Senior leaders, particularly CEOs, confront a central paradox in their work: They generally have access to more lines of communication than anybody else, but the information that flows to them is suspect and compromised. Warning signals are tamped down. Key facts are omitted. Data sets are given a positive spin. All of it isolates leaders in a dangerous information bubble. But they can escape that bubble, the authors argue, by working actively to create a more expansive "listening ecosystem." They first have to learn how to listen actively themselves, without distraction or judgment, purely for comprehension; then they have to create systems and processes all around them that elevate listening to a constant state of hypervigilance. This sort of sustained attention to listening allows leaders to pick up on early signs of both danger and opportunity--and that, in turn, allows them to do their jobs and serve their organizations better. The authors conclude this piece by sharing advice--gleaned from interviews and personal experience--about how leaders can learn to listen better.
In March of 2011, Northrop Grumman divested shipbuilding assets through the spin-off of Huntington Ingalls Industries. This case reviews many of the key questions faced by Northrop's CEO, CFO, and top management team during this process, including questions concerning whether to sell or spin-off the assets; how to handle customers, employees, and investors during the restructuring; and how to reorganize a diversified business to increase the performance of its parts.
The personal traits your top people possess matter much less than what they actually do every day. Kevin Sharer, former chief executive at Amgen, argues that your greatest job as a CEO is to define the behavior you want the leaders of your organization to exhibit--not by dictating the behavior from on high but by involving the leaders themselves in the process of defining it.
Fast growth is a nice problem to have--but a hard one to manage well. In this interview, Kevin Sharer, the CEO of biotech giant Amgen, talks about the special challenges leaders face when their companies are on a roll. Sharer, who was also head of marketing at pre-WorldCom MCI and a division head and a staff assistant to Jack Welch at GE, offers insights drawn from his own experience--and from his own self-proclaimed blunders: "I learned the hard way that you need to become credible and enlist support inside the company before you start trying to be a change agent. If you think you're going to make change happen simply by force of personality or position or intellect, you'd better think again." And change there was: Under Sharer's leadership, Amgen overhauled its management team, altered its culture, and launched a couple of blockbuster products. How do chief executives survive in that kind of dizzying environment? "A CEO must always be switching between different altitudes--tasks of different levels of abstraction and specificity," Sharer says. "You might need to spend time working on a redesign of your organizational structure and then quickly switch to drafting a memo to all employees aimed at reinforcing one of the company's values." Having a supportive and capable top team is also key.