Forster N. - Maximum performance (2005)(en)

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[In the future] I think investors will pay more attention to the culture of a company and its values. Boards will also focus more on the triple bottom line. Boards will tend to be smaller in size, and there will be more private sessions of the non-executive directors and more questioning of management. Boards will require greater time. Directors will serve on fewer boards and there will a decrease in the level of directors’ fees. Boards will focus more on risk assessment and on management compensation, and there will be a trend away from options to deferred shares. And, where options are issued, these will be expensed.

(Cited by Gottliebsen, 2002b)

The historical evidence shows that business leaders and companies who pursue short-term profits, at the expense of all other considerations, usually run into major problems. We also know that many longlasting, visionary, successful and profitable companies have a purpose beyond simply making profits, delivering short-term results to their shareholders or allowing CEOs to receive obscene levels of remuneration. This is not to say that making money is not important to these companies; it is. However, this is balanced by other important considerations. For example, in great companies of the 20th century examined by Collins and Porras, phrases like ‘returns to shareholders’ or ‘making money’ were rarely included in their statements of core values and ideologies (and, where mentioned, were made subservient to other values). Furthermore,

Contrary to business school doctrine, we did not find that maximising shareholder wealth or profit maximisation was the dominant driving force or primary objective throughout the history of most of the visionary companies. Visionary companies pursue a cluster of objectives, of which making money is only one. Yes, they seek profits, but they are equally guided by a core ideology – core values and a sense of purpose beyond just making money Yet, paradoxically, the visionary companies make more money than the more purely profit driven comparison companies.

(Collins and Porras, 1996: 8)

This counterintuitive and important finding is one that all regulatory authorities, company directors and shareholders should take to heart.

In conclusion, it is apparent to a growing number of business analysts that ethics are no longer just an optional ‘add-on’ to the main business activities that organizations, and their employees, are engaged in. They play an important role in their longevity, adaptability and profitability, as well as in the livelihoods of their employees and the financial wellbeing of their investors. Even economic libertarians, such as Milton Friedman, believed that business must be conducted within ethical frameworks. He once commented, ‘There is one and only one responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities that are designed to increase its profits – so long as it engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud (Friedman: 1993: 349; my emphasis).

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3.

4.

Notes

1The scale of corporate fraud and corruption in recent times is mind-boggling, and the following examples are just a snapshot of some of the more high-profile cases of the early 2000s.

On 1 July 2004, Bank One agreed to pay $US90 million to settle allegations that it allowed hedge fund managers to make improper trades in mutual funds. Mark Deacon, former One Group Mutual Funds’ CE, agreed to a $US100 000 fine and a two-year ban from the mutual fund industry. Tomo Razmilovic – former chief executive – and six other top executives were indicted on securities fraud, manipulation of stock options and related charges at the high-tech firm Symbol Technologies on 4 June 2004. The company had already admitted liability and agreed to pay $US139 million in penalties. On the same day, former HealthSouth executives Catherine Fowler, Malcolm McVay and Richard Botts all managed to avoid jail sentences for their roles in a $US2.7 billion accounting fraud at the company. On 28 May 2004 former Rite-Aid chairman, Martin Grass, was sentenced to eight years in prison for his role in a $US1.6 billion accounting fraud and was also fined $US500 000. Three other former executives of the company, Ranklin Bergonzi, Eric Sorkin and Philip Markovitz received sentences of 28 months, five months and one month, respectively, for their roles in this scam. On 23 May 2004 the founder of Capital Management, Richard Strong, paid $US60 million in costs and $US80 million in compensation to former clients in settlement of charges of illegal trading and was banned from the securities industry for life. Two other executives, Anthony D’Amato and Thomas Hooker, were also banned from the securities industry for life.

Prosecutors in the USA charged 642 defendants in 290 different cases and secured convictions or guilty pleas from 250 of them between January 2002 and April 2003. The typical number of convictions during the 1990s was about 50 a year. The following former employees of Enron had been indicted to stand trial in 2003–4: Jeffrey Skilling (president and chief operating officer), Michael Kopper (senior executive), Andrew Fastow (chief financial officer), his wife Lea (assistant treasurer), Scott Sullivan (financial officer), Ben Glisan (treasurer) and Dan Boyle (finance officer), as well as seven other senior managers who had worked in Enron Broadband Services and one trader (John Forney). Skilling was arrested on 20 February 2004 and charged with 35 counts of insider trading, fraud and conspiracy. If convicted on all charges, he faced life in jail and hundreds of millions of dollars in fines. Andrew Fastow is serving ten years in prison and his wife received a five-month sentence with five months’ home detention. Glisan was sentenced to five years in jail for conspiracy to defraud on 11 September 2003. Ken Lay, Enron’s former CEO, was still under investigation by the SEC in June 2004.

