Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dov Frohman, a pioneer of the global corporation, is the founder and former general manager of Intel Israel?and?widely respected as a leader and?innovator in the worldwide semiconductor industry.?
 
Robert Howard is a former senior editor of the Harvard Business Review. A veteran writer on work, technology, and management, he is the author of Brave New Workplace and the editor of The Learning Imperative: Managing People for Continuous Innovation.

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Praise for Leadership the Hard Way
 
"If leadership is defined by the number and quality of followers, and by their ability to do better than they-or anyone else-thought possible, Dov Frohman's career is the epitome of leadership. This book portrays his style-pragmatic, unassuming, persistent-in a genuine and entertaining way. Reading it is like going along for the ride."
-Andy Grove, former CEO, Intel Corporation and author, Only the Paranoid Survive
 
"Dov Frohman and Robert Howard say that leadership cannot be taught-at least not in classes and slides-but it can be learned, especially in turbulent times, with brilliance and open-spiritedness.?Our best evidence is Frohman himself, whose fascinating decisions-as computer scientist and pioneer CEO-stud this stimulating, practical, elegant book."
-Bernard Avishai, contributing editor, Harvard Business Review and author, The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace At Last
 
"Leadership the Hard Way reads like a report from the front by a solider who is a hero. A must-read for leaders in today's tough and uncertain economy."
-George Stalk, senior partner, The Boston Consulting Group and author, Hardball: Are You Playing to Play or Playing to Win?
 
"In a highly personal style, yet with nuanced insight and useful principles, Frohman and Howard expertly navigate the necessary tensions of leading on the edge: how to be both an insider and an outsider, stay true to a vision yet listen to dissent, see things differently in order to do things differently. I could not put this book down."
-John Seely Brown, former chief scientist, Xerox Corporation and former director, Xerox PARC; coauthor, The Social Life of Information and The Only Sustainable Edge

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leadership the Hard Way
 
Few subjects have captivated the business world in recent years more than leadership. Yet at the very moment we are seeing so many efforts to teach leadership, we are also experiencing widespread and continuous failures of leadership-and not just in business but in politics, education, and other institutions of modern society. The reason for this disconnect, says Dov Frohman, is that most of the conventional wisdom about leadership today is, while not wrong exactly, surprisingly irrelevant to the true challenges and dilemmas of leading in today's world. While so many of the articles, books, and programs on the subject maintain that leadership is largely a matter of technique or a set of skills that can be taught, Frohman believes that precisely the opposite is the case: learning how to lead is more in the nature of cultivating personal wisdom than it is of acquiring technical skills.
 
In this book, Frohman-iconoclastic innovator and founder of Intel Israel-and coauthor Robert Howard present a method of living and working that can truly facilitate the learning of leadership. Their method shows how to go against the current, fight conventional wisdom, and embrace the unexpected. It is about trusting oneself and valuing?intuition, principles, and imagination as much as hard skills and analysis. Frohman combines his counterintuitive ideas with experiences from his own background-from hiding out during the Nazi occupation of Holland as a child to becoming a leading innovator in the semiconductor industry-to show how readers can build their own leadership abilities. A leader's values and personality, he ultimately reveals, are the only sure source of stability in a world of continuous change.

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Leadership the Hard Way

Jossey-Bass

Chapter One

In a turbulent economy, the first task of the leader is insisting on survival-that is, continuously identifying and addressing potential threats to the long-term survival of the organization. At first glance this statement may seem obvious, even trivial. Doesn't it go without saying that no organization can be successful if it doesn't first survive? Yet the rapid increase in the pace of change in business has made survival more problematic than ever before. The frequency with which organizations face major challenges to their survival is growing.

In the days when most established companies had relatively stable markets and competitors, survival was only rarely an issue. To be sure, every now and then a company might face a major crisis, but once that crisis was addressed, things went back to normal. Few companies today have that luxury. Threats to survival aren't occasional; they are nearly continuous. If an organization waits for a full-blown crisis to develop, it may find that it is already too late.

The growing frequency of threats to survival is especially evident in technology-or innovation-based businesses. In such businesses, success at any one generation of technology is really only buying an option on the future. It wins you the right to compete at the next level of technology, but offers no guarantees of continual success. Indeed, quite the opposite: often it is those companies that are most successful at one generation of technology that have the most difficulty in adapting to subsequent generations.

