Always learning

A while ago one of us had a conversation with Joe Jimenez, CEO of the pharmaceutical company, Novartis. It was 4 July, a big day for Americans, but he was hard at work doing what a modern corporate leader does. What especially interested us about Jimenez was that he was an outsider to the pharma industry when he joined the company. He was not even a scientist when he became the head of the pharma division at Novartis in 2007.

We thought that it must have been awkward, indeed very difficult, dealing with the company’s scientists, working at the leading edge of pharma, knowing nothing about the interior workings of molecules and so on. It was a point we made to Jimenez. ‘I felt it was very important that I study not just our medicines but the diseases that our medicines are involved in, as well as the mechanism of the molecules that we have discovered and developed,’ he agreed:

I had a lot of help in understanding the science in the early years. I had a tutor that would come in early in the morning before the work day. We would pick a particular disease and he would explain how the disease progresses, what pathways are implicated in that disease and how the pieces manage through that disease and where each one of our compounds fit in the overall management of the disease.

I found that with a lot of work, while sitting in meetings with our scientists, I was able to ask the right questions around what has been considered and what has not been considered.

It is very interesting that you can run a company like this without being a physician or a scientist as long as you understand something about the sciences and you make sure that you have the right people in the room when you are debating. We have an innovation management board where there are some of the most brilliant scientists in the world sitting at the table as we are debating whether we are going to proceed to phase two or phase three on a particular program and I am in there with them. It is amazing how you can learn a new industry and learn the science even if you didn’t grow up in that background.

Jimenez’s willingness to go back to school, to put in the extra hours every single morning so he could hold his head up in a conversation struck us as entirely admirable, part perhaps of the humility we have seen in so many great leaders.

We are always suspicious of leaders who say they are not motivated by money – easy to say when you have a great deal of it. But, it is said to us so often, that we are becoming convinced that the very best leaders are driven by more laudable forces. This is how Chris Gibson-Smith, chairman of the London Stock Exchange, explained the motivation of his career: ‘Making personal money is a consequence of my amused participation. I have followed my curiosity more than my ambition. And I think that’s a more winding trail.’

Curiouser and curiouser. A similar appetite for improvement was expressed by the formidable Mick Davis, then CEO of Xstrata, when we spoke. Davis is a highly experienced business leader and yet, in our interview, he emphasized the need for continuing learning and development with and from colleagues. ‘I continue to spend a lot of time trying to learn as much as I can about the qualities of the people in my business,’ said Davis:

To do that, I travel to the various operations so I know who’s there and what they’re doing. Choosing the right people with the potential for success remains one the key parts of my job. I spend a lot of time trying to encourage people to think about what they can do. I’m quite demanding in terms of outputs, but my style is one of very significant delegation of accountability and authority. Although I always think about risk, I am careful to allow people the space to get on with their jobs, make their own decisions, make their own mistakes – and learn from those mistakes. I also continue to try to be highly supportive when they run into trouble.

In their Harvard Business Review article, ‘Are You a Good Boss or a Great One?’, Linda Hill and Kent Lineback observe that a lot of bosses fail to fulfill their full potential because they neglect to continue developing their talents. They fail to ask the questions ‘How good am I?’ and ‘Do I need to be better?’ Hill and Lineback suggest that not enough bosses really know what is needed to be truly effective, or where they want to be in the future. Hill and Lineback suggest there are three imperatives which leaders face: to manage yourself, manage a network and manage a team.

Leaders need to influence others if they are to succeed. At the same time followers will be observing their boss at work, and making judgments about whether or not they are willing to let the leader influence them. The followers must trust their boss in order to be influenced. If trust comes from competence and character, leaders must manage themselves in ways that display competence and character and inspire trust.

Effective leaders manage their network well. Rather than recoiling from organizational politics, they embrace it, knowing that they need to make the right contacts in the organization if they are to exert influence in a productive way. Building an informal network throughout the organization, and engaging in organizational politics, is the best way to ensure they have the resources and power to get things done. Not only do effective leaders build and maintain these connections, they also make sure that they do it on several levels, including their own boss in the network, for example.