The judge in the grand larceny case against former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski and CFO Mark Swartz declared a mistrial on 2 April 2004, after nearly six months of testimony and 11 days of jury deliberations, citing ‘intense outside pressure and coercion placed on a juror’ (Maull, 2004). The two accused were still facing the prospect of a second trial, and up to 30 years in jail if found guilty. The disgraced former boss of Worldcom, Bernie Ebbers, was arrested and charged with securities fraud on 3 March 2004 after the company’s former CEO, Scott Sullivan, made a deal with prosecutors

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to lessen a 25-year prison sentence. Ebbers was charged with orchestrating a securities fraud worth an estimated 11 billion dollars (Dalton, 2004). On 17 December 2003, Calpers, the largest US public pension fund, launched a $US155 million class action on behalf of its clients against the New York Stock Exchange, accusing the NYSE of ignoring illegal acts of stock manipulation by seven investment companies from 1998 to 2002. These companies were accused of being ‘routinely engaged in wide-ranging manipulative, self-dealing, deceptive and misleading conduct’ (cited by Dalton, 2003b). Six days earlier, on 11 December Freddie Mac, the second biggest buyer of US mortgages, was fined $US169 million for disregarding accounting laws and violating oversight and disclosure rules (AFP, 2003a).

In early April 2004, five market-making firms at the NYSE agreed to pay nearly $US242 million in client compensation and civil penalties to settle allegations of improper trading between 1999 and 2003. In mid-March 2004, Bank of America and Fleet-Boston Financial agreed to pay a record $US675 million to settle allegations that executives allowed mutual fund trading for ‘favoured’ clients that diluted the gains of other investors. JP Morgan Chase agreed to pay $US25 million in an out-of-court settlement after an inquiry by the SEC into its favoured clients practices during IPO flotations in 1999–2000. In late July 2003, Citigroup and JP Morgan agreed to pay out a total of $US308 million in two out-of-court settlements to end investigations by state and federal regulators into allegations that they helped Enron commit fraud in the mid-to-late 1990s. Wall Street’s largest investment firms paid a total of $US2.6 billion dollars in out-of-court settlements during 2003 for misleading investment advice given to clients in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

In late September 2002, former Merril Lynch broking assistant, Douglas Faneuil, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanour charge, and agreed to cooperate in another SEC investigation into allegations of insider dealing by ‘lifestyle guru’ Martha Stewart. Three former Merril Lynch bankers, Robert Furst, Daniel Bayly and James Brown, were arrested and indicted on fraud charges by the FBI on 18 September 2003 (Doran, 2003). The founder of Adelphia, John Rigas, his sons Timothy and Michael, James Brown (the company’s former VP for finance) and Michael Mulcahey (former VP for operations) were indicted on fraud charges in October 2002, with their trials in progress when this book was published.

Imclone Systems founder, Sam Walsal, was sentenced to seven years and three months in jail for insider trading in early July 2003 – the case that also dragged Martha Stewart into court accused of selling her stock in the company just before its share price crashed in 2002. Stewart was ordered to stand trial for securities fraud and obstructing justice in November 2003, and was found guilty on four charges on 5 March 2004. Other high-profile SEC scalps in 2002 included former corporate hatchetman, Al ‘Chainsaw’ Dunlap, who was fined $US500 000, and barred for life from serving as an officer or director of a publicly owned company. He had been found guilty of fraud and misleading investors, by inflating revenue and profit figures, while CEO at Sunbeam in the late 1990s (Dalton, 2002a). The former vice-president of US energy company El Paso, Todd Geiger, was indicted on fraud and false trading charges in December 2002. The SEC was also investigating Duke Energy, Reliant Resources and CMS Energy at this time (Bloomberg, 2002a). In the same month, senior executives of the investment banks Citicorp and JP Morgan Chase were ordered to appear before a US Senate Committee investigating accusations that they helped Enron deceive investors in a series of sham deals (AFP, 2002c).

Former Tycho director, Frank Walsh, was indicted on security fraud charges on 21 December 2002, joining his former chief executive Dennis Kozslowski who had been charged earlier in the year with looting the company’s finances before it went under. At the same time, a bid by the US Congress to gain access to documents detailing the murky relationships between members of Bush’s White House staff and energy executives was refused by a Federal Judge. During 2004, the US Vice-President, Richard

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Cheney, also faced the prospect of legal action for fraudulent accounting practices, during his time as an executive at Halliburton, by the anti-corruption group, Judicial Watch. A decision on this by the US Supreme Court was due in June 2004.

