And develop all others.

By Tom Peters
Featured in Leadership Excellence Magazine

In New Delhi recently, I met a general in the Indian Army. The topic of evaluating senior officers for promotion came up. I ventured, boldly, that one issue stands above the rest, namely: What is this candidate's track record in developing people?

I posited that the One Question might be this: "This past year, name the three people whose growth you've contributed to. Explain in some detail where each was at the start of the year, where he or she is today, and where each is heading in the next year. Please explain your development strategy in each case. Tell me your biggest development disappointment this past year—looking back, would you have done anything differently? Tell me about your greatest development triumph—and disaster—in the last decade. What are the three big things you've learned about people development along the way?"

As I see it, it's not the boss's role, for instance, to make strategy but to develop the best strategist—and ensure that the process moves along rapidly and imaginatively.

This applies to every promotion and even to evaluating a non-manager on a three-month project. That person will, for example, be responsible for accomplishing a milestone—and to do so, she must engage her team members in a way that they go away with learning that contributes to their development.

A New Generation Gap

Leadership today is largely in the hands of baby boomers—my generation. It is a small leap of reason to say that we shaped, if not created, today's turbulent economy. The greatest generation gave us an economy that provided a solid foundation to build on. They moved beyond the war, overcame the great depression, and left us with the promise that "You can be anything you want to be." We have flat-out failed to build a similar solid foundation for those who will follow us. We have made a mess. We are not the victims of changing economic conditions—we created them. We have maybe 10 years to do something about it. The next generation may be the first (ever?) that will not be better off than their parents. I think we baby boomers own that.

Let me offer a few bullet points:

• We didn't invent greed, but we took it to a new level. The pursuit of individual wealth has often trumped the collective national good. And not just at the executive level; some labor rates grew beyond the ability of companies to pay them and remain competitive. The gap between haves and have nots has grown. We're paying a price for that greed: many people are finding that their golden goose has cancer.
  
  
• We confused profit with value. Maximizing profit led us to cut costs so dramatically that we may have sacrificed the survival of our enterprises. Our miserly investment in talent development, R&D, and our relentless push to lower supplier costs have weakened historically strong brands.
  
  
• Too many MBAs were in charge. Running a business is a lot different from building a company. We became managers; we have to become leaders. Yes, we must be fiscally disciplined and focused on metrics, but a quick look at our more troubled companies shows a career path to the executive suite that runs through finance. It's not working!
  
  
• We have been reluctant to accept responsibility. I hear often that we are just unlucky to be leading in a tough economic time and are doing as well as can be expected. Baloney. We made this economy. I hear (and see) a lot of operational excellence. Look back at your metrics; if they have not improved continuously, it isn't a failure in operations—I suggest it is a strategic failure. We own that.
  
  
• Our parents unwittingly made us soft. We had our needs and wants indulged by parents driven to make sure we had more than they had had as children. We can't leave a great legacy without honest-to-goodness hard work.

I have high hopes for my generation, but there's little time to get about it. In working with leaders, I help them to be clear about who they are and what they stand for. Their values should be easily recognized in what they do and in what they say. As a leader, what are your values? Are you living them out so that others can see them in you? As an individual, are you clear about your values and, more importantly, are you standing behind them and making decisions based on them? If you haven't thought about what you value, now would be good time to reflect on it.

Managers have lost dignity over the past decade in the face of a widespread breakdown of trust and self-policing in business. To regain society's trust, leaders must embrace a way of looking at their role that goes beyond responsibility to the shareholders to include a civic and personal commitment to their duty as institutional custodians. It's time that management became a profession.

I still hear senseless debate on leadership "style" versus "substance." In my opinion, it's a no-brainer—style is substance for leaders. I've always taken a shine to the oft-repeated Gandhi-ism, "You must be the change you wish to see in the world." And I like this expression from St. Francis of Assisi: "It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching."

Service? Sacrifice? Equity? Honor? When Representative Peter Roskam (R-IL) asked automaker CEOs if they'd work for a dollar a year, Chrysler's Nardelli said yes, GM's Wagoner said, "I don't have a position on that today," and Ford's Alan Mulally, who made$21,700,000 that year, said, "I think I'm okay where I am." In the immortal words of Dave Barry, "I'm not making this up."

Meanwhile the CEO of JAL rides public transit to work, eats in the company cafeteria, and cut his salary below that of his pilots as a personal response to layoffs and forced early retirements.

A Financial Times headline on Citicorp reads: "Bank loses over half its value in past three days—CEO Pandit moves to shore up his position as chief."

As disgusting as Mulally's "I'm okay" comment is, the Pandit headline sickens me even more. Citi's performance is awful—and Pandit is a major part of the problem. Hence his primary response, following a 50,000 plus layoff, is to try and save his own skin? Have these guys (they're almost all guys) no sense of shame? No sense of service? No sense of honor? No sense of sacrifice? No sense of equity?

None of the Big Three CEOs had any military service. I believe that the uniform absence is indicative of a lack of a life-as-service, servant leader ethos. The "no military service" piece is almost amusing, in a perverse way, in the case of Nardelli, who is a fanatic believer in some twisted notion of the "military model" of doing business—his willy-nilly application of his abominable interpretation of military leadership was one of his many screw-ups at Home Depot. Part of Nardelli's, yes, admirable willingness to work for a buck at Chrysler may be the $200 million he took home as a prize for being fired from Home Depot.

Have they no shame? No sense of service or servant leadership? Have they no soul, no honor, no ethos of sacrifice? Have they ever attended Sunday School?

I've spent 40 years effectively on one topic: profit through people-centered, people-obsessed leadership. Mulally and Pandit and their ilk make me wonder if I pissed away my life in pursuit of an impossible, ideal.

Gestures do count. Lee Iacocca worked for a-dollar-a-year when the government gave Chrysler a life-saving loan. Why didn't Ford CEO Alan Mulally drive a 2008 Ford Escape Hybrid the 520 miles from Detroit to D.C.? Hokey—but he just might have gone home with a billion-dollar check in his pocket.

Start Leading Yourself

To lead yourself in these weird times:

1. Be conscious in the Zen sense. Think what you're doing and how you project.
   
   
2. Meet daily, first thing, with your leadership team—to discuss priorities, check assumptions—max 30 minutes.
   
   
3. Check in daily. If you are a "big boss," use a private sounding board.
   
   
4. Concoct scenarios by the bushel, test them, play with them, short-term, long-term, sane, insane.
   
   
5. MBWA. Wander. Sample attitudes. Be visible but not frenzied.
   
   
6. Work the phones, chat up experts, customers, vendors. Seek diverse opinion.
   
   
7. "Over"communicate!
   
   
8. Exercise—encourage your leadership team to double up on their exercise.
   
   
9. Underscore excellence in all.