Archives: January 2022

Course 6: Leadership with Urgency–OUT NOW!

Tom’s final course is now out! WOW.

His series, Excellence: Now More Than Ever, The Excellence Dividend Online Experience, consists of six courses and offers a total of 99 Steps to Excellence, each followed by specific actions you can take NOW. The goal of this series is simple: to offer you and your organization a helping hand in implementing the products of decades of Tom’s research.

Course 6 is the culmination of Tom’s course series. Leadership with Urgency will invite you to take a very close look at your daily leadership habits and start to make some immediate changes to improve how you’re getting things done. They may sound simple, but as you’ll read below, they’re not exactly easy. Nothing worthwhile is, right?

Course 6: Leadership with Urgency

[Below is what Tom has written to introduce this course, beginning with a quote from Dov Frohman.]

Avoid busy-ness, free up your time, stay focused on what really matters. Let me put it bluntly: every leader should routinely keep a substantial portion of his or her time—I would say as much as 50 percent—unscheduled. . . .Only when you have substantial ‘slop’ in your schedule—unscheduled time—will you have the space to reflect on what you are doing, learn from experience, and recover from your inevitable mistakes. . . . It takes enormous effort on the part of the leader to keep free time for the truly important things.” Dov Frohman, Leadership the Hard Way

High-tech superstar Dov Frohman lays down an outrageous law: 50 percent UNSCHEDULED TIME.

Frankly, I don’t think many of us could pull this off—could even pull off 25 percent free time. Nonetheless, Frohman’s credentials from Intel and from reshaping Israel’s high-tech sector are impeccable. My goal is to have you reflect on the likes of Frohman’s outrageous command. I don’t think I could do it—but upon personal reflection I think he is absolutely positively on the money.

TYPICALLY FRENZIED LEADERSHIP IS NOT LEADERSHIP AT ALL.

How many of us have had a boss who is late to four out of every five meetings because he’s overscheduled? Well, count me as one who’s experienced it—and lost all respect for the boss as a result thereof. The late boss is disrespectful (and, I’d bet, an awful decision-maker). You can’t do “frenzy” and “thoughtful” at the same time. I’d bet his decision-making is as half-assed as his on-time record.

The goal of this course is to lay down some formidable leadership challenges. It’s meant to get you thinking and trying several of these ideas out. I’m going to push you, for instance, on your communication skills. I’m going to tell you that each of the 15 people who report to you is very different from the other 14. Which means you need 15 dramatically different communication strategies in order to move forward effectively—every top football coach knows that, and so does every superior third-grade teacher, but damn few bosses seem to get it. They blame a miscommunication on the recipient—when in fact it is the boss’s fault 100 percent of the time!

Twenty challenges are forthcoming. I hope they help you down the path to leadership excellence.

Good luck.
-Tom

Register for Course 6: Leadership with Urgency today.

43 Quotes

Tom has assembled wise words that he has collected over his years of research, those that he shares most often or feels are most valuable. He uses these words to guide his work, whether speaking or writing or simply living. The words themselves come from military leaders, professors, photographers, entrepreneurs, film directors, business leaders, and high-level researchers because, as Tom acknowledges, excellence can be ubiquitous.

If you’re in need of inspiration or a thoughtful reminder, download the Forty-three Quotes.

Bob and Tom’s Excellent Adventure: 1977-2022

Bob Waterman died, at age 86, on January 2, 2022; among other things, the 2nd day of the year that marks the 40th anniversary of the 1982 publication of In Search of Excellence.

Bob and I co-created/co-authored In Search. We both thought we had done a pretty decent job, and the reception to the presentations of the book’s material had been uniformly heartening; but make no mistake, we were both staggered by the reception the book received and, for that matter, continues to receive. The only person more surprised than we were was our Harper & Row publisher, Ed Burlingame.

Bob and I were, on the one hand, cut from the same cloth. We were both trained as engineers, Bob at the Colorado School of Mines, me at Cornell. We both got MBAs from the Stanford Business School, and we both labored at McKinsey’s San Francisco office.

But we were also very different in ways that doubtless, in retrospect, drove our book’s success. I was noisy (orally and in print), profane, and opinionated. Bob was calm and thoughtful. Blending those differences was, upon reflection, what in the end made the book. After Bob had done a re-write of an early draft of the manuscript on his spanking new Apple II, my closest McKinsey friend, Alan Kennedy, was furious, and thought Bob had drained the spirit from the book. I was irritated, too; but I subsequently believe that the to-ing and fro-ing enabled the book to connect with the real business or non-business reader and leader—challenging her or him pretty directly, but not whacking her or him over the head with a splintery two-by-four.

Bob and I became close pals, and the Waterman family, starting with the wonderful Judy Waterman, became my second family during a rough patch in my personal life which coincided with the book’s birthing.

Bob and I never argued. At least in the normal usage of the word. We “argued” by editing intensely the most recent draft of the manuscript that one of us had handed over to the other.

A year before the book’s publication, I left McKinsey rather unceremoniously, having pushed some “strategy first-last-forever” power players too hard with my incessant “people first” ranting. But the writing process, amazingly, continued without a hitch. I even continued my presentations of the materials to McKinsey clients as the material was massaged and massaged some more.

Bob was a dear dear pal, his family was my family, and in some strange way the book reflected that rather perfectly. The idea of the book was to get beyond the sterile P&Ls and org charts, and get to the human heart of enterprise and its place in the community and the world. The data and our extensive research led us that way, but the true magic was arguably the quiet Tom & Bob Show that made the book what it was and is, and made it a dramatic departure from the bloodless depiction of business practices that were the norm in the 1977-1982 interval that marked the book’s birthing and road-testing.

I loved Bob dearly and miss him to an unimaginable degree. Rest in peace, brother.

Read Tom’s full remembrance article.

For more on Bob Waterman, check out this Cool Friend interview with him.