By Wes Ball. Wes is a strategic innovation consultant and author of The Alpha Factor – a revolutionary new look at what really creates market dominance and self-sustaining success (Westlyn Publishing, 2008) and writes for Leadership turn every Tuesday. Wes can be reached at The Ball Group. See all his posts here.

How can we create successful leaders when we lie about what creates success?

A few days ago Miki, for whom I guest post here, sent me an email letting me know that Nina Simosko, Global Chief Operating Officer for the worldwide SAP Education organization, had referred to one of my Leadership Turn blog posts on her blog about leadership.  Her post discussed the issue of failure and its role in developing leaders.   She was referring to a post I had written that stated that future leaders need to be mentored and nurtured through failure, because through failure comes the learning for creating success.

Her article sparked a thought chain that reminded me about a significant problem we have in developing strong future leaders organically in our organizations:  the current mythology about leadership.  Our current leadership mythology (and mythology about business in general) is self-destructive and, as with most mythologies, is not even based upon broad truth.

Everything in life has a mythology – i.e. a set of stories and examples that define what we believe about that subject.  And, like all mythologies, they change to reflect current cultural thinking.

For instance, the mythology of “dating” was once that a young woman desired to get married.  She watched for the “right” man, made herself visible to him, waited for him to “ask her out,” resisted his passions until marriage was consummated, and lived happily ever after.  This was played out in a mythology that pervaded books, movies, conversations, examples of friends, etc.  That doesn’t mean that there were not plenty of real-life examples of very different scenarios, but the mythology defined the ideal, the thing to which we were to aspire.  It was the thing that young girls held onto when confronted with tough decisions.

That mythology has changed quite a bit even in my lifetime.  There is no need to define the current mythology about dating, because you probably either laughed or cried as you read the contrast between the old mythology and what you hear shared every day about the “ideal” of dating now.

Those changes in mythology drive how we think about dating even before puberty.  Obviously, if sociologists were to do an unbiased long-term research study of what creates the most productive, least destructive dating and the best, most sustainable long-term results, they could help us turn those facts into a mythology that we could embrace.  That new mythology could then offer a much happier alternative for people to follow.

Now, we all know that mythologies are created by people.  They are the propaganda that is issued to create a desired result.  When I was a child, for the most part, those mythologies were created and spread by well-intentioned persons to help protect and guide us to happiness and success.  We also know that there are many factions who have their own agendas for how people should think that are based upon completely irrational, less than well-intentioned purposes.  Their purposes may be to make themselves feel better about pain they experienced, a desire for others to be no happier than they are, a desire to justify bad decisions they have made, etc.  That’s why there has to be some rational basis for mythology to have a good outcome.

In the business of leadership development, we have a similar problem.  There is more than enough empirical data to demonstrate that creating sustainable, beneficial success is hard work.  It takes risk. It takes time. It takes pain.  It takes making a long series of wise decisions.  It takes great investment and some losses.  It takes gaining the help of many other persons who will aid in creating your success.  It takes courage.  And, most of all, it takes failure from which learning and improvement comes.

But what is the mythology of success under which we operate?

We choose to believe that…

• Success comes relatively easy.
• It comes through minimizing risk or at least spreading it to others – mostly that happens through putting others at risk more than yourself.
• It happens quickly.
• It happens with minimal or no pain, like winning the lottery.
• It involves little in the way of acquired wisdom; there is more luck and “who you know” than wisdom involved.
• It takes minimal personal investment in money, time, or effort.
• It is done virtually on your own with little outside help.
• It requires no courage, because there is so little effort, pain, or risk required.
• Failure is a thing to be despised and ridiculed, not embraced or used as a platform for learning.  And, when failure comes, you blame it on others.

This is the mythology that has created our current age of entitlement.  “I did not ask to be born, so you owe it to me to make things go well for me without a lot of work on my part.”  To greater or lesser extent, this attitude pervades both the educated and the uneducated.  It is nourished by the stories about instant successes and greedy top executives who did not earn what they got.  It is fueled by stories about companies that are harming us with their “outrageous” profits while ignoring the investment and work that made it possible to gain those profits and even ignoring where most of those profits go to create more job opportunities and wealth for a great many persons.

