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When we do our best work as leaders, we don't imitate others. Rather, we draw on our own values and capabilities. We enter what author Robert Quinn calls the fundamental state of leadership. This is a frame of mind we tend to adopt when facing a significant challenge: a promotion opportunity, the risk of professional failure, a serious illness, a divorce, the death of a loved one, or any other major life jolt. Crisis calls, and we rise to the occasion. But we don't need to spend time in the dark night of the soul to reach this fundamental state. We can make the shift at any time by asking ourselves--and honestly answering--four transformative questions: Am I results centered? (Am I willing to leave my comfort zone to make things happen?) Am I internally directed? (Am I behaving according to my values rather than bending to social or political pressures?) Am I other focused? (Am I putting the collective good above my own needs?) Am I externally open? (Am I receptive to outside stimuli that may signal the need for change?) When we can answer these questions in the affirmative, we're prepared to lead in the truest sense. Of course, we can't sustain the fundamental state of leadership indefinitely. Fatigue and external resistance pull us out of it. But each time we reach it, we then return to our everyday selves a bit more capable, and we usually boost the performance of the people around us. Over time, we create a high-performance culture--and one that can be sustained.

The U.S. Army's Opposing Force (OPFOR) is a 2,500-member brigade whose job is to help prepare soldiers for combat. Created to be the meanest, toughest foe that soldiers will ever face, OPFOR engages units-in-training in a variety of mock campaigns under a wide range of conditions. Every month, a fresh brigade of more than 4,000 soldiers takes on this standing enemy. OPFOR, which is stationed in the California desert, always has the home-court advantage. But the force being trained--called BLUFOR--is numerically and technologically superior. It possesses more resources and better, more available data. It is made up of experienced soldiers. And it knows just what to expect, because OPFOR shares its methods from previous campaigns with BLUFOR's commanders. In short, each BLUFOR brigade is given practically every edge. Yet OPFOR almost always wins. Underlying OPFOR's consistent success is the way it uses the after action review (AAR), a method for extracting lessons from one event or project and applying them to others. AAR meetings became a popular business tool after Shell Oil began experimenting with them in 1998. Most corporate AARs, however, are faint echoes of the rigorous reviews performed by OPFOR. Companies tend to treat the process as a pro-forma wrap-up, drawing lessons from an action but rarely learning them. OPFOR's AARs, by contrast, generate raw material that is fed back into the execution cycle. And while OPFOR's reviews extract numerous lessons, the brigade does not consider a lesson to be learned until it is successfully applied and validated. It might not make sense for companies to adopt OPFOR's AAR processes in their entirety, but four fundamentals are mandatory: Lessons must benefit the team that extracts them; the AAR process must start at the beginning of the activity; lessons must link explicitly to future actions; and leaders must hold everyone, especially themselves, accountable for learning.

Corporate leaders seeking to boost growth, learning, and innovation may find the answer in a surprising place: the Linux open-source software community. Linux is developed by an essentially volunteer, self-organizing community of thousands of programmers. Most leaders would sell their grandmothers for workforces that collaborate as efficiently, frictionlessly, and creatively as the self-styled Linux hackers. But Linux is software, and software is hardly a model for mainstream business. The authors have, nonetheless, found surprising parallels between the anarchistic, caffeinated, hirsute world of Linux hackers and the disciplined, tea-sipping, clean-cut world of Toyota engineering. Specifically, Toyota and Linux operate by rules that blend the self-organizing advantages of markets with the low transaction costs of hierarchies. In place of markets' cash and contracts and hierarchies' authority are rules about how individuals and groups work together (with rigorous discipline); how they communicate (widely and with granularity); and how leaders guide them toward a common goal (by example). Those rules, augmented by simple communication technologies and a lack of legal barriers to sharing information, create rich common knowledge, the ability to organize teams modularly, extraordinary motivation, and high levels of trust, which radically lowers transaction costs. Low transaction costs, in turn, make it profitable for organizations to perform more and smaller transactions--and so increase the pace and flexibility typical of high-performance organizations. After the system achieves critical mass, it feeds on itself. The larger the system, the more broadly shared the knowledge, language, and work style. The greater individuals' reputational capital, the louder the applause and the stronger the motivation. The success of Linux is evidence of the power of that virtuous circle. Toyota's success is evidence that it is also powerful in conventional companies.

