Former IBM CEO said, I stay in my own domain, and I'm smart in my own area. I'm dump beyond my comfort zone.
Sam Palmisano, the former head of IBM, was photographed at The ... his own, but who needed a leader to bring out their collective best. ... I was maybe the longest-
He thought about employees as players whose technical skill outshone his own, but who needed a leader to bring out their collective best.
"If you have to be the smartest person in the room, then you can’t get people to open up and work with you to solve a problem."
why?
the reality kicks in: (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2015/06/26/ibm-is-struggling-but-former-ceo-sam-palmisano-says-he-isnt-looking-back/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.7493da0cbf25)
"Q. Do you think many CEOs have trouble keeping in mind the things they should really care about when all is said and done?
A. You’re there primarily to drive financial results. We could argue the good or the bad of that—that’s a nice intellectual discussion—but you’re measured by your owners, the shareholders, and they expect financial performance. It’s like if you’re a coach in sports, you have to win on Sunday. You can’t lose two years in a row in the NFL and still be a coach for that team. It’s the same thing. You can’t have three or four bad years as a public CEO and expect to be CEO during year five. That’s just the nature of the job."
Q. Did you develop techniques for getting people to still give you honest feedback and not shield you from things because suddenly you’re CEO?
A. Their instincts are going to be to shield you, for lots of reasons. Sometimes they think they’re protecting you; sometimes they only want to give you good information or good news. That’s human nature.
There were ways I would try to make sure I had a constant feedback channel. I used to include people other than my direct reports as part of the monthly meeting. They could be four levels down from the senior vice presidents. It was a way for them to learn, and also a way to get different points of view into the discussion that weren’t just the old guys who had been around and seen these things a zillion times.
The other thing I would suggest to any CEO is to have one source of data. Not multiple financial systems, not multiple facts. At IBM there was one system—one set of accounting, one set of market share, one set of customer satisfaction and employee morale. It created total transparency. Whether you were a salesperson or an entry-level HR person, you saw the same information the CEO and CFO saw.
There was no time spent debating the data. The discussion was: Given these problems we see, how do we work on them? A lot of companies spend all their time in meetings discussing whether their facts are correct. They never get to the problem-solving phase of the meeting. I viewed that as a waste of time.
Q. What mistake in your life yielded a leadership lesson that has stuck with you?
A. There are a lot of those. Gosh. I was slow to make a decision. Slow to react. You have to move faster—I learned that in the PC business. Suddenly one of your competitors cuts prices in Asia, let’s say. You don’t have a lot of time to respond. You can’t study the market trends. You’ve got to react one way or the other. I learned I was slow.
Discipline. Sloppiness. I learned over time to be much more disciplined, much more thorough in the analysis than I ever imagined I ever would become.
Personnel decisions. You grow up with all these people, so you always want to give them a second chance. But a third chance? A fourth chance? A fifth chance? You think: Come on, they’ll get better. You coach them and they don’t.
If you go through the patterns of mistakes I made, it all came down to speed. And maybe that’s a little bit of confidence, which brings speed. If you’ve been through enough experiences, you can pick up the pace of decisions. Usually when I was slow to respond to whatever it happened to be, it’s because I was too reflective. I knew what was the right thing, and I should have acted—based more on intuition and less on analysis.
Q. On the flip side of that, what would you identify as a key factor that helped you move up the ranks to have a successful career?
A. You’ve got to start with luck. You’ve got to be in the right place at the right time, and moving at the right pace. If you’re 60, it’s hard to become the CEO.
But the most important thing, to me anyway, was phenomenal resilience. You’re going to get knocked down. You’re going to get beat up. And I got beat up a lot—2005 first quarter was a bad quarter. Everybody was screaming for my head on TV. You have to fight through it, you can’t personalize it. Bad times are going to happen to everybody. You can’t be in these jobs and not have something bad happen, it’s impossible.
People say you have to be smart—I don’t know if I’m smart. I was a scholarship kid who played sports. I’m not an engineer. Do you have to be brilliant to be a successful CEO? If you’re brilliant, you should be a brain surgeon. Or an academic. You don’t have to be brilliant to run a company, but you have to be a good people person. You have to be able to lead, to cajole. You have to care. That’s what you have to do.
Q. What’s the best piece of leadership advice anyone ever gave you?
A. The best piece of leadership advice I ever received—other than take off those goofy glasses (which I still have, I’ve had them since I was in the 7th grade, they haven’t changed much) and you smile too much—was to never be the smartest person in the room. If you have to be the smartest person in the room, then you can’t get people to open up and work with you to solve a problem.
It was easier for me, because I wasn’t the smartest person in the room ever at IBM. There were PhDs, Nobel Prize winners. I mean it was impossible for me to be the smartest person in the room. It wasn’t ever going to happen.
The ultimate measure of your success is the results of the company or your team. Not you. Not your brand, not your personality, not your great interview, not that phenomenal speech that you gave. It’s the team. At the end of the day, just like in sports, the score goes up. And if it was a winning score, you won. And if it was a losing score, you didn’t. So it’s about how you can get the best out of the organization, not necessarily how you can be the best yourself. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2015/06/26/ibm-is-struggling-but-former-ceo-sam-palmisano-says-he-isnt-looking-back/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.7493da0cbf25)
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Mar 25, 2018 - Let's put smart to work!” That was a main theme of IBM's CEO Ginni Rometty's keynote address at the recent IBM Think conference
强龙不压地头蛇（强龙不压地头蛇）
