Smart Steps

Paul Wieand

President and founder
Center for Advanced Emotional Intelligence
Ottsville, Pennsylvania

Six years ago, when I started my company, I didn't realize that leaders could be so self-destructive, so deceiving, and so alienating. Then my colleagues and I started working with dozens of senior executives from major companies. Most of those leaders had lost their identity because they didn't know how to be authentic. At the same time, they didn't know how to build trust within their organization.

While today's sophisticated world has raised the bar for leadership, we've forgotten a basic rule about what makes us most human. It's not intellect, it's values. The most powerful force on Earth is knowing how to be yourself.

My advice? Obsess about your human architecture. Many companies worry about quality in just about every area of the company except their own people. Yet relationships matter now more than ever. Social capital breaks down when you don't have role models across every level of the organization building trust.

Companies that lack high-quality social relationships are self-destructing, because the people within those companies are being pushed beyond their limits.

For many leaders, life in the go-go boom times was so good for so long that they never became very sophisticated at managing their social capital. When distracted by greed, excitement, and the powers of Wall Street, how can you reflect on the human stuff? Hard times test people; people get real or get lost.

In 1995, Paul Wieand (aeileads@aol.com) founded the Center for Advanced Emotional Intelligence, a 12-month leadership-development program for top executives and entrepreneurs, six years after stepping down as president and CEO of Sovereign Bancorp. He was one of the banking industry's youngest-ever CEOs. Wieand previously appeared in FC 25, June 1999 ("A Leader's Journey").

Peter Solvik

Senior vice president and chief information officer
Cisco Systems
San Jose, California

The Internet is changing every bone in our body, and we assess our leaders today by how well they understand the enormous scope of that lesson. You either get it, or you don't. The new economy is about reinventing how business is conducted -- in every single job, in every single corporation. There's a revolution going on, and we have to rethink every single relationship within the company and beyond.

In the early 1990s, when we launched our Internet initiatives, we had been focused on our customers. We knew that the Internet was going to change how we deal with our customers in terms of commerce and support, but we weren't as quick to jump on another concept: The Internet also requires a major internal transformation. It wasn't until 1997, when we took our first step toward Internet supply chains, that we realized that we had to change completely how we operate -- inside and out. Now we're changing the way we communicate, the way we make decisions, the way we think about productivity, and the way we interact with our employees, customers, suppliers, partners -- and with other corporations. And in the past five years, we've reduced the cost of Cisco's finance function as a percentage of revenue by 50%. We've also cut the time that it takes us to close our books -- from two weeks to one day. When most people think about the Internet, they think about commerce, customer support, or B2B and B2C plays. They don't think about closing their books faster. This is not a one- or two-year transformation. Try a decade. But we're already one-third of the way through this revolution, and most companies still don't understand that they need a new backbone.

Peter Solvik joined Cisco in 1993 and is responsible for the company's worldwide use of information technology. He also oversees Cisco's Internet business solutions group. Solvik previously appeared in FC 7, February 1997 ("Two Billion Reasons Cisco's Sold on the Net").

Mimi Silbert

Founder
Delancey Street Foundation
San Francisco, California

I've learned to put all of my faith in people, rather than in the dollar. That's the way we run our businesses. Our bottom line is how much the business teaches people and how much those people grow and develop their talents. The exciting lesson of the new economy has been about learning to embrace a new creativity and a willingness to take risks.

But sometimes, when you take a lot of risks, you bump your nose. So you need time to take a hard look at those risks -- and to experience the most telling time of all, the time when you try to retain or maintain that original excitement, creativity, and risk-taking orientation, but combine that feeling with the grounding lessons you've learned.