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CSPAN2 After Words October 7, 2013

Know. People here really do like to read about where they live and their history. There is a real connection among people who grew up here, especially the ones who are several generations on. The relationship to the land, you know. Its great to be with you this afternoon. I hope you are doing well. Guest thank you, debbie. I hope you are, too triet host ibm. I enjoyed reading the book in the last week. Do and a member of the people in the book you wrote about but i wonder why did you write this book now . Guest well, its clearly something i couldnt have written while i was still actively employed by General Motors because some people either within General Motors or other Companies Might have taken offense but it was a book i always wanted to write because i have worked for a number of very interesting personalities and i felt people with a great deal of ability on one side but some very serious flaws on the other and the public if rarely ever gets an inside look at the overall behavior of some of these famous executives that they dread about. Host so what is your definition of leadership especially in business . What do you look for in a good leader . Guest the most important prerequisite is an absolute sense of integrity because if that isnt fair then Everything Else is built on the house of cards but you also look for a healthy degree of selfconfidence. There has to be some ego. You cant have a retiring shy person who likes to defer to other people. Thats not possible. It has to be somebody with some command presence. A leader also has to obviously have a decent interpersonal skills but must have the ability to communicate because the leader cant say do this and dont ask why just do it because i say so. Thats not an effective form of leadership. A much better form of leadership is to use the power of verbal or written communications to pave the vision that everybody wants to follow and once youve got all the troops mobilized wanting to go in the same direction as you do then it becomes pretty easy. Host i read this book a couple of times preparing to talk about this today with you and i honestly is trying to figure not who was the most effective leader and did you have a favorite and i had a difficult time because you did give both pluses and minuses of the scoring you did at the end of the book but who do you think the most effective leader was the you worked with in the Auto Industry claques guest the most effective leader i worked with in the Auto Industry i have to say for all its worth, for all of its profanity and for all the down sides to him was without a question leave. Host why . Did you learn things from him . Guest well, i learned a lot of good things. Hopefully not many bad things, but he was passionate about the company, passionate about staging of this inner passion and in your drive that of course is another hallmark of good leaders. They have to be enthusiastic about the task and they have to be able to convey that enthusiasm. He was a brilliant communicator and also on good days he was off his game a little bit but on good days he could listen to a very, very complex multifaceted business problem and listen to everybody talking and after about 30 minutes he would say wait a minute five think ive got this figured out and then he would lay out an impeccable stepbystep plan. There were other days when seemingly obvious problems seemed to skate them and he was also at times i would say overly driven by the sense of ego and people need to defer to him and figuratively speaking of course and he was often somewhat asia ayman especially in the company of others that he didnt know. But overall take the weaknesses and the positives and he was in a highly effective and a visible leader who could rally the troops not only in house that he could get the beavers behind him and use all the brilliant job that he did with the u. S. Congress during the days of the chrysler loan guarantees. Believe me there was a tough sale. Host i agree with you she was loved and respected. I was trying to figure out who you least respected. Who in your career or life did you least respect and why . Guest . I never worked with him directly but he was the ceo, chairman and ceo of the corporation at the time was the producer of the lead acid batteries and i succeeded him as the ceo of the company. I just uncovered the biggest possible can of worms. He was in violation of many state and federal laws found guilty of racketeering. There wasnt only a lack of integrity but also a colossal ego, self dealing. This man shouldnt have been in the position of responsibility in any Large Organization but again he possessed some of the treats good leaders have which is the enormous degree of selfconfidence, the command. He looked like a leader and sound like a leader and used the vocabulary of leadership and people were persuaded by him and they did follow him and they were fooled by him so he was somebody that possessed the skill set but didnt possess the moral or the efik requirements to be a leader and he eventually dragged the company down because when i took over it was almost impossible for me to do business with certain companies. I couldnt entertain walmart as a customer even though they would potentially would buy seven or 8 million batteries a year but they would say im sorry but we are not going to deal with a company where the former ceo is headed for the federal penitentiary erie. So i found that a lot of doors i couldnt raise equity because the company was still under indictment in federal states several states. This was a guy whose personal greed and willingness to cheat and lie to achieve his goals actually destroyed the company and drove it into chapter 11. Host i think you did right by the week. But me ask you this question. Why did you talk about at the end of the book you have a scoring metric system that we need to have things in metrics. Talk about that a little