'One Terrible Cost of Leadership'

It is interesting how J. Crew's Mickey Drexler identified a classic leadership characteristic as one of the things he wished he knew when he started out in business (as per my earlier blog post) — the need to ease an executive out of the organization once it is determined that he or she is not up to the job. As Drexler put it, "Let those who aren't working out go quickly."

I first came across this counsel in an interview I edited that Warren Bennis conducted with Dr. Franklin Murphy, which was published as a Q&A article in Directors & Boards in 1982. Dr. Murphy is not a household name today in the annals of corporate leaders, but he was a major figure in the 1960s into the 1980s. He had a most unusual route to the top of a major corporation. Trained as a medical doctor, he began his management career at the University of Kansas, serving as dean of the medical school and then, at age 35, chancellor of the university. He subsequently spent eight years as chancellor of the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1968 he was personally recruited by Norman Chandler, then chairman and CEO of Times Mirror Co., to be his successor.

In 1982 Murphy was chairman of the executive committee of Times Mirror when Bennis spoke with him on “Starting Corporate Life at the Top,” as we titled the article. Here is the key question and answer that identified a classic test of a leader's ability to act:

Bennis: You’ve been in very responsible positions virtually from the start. Are there any costs of responsibilities?

Murphy: Yes, there’s one terrible cost and it’s the one thing in administration that I find the most distasteful by far — and that is when you have to fire somebody. Having to let go a loyal and capable person who just isn’t up to his job is so painful. I brood about that, but it is a price you pay. You’re not just disemploying an individual, you’re affecting a wife, children, a whole group. I must say, if I’m indecisive about anything it’s in that area. But I’ve learned over time that the quicker it’s done, the better it is for all parties.

As Murphy implies, the removal, while it must be done, can be done with a human touch —another classic characteristic of a leader.

Franklin Murphy died in 1994. Portrait of him shown above was done by Directors & Boards to accompany his 1982 article.

Trench Foot: A Veterans Day Tale from Warren Bennis

Being a veteran of the U.S. Navy, this day has great meaning for me. Here is a tale of battlefield leadership that has just made a big impression on me that I want to share as we celebrate our country's past and present servicemen.

It comes from a new book by Warren Bennis, who has distinguished himself in so many ways over a long well-lived life — in leadership positions in academia both as teacher and administrator, as an adviser and consultant to companies, and as an author (of 30 books!) and thought leader in the art and science of management. His book is titled, "Still Surprised: A Memoir of a Life in Leadership" (published by Jossey-Bass).

That life in leadership started early. Here he is as a young officer leading a platoon of soldiers on the front lines "in the final throes of the Battle of the Bulge, that murderous last-ditch effort by the German military," he writes. There is no way to effectively paraphrase Bennis' tale, so here it is in his own words (copyright by the author):

In the field, one of the dangers our G.I.'s faced was a horrible condition called trench foot. For their march across Europe, the men had old-fashioned leather boots, not the rubberized ones that would be standard issue later. Their boots and socks would quickly become soaked through as they slogged through the snow. In a vain attempt at keeping their boots dry, they would wrap them in burlap sacks. That only kept the moisture inside, making the situation worse. Soon their feet would become infected. If they weren't tended to properly, their toenails fell off, their feet eventually turned black, and they developed gangrene. Frostbite might cost you some toes, but trench foot cost soldiers their feet, even their legs. The problem was enormous, especially for those soldiers stuck in water-filled foxholes for weeks at a time. Stephen Ambrose writes in "Citizen Soldiers" that in the winter of 1944-45, 45,000 American fighting men had to be taken off the front lines of the European Theater of Operations because of trench foot.

Some officers thought the men were goldbricking, getting trench foot on purpose in order to be relieved of duty. Given how agonizing and potentially crippling the condition was, I found that hard to imagine. I had been warned of the seriousness of trench foot by one of the doctors back at the regiment's makeshift first-aid station. He said that the only way to avoid it was to take off your boots and socks, wash your feet, and then dry them carefully, toe by toe, preferably by a fire.

Given the bitter cold and the men's ambient level of exhaustion, they were loathe to bother with this complicated nightly toilette. After all, it meant heating water from their canteens in their helmets, draping their wet socks around their necks to dry overnight, washing and meticulously drying their feet, then putting dry socks and their boots back on. But I had taken the regimental doctor's warning to heart. Other companies were losing a lot of men to frostbite and trench foot. I decided I would preach the gospel of meticulous foot care to my men. My crusade didn't have a heroic ring to it, but it would serve two important purposes: it would save the men from suffering, and it would limit the company's losses to those caused by German snipers and other perils we couldn't avoid.

