The boldness being recognized and celebrated today is cautious and thoughtful. Boldness was being distorted by that generation of swashbuckling serial acquirers: deal-a-day Dennis Kozlowski at Tyco, Ken Lay at Enron, WorldCom's Bernie Ebbers. They were intoxicated with churning up the waters, making a big splash. There was no logic to it, and there was no business courage behind it.
What you see today at exemplars such as Pfizer, IBM, GE, and 3M is an embracing of big ideas. Their leaders are going back to imagination. They're funding expensive research, things that may take a little while to pan out. These visions are modeled on a lot of the entrepreneurial genius in those companies' histories. The legends they're drawing on go back to those pioneers, whether it's a founder or a key reshaper. At IBM, they're not referencing Lou Gerstner; they're referencing Thomas Watson Jr. and his bet on the IBM 360 mainframe. Even McDonald's is rediscovering Ray Kroc. Today's leaders are asking, "What's the core nature of our business and how do we stretch it to its limits?"
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld
What you have to do is educate your board. You have to encourage dissent, have people take positions of devil's advocate to try to create that culture.
It's not easy. Boards right now are financially risk-averse, legally risk-averse, and reputationally risk-averse. Rather than encouraging boldness, boards have arms folded, anxious to look as if they're being watchful. But the result is that CEOs can't let their hair down and show vulnerabilities and ask for help, which is a key aspect of being courageous. A balance of power, a legal conception of governance, doesn't encourage nimble risk taking.
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld
Groupthink.
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