In Europe, in addition to the Parmalat, Adecco and Royal Ahold cases, there were ‘at least’ 25 successful prosecutions for insider trading between 1997 and 2002, about one-third of the convictions that the US SEC secured in 2002 alone. The biggest scalp for European regulators was George Soros, fined 2.2 million euros (four million US dollars) by a French court for insider dealing in 1988. It took six years of legal action in the 1990s to procure documents relevant to the case from Switzerland. This fine amounts to about 0.1 per cent of Soros’s estimated wealth (Bloomberg, 2002d). In Australia, more than two dozen criminal cases involving HIH, One.tel and several other companies were in progress during 2004–5, with Rodney Adler and Ray Williams being banned from serving as company directors for 20 and ten years, respectively. Between 2000 and 2003, the Australian Security and Investment Commission put 70 white-collar offenders in jail, had 40 directors removed from office and had 95 people banned from working in securities and financial planning businesses (Elliott, 2003).

2This appeared in The Australian during September 2001, shortly after the collapse of HIH, a ‘menu’ that could have been repeated in many other businesses at this time:

HIH Annual Dinner 2001

Raw prawn cocktail or porkie pies

Duck for cover confit or premium cut of carpetbaggers

Steak in reduced stock or stakeholders well done over

Hard cheddar or sour grapes

Just deserts

Followed by Chateau Renovation 2001 and Any Port in a Storm

3If you’re interested in ethical investments, most major banks and finance houses now offer these to their clients. There are also dozens of websites that deal with these, including www.ecobusiness.com.au, www.peg.apc.org and www.austethical.com.au

4Furthermore, the average tenure of CEOs in industrialized countries halved from 8.4 years in 1997 to 4.2 years in 2002. This trend placed even more pressure on CEOs to deliver short-term, quick-fix results that would satisfy institutional investors, and to implement strategic policies that would ensure that the value of their personal stock portfolios increased in the short term. This is not a healthy recipe for ensuring that CEOs implement policies that are aligned with the long-term interests of the companies they lead (Wilson, 2002a). This realization prompted many companies in the USA, Europe and Australia to review the practice of awarding share options to senior management, roundly criticized during 2002–3 for encouraging executives to manipulate the short-term financial results of their companies (White, 2002).

It’s also been pointed out that exceptional incompetence – not outstanding performance – became the shortest route to millionaire status for CEOs in the 1990s and early 2000s. As one commentator has observed:

Renegade company consultant Graef Crystal thought that golden parachutes should be designated ‘golden condoms’, because they protect the executive and screw the shareholders [ ] We have strayed a long way from the original idea that rewarding executives with stock would strengthen their sympathy with shareholders. On the contrary: because what gratifies investors in the short-term is not always in a company’s long-term interests, it can provoke as many bad business calls as good. But there’s more: as at Enron, sundry telcoms and dotcoms, it may encourage dishonesty. Fully valued stock price: good. Overvalued stock-price: better. Absurdly inflated share-price based on sham accounts: best – particularly if you’re a seller [ ] The most surprising aspect of the creed of shareholder value is not that it encourages dishonesty, but that it seems to encourage little else. Studies

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at Harvard and Wharton in the late 1990s found that compensation of both executives and directors was not predictive of corporate success.

(Haigh, 2003; 48, 61, 63).

For more on the ‘relationship’ between CEO remuneration and company performance, see Haigh’s humorous and masterful demolition job on this persistent and resilient myth.

5The topical issues of ecological/environmental management and sustainability strategies are addressed in the sequel to this book, Creating Intelligent Organizations: The Secrets of Long-Lasting Business Success.

6.Whom would you do business with?

(The years refer to those in which these countries held/will hold the Olympic games)

* While genocide has not been carried out in the systematic way that it was under the Nazis, both the Soviet Union and China have engaged in policies that resulted in the deaths of millions of their citizens, and the destruction of the cultures of minority groups, such as the Chechens from Stalin’s time to the present day and the people of Tibet under China’s rule.

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Allow yourself time to grow and develop throughout your career. Never assume that you can learn everything that there is to know about leadership and managing people, or that you will always have the right answers to every situation and problem you encounter at work. If any of us ever reach this stage, it probably means that we have forgotten how to think, and it may well be time to put the cue back on the rack and retire from the game. Recall that leadership is not an ‘is’ – it is a never-ending process of becoming, and this can only be realized by honest self-reflection, embracing continuous lifelong learning and unlearning, and by developing an ability to learn from our mistakes and moving on.