This wasn't the kind of campaign you could wage by fiat. Every night I would go from squad to squad, making sure each man took off his boots, washed his feet, dried them carefully, and put on dry socks before he put his boots back on. And my initiative did what it was supposed to do. None of my men got sent back because of trench foot.

In retrospect, it is one of the things I am most proud of doing during the war. It sounds compulsive, even fussy, but it was an example of an officer fulfilling one of his most important obligations — taking care of his men. To this day, I think of those soldiers every morning after I shower and carefully dry between my toes.

A powerful story of leadership, no? It is just such displays of care for their country and their fellow comrades by veterans like Warren Bennis that we honor on this day.

Smith International as Buyer and Seller

That's a big deal — Schlumberger's acquisition of Smith International for $11 billion, announced on Feb. 21. It would be the largest acquisition in the U.S. so far this year, according to the Wall Street Journal's report on the transaction.

Smith International is a company that came to the attention of Directors & Boards almost 30 years ago. In 1981, Warren Bennis, then and still a guru on leadership and governance, visited with Jerry Neely, then the CEO of Smith, for a conversation on "Keeping the Entrepreneurial Spirit Alive," as we titled the resulting Q&A article. Bennis found much to admire in Neely's management practices and in Neely himself as a personable CEO, and we shared their informative exchange with the journal's readers.

You always read horror stories of companies botching up acquisitions because they want to make wholesale changes with their new purchases — which causes the sellers, the very people that made the company a worthy purchase, to bail out. Well, that seems to have been something Neely was quite keenly aware of and determined not to do as he grew Smith. Listen in to this exchange between Neely and Bennis:

Neely: Interestingly enough, in most of the companies that we acquired, the presidents or the owners stayed on until they retired. We tell them, "Look, you are selling your company, but we want to preserve your entrepreneurial spirit. However, in order to grow, we think that certain things have to be done. Can you live with that?" And if he can't, we don't want him or his company.

Bennis: You wouldn't just say to him, "Look, you're through, and we're going to put our personnel in there."

Neely: We have done that twice and failed miserably both times. I don't think that you can buy a company that feels right, or that appeals to you, then change all of the structure and hope to run it better yourself. A lot of people like to think they are turnaround specialists. I guess there are those people, but I haven't really seen any of them. I look with a jaundiced eye at people who say they can turn a company around. So, as a result, we try to keep people on board.

As the M&A market heats up, which it is, as this deal for Smith demonstrates, this seems like awfully good advice that holds up after all these years. Perhaps today's management team at Smith will benefit from this enlightened approach, presuming that this policy is embedded in Schlumberger's M&A strategy.

Jerry Neely, who started with Smith in 1966 as a plant manager, retired as chairman at the end of 1988 and stayed on the Smith board until 2007. He continues to serve as an advisory director of the oil tool manufacturer, and is also on the advisory board of Arenda Capital Management, among other board affiliations. [Illustration of Neely that appeared in the 1981 Directors & Boards article]

Peter Drucker's Humble Assertion

Today marks the 100th anniversary of Peter Drucker's birth, about which a big deal is being made in the business media and throughout the business world. Activities include an international conference in Vienna, the city where he was born.

Drucker made several appearances in the pages of Directors & Boards. The first such appearance is the most memorable — an eight-page Q&A interview conducted by another expert on leadership, Warren Bennis. We published it in early 1982, just a few months after I joined the journal. (What an early coup for the new editor.) And what a textbook case of two brilliant guys sitting around talking about "The Invention of Management," as we titled the article.

Drucker made a rather charming admission in our article. "I am ashamed to admit how little I knew about management," he recounted to Prof. Bennis about his early forays into studying industrial organizations. "It was amazing, not because I was so ignorant but because nobody knew anything."

As he explained: "You could find all the books you wanted about salesmanship — and they have not improved since, by the way. You could find all you wanted about accounting; of course, that has improved. You could find an enormous amount about insurance and insurance law and banking. But management? Nothing.

"So maybe I can claim to have been the first, in my one-eyed way, and with very poor vision in that eye. I saw management as a generic function in the future of industrial man. That, I think, is the one and only contribution I've really made to management."

I'm sure all those convening today and throughout the month to honor this management thinker on the centennial of his birth would vigorously dispute his humble assertion.

Portrait of Peter Drucker that accompanied his 1982 Directors & Boards article.