Customer Reviews

Leading Quietly

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

In Leading Quietly, Joseph L. Badaracco observes that society tends to think about leadership primarily in terms of heroic figures. His readers have been taught from their childhood to show respect for the efforts and sacrifices of great men and women. Often, his readers are not properly informed about the fact that most sung heroes like Winston Churchill or Mother Teresa worked, quietly and patiently, for years or decades, before their key contribution to society was widely acknowledged.

To his credit, Badaracco celebrates modest, unassuming men and women with their mixed and complicated motives. Like most of his audience, those men and women will probably never be in the limelight but make the world a better place through countless, small, often unseen efforts. Badaracco convincingly demonstrates that it is given to almost all his audience to learn and practice the simple virtues of quiet leadership, e.g.: Restraint, modesty, and tenacity.

Contrary to some wisdom, quiet leaders
1) Buy time.
2) Drill down into the political and technical elements of the problems they face.
3) Invest their political capital wisely.
4) Nudge, test, and escalate gradually.
5) Find ways, when necessary, to bend the rules.
6) View compromise as a high form of leadership and creativity.

In his recently published Good To Great, Jim Collins interestingly comes to the conclusion that the CEOs of great companies turning around good companies successfully are usually humble, modest, and tenacious. Is quiet leadership from top to bottom within any organization the future?

In a second edition of Leading Quietly, Badaracco could perhaps use both success stories and failures to illustrate each guideline for practicing quiet leadership. Often, failures are more valuable learning experiences than successes. Furthermore, Badaracco could perhaps further elaborate on white-collar criminality that can have an impact on quiet leaders as well. Quiet leaders at companies like Enron and Andersen could have been pressurized to violate the law and could eventually not simply walk away from their organizations because of their sense of duty and/or their responsibilities towards their family, especially in a downturn economy.

Professor Badaracco acknowledges here what conventional wisdom on business ethics might suggest before he presents a well-argued case for why the stock responses that call for black and white behavior are not always the most effective options for individual choices. Badaracco's take that the quiet leader doesn't knee-jerkingly draw a line in the sand and say, "this is right; this is wrong; I will not cross this line" might strike some readers as coping out or compromising at the expense of doing the absolute right thing. But careful readers will discover that Badaracco's notion isn't to cave when right action is called for, but rather to look more broadly at the issues and make more informed decisions. Main strengths: 1) provocative, well-articulated argument; 2) clarity of writing; and 3) clear case studies to support argument of the book.

"Leading Quietly" is the result of a professional five year study on leadership by Joseph Badaracco. It is NOT your run-of-the-mill "how-to" book on the subject, designed primarily to make money. That sets it apart from all the other books out there. As a Harvard professor, the author uses the same type of case study methodology as is used in the MBA and Law School programs. I found that "Leading Quietly", standing alone, was enjoyable and useful enough to recommend to everyone interested in character and leadership. But, following suggestions I read on Amazon.com, I went on to read Norman Thomas Remick's "West Point: Character Leadership Education....Thomas Jefferson", and found the combination of the two books to be a dynamite education on character and leadership. I can only say thankyou to Amazon.com for leading this horse to water. I strongly recommend that you do the same ----- if you really want to be a good leader.

I was very disappointed in this effort from a Harvard Business School professor. Not only did I think that this book would deal with the ethics of leadership, I also was expecting to read about success stories of leaders. Although the stories presented do show some of the elements that leaders can use to accomplish things quietly, the reader is left hanging as to what long term impact is felt from the decisions made. For example, the first story used is of a new hospital administrator who faces a difficult situation and resolves it using the techniques of a quiet leader,ultimately leading the second in command to tender his resignation. The disappointment is that we never find out if the administrator has lost the ability to lead those left behind or what other long term impacts there are to this type of leadership.