so that people understand what the metrics are. I dont think people who know you very well would think if you as an encounter or metric seoul. I think youve got passion. Guest i am not. And of course, debbie, when first of all the set of leadership attributes are my ellinwood and i dont claim that they are complete. Other people might have others. But i think i have a fairly comprehensive list. Secondly, the importance or the waiting of the leadership skills i mean, to be honest, some people might not attach it as a highly waiting to integrity. Others might attach a greater leading to the creativity. I think that it depends both. I gave the disclaimer i said these ratings are subjective. They are the way that i see it other people might have different weights. But i wanted to let the end of the book i wanted people to have an opportunity to kind of see an effort ebenefits subject if qualification. I wanted them to see some sort of qualified way of assessing who is best, who is second best, who is third best and i wanted to encourage people to do a Self Assessment or assessment the present leaders. He will probably recall at some point in the book i said those individuals who have worked for me at any of the companys i worked for i certainly would welcome them filling out the same forms on me and sending it back because you are basically never too old to learn. Host why dont we use this as a chance to talk about the Business Assessment and talk about yourself as a leader. What do you think some of the leaders thought about having you as a team member . Some chose you and it looks like a few might not have. What do you think of yourself as a leader using that . Guest well, i dont classify myself as an articulating i classify myself as articulate because i can describe what i want, i can describe a division i can get people enthusiastic. And i was always very passionate about the business i was in the. Thanks to my training in the marine corps and also my early training in General Motors and leader in ford, the large american Automobile Companies, i had i think a pretty impeccable sense of Business Ethics what you do and what you dont do. And so on the integrity front, i passed. I certainly think any creative person. So i found it easy to come up with new ideas and new solutions to old problems so i give myself a high score on that. I think i was a better leader than i was subordinate because i found i had a lifelong problem of not being able to tolerate fools gladly and at times i was in working for a leader who was behaving in a particularly strange fashion i didnt always keep it to myself and of course one of liberals you should observe as a subordinate is you maintain loyalty to your leader and you should not openly criticize that leader in the presence of others and thats one that i occasionally violated so i mark myself down on that one. Host one of the things that struck me in reading your book is an organization can become a bureaucratic institution but can from dampen the inspiration. I dont think you ever let that happen to yourself. But how and to you and how the leaders ensure the doesnt happen . Guest well let basically this is where i say good leaders, really good leaders are often in patient, they are often harbinger rita cosby leader the always listens to every one, always listens to all the viewpoints wants to make sure that everybody is convinced before he or she finally makes a decision you just lose valuable time and i think a good leader does have a sense of impatience, is impatient in long meetings where people make contributions to demonstrate their knowledge as opposed to the cause of the meeting. A lot of leaders then by late Good Management behavior in that they say stop talking about that, please we heard it before. The only thing you can do this to say just keep quiet. We need to get this over with. Well, you know that is unpleasant to hear. It has fewer and anxiety in the meeting. But both leaders are focused on getting the job done. And they are focused on getting it done fast. You can have a very pleasant environment absent about leadership, but not as much gets done. And i think that you and i both know it samples of eight leadership style that was overly patient, overly tolerant up whether the opinions and finally it was too slow moving. But a good leaders just run roughshod over that. Host i agree with that. You were allowed to share your impatience more than i was. But me ask a different question to and how do you encourage to the leaders encourage great thinking and how do those ideas come forward and be heard in an organization . Guest yeah, i dont think anybody ever completely solved that. But certainly one way you do it is by espousing new and Different Solutions to yourself. Secondly, so people say this guy certainly thinks outside of the box. Maybe thats okay. You definitely encourage other people to think out of the box. And you reward people who think out of the box even though the idea may not pan out the first time. Eddy and above all, when people try something out of the box and it doesnt work you dont punish them. I will just tell you a little off 32nd story. Two engineers at chrysler when i was there it took a company car home with them because they felt they could make some modifications to where you could shift the fourspeed automatic transmission with a little switch, which is now known as the top shift. Every car has got it. The successful we did that and they were able to demonstrate. But chrysler now for the cost of 10 a car they could introduce a manually shiftable automatic transmission. When the organization heard about it was immediately how dare you do unauthorized work on a company car. Who authorized you to take the car with you . Who authorized this work . Do you realize you did on authorized damage to a company car and the whole weight of the bureaucracy was about to descend on them and they were going to be squashed like maggots. I found out about it and i said wait a minute to these