The Well-Worn Path To Success. - Review - book review

Chief Executive, The, April, 2001 by Robert W. Lear

I haven't kept an exact count, but this is about the 100th book I've read on leadership. That's not enough to make me an expert, but it does allow me to say, "Been there, done that."

This 100th leadership book is by James Champy of re-engineering fame and Nitin Nohria of Harvard Business School. It fits neatly into my collection of books that try hard, but don't quite capture the true essence of seemingly indefinable leadership.

Actually, it's not a bad book. The writing is well done, the organization is clear, and the 14 pages of reference sources are evidence of diligent research.

The uncomplicated theme of the book is that careers of ambitious people typically follow a predictable path. The book divides this path, or arc, into three segments: The rise of ambition, the initial dream of an individual, and the courage and the per severance exercised in pursuit of that dream; the apex of one's ambition to build some organization larger than oneself; and the decline of ambition, when every achiever must cope with his or her hardest challenges.

The achievers are in turn grouped into three categories: The Creators who power a new technology; the Capitalizers who energetically mar who make the new technologies work consistently and profitably.

In yet another breakdown, the authors contend that ambitious leaders are created during three technological sea changes. The first was the 50-year expansion of 19th century industry. The second was the mass-production revolution of the 1900s. The third is the current convergence of information and communications technology.

Are you still with me? Now comes the tricky part. The authors cram about 100 stories of ambitious leaders into 10 chapters with provocative titles like Seize the Moment, Inspire with a Greater Purpose, and Change or Die.

The chosen heroes of ambition include most of the usual suspects -- Jack Welch, Andrew Carnegie, Alfred Sloan, Sam Walton, etc. Equal representation is given to non-business characters--Mikhail Gorbachev, Napoleon Bonaparte, Cesar Chavez, and Guiseppi Garibaldi, to name a few. A conspicuous predominance of figures from India's history are also included, evidently at co-author Nohria's behest. Mahatma Ghandi, Drirubhai Ambani, Thabong Motsohi, and Azim Premji are trotted out -- unfortunately, they don't quite fit in with the rest of the book.

To speak the awful truth, there are so many examples, and so much name-dropping, that I became confused as to what was being illustrated. I couldn't keep track of which arc of ambition, which group of achievers, which sea change was in play, and which chapter was being invoked around which illustrative leader. It all served to reduce the resonance of the leadership message the book jacket trumpeted: "To present fundamentally new thinking from two of today's greatest business minds."

Why should a CEO read this book? It has a few new examples of leadership quotes that might be useful sometime. It's a quick read and you can flip the pages to pick out excerpts. If you are going to India on business, it will give you some conversational gambits. And it's attractive and different enough to leave on your desk to provoke questions from office visitors.

Personally, if I were a suspicious person, I would suspect that the book was an effort by James Champy to escape the image of a one-trick, re-engineering pony and to give an aspiring HBS professor a vehicle for further academic research. It perhaps accomplished these two tasks, but is not a memorable literary effort. It simply supplies the world with one more under achieving treatise about over achieving people.

Formerly CEO of F.&M. Schaefer (1972-1977), Robert W. Lear is chair man of CE's advisory board. He taught at Columbia Business School, where he was executive-in-residence until June 1999. He has been a director of many companies and is on the advisory boards of five small firms. He is a partner of Lear, Yavitz and Associates corporate governance consultants.