I did some extensive research for the U.S. Department of the Treasury about 10 years ago.  We were looking at attitudes about investment and savings among a broad cross-section of the population.  I was stunned to discover what I called, “the lottery mentality.”  This thinking said that it wasn’t worth saving money.  If you couldn’t get 30+% return on your investment (the then current mythology about investing), then it was better to either spend it on self-entertainment or buy a lottery ticket.  It just wasn’t worth the aggravation of trying to slowly, steadily save for the future. This attitude stretched from the very poor to persons making seven-digit incomes.  Surprisingly, the only demographic that consistently resisted this and embraced the idea of “slow and steady saving is better than wasting it” were low-income ethnic women, especially black and Hispanic.  Men generally were the most predisposed to the “lottery mentality,” but white women of all incomes were almost as enthusiastic about it.

The modern mythology about how businesses run and how leaders lead was one of the greatest hurdles I had to overcome in researching my book, The Alpha Factor.  As I tried to understand what really created sustainable success and dramatic growth, I continually stumbled over mythology-based conclusions from both the corporate executives involved and the media that were covering it.  It took a great deal of deeper digging to uncover the real factors that were behind those successes.

Most of what I would hear from corporate executives involved in successes was their own brilliance at responding to market fluctuations, being able to generate short-term results no matter what the competitive environment, spotting new trends and creating the right products and business model to address them, and other self-aggrandizing perceptions of what created their success.  What I generally found was that the great products that were so “right” were discovered more by accident than by purpose.  And the short-term responses they thought so highly of actually had made things harder for them to keep moving forward profitably.

Most often, it was things they discounted as minor that were the real driving force behind customer perceptions that created the demand for their products.  Most often, these “minor” things were ones that they felt unable to control directly, so they discounted them as being irrelevant.

That has created an incorrect business mythology that says that money managers are the lifeblood of the business.  That cost-side management is the secret to long-term success.  That price is “everything.”  And, if not price, then quality is.  It focuses business watchers upon stock price as the indicator of success (and we all know how accurate that was from the “dot com” bubble).  It has created a perception of entitlement among top executives that says they deserve multi-million dollar bonuses, while ignoring the real drivers of corporate success that will continue to create jobs and wealth for generations to come.

There have been a number of articles in recent years about the failure of top business schools to turn out potential future leaders.  Much of that failure can be attributed to the reality that our mythology about what creates success taints how we think about what defines a leader.  So we generate self-serving, short-term focused MBAs who have little ability to drive long-term success.

Compounding that, in the ranks of corporations all over America, future leaders receive no real leadership training.  They simply do their jobs under the constant threat resulting from short-term management thinking that the company could sell itself at almost any time or that budgets will be cut making it impossible to accomplish the tasks assigned to them.  Managers do their best to look effective while hiding from the fact that they can’t, given the little support they receive.

Our mythology has made us into a nation expecting miracles without a willingness to make the investments required for real, sustainable success.  Instead, we fail through lack of willingness to really succeed and cover our failure under a veil of blame pointed at others around us.

If we really wish to create future leaders, we need to create a new mythology based upon what truly creates success.  That mythology should be based upon truth and not self-aggrandizing lies.  It should be based upon a rational, empirical understanding of what creates sustainable success.  That’s why I wrote The Alpha Factor.

Creating such a mythology within every organization and generally throughout the business community is a task that every person involved with leadership should pursue.  It should be based upon empirically-based reality in order to be truly valuable.  To do that, we need to understand the real factors behind success, before we can ever expect to recreate it or to develop tomorrow’s successful leaders.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 at 4:30 am and is filed under About Leadership, Culture, Entrepreneurship, Ethics, Personal Development, Wes Ball, What Leaders DO, What Leaders DON'T. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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