kids had their own initiative and did something every Automobile Company in the world has tried to do, General Motors, ford, nobody has done it yet. They figured out a lowcost way to get the owner to shift the automatic transmission. They finally wound up giving them that chairman spry is and i think if you do that sort of thing once or twice. The word gets out and then what you find is all of the innovative people in the organization who prior to that have sort of concord down they come out of the woodwork and start making contributions. Host i need to ask a question that the United States government could use help on. Like so many appropriations that have been successful for decades and hundreds of years have gone into the large bureaucratic organizations that do squash and become much more that are authorized to take the car home than the creativity. What is your solution to the government and bureaucracy and how do you get rid of the bureaucracies that come into the existing organizations that have been successful at lasting but are not successful in innovation creativity etc. It is a problem still facing a lot of american businesses. It is facing a lot of American Communities and we saw what happened to detroit where over time we have built in apparatus, an administrative apparatus with its revenues. I was just talking to the consultant about a Major American Corporation facing headwinds and a decline in revenue and a decline in the margins. They are also reluctant to reach in and take the medicine that is going to take the right side of the company. Basically what it takes is somebody who doesnt try to solve ive always found it so amazing in the government when there is a new problem instead of asking your existing organization to deal with this new problem expands the scope and the new department is formed. So weve got departments all over the place. Many of them operating across purposes i dont know how many Intelligence Services we have, but a lot of corporations believe the same way. You will remember that General Motors under the socalled go Fast Initiative that is supposed to be a spontaneous flow of little ideas that can be quickly adopted to streamline the organization or to make the tasks easier. Now as it happened, the ceo wanted to know how many were occurring for rot company, who was creating it, what departments on how fast were they being processed, how many were adopted. So the huge parallel bureaucracy was built up around to go Fast Initiative which was designed to eliminate bureaucracy. The was the ultimate irony and i see all of the Large Organizations doing that pitted a well create a new bureaucracy to solve the problems of the old bureaucracy and of course the old bureaucracy doesnt want its problems solved. The only way to cut through that is that its got to be either external sectors like chapter 11, which unfortunately would be a great way to Fix Companies if it were not for the fact that shareholders get wiped out but its under the leadership going to emerge with a realistic tax base heretofore Public Services privatized etc. , etc. And certainly it is true for General Motors and for chrysler and its true for all of American Companies. Governments are going to require i hate to say this, but its going to require a chief executive who is not consensus driven but it is very much focused on streamlining the government and reducing the size of Big Government and forcing a lot of nice to have people out of the Government Service and encouraging them to find jobs somewhere else. But again, this gets back to my comment on leadership that a highly effective leader that is facing a difficult or seemingly intractable situation cannot wait around for everyone to agree with what he or she is doing. At some point thats why he or she is the leader to force change. Its going to take somebody in government to really force the change to say i dont care about this. We need this, we dont need that. We can consolidate that or hand out tasks to everybody and tell everybody that everybody is going to get rid of 25 to 30 of the people. You figure out. Im not going to tell you how to do it but its going to take Something Arbitrary like that. And of course is it an unpleasant task . Yes. With the person get heavily criticized . Will there be negative press . Yes. What he or she likely be voted out of office the next time around . Again yes. That is why he is so difficult to do. So instead of actually tackling the problem, most of leaders in the government kick the can down the road and say this is something we are really going to have to address some day and then a lot of these people find comfort in doing longrange plans and the longrange plans are usually five years out and designed to show a well addressed problem in a few years and heres how we plan to do it. But meanwhile the revenue will pick up and we will be okay. I have seen in my career i have seen hundreds of those plans which we get rid of the feelgood. They all go home at night and they are tired. Theyve worked on this long range plan would that a mistake for doing something about the problem. Once the longrange plan is finished and its put to bed then everybody says we fixed that one and of course they havent fixed a fame. Host i call it kind of the program the issuer. There was always a new phrase that could be used and then things would come in and im not sure that any of them really made a difference. Did any of them make a difference to you . We agree on that, too. All of these seven initiatives of this and that, and there was the program will and they were usually sold to the company by what consultants and i think one of them on the american side of the industry and the Human Resource professionals as grant be sending me a bunch of angry emails on this one. But Human Resources in the United States has almost become a cancerous growth on the side of the american industry in that humanresources were who keep their p

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