The Real Work Of Leaders: A Report From The Front Lines Of Management - Softcover

The look-at-last-month's-calendar trick was devised by Donald Laurie, a Boston-based management consultant, to help top executives figure out how best to lead their companies. Laurie sees a leader as the person who climbs out on the balcony and sees the company from above, the one who sees how all the parts connect to make a smoothly running machine. At the same time, if the leader stays up on that balcony for too much of the day, he or she can't hear the grumbling below. And what's being grumbled about is often the information that could save the CEO's job. As an example of this, Laurie relates the story of Xerox Corp. when it was trying to compete with Japanese companies in the affordable-copier market. The Xerox product didn't work very well, and the company took an embarrassing tumble. But any of the line employees could have told the top executives that the machine wasn't up to snuff; there just wasn't a mechanism for them to do so.

Besides exhorting them to stand on the balcony and promote dialogue after they get back down, Laurie urges today's executives to undertake the real work of: communicating what's real; clarifying competing values; supporting changes in values; regulating distress; and making everyone in the company collectively responsible.

He peppers the book with real-world examples of those imperatives, quoting executives at Chase Manhattan Bank, General Electric, Nordstrom, Johnson & Johnson, the postal service, airlines--so many, in fact, that the specific examples he cites all take on a universality. Whether it's at a post office, a high-tech startup, or a corporate conglomerate, the person at the top has the same job to do, Laurie argues. Yet, chances are, very little time is spent actually doing it. --Lou Schuler