Why Is The Course Uncharted?
Leadership is about change, and change can be technical or adaptive.2 When organisations face problems for which solutions are known, i.e., maps are available, then the bosses set out to do the work and they do so by applying available current knowhow, e.g., structuring an acquisition or merger. This kind of leadership is somewhat safe. However, organisations also face major issues for which there is no readily applicable solution. The solutions have to be discovered through adjustments and experiments, e.g., consummating an acquisition or merger through the people in the organisations. In this situation, adaptive change is required. That means the grassroots people with the problem have to do the work by learning new ways.

This type of leadership is risky; change appears dangerous to people because they confront loss or challenge to life-time beliefs. The leadership challenge is to disturb people, but only at a rate they can absorb. Think of the leadership challenges at the national level posed by the piloting of reform in the power sector or disinvestment. It is dangerous because the leader risks being marginalised, diverted or attacked, evidence of which is visible everyday.

This happens at the corporate level too. Jamsetji Tata was criticised when the Tatas bought a sick textile mill at Bombay in 1886. It took him eight years to pitchfork this unit into the top bracket of India's textile mills. After Dorab Tata hugely expanded the Jamshedpur steel capacity in 1916, prices collapsed and the steel company was in danger of closing down. It took a pledge of his personal wealth and some providence to rescue the fledgling company. More recently, when Ratan Tata proposed the payment of subscription by Tata firms to shares of Tata Sons and to a Tata Brand Equity Fund, there was huge public criticism. Eight years later, the financial and brand benefits to the wide body of shareholders are visible all around. But the areas of criticism will continue - the Indica car, the entry into telecom and, for sure, others to come in the future!

Some commentators define good leadership by studying unsuccessful leaders.3 Coriolanus, the Roman general, was a great warrior, a man with a strong moral sense but an utter inability to reach out to the people of Rome and engage them in his vision. His mother encouraged her son repeatedly, but Coriolanus just could not connect with his people because he was somehow convinced that doing so would compromise his integrity. Shakespeare opens his tragedy play, Coriolanus, with the Romans on the street being addressed by a citizen, who proposes that the citizens kill Coriolanus. The Roman emperor had clearly lost a connection with his people.

Doug Ivester lasted 28 months as CEO of Coca-Cola after the legendary Roberto Goizueta. He was seen poorly for his insensitivity to ethnic minorities, his inadequate response to adulterated coke in Europe and other failures of adaptive capability. Eckard Pfeiffer of Compaq was fired for surrounding himself with yes-men and ignoring those who spoke truths to him, isolating himself from employees and customers. As Aldous Huxley said: "Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him." To the extent one can validly isolate one single quality that determines success, it is adaptive capacity, i.e., the ability to understand context and the capacity to struggle in the experiences encountered, but not get stuck in them or get defined by them.

Since there are no simple ways for organisational leaders to avoid the risks of leadership, four steps of Sensing-Thinking-Doing-Correcting are a good way.

Sensing: The homing pigeon is unique in that it has a sense of direction (compass) as well as a sense of location (map). Jonathan Hagstrum, a researcher at the US Geological Survey, has postulated how. Pigeons can hear very low frequency sound, called infrasounds. When the ocean waves bang against one another, infrasounds are generated. Infrasounds travel thousands of miles from their sources, so the pigeon always has a sense of where the ocean is. These infrasounds also reflect from the local terrain like mountains and cliffs, so the bird gets an excellent acoustic picture of its surroundings. This is what makes the pigeon's compass and map sense so unique. On Sunday, 29 June 1997, a great race was held to celebrate the centenary of the Royal Pigeon Racing Association. More than 60,000 homing pigeons were released at 6:30 a.m. from Nantes, France, flying to lofts all over Southern England. They should have arrived at their lofts by early afternoon. They didn't. A few thousand out of the 60,000 straggled in over the next few days. In pigeon racing terms, this was a disaster. What happened? Hagstrum found that at about 11:00 a.m., when the pigeons were crossing the English Channel, a Concorde airliner was flying along the Channel. A supersonic airliner generates a shockwave down towards the earth, almost one hundred miles wide. Most of the birds must have been caught in this shockwave. This prevented them from listening to the infrasounds which guided them, thus they lost their bearing and their way.

The most important requirement for a leader is not to get caught in a shockwave that prevents him from sensing his bearings. Jamil Mahuad had been a very successful mayor of Quito province and was probably elected president of his country, Ecuador, for that reason. Eager to show quick results, he became very focussed on providing a short-term remedy for the mounting problems of his countrymen. Later, he himself admitted: "I have lost my connection with the people." On the other hand, when Lee Kuan Yew first became prime minister of Singapore, he took precious time from his daily schedule to learn Mandarin, the language of his constituents.