All of the other vignettes follow the same pattern, with no long term follow up on the effectiveness of these leaders, and how they dealt with other leadership challenges that arise in the future. This is also shown in the story of a new Army captain who reports a lapse on the part of inspectors, which is greeted by superiors with a "That is good to know", and then we never find out what changes are made to improve the situation, or if the captain is labeled by superiors as someone not to trust, or, hopefully, as someone with strong character.

However, what scared me most about this book was the chapter entitled "Buy a Little Time". In this chapter the author reflects that "But if he must choose between creative accounting and firing people unfairly, Williams may need to depart from highest standards of accounting precision and play some of the games that managers often play." (p. 67) As would be rather obvious to most, this sounds like the path that certain corporations have recently taken with disastorous results (See Enron - {"Accounting of several transactions 'is creative and agressive but no one has reason to believe that it is inappropriate from a technical standpoint..." Quote from Vinson & Elkins law firm regarding potential financial wrongdoing at Enron as quoted in the Wall Street Journal 1/16/2002, p. A18}). It is this "stretching" of the rules that is too often used to explain what most would consider unethical or immoral behavior. It scares me to think that recent and future graduates of the "premier" business school in the country are being given this type of guidance in business ethics.

I desperately wanted to like this book. The author has enormous credibility and writes extremely well, and his approach (based on typical Harvard-style case studies) promised interest and a practical turn of mind. Yet I finished the book feeling frustrated and very much at odds with much of what Professor Badaracco has written.

Two elements of the book bothered me: a very loose definition of what constitutes an ethical problem, and the author's apparent viewpoint that what matters most is doing whatever works in terms of maintaining or advancing your career--even if the problem remains barely solved.

My first reservation concerns the case studies. Virtually none are truly ethical or business dilemmas. They deal with fairly difficult situations--everyone would agree with that--but what generally makes them hard to resolve is the personal and emotional viewpoint given to the protagonist. Ethical problems concern right and wrong in some generally accepted sense, not simply a practical (or, in many cases here, mostly political) problem complicated by something in the protagonists' past that adds an emotional twist.

My second reservation is more substantial. Professor Badaracco continually draws a contrast between what he terms heroic stands on ethical issues and everyday ones. He nods in the direction of a Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King, Jr., but suggests the reader treats their example as inspirational rather than practical. In his eagerness to make day-to-day leadership responses pragmatic, he seems to me to blur the line between what is right or wrong and what is politically advantageous to an individual. While keeping your job or advancing your career is a serious consideration, it doesn't seem to me to be an ethical or even a leadership one.

My conclusion is this: If you're interested in practical ways to handle difficult issues within a hierarchical, highly-political culture (such as a major corporation--or a university), Professor Badaracco offers some interesting ideas and tips and you will enjoy his book. Since some involved walking close to the line between being politically savvy and being somewhat dishonest, you will need to be unconcerned about minor moral lapses, just so long as you get what you want.

If you are seriously interested in mixing organizational success with an ethical approach to business and relationships, you may feel as I do: that this book is too Machiavellian for comfort. That is why I could not award it more than three stars.

One final point: At no point does Professor Badaracco suggest that organizations might need to change their cultural stance. He writes often about "realism," and seems to see this purely as accepting the way organizations are today and working within those constraints. I would have felt happier if he had at least considered that it is the way organizations work today that produces many of the day-to-day ethical conundrums facing leaders.

Jim Collins and his 21 associates committed more than 15,000 hours to rigorous research on the 15-year performance record of 1,435 companies (that had appeared on the Fortune 500 list) as candidates for designation as "good-to-great." They then shared what they learned in a book. One of the revelations which surprised me most was that what they call "Level 5 Leadership" invalidates conventional wisdom concerning the so-called "charismatic" CEO. (Please see pages 17-40 as well as pages 72-73 in Good to Great.) After four years of his own rigorous research, Badaracco seems to have arrived at many of the same conclusions that Collins and his associates did. For example, that the most effective leaders are passionate about the organizations they lead but not about their own careers; that they are relentless in the pursuit of what Collins calls Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs) but, meanwhile, manifest impeccable personal as well as professional integrity; that they are (in Badaracco's words) "quiet leaders because their modesty and restraint are in large measure responsible for their impressive achievements."

