Talking to CEOs about eliciting candor, interviewing new hires and finding out what workers really think.
By ALAN MURRAY
Interviews with chief executives are not always a reliable tool for judging CEO performance. Nearly everyone who makes it to the top of the corporate ladder has learned to talk a good game. Not all have learned to play one.
Still, there is fascination in hearing CEOs talk about their jobs—a fascination that Adam Bryant captures neatly in "The Corner Office." Running large, complex organizations is one of the most difficult tasks in modern society. When done well, it may even be worth the outsize compensation that it brings. And listening to how these leaders "make elephants dance"—to borrow a phrase from Louis Gerstner, IBM's former CEO—provides not just instruction in management but a window into the human condition. (click below to read more)
Mr. Bryant, a New York Times columnist, has picked a diverse group of subjects for his interviews—more diverse than the executive population itself. Roughly a third of the 75 CEOs he talked with are women, for instance, though only 11 women now head Fortune 500 companies. His subjects have not all been successful in their jobs—one or two may be gone soon after this book is published. Their struggles are interesting nonetheless.
One lesson of "The Corner Office" is that a leader needs to create a culture of candor. Institutions, like the people who staff them, have a remarkable ability to wrap themselves in self-deceit. It is the leader's job to pierce the fiction.
Xerox CEO Ursula Burns provides an example. She tells Mr. Bryant how, in 1991, Paul Allaire, then president of the company, would hold monthly meetings with top executives at which Ms. Burns and other managers were allowed to sit off to the side. She noticed that he would declare, "We have to stop hiring," and then the company would go out and hire a thousand more people. The next month, same thing. Finally Ms. Burns raised her hand. "I'm a little confused, Mr. Allaire," she said. "If you keep saying 'No hiring,' and we hire a thousand people every month, who can say 'No hiring' and make it actually happen?" At the meeting itself, Mr. Allaire stared at her forbiddingly and moved on. But soon after he called her into his office and, expressly grateful for her candor, made her his executive assistant. The job of CEO, Ms. Burns says, is partly "having great questions asked and great people helping you answer them."
Cristóbal Conde of SunGard talks about the importance of collaboration and how he has used social-networking technology to foster it. "I think top-down organizations got started because the bosses either knew more or they had access to more information," he says. "None of that applies now. Everybody has access to identical amounts of information."
Mr. Conde uses Yammer, a Twitter-like system open only to employees. It allows people to brag, share information and learn about the work of others. "I think that a CEO needs to focus more on the platform that enables collaboration," Mr. Conde says. The boss, these days, is "more like the producer of the show, rather than being the lead." Not that Mr. Conde wants to be endlessly connected to technology. He tells Mr. Bryant that he tries to set aside 90 minutes every day free from the phone and personal computer. "There are many times where you need solid focus. So I've learned that it's incredibly useful to reserve some time."
There are lots of practical management tips in "The Corner Office." The book has an entire chapter about interviewing, in which CEOs reveal their favorite questions. "I try to ask questions that give me a sense of the person's character," says Michael Mathieu, the CEO of YuMe, an online video advertising firm. (For example: "On your deathbed, what do you want to be remembered for?") Barbara Krumsiek, the CEO of the Calvert Group, takes a more down-to-earth approach. One of her questions: "Wherever you worked before, what made it a good day?" Meridee Moore of Watershed Asset Management likes to ask men if "they've ever been in anyone's wedding party. If someone has asked him to stand next to him on the most important day of his life, at least one person thinks he is responsible."
Another management challenge is avoiding isolation and finding ways to learn what employees are really doing and thinking. Many CEOs, Mr. Bryant writes, believe that it's a good idea to "get out and walk around." Deborah Dunsire of Millennium Pharmaceuticals routinely schedules walk-around time, during which she asks workers what is keeping them up at night and what they are feeling excited about. Bill Carter, a co-founder of Fuse, a marketing agency, confesses that he used to come back from his frequent out-of-town trips and retreat to his office. He soon discovered that "holing yourself up in your office is not the way to learn about what's happening in the organization."
Mr. Bryant's interviews also offer some insight into the most important challenge of corporate leadership—creating a shared vision that will motivate people to give their best. Alan Mulally of Ford, one of the CEOs in the book whose performance matches his rhetoric, tells a version of management guru Peter Drucker's famous story of the stonecutters. Three bricklayers are asked what they are doing. One says that he is earning a living laying bricks. The second says that he wants to make bricklaying his profession and be the best bricklayer ever. And the third says that he is building a cathedral. Says Mr. Mulally: "We all want to contribute to making a cathedral."
Mr. Murray is deputy managing editor of The Wall Street Journal and the author of "The Wall Street Journal Essential Guide to Management."
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