Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

ROBERT GANDOSSY is the Global Leader for Hewitt Associates’ Talent and Organization Consulting. Prior to joining Hewitt, he was a senior management consultant at a general management consulting firm.

MARC EFFRON is the Global Leader for Hewitt Associates’ Leadership Consulting Group, helping global companies build leadership quality and depth. He brings practical insight to his work through senior leadership roles at large Fortune 500 organizations.

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Praise for Leading the Way

"Leading the Way leaps beyond tired debates about whether leaders are born or made to show that they can be shaped, perfected, and polished. This persuasive book is packed with practical lessons about how the best companies turn gems of talent into crown jewels that enrich the whole enterprise."
Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Harvard Business School, bestselling author of Evolve!, When Giants Learn to Dance, and The Change Masters

"Leading the Way offers actionable insights for business leaders of enterprises both large and small. Gandossy and Effron focus on the things that matter: leadership, talent, and programs that work."
Dave Cote
CEO, Honeywell International

"When I first read the manuscript of Leading the Way, I was beside myself with excitement. I quickly dashed off notes to colleagues saying This is a very important book. You have to read it. Good leaders will be in very short supply very shortly. Either you implement what Gandossy and Effron recommend, or you risk watching from the sidelines. The good news is that the prescriptions in Leading the Way are clear, credible, proven, and doable. Be forewarned, however. This is not a fad-diet book for business. No quick fixes here. It will demand absolute dedication and tireless commitment. It will take time to work. But you have no choice. Do not hesitate. Read it now, and act on it immediately."
Jim Kouzes
coauthor, The Leadership Challenge and chairman emeritus, Tom Peters Company

"Through anecdotes and examples stressing the importance of the leader s attitude toward people, philosophy, and process, Leading the Way provides the road map to building strong leaders and motivates the reader to promote leadership as a critical part of their company s DNA. An important and compelling book for leaders everywhere."
Randy MacDonald
Senior Vice President, Human Resources, IBM

"Effective leadership is the difference between winning and losing in the marketplace. It is what makes strategy come to life. Creating a culture of leaders is an organization s best investment and competitive advantage. Gandossy and Effron offer useful insight into the patterns that top companies are using to attract, select, and develop organizational talent."
Robert L. Nardelli
Chairman, President, and CEO, The Home Depot

"All companies produce goods or services, but only a few produce leaders. From studying the best, Robert Gandossy and Marc Effron have nailed the three great drivers of leadership development. To learn what companies require to become leader makers, Leading the Way is the way."
Michael Useem
Professor and Director, the Wharton Center for Leadership and Change, University of Pennsylvania, and coauthor of Upward Bound

"Leading the Way . . . is a must-read for all leaders. It provides clear direction on how to build a strong leadership team at all levels, and leaves the reader with thought-provoking ideas to pursue. Both current and future leaders will benefit from the valuable suggestions in this book."
Susan Peters
Vice President, Executive Development, GE

Aus dem Klappentext

Sustained earnings growth ranks at the top of every company s performance objectives but, despite heroic efforts, all too few ever realize this goal. Their investments in technology, marketing, new products, or logistics bring temporary benefits at best. The top companies for leaders start with the value proposition that great performance begins with great leadership and they have the financial results to prove it!

In Leading the Way, Hewitt Associates business leaders Robert Gandossy and Marc Effron present their findings from the largest research project ever conducted on leadership, the "Top Companies for Leaders." Using data from more than 600 companies around the globe and interviews with senior executives at the top companies, they present a compelling business case for investing in growing leaders. Their stories, examples, and tactics provide tangible, practical tools for leaders everywhere.

Their "three leadership truths" define the fundamental building blocks used by top companies to build a sustainable pipeline of great leaders:

• The CEO and Board of Directors provide leadership and inspiration: Going beyond lip service to active and passionate involvement in building leaders capabilities
• A maniacal focus on high-potential leaders: Carefully identifying and aggressively developing your absolute best talent
• Doing the right programs the right way: Creating programs and processes that enhance the few differentiating leader-ship capabilities in a nonbureaucratic, measurable way

While many organizations successfully execute one or two of the truths, top companies differentiate themselves by consistently executing all three.

Going far beyond a simplistic best-practices approach, Leading the Way shows how growing great leaders begins with understanding the type of leaders your business strategy demands. Gandossy and Effron also highlight the "little things that count" the secrets that allow the top companies to sustain their success.

Leading the Way drives home its conclusions with financial analysis that shows how the three leadership truths translate into sustained financial success for the top companies, and how they can do the same for your organization as well. Put the knowledge of how IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Pepsi, FedEx, and other top companies build great leaders and great financial results to work for you.

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Leading the Way

Jossey-Bass

Chapter One

Leaders aren't born, they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. -Vince Lombardi

Surveying the crowd at the first meeting of IBM's Senior Leadership Group in 1996, Lou Gerstner, the blunt-talking chief executive charged with saving Big Blue from the brink, issued an edict: Go back to school! The directive must have surprised and likely angered more than a few of the 300 senior executives-including Gerstner's own direct reports-many of whom had been with the tech giant for decades.