The boss test

In the Preface it was suggested that good leader/managers have robust characters combined with deep self-awareness, and a blend of different kinds of intelligence. Their leadership and management practices are underpinned by clear values and principles, which define the boundaries that they will not step over, regardless of the temptations. They are self-disciplined, have great self-motivation and the capacity for hard work, combined with a good understanding of their physical and psychological thresholds. While they are capable of working hard, they also know-how to relax and have fun. They are self-confident and possess a steely resolve in adverse or uncertain situations. They pay attention to their people, because they understand that they are the most important assets that their organizations possess. They lead from the front and lead by example. They understand that true leadership is a two-way process and, as a result, are able to motivate and empower their followers. They have exceptional two-way communication skills, combined with an ability to lead, direct and focus dialogues with others. Through stories and good formal presentation skills, they are able to engage with and influence the minds and hearts of others. Furthermore, they fully understand that it is the character, intelligence, skills and abilities of their employees that really count these days, not their race, culture or gender.

In a fast-changing world, they have the desire and capacity to learn and unlearn quickly, while not discarding good leadership and management practices that have stood the test of time. They experiment with new business and people management techniques, without becoming reactive ‘fad-surfers’. They have a chameleon-like quality that enables them to adapt quickly to new situations. They are creative and able to envision the future, but also have the ability to make fast practical day- to-day decisions with incomplete knowledge or data. They are

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comfortable initiating, leading and managing the complex processes of perpetual organizational change, innovation and learning. They are curious about the world and lifelong learners. They are men or women of both action and contemplation, and because of this they understand exactly what the American comedian Groucho Marx meant when he said, ‘That’s all very well in practice – but how does it work in theory?’

Good leader/managers also understand how to wield power and how to use organizational politics to their best advantage. They exploit any opportunities that come their way, but also have the capacity to create them. They acquire, keep and use information to further their interests and those of their followers. Of equal importance, they use power to drive themselves and their followers towards successful joint outcomes. They give power away to their followers and this, in turn, enhances their power bases. As a result, they are better able to compete and win, and achieve their destinies. They understand the important role that employee knowledge management and intellectual capital now play as key drivers of organizational success. They have high ethical standards combined with a pragmatic understanding of the realities of doing business in the real world. However, while they may be highly driven individuals, they do not step over the line into unethical business practices, because they understand the dangers of these and the impact these can have on the overall effectiveness of their organizations. We’ve seen that successful and effective leaders do a number of fairly simple things, but they do them well and they do them consistently under all circumstances.

We also discovered that the starting point on the journey to becoming a really successful leader/manager is an honest self-evaluation of our personal strengths and weaknesses. This does not mean that we should constantly focus on ourselves, or engage in lengthy bouts of navel gazing. However, it does mean that we need to take time out from the frenzy of modern organizational life to pause and reflect on what we do, why we do it and how we do it. Many of the greatest leaders in history, including Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jnr, Gandhi and Roosevelt, did this. Even Churchill, at the height of World War II, took time out to read and paint in order to recharge his batteries. Throughout this book, there have been opportunities to develop a greater sense of self-awareness, and to identify strategies that will enable you to build on your leadership and people management repertoires. There have also been opportunities to assess what kind of leader/manager you would like to become in the future. During this process, we identified a cluster of seven core skills, competencies and qualities that appear time after time, and leader/managers who possess these are the ones that all normal people want to follow:

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•honesty and integrity,

•competence and credibility,

•the ability to motivate and inspire others,

•the ability to create a vision/sense of direction for the future,

•good two-way communication skills,

•equity/parity and fairness,

•a sense of humour.

Of course, there are other important elements that play their part in successful leadership and people management, but these seven appear to be essentials, and if you possess them the chances are that you will be a successful leader/manager, now and in the future. Of equal importance, we’ve also seen how all of the components that make up each one of these elements are ones that can be developed and enhanced throughout life, given self-belief, time and commitment.

Reinventing the wheel

The emptiest and most tired cliché in organizations for many years has been ‘People are our most important asset.’ This is of course true, but many organizations just pay lip service to this mantra and, far too often, there is often a huge gulf between the rhetoric of ‘people as assets’ in organizations and how their employees are actually treated. The harsh truth is that most organizations, and the leaders and managers who work in them, often fail to get the best out of their people. Conversely, those organizations and leaders that are able to get the most out of their employees over long periods of time expend a lot of time and effort setting up organizational systems and cultures that support these processes. Enough evidence has been presented in this book (and in others that have been cited throughout) to demonstrate that, if the latent energy and talents of people are unleashed and rewarded, the more successful your organization or business will be, and so will you. This is particularly true in a world that is fast moving from manufacturing to mentofacturing, where new technologies, innovation and the management of employee knowledge and intellectual capital are fast becoming the principal drivers of organizational success, profitability, adaptability and longevity.

The greatest puzzle about the thousands of books and articles that have been written on leadership and people management over the last 20 years or so is that many of them seem to imply that the techniques they advocate are largely new, or at least creations of the 20th century. Nothing could be further from the truth, because human behaviour has changed little during the last 10 000 years, and this is why many of the