Badaracco goes on to note that because many big problems can only be resolved by a long series of small efforts, "quiet leadership, despite its seemingly slow pace, often turns out to be the quickest way to make an organization -- and the world -- a better place." Invoking metaphors, I presume to suggest that the so-called "charismatic leader" resembles a Roman candle or perhaps a single sparkler whereas the "Level 5 Leader," the Quiet Leader," resembles a Bunsen burner. Navy fliers training for duty aboard aircraft carriers are told, "There are no old, bold pilots." Badaracco correctly asserts that preparation, caution, care, and attention to detail are usually the best approach to everyday challenges. "What usually matters are careful, thoughtful, practical efforts by people working far from the limelight." How long might it take to achieve a BHAG? Collins suggests ten to 30 years..."or more." The leadership required over such an extended period of time (leadership which includes but is not limited to the CEO) reflects a specific way of thinking about people, organizations, and effective action. "It is a way of understanding the flow of events and discerning the best ways to make a difference." Moreover, Badaracco adds, "...in a small way, quiet leadership is also an act of faith: an expression of confidence in the ultimate force of what [Albert] Schweitzer called 'small and obscure deeds.'"

The material in this brilliant book is carefully organized within nine chapters whose titles correctly suggest their respective focal points. For example, in Chapter Eight ("Nudge, Test, and Escalate Gradually"), Badaracco suggests that quiet leaders "prefer more cautious, modest ways of thinking and acting. Instead of hunting confidently for the [in italics] right answer, they concentrate on finding the right ways to to eventually get sound, workable answers." For them, unlike those who are impulsive and flamboyant, "leadership is a process, often a long and oblique one, not a single or courageous event." They are practical but NOT expedient. They focus on what is reasonably attainable rather than on what is ideal and, therefore, almost never attainable. They "buy a little time" (the title of Chapter Three) inorder to drill down deeper to reveal the technical and political elements of the questions to be answered and the problems to be solved. They have a bias for action but only after sufficient (albeit imperfect) preparation. Their core values are non-negotiable even as they view compromise as being essential to consensus. The "eloquence" of such women and men is expressed by what they and their associates accomplish together each day, to be sure, but also year after year.

Badaracco includes an especially apt quotation in his Introduction. It is an excerpt from Schweitzer's autobiography, Out of My Life and Thought, and provides what I consider to be an appropriate conclusion to this review:

"Of all the will toward the ideal in mankind only a small part can manifest itself in public action. All the rest of this force must be content with small and obscure deeds. The sum of these, however, is a thousand times stronger than the acts of those who receive wide public recognition. The latter, compared to the former, are like the foam on the waves of a deep ocean."

Instead of Leading Quietly, this book should have been titled "Manuevering Quietly." It discusses the nuts and bolts of approaching problems without falling on your sword, but I failed to find real leadership principles applied.

For one thing, leaders have followers and many of the case studies involved (roughly half) depicted people who had to solve an ethical problem, yet they did not have anyone following them. The protagonists navigated their way through murky waters, but there weren't taking anyone anywhere. That's why I think "Manuevering Quietly" would have been more appropriate.

And yet, it's an intriguing concept. Who has not stood up for an ethical principle and been punched in the nose, ultimately thwarting any potential influence to be applied down the line? Like Jim Collins and Jerry Porras' Built To Last, Badaracco advises us to not always think in black and white, right and wrong terms, that the sooner we realize every situation has infinite shades of gray, the better off we are to handle the conplexities of our problems.

