“They say you can teach a squirrel to fly.
But it’s easier to hire the eagle.”

- David McClelland, Organizational psychologist

Kenneth I. Chenault, chairman and CEO of American Express, shares his business insights and philosophies at a talk in Wharton

The quotes are from his talk.

Integrity: “Many people construe ‘integrity’ to mean being honest. That’s a piece of it, but it’s really about being consistent in words and actions. When you are trying to lead others, they look for consistency. I want people to have a will to win, but I want them to win with integrity.”

Courage: “To me, it’s not personal. I want you to argue with me. It requires courage to offer a different perspective and challenge current or popular views. It requires courage to speak out, especially when one doesn’t personally benefit from it. To build ‘followship,’ one has to be courageous and orient always from the core value of integrity.”

Team player: “Everybody wants to be a team player but there can be nice people who are bad team players — people who don’t engage in confrontation when that’s what is really needed, people who don’t give feedback. I look at whether the person helps the team improve.”

Execution skills: “Today, people are focused on IQ, but executional quotient, EQ, is just as important. If a person has a match of IQ and EQ, he or she has an incredible personal commitment and can be an incredible force. Disparity between IQ and EQ means that person is just focused on himself.”

Development of people — helping others succeed: “I judge the success of a leader by the success of the people who are the followship. I look at the results. Is this a person who facilitates the achievements of others and who has the capacity to get people to willingly follow?”

Being proactive: ?A leader has to take action and make things happen.”

To read Dr. Warren Bennis’s “Six time tested competencies of Exemplary Leadership”, go here

The recent issue of “Leader to Leader” (subscription required) has an article on ?Leading the Way to Double-Digit Growth” by Robert P. Gandossy and Shelli Greenslade.

The single biggest differentiator based on extensive research of double digit growth companies is Leadership Development. According to the authors, “Without a strong leadership infrastructure, organizations simply would not possess the ability to sustain long-term double digit growth.?

Some findings include:

More than half of the fast-growing companies studied cited corporate culture as a factor that enables them to develop leader quality and bench strength. Approximately 20 percent named it as the key enabler.

On the contrary, among single digit growth companies, culture was viewed as a barrier to developing leaders by more than a third of the companies, with 15 percent ranking it as the number one barrier.

Among survey questions that studied ?Employee Attitudes at Double-digit growth companies as compared to other companies?:

Pretty significant.

So as a leader, if you wish to grow in double digits, ?focus on combining culture, strategy, performance management, development, and senior leadership support in a way that enables your people to consistently deliver strong financial returns.?

There was a similar study byWatson Wyatt in 2001 that focused on HR Practices. It identified the following HR Practices to increase shareholder value by as much as 47%.

This month’s HR News and Views has a compilation of people practices worth adopting.

Here is the first one:

1. Support and Accountability for New Recruits at Trilogy Software

Trilogy Software Inc among the world’s largest privately held software companies pushes the responsibility of grooming new hires into the organization on their sponsors. As a result, if the new hires make the grade, the sponsors are paid a $1000 bonus. If the new hires fail, the sponsors are required to pay $4000. As most Sponsors hold stock options worth millions of dollars so the penalisation does not mean much to them. However, what happens is those who fail examine why their recruit failed and take steps to avoid those mistakes.

Source: From Noel Tichy?s Article, The Growth Imperative

You can read the remaining here

I would not have written about “The Emperor of Scent” by Chandler Burr here but for the debate that often come up - The Specialist Vs the Generalist.

The “Emperor of Scent” is about Luca Turin, a scientist who offers a new theory of smell. He arrives at this theory based on his ability to draw on his knowledge of various disciplines such as chemistry, physics, biology apart from his powerful ability to smell! His theory does not find acceptance from the scientific community largely because of the lack of understanding of multi-disciplines. To quote from the book;” the biologist said the chemistry was wrong, the chemists said the problem was the physics, and the physicists said the problem fault lay with the biology.”

Sounds interesting and all too familiar from the meetings we attend in the world of Business! I believe that the future calls for skills that require us to have a deep understanding of domains beyond and above our areas of expertise. It also calls for an ability to see opportunities and make connections.

The need for being multi-disciplined is best said in the words of Luca Turin as it appears at the end of the book:

“Metaphor is the currency of knowledge. I have spent my life learning incredible amounts of disparate, disconnected, obscure, useless pieces of knowledge, and they have turned out to be, almost all of them, extremely useful.Why. Because there is no such thing as disconnected facts. There is only complex structure. And both to explain complex structure to others and, perhaps more important- this is forgotten, usually - to understand them oneself, one needs better metaphors. If I was able to understand this, it is because my chaotic accrual of informaton simply gave me better metaphors than anyone else.”

“My father always said if you translate a proverb from one language to another, you pass for a poet. The same for science. Work strictly within one area, and its diminishing returns, hard to make progress. But translate a concept from its field for use wher it is unknown, and it is always fresh and powerful. In buying outside, you are doing intelectual arbitrage. The rate limiting step in this is your willingness to continously translate, to force strange languages to be yours, to live in between, to be everywhere and nowhere.”

• Deepa