But Gerstner hadn't been recruited from R. J. R. Nabisco to make friends. His immediate challenge was to save an institution that had quite literally been placed on a 24-hour deathwatch. Those in the room that day understood they had been hand selected because they were critical to IBM's recovery. So, when Gerstner told them they would be participating in a program focused on developing their own leadership capabilities, they knew they'd better listen.

That's not to say that everyone had confidence in Gerstner's ability to breathe new life into IBM. A downward spiral had taken the company's $6 billion profit in 1990 and quickly turned it into an $8.1 billion loss by 1993. In an industry that was rapidly expanding, IBM had lost half of its market share since 1985. They ranked 11th in customer satisfaction among companies in the computer industry, trailing several companies that no longer existed. IBM's stock price stood at an all-time low, and competitors like Hewlett-Packard and EMC clawed at its market share. On April 1, 1993, the day Gerstner took charge, IBM's stock had dropped from a high of $43 per share in 1987 to $13 per share.

The organization that had long held court as America's most admired company was forced to abandon its practice of lifetime employment, sending tens of thousands of workers in search of new jobs. Many of those workers found employment within the legions of new dot.coms and undoubtedly snickered at IBM as a soon-to-be-extinct dinosaur. However, it wouldn't be the dot.com millionaires but Big Blue that would ultimately have the last laugh.

Just as Wall Street was preparing to throw the first shovelful of dirt onto IBM's casket, something miraculous happened: The giant rose from the dead. In 2001, profits reached over $8 billion on revenues of $83 billion, and shares hit an all-time high. The company once credited by The Washington Post for inventing the computer industry was back-with a vengeance. And, in an instance of ultimate irony, BusinessWeek declared IBM the largest dot.com in the world. Gerstner and his team had pulled off the turn-around of the century, leading IBM back to profitability-without chopping the company into separate operating units, a plan that had been in the works when he took over as chief executive.

While Gerstner himself has been given much of the credit for IBM's amazing turnaround, Big Blue's boss clearly recognized that the company's leadership strength extended far beyond his office.

On his watch, a comprehensive approach to building great leaders was crafted, including careful selection, development, and rewards for IBM's best talent. Leaders were held accountable for growing other leaders, and good leadership was viewed as a critical asset to be carefully managed for the best possible return.

Gerstner's mandate accomplished much more than saving IBM. It positioned the company for the future by building a deep bench to ensure that Big Blue's dramatic turnaround wasn't just a passing phase. The fact that the transition from Gerstner to new CEO Sam Palmisano in 2002 was flawless in the eyes of the hypersensitive stock market and critical business press drives that point home. And with IBM facing likely retirement of as much as 75 percent of its senior management team by the year 2007, Gerstner's investment in a powerful leadership-development and succession-management process will prove to be an absolute necessity if IBM is to retain its regained crown and Gerstner's turnaround legacy is to last.

Reaching the Boiling Point

As Gerstner's story demonstrates, it is the development of a strong leadership team, rather than the actions of a single individual, that sets one organization apart from the rest. The facts are indisputable: Great leadership teams build trust and confidence among their people. They motivate and inspire. They anticipate challenges and redirect the enterprise in timely and appropriate ways, unifying the workforce behind a single cause and driving the kind of performance that allowed a Southwest Airlines to soar or an IBM to reboot itself. Simply put, they deliver better business results, and the opposite is true as well: An incompetent leadership team wreaks serious damage and creates inflexible bureaucracies, often destroying shareholder value and dooming the organization to failure. The corporate landscape is littered with hundreds of overly managed, poorly led institutions.

Tales of leadership successes and failures have served as juicy fodder for the likes of The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and Fox News. They've put leadership on the map, awakening many sleeping corporate giants in the process. It's clear now that there is a cause and effect-great returns for those organizations that invest in leaders and failure for those that do not. After decades of largely paying lip service to building great leaders, executives everywhere have begun to think more seriously about their own leadership processes.

This new awareness arrives at the right moment as two daunting demographic trends loom. Those trends will forcefully challenge how companies develop their leadership talent. In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, companies became spoiled by the enormous baby boomer generation-the pig moving through the python-which provided millions of talented, dedicated workers. While efforts were made to increase the capabilities of this group, the mindset that you could "buy" a leader when needed became ingrained in many firms. Revenue at executive-search firms nearly tripled in the seven-year period from 1993 to 2000 as companies tried to find outside what they could not or did not develop inside. "Twenty years ago," says Jeff Sonnenfeld, associate dean at Yale's School of Organization and Management, "only 7 percent of major firms hired CEOs from the outside. Now it's over 50 percent."

In the late 1980s, one Fortune 50 company was so concerned about the inability to grow leadership talent and the shortage of qualified leaders inside the company that it began to identify and track executives outside the company. The CEO and senior vice president of human resources undertook a confidential, but rigorous, process to review exceptional executives from other firms-the company even developed tracking mechanisms on their growth and development. They went so far as to structure forums-industry task forces, board presentations, golf outings-to observe targets firsthand.

The shortage will worsen. Aging boomers are beginning to trade the workforce for the golf course, trading corner offices for porch rocking chairs, company cars for golf carts. As this boomer bubble bursts, we will see a 15 percent drop in the number of men and women of "key leader...