great organization. They enabled great companies to emerge, not through hard-charging charisma, but through the Lincoln-like attributes of humility and an iron will.

(This is the sixth in a series of articles on leadership and collaborative genius.)

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