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LEADERSHIP
ADVICE:
FROM FOUNDER TO CEO
GSB.STANFORD.EDU/INSIGHTS
L
W
BY IAN hen Marc Andreessen wants to think about During a View From the Top talk with students at Stanford
CHIPMAN deep issues like the state of the economy and Graduate School of Business, Andreessen shared insights
technological change, he mentally spars with and advice about the role of technology in a changing
Photograph by
Joe Pugliese the likes of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Larry Page the economy, how to capitalize on the opportunities that
people he says are the most audacious people present themselves throughout a career, and why the
who have worked in Silicon Valley. I have a little best ideas are likely already out there waiting to happen.
STARTUPS
says. Take the bet, lose This opens up a whole new set of questions. If you can grab
which is a very hard 1X. Dont take the bet
and possibly miss
a chunk of your sleep time in a car, the geography of daily
life changes and urban environments can become much,
E
BY STEVE ven in the biggest, most stable corporations, Much of this course-related fieldwork has made its way
HAWK putting together a small team can be a perilous into Greers scholastic studies and even directed her future
process fraught with personality clashes, research. Its a nice feedback loop, because there isnt a lot
Photograph by
Amy Harrity hierarchical imbalances, and conflicting visions. of good research on the people side of startups, she says.
But in a startup, the challenge of assembling a Theres a lot on product and strategy and structure and
funding, but not a lot looking into the social interactions.
STARTUPS
You might not even have an HR team in place. So maybe youll end up selecting someone whos a
You usually dont, so youre doing it on your own. And slightly less talented coder.
thats rough because most people arent trained in this. If theyre a cultural fit, absolutely. But theres a caveat. You
want them to have similar values, but they dont need to be
Would you go so far as to actually sketch out a dream
team and then go find them? your best friend. Too often, founders think, Oh, I need to
Definitely. You dont want to just be grateful for the first get along with them. We overrate that. Its important to
decent coder you find. You want to be intentional about it. have a diversity of personalities. Risk aversion, for instance,
Thats the main takeaway from my course: Be as intentional is more of a personality preference than a value. And thats
about your people as you are about your product. actually a really good thing to have diversity on.
Does that mean looking beyond personality I know one founding team that has a CEO whos extremely
and experience? risk-prone. If it were only up to him, he would scale way before
It means looking at everything. Make a list of your own his company is ready. But hes paired with a great CTO whos
competencies. What are you great at? What are the skill sets very good at putting on the brakes. And together the two of
you need to have in other people? And, just as important, them balance out. So its also knowing yourself and your
what common values are you looking for? personality. And then finding complementary teammates.
Can you define values in this context? But when it comes to personality traits, how do you
Things that you hold dear to your heart. Things that youre narrow it down? There are dozens of personality types.
not willing to compro- Whatever is more salient to you. If you had to describe
mise on if you get into a yourself in five words, what pops into your head? Like I
You need to find people conflict over them. said, risk aversion is a big one. Optimism and pessimism
So thats a squishy, are also important.
who are excited by ethereal thing? Do you actually want a pessimist on your team?
Not necessarily. The Yes. Theres research on that, showing that too many
the companys mission best value systems for
startups are directly
optimists can be bad for startup performance. Having a
contrarian can be a great thing, especially at startups,
statement. Like Disney tied to the product.
One startup that I know,
where people tend to have such rose-colored goggles about
the future. Having someone whos more realistic can help
they have a 3-D printing
makes families happy. company, and their
turn around some pretty bad decisions.
How do you make sure that youre asking the right
value system is, We
love to build things, questions and doing the right research on someone so
and we love sharing that you get to know their personality?
what we build. So theres a passion for building things, but Take your time. My favorite advice Ive heard from VCs to
also some gregariousness and intellectual playfulness. founders is, Hire slow, fire fast. That one rule alone could
S
BY BILL SNYDER tanford faculty, students, and alumni have founded Kiah Williams of SIRUM, a nonprofit that redistributes
more than 39,000 companies and nonprofits since unused, unexpired drugs to clinics
the 1930s, ranging from tech giants like Hewlett-
Photograph by
Elena Zhukova Packard and Cisco Systems to retailers like the Gap, and Mike Krieger of Instagram, the popular photo-sharing
much newer nonprofits such as Noora Health service
and Embrace.