Many critique this book because they feel it reduced ethics to a worldview of pragmatism, but I think Badaracco emphasizes the importance of character and caring enough to where he's not preaching a nihilistic approach to problem solving. The bottom line is if you're often in a rock and a hard place and the most likely thing to get smushed is you, Leading Quietly can help you get out of the way without compromising your principles. And that's applaudable.

Leading Quietly is not a book that promotes the pompous prominence of those our culture labels as its leaders. It is not about celebrity, fame or vainglory. It is about the "small and obscure" actions done by ordinary people who make the world work. Badaracco has written this book after four years of research and discovery that the quiet leaders are those whose patience, restraint and modesty are in a great part responsible for impressive achievements. He defines "leading quietly" as those individuals who maintain a low profile, and inconspicuously do what is right for themselves and their organizations without fatalities.

Badaracco uses case studies throughout the book to highlight his major points. He also includes special insights from a moral leadership class he teaches at the Harvard Business School. The literature he refers to from this class is particularly perceptive in contrast to the moral bankruptcy we have been reading about in the business pages of our daily newspapers!

Here are some of the qualities and guidelines possessed by those who are Leading Quietly:

Good leaders are those who are honest with themselves about how well they truly understand a situation and how much control they really possess. They don't kid themselves or deny reality. Effective leaders learn to trust their mixed motives. They accept their motives to be confused and mixed, and they use this ambiguity to solve problems or create compromises. Successful leaders often play games or create stall tactics to gain enough time to ponder difficult situations and think things through. They understand the value of buying a little time when necessary. Wise leaders build "political capital" and use it wisely. They cautiously borrow on this capital when proceeding in an uncertain environment or situation. Quiet leaders gather the details of complex problems. They take the time to "drill down" through the quagmire of bureaucratic, legal or technical details to discover a good solution. The quiet leader also seeks creative compromises as a responsible and practical goal of the responsible leader.

This is a book that celebrates the old-fashioned values of hard work and wisdom. Badaracco writes, "Preparation, caution, care and attention to detail are usually the best approach to everyday challenges." The only major weakness of the book is its lack of emphasis on proper ethics. Leading Quietly offers a careful analysis of those unsung leaders who truly make the world work for all of us.

I was told that leading quietly is an unorthodox guide to doing the right thing; and indeed there is much grist for the leadership mill buried in this excellent book. There are many memorable points of view, but perhaps the one that sticks most in my mind is that quiet leaders possess three very unglamorous virtues: restraint, modesty, and tenacity. "Each of these is a habit of mind and action, and each helps men and women use the tools and tactics of quiet leadership in responsible, effective ways."

But what is quiet leadership and who are the quiet leaders? Quiet leadership is dealing with the messy, everyday challenges, and the quiet leaders are those who labor endlessly to meet those challenges and keep things moving in our corporations. They are NOT the "flashy, public hero" kinds of leaders. They simply get the work done and make the hard decisions.
Badaracco convinces me more than ever that it is imperative that we define our corporate moral values and clearly articulate the ethics process we use to choose between competing moral and/or economic values. The reason is that the hard choices are embedded in our everyday corporate life. In these situations, individuals rarely take bold or courageous steps. Rather they step back, study, analyze, worry, and finally, make the best decision they can make - then stand behind it and move on.

Quiet leaders possess a positive attitude, but they are also very realistic, not cynical, in evaluating the situation. These leaders work with four basic principles: 1-You don't know everything; 2-You WILL be surprised; 3-Keep and eye on the insiders, and 4-Trust, but cut the cards! They learn to trust mixed motives rather than trying to define their actions in purist terms. In other words, they accept that the right solution can also include positive results for themselves as well as the company, employee, and/or customer.

This well written and well organized book is definitely worth the time and should be in any management library.

This book is intellectually well done, from the way it is written to the supporting arguments used. One does not have to agree with everything to rightly judge this as 5 stars. For a completely different presentation and a more "stoic" philosophical approach, I also recommend reading "West Point" by Norman Thomas Remick (available right here from Amazon.com).