When you are leading a team, it can be tempting to deal with team members individually rather than collectively. Time is precious. Everyone is working hard. Online, virtual team meetings are not always that effective. Yet people like to be part of a team, to share common goals and feel that sense of collective purpose. Even if it is not the easiest option, an effective leader manages their team as a team and not as a group of individuals. Everyone needs to be included, and individuals will need to be dealt with individually, but that interaction can always be freehand in a team context.

Finally, the effective leader needs to keep tabs on how they are doing with the three imperatives. Fortunately, Hill and Lineback provide a checklist questionnaire to help them keep score.

The willingness to learn is not about signing up for evening classes  – though these might be a good idea. It is an outlook on life, a willingness to listen and to learn from others, to admit fallibility rather than perpetuating the myth of leadership perfection.

Learning is also about having an appetite for reinvention. ‘You can never have an impact on society if you have not changed yourself,’ noted Nelson Mandela. There are second acts in leadership. There are comebacks. There are reinventions. Leaders are by their very nature curious and driven. This explains why the very best leaders have a capacity for the kind of reinvention which is beyond mere mortals.

Take the reinvention of Dame Ellen MacArthur. She remains best known for her remarkable sailing exploits. Aged 18 she set off to sail around the UK singlehandedly. She came second in the 2001 Vendée Globe solo round-the-world race and went on to break the world record for the fastest solo circumnavigation in 2005.

In the years following her world record, MacArthur remained involved in sailing. But, through her sailing experiences, visiting the remote island of South Georgia and having a powerful thirst for knowledge, MacArthur became fascinated by the economic and resource challenges facing the global economy. She announced her retirement from racing in 2009 and in 2010 launched the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

MacArthur refers to the years before the establishment of the Foundation bearing her name as her ‘journey of learning’. ‘Being a round-the-world sailor is fairly specific in many ways – even though you have to learn many skills from understanding the weather to first aid to sailing, I had absolutely no idea about global economics. It was a long journey of learning,’ she told us when we talked at the Foundation’s base, temptingly near to water.

Sailing around the world, every item on board has to justify its inclusion. The lighter the yacht, the faster. Each mouthful of food, each piece of kitchen roll has to be consumed with the overall resources in mind. Says MacArthur:

On a boat you have finite resources and you really realize what finite means. Translate that to the global economy and you realize there are some pretty big challenges – 3.5 billion new middle-class consumers coming online, the population increasing, more and more demand on resources. We’ve seen a century of price declines erased in ten years. Economists don’t seem to think that’s going to change because there’s more and more demand for commodities. And for me the question was, so what works?

With this question burning in her mind, MacArthur sought out answers. She visited a power station and saw the vast supplies of raw materials required to keep them running. She traveled, but with a new agenda. Her eyes were opened to the concept of the circular economy when she saw a diagram in a book by Ken Webster (later the Head of Innovation at the Foundation). ‘Suddenly there was this idea of a cycle. For me it made sense. It was a different way of looking at things,’ she says. ‘I thought this could work. This is an economy that could run in the long term. At that stage we had absolutely no idea of the economics. It made sense from a materials flow perspective and it made sense from an energy perspective but we had no idea whether it cost three times more than a current linear product.’

MacArthur invested her own money for the first eighteen months to kickstart the Foundation. In straitened times it raised £6 million to fund its work into promoting understanding of what is now labeled the circular economy.

At the annual general meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2015 the circular economy was one of the big ideas discussed and debated – thanks largely to Ellen MacArthur’s campaigning work and her reinvention as a leader of ideas.

Resources

The interview with Joe Jimenez, ‘Pharma plus’, is in Business Strategy Review (Spring 2014).

Linda Hill and Kent Lineback’s article, ‘Are You a Good Boss or a Great One?’, can be found in Harvard Business Review, 2011.

Ellen MacArthur’s story is brilliantly told in Full Circle (Michael Joseph, 2010).