I believe it was the increasingly problematic nature of survival that Andy Grove had in mind when he claimed famously that "only the paranoid survive." As Grove describes in his book of that name, sooner or later, every business reaches what he calls a "strategic inflection point"-that " time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change. That change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights. But it may just as likely signal the beginning of the end." Grove makes clear that such strategic inflection points can be caused by technological change but they are about more than just technology. They can be caused by new competitors, but they are about more than just the competition. "They are full-scale changes in the way business is conducted." As such they "can be deadly when unattended to."

Despite the proliferation of such threats to survival in business today, most people in most organizations avoid engaging squarely with the issue. This is partly a result of the complacency that comes with success. But even more, there is something in the very nature of an organization that leads its members to take its ongoing existence for granted. In this respect, an organization is a lot like an adolescent. It assumes it is going to live forever!

It's easy to understand why most people would prefer not to think about potential threats to their survival. It's scary, and fear can be paralyzing. Nobody wants to consider the possibility that "I might not survive!" What's more, threats to survival generate massive uncertainty. To survive such threats means to take risks. But risks are by definition uncertain. What if we try and fail? What if things don't work out? No wonder people avoid the issue of survival, if they can get away with it.

The job of the leader is to make sure they don't get away with it. A leader must represent to the organization the imperative of survival, the challenge of survival, and the reality of threats to survival. By constantly asking "What will it take to survive?" leaders in effect force people to anticipate in advance the potential threats facing the organization. In this way, they become the catalyst for continuous adaptation that allows the organization to avoid a genuine crisis of survival.

To do this effectively, you must take a position consciously "in opposition" to the organization and its identity and systematically resist the taken-for-grantedness that one finds in any organization. The leader has to embody the possibility that the organization can fail and fail disastrously-precisely to make sure that it does not.

A Wartime Childhood

In retrospect, I realize that my preoccupation-some might say obsession-with survival is, at least in part, a by-product of my experience as a child during the Second World War. My parents, Abraham and Feijga Frohman, were Polish Jews who emigrated to Holland in the early 1930s to escape the rising anti-Semitism in Poland. I was born in Amsterdam on March 28, 1939, just months before the start of the war.

After the German invasion of the Low Countries in 1940, we continued to live in Amsterdam. But in 1942, as the Nazi grip on Holland's Jewish community steadily tightened, my parents made the difficult decision to give me up to people they knew in the Dutch underground, who hid me with a family in the Dutch countryside.

Antonie and Jenneke Van Tilborgh were devout Christians, members of the Gereformeerde Kerk or Calvinist Reformed Church, the most orthodox branch of Dutch Protestantism. They lived on a farm on the outskirts of Sprang Capelle, a small village in the region of Noord Braband, in southern Holland near the Belgian border. The Van Tilborghs had four children. Their oldest daughter, Rie, was twenty-one but still living at home. Another daughter, Jet, was fourteen. And the two boys, Coor and Toon, were ten and six. The Van Tilborgh family hid me from the Germans for the duration of the war. Only a few close neighbors knew that I was staying with them.

I was only three when I arrived at the Van Tilborgh household, so it is difficult to differentiate between what I actually remember and what I was told later. But one thing I do recall was feeling different. For example, I had dark hair, and the Van Tilborgh children were all blond. I had to wear a black hat to hide my black hair.

I also remember hiding when the Germans would search the village. Sometimes I would hide under the bed, sometimes in the root cellar (I have a warm memory of treating myself to the apples that were stored there), sometimes with my "brothers" and "sisters" out in the surrounding woods. To this day I have a scar on my wrist that, according to the Van Tilborghs, came from a time when we were running through the woods and I tried to jump over a creek and got caught by some barbed wire.

Other memories are more disturbing. One day, looking out the cellar window, I saw German soldiers execute a fellow soldier. I don't know why they were doing it; perhaps he was a deserter, perhaps he himself had helped some Jews who were in hiding. Whatever the cause, I have the image seared in my mind of seeing him hit by the bullets and falling to the ground in a heap.

My parents did not survive the war. They were taken in one of the many roundups of Jews by the Nazis. Much later, I learned that my father died in Auschwitz. I never learned for sure where my mother died, although it's likely she was taken to Auschwitz as well.

I see now that my experience during the war inculcated in me a stubborn conviction that nothing is truly secure, that survival must never be taken for granted-but also that the actions of determined individuals can "achieve the impossible" and have a literally heroic impact on events. If...