Thinking: Thinking networks by not only finding allies but also by keeping close to those opposed to the new ideas. This is all part of a success plan. For many years, as a competitor from Unilever, I had been an admirer of Procter and Gamble. I was quite surprised to see the departure of Durk Jager, who took over in 1999 from his legendary predecessor. Jager was a man of considerable vision and saw the need to modernise the tradition-bound consumer goods giant. He planned a complete organisational overhaul, a cultural revolution. He moved out before he was able to get the rest of the company behind his innovative plan for change, before he could form networks with allies. It does not matter whether his plan was good or not, he never managed to communicate the superiority of his new vision for the company. He did not survive the turmoil he unleashed, perhaps, because he did not think networks and allies.

To survive and succeed in exercising leadership, you must also work as closely with opponents as with supporters. In fact, opponents deserve more attention not only as a tactic of strategy and survival, but also sometimes as a matter of compassion. Take how our national leaders deal with disinvestment. By its very nature, there will be conflict and heat. So the leader needs to create a holding environment within which people can tackle tough, divisive questions without flying apart.

The late Rajiv Gandhi lost the 1989 election partly because he was seen widely as Westernised and elitist. In fact, in 1980, it was Indira Gandhi who really launched economic reform, which was rejuvenated in 1985 by Rajiv and abandoned by him in 1987. In 1991, Narasimha Rao faced pressure from the reformers for a big bang approach. Very boringly, he chose the middle path, which he articulated at the Tirupati Session of the Congress party. By not decrying Nehruvian economics, by projecting his policies as a continuity with the past, by being seen to learn from Asian experience rather than Western experience, Narasimha Rao created networks with his allies as well ways to track his opponents.

Doing: Many leaders are excellent thinkers. They develop the correct visions, often grand ones. They go public with their thoughts or even launch their initiatives in the hope that somebody will dot the i's and cross the t's. Then, too late, they notice a gap between what they want to achieve and the ability of their organisation to achieve it. Strategies often fail as they are not executed well, not because they are bad strategies.4

Xerox hired Richard Thoman from IBM in 1997 as COO to usher in change. Two years later, the board elevated him as CEO and he was one of the most thoughtful people to head a major American company. One year later, Rick Thoman was fired by chairman Paul Allaire. Thoman had launched two major initiatives, both of which were necessary and important. One related to consolidating the 100 administration centres of the company and the other related to reorganising the 30,000-strong sales force. Xerox's clubby culture had not quite taken to an outsider and so he was too aloof to connect with the people who had to execute the changes. So, the organisation failed to execute Rick Thoman's vision and promises, morale dropped, cash flow from operations went negative and the stock plunged.

While strategy thinking has been recognised and taught as a discipline, strategy execution has not. Top management knows deep down that something is missing when commitments consistently fail to get delivered. They search and struggle for answers, benchmarking competitors, rationalising the differences and looking for answers in the organisational processes, culture and structure. In the name of delegation and trust of subordinates, they fail to undertake persistent and constructive probing. They fail to ask questions like 'Where will the increased sales come from?', 'What will competitors do?', 'What if the economy takes a turn?' and so on.

Apart from the lack of execution discipline, another enemy of doing is the misjudgement of how to pace the work. In 1994, US president Bill Clinton recommended sweeping healthcare reforms that involved radical changes in the financing and delivery of healthcare services. To generate that magnitude of change, Clinton needed a process of education, explanation and persuasion that would have taken years with small experiments all along the way. However, Clinton believed that his election in 1992 gave him the mandate and he pressed ahead with his proposals. There was great opposition, his own popularity crumbled and the media wrote stories wondering whether he was still relevant!

Correcting: Finally a leader must pick up signals for corrective action. This requires the leader to engage his top team in collective learning. A good way to illustrate collective learning is through an example5 from nature.

In the Britain of the early 1900s, milk bottles supplied to homes were without any caps. Two garden birds, the blue jay and the robin, had both perfected the art of sipping cream from the bottle. After World War II, tin foil caps on bottles were introduced. The blue jays soon learnt to peck the caps open and continued to sip the cream while the robins could not. On researching the success of one species, zoologist Alan Wilson found that blue jays moved in flocks of 14 or 15 birds. The parents stayed with their young ones till they were old enough to take care of themselves. So, the learning by one bird was quickly and efficiently shared among the entire flock. On the other hand, the robin was a loner. The male robin defended his territory rather fiercely and was antagonistic to other birds of the species if they came too close. Hence, sharing between robins was non-existent. His conclusion was that innovation, social propagation and mobility allowed blue jays to enjoy the cream and grow healthy.

References
1 The Failed Mahabharata by A.D. Moddie
2 Leadership on the Line by Heifetz and Linsky
3 Geeks and Geezers by Bennis and Thomas
4 Execution by Bossidy and Charan
5 The Living Company by Arie de Geus