STARTUPS
T
BY MARTIN he tech landscape is lush with entrepreneurs whose operating in 4,566 organizations in 456 different market
J. SMITH success blossomed only after the founders had categories over 12 years.
modified or even abandoned their original vision.
Illustration by They focused on the software industry because its filled
Gracia Lim Facebook became something quite different from the
with producers and investors constantly racing to identify
Harvard-specific social connection site created
the next big thing, and studied how big successes and
by Mark Zuckerberg. Airbnb? That short-term
COMPANIES
YOUNG
Its almost always the case that the greatest firms Barnett and Pontikes found that entrepreneurs who were
are discovered and not planned, says William willing to adapt their vision and products to find the right
P. Barnett, a professor of business leadership, market often did the best. They also found that those who
strategy, and organizations at Stanford followed the herd into perceived hot markets, or consen-
Graduate School of Business. sus entrants, were less viable in the long run than those
who made non-consensus choices by defying common
Thats one conclusion from a study Barnett
wisdom and entering markets that were tainted by failures
co-authored with colleague Elizabeth G. Pontikes
and thus regarded as riskier.
of the University of Chicago. They decided to
gauge entrepreneurial success rates by research- We know from studies of human behavior that, as social
ing the early choices made by software entrepreneurs beings, we want to resolve uncertainty, Barnett says. We
M
BY STEVE SHAW ost leadership advice is based on anecdotal managers, What are the traits of a good boss? They found
& BETH RIMBEY observation and basic common sense. Stanford that bosses matter substantially.
Graduate School of Business professor Kathryn
Photograph by Shaw pursued this same topic separately in a Stanford GSB
Damian Maloney Shaw tried a different tack: data-driven analysis.
case study of the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), which had
Through research done in collaboration with a developed an in-house analysis of this same question as
COMPANIES
YOUNG
very large, undisclosed technology-based part of a drive to develop people analytics. In addition, she
company that has a penchant for collecting data, examined similar research from Google, which also tried to
Shaw found that employees who work under quantify the impact of good (and bad) managers.
good bosses were more productive. There are Shaw recently sat down with Insights to discuss her
bad bosses out there, she says, but whats not findings, and to share three keys to effective employee
talked about as much is that there are also good management.
bosses.
Track Records Matter
Shaw, along with fellow Stanford GSB professor At the unnamed technology-focused service company,
Edward Lazear and Harvard Business Schools workers performance was gauged by the number of
Christopher Stanton, published a 2015 paper customers they served per hour. Shaw and her co-authors
titled The Value of Bosses, in which they found an enormous range of productivity levels, depending
gathered data from the tech company in an on the quality of a workers boss. If you have a change in
attempt to see whether they could show that bosses and you get someone who has a history of being a
bosses matter and, if so, how much. As part of good boss, you become more engaged in your work and
their research, the authors asked company employees and your productivity goes up, she says.
W
BY BILL SNYDER hen Jeff Weiner discussed taking the job as Focus on the Core
LinkedIns CEO in 2008, he asked founder Reid Defining your companys core value the value youre
Photograph by
Hoffman what decisions each of them would be going to bring to customers is essential, Weiner says.
Stacey Geiken making. Recounting that conversation to a group of
But companies that have defined their core value proposition
Stanford business students recently, Weiner
sometimes move away from it when they experience what
recalled that Hoffman said: This is easy. Its your
Weiner calls hyper growth. They draw resources away
MATURE
COMPANIES
Its your ball. join organizations. gies such as robotics, artificial intelligence, and automated
driving will create 2 million jobs by 2020, but will eliminate
Manage 7 million jobs in the same period, notes Weiner.
You run with it. Compassionately
Weiner cites the Dalai The U.S., he says, has placed a tremendous emphasis on
Lama as the inspiration degrees from prestigious four-year universities and
for his management graduate programs. And while thats important, it doesnt
style, which he calls speak to the needs of workers being displaced today.
compassionate We need to go all-in on vocational training, Weiner says.
management. Manag- Its important for people who are going down a different
ing compassionately is path to have access to an education where they can develop
about putting yourself in another persons shoes and seeing a skill and a trade that they can utilize to earn a living and
the world through their lens or perspective, Weiner says. create a career path, he says.
