Q. If you were
teaching a class to business school students, what lessons would you impart to
them?
A. Follow your instincts. If your instincts for the job are
good, you will be successful. If your instincts are bad, it’s the wrong job and
you should get out early and try something else. Textbook learning can take you
only so far. It can give you tools that will help you analyse things. But don’t
do it the way other C.E.O.’s that you read about have done it. Don’t follow the
case studies if your instinct tells you otherwise.
The great leaders, I think, are people who were smart enough
to gather all of the tools that they needed, all the information, all the peer
mentoring that they could get and then just tucked that away somewhere as extra
fuel and followed their instincts to do what they had a passion for, what they
thought they knew how to do.
Too often, leaders fail because someone told them they can’t
do it. If you don’t know what you can’t do, then you may well achieve it. That
is so important. Look at our great companies. Almost all of them shouldn’t have
succeeded the way they did. Often it’s accidental, opportunistic, it’s luck,
it’s something else. But it’s being open to falling into that success. And you
can see it in some of our most innovative companies.
As soon as you get overly tied to the lessons you were
taught in business school or elsewhere, I think you’re going to start doing it
the way it’s been done in the past. And then you’re going to have a company
that’s like those that existed in the past. You’re not going to see that new
technologies could offer possibilities that no one has even thought of. You
have to be willing to go into a room and say, “Why can’t this happen?” And then
have someone look at you and say, “That’s the dumbest question anybody ever asked.”
Even though you are the C.E.O., you have to allow and
encourage that kind of feedback. Because you can sink a company if you come in
with a load of ideas and innovation and creativity that’s bigger than the
company can carry. So you’ve got to have people coming back and saying, “We
know that,” or “We understand where you’re going with it, but it’s not
something we can do at this point.”