S
BY BILL SNYDER oft drinks and snack foods dont get the best press by Apples late CEO Steve Jobs: Dont be too nice. Nooyi,
these days, but that hasnt slowed Indra Nooyis named by Fortune in 2014 as one of the most powerful
campaign to restructure PepsiCo, one of the worlds women in business, spoke at a View From the Top session
Photograph by
Stacey Geiken largest food and beverage companies. Since she became this month, where she was interviewed by Walmart CEO
CEO in 2006, the companys global revenue has Doug McMillon. Here are six key insights into management
increased from $40 billion in 2007 to more than she shared during that conversation:
MATURE
COMPANIES
F
BY MARTIN or more than a decade, business expert Richard Cox true to themselves, says Cox, one of the course lecturers. It
J. SMITH has been using improvisational theater techniques gets labeled as soft skills, but its really a hard business
to teach aspiring corporate leaders how to become driver, he says. And theres hard science underneath it, so
Illustration by
Abbey Lossing more authentically powerful. we understand how it works. Its a critical piece of being an
effective communicator.
You cant afford to not be good at this, says Cox,
IN THE GAME
STAYING
whose management design firm, People Rocket, He shared some of these lessons during an interview with
has worked with executives, leaders, and teams at Stanford Business.
such firms as Google, Cisco, and JPMorgan Chase.
Youre Already an Expert
You depend on your job as a leader to get other
Cox says most people subconsciously rely on nonverbal
people to take actions. You need to be skilled in
communication to get through the day. Just navigating the
relationships, in influence, and in communica-
line at coffee and traffic and walking on public transit,
tion. Theres no getting around it.
youre speaking that language of power in negotiating who
Group dynamics and body language are among moves out of the way, what gestures you do, and who takes
the concepts covered in Acting with Power, a what seat.
course at Stanford Graduate School of Business
For example, consider how a tight knot of people at a
led by Deborah Gruenfeld, a professor of
cocktail party react when someone new approaches. That
organizational behavior and the author of many
circle is either going to open up and invite that person in, or
articles on the psychology of power and group
its going to close ranks because its not, for whatever
behavior. This is the secret language of power
reason, OK for that person to enter, he says. The group
that will help students project authority while remaining
reaction is nearly instant and without discussion; they do
I
BY SHANA LYNCH f life focuses on the pursuit of happiness, work focuses group of strangers influence others? Lowery cites six
on the pursuit of power. We angle for those promo- sources of power.
tions, negotiate for raises, or eye the corner office.
Illustration by Reward: We give people what they want.
Nishant Choksi
But success extends beyond pursuing power
Coercion: We use fear to get people to do what we want
we must also learn how to manage it, says
them to do.
IN THE GAME
STAYING
C
BY EILENE orporate training in the U.S. is a $70 billion market, The leadership industry has failed, he says. There is
ZIMMERMAN and 35% of that is spent on management and little evidence that any of these recommendations have
leadership training. Over the last several decades, had a positive impact. Pfeffers book points to the ways in
Illustration by
John Ritter the industry has produced a recipe for how to be a success- which those prescriptions have actually been problematic
ful corporate leader: Be trustworthy and authen- for leaders and proved themselves to be invalid. Many of
tic, serve others (particularly those who work for them come from the inspirational leadership success
IN THE GAME
STAYING
and with you), be modest, and exhibit empathetic stories we love. As a culture, were fascinated by the
understanding and emotional intelligence. legends think Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, and Mark
Zuckerberg but those are just stories, says Pfeffer, and
But heres the problem, says Stanford Graduate
nothing more. People generally want to see and hear only
School of Business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer: None
good things about their leaders, so they tend to ignore
of that is working. Despite the tens of billions of
contradictory evidence and failures. Theres all this
dollars we pour into training-related books,
mythologizing that besets leadership, as people try to
attendance at inspirational speeches, workshops,
generalize and learn from exceptional cases, he says.
conferences, and training sessions, the workplace
But that has resulted in this enormous disconnect
today is as dysfunctional as ever. Organizations
between what actually makes individuals successful
are filled with disengaged, dissatisfied employees
and what we think makes them successful.
who dont trust their leaders, and those leaders,
in turn, face shortened job tenures, career In Leadership BS, Pfeffer argues that one reason the
derailments, and dismissals. Pfeffer confronts leadership industry has not been successful is that its
this paradox in his new book, Leadership BS: recommendations are based on an ideal world, rather
Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time. than on the real world. Among the prescriptions for better