If sales and service organizations are to improve, they must learn to measure and manage the quality of the employee-customer encounter. Quality improvement methodologies such as Six Sigma are extremely useful in manufacturing contexts, but they're less useful when it comes to human interactions. To address this problem, the authors have developed a quality improvement approach they refer to as Human Sigma. It weaves together a consistent method for assessing the employee-customer encounter and a disciplined process for managing and improving it. There are several core principles for measuring and managing the employee-customer encounter: It's important not to think like an economist or an engineer when assessing interactions because emotions inform both sides' judgments and behavior. The employee-customer encounter must be measured and managed locally, because there are enormous variations in quality at the work-group and individual levels. And to improve the quality of the employee-customer interaction, organizations must conduct both short-term, transactional interventions and long-term, transformational ones. Employee engagement and customer engagement are intimately connected--and, taken together, they have an outsized effect on financial performance. They, therefore, need to be managed holistically. That is, the responsibility for measuring and monitoring the health of employee-customer relationships must reside within a single organizational structure, with an executive champion who has the authority to initiate and manage change. Nevertheless, the local manager remains the single most important factor in local group performance. A local manager whose work group shows suboptimal performance should be encouraged to conduct interventions, such as targeted training, performance reviews, action learning, and individual coaching.

Managing a traditional team seems pretty straightforward: Gather up whoever's available, give them time and space to do their jobs, and make sure they all play nicely together. But these teams produce results that are often as unremarkable as the teams themselves. When big change and high performance are required, a virtuoso team is far more likely to deliver outstanding and innovative results. Virtuoso teams are fundamentally different from the garden-variety work groups that most organizations form to pursue more modest goals. They comprise the top experts in their particular fields, are specially convened for ambitious projects, work with frenetic rhythm, and emanate a discernible energy. Not surprisingly, however, the superstars who make up these teams are renowned for being elitist, temperamental, egocentric, and difficult to work with. As a result, many managers fear that if they force such people to interact on a high-stakes project, the group just might implode. In this article, Bill Fischer and Andy Boynton put the inner workings of highly successful virtuoso teams on full display through three examples: the creative group behind West Side Story, the team of writers for Sid Caesar's 1950s-era television hit Your Show of Shows, and the high-powered technologists who averted an investor relations crisis for Norsk Hydro, the Norwegian energy giant. Each of these teams accomplished enormous goals and changed their businesses, their customers, even their industries. And they did so by breaking all the conventional rules of collaboration--from the way they recruited the best members to the way they enforced their unusual processes and from the high expectations they held to the exceptional results they produced.

A company's most important asset isn't raw materials, transportation systems, or political influence. It's creative capital--simply put, an arsenal of creative thinkers whose ideas can be turned into valuable products and services. Creative employees pioneer new technologies, birth new industries, and power economic growth. If you want your company to succeed, these are the people you entrust it to. But how do you accommodate the complex and chaotic nature of the creative process while increasing efficiency, improving quality, and raising productivity? Most businesses haven't figured this out. A notable exception is SAS Institute, the world's largest privately held software company. SAS makes Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For list every year. The company has enjoyed low employee turnover, high customer satisfaction, and 28 straight years of revenue growth. What's the secret to all this success? The authors, an academic and a CEO, approach this question differently, but they've come to the same conclusion: SAS has learned how to harness the creative energies of all its stakeholders, including its customers, software developers, managers, and support staff. Its framework for managing creativity rests on three guiding principles. First, help employees do their best work by keeping them intellectually engaged and by removing distractions. Second, make managers responsible for sparking creativity and eliminate arbitrary distinctions between "suits" and "creatives." And third, engage customers as creative partners so you can deliver superior products. Underlying all three principles is a mandate to foster interaction--not just to collect individuals' ideas. By nurturing relationships among developers, salespeople, and customers, SAS is investing in its future creative capital.

Boards of directors typically believe that transforming a company from good to great requires an extreme personality, an egocentric chief to lead the corporate charge. Think "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap or Lee Iacocca. But that's not the case, says author and leadership expert Jim Collins. The essential ingredient for taking a company to greatness is having a "Level 5" leader, an executive in whom extreme personal humility blends paradoxically with intense professional will. In this January 2001 article, Collins paints a compelling and counterintuitive portrait of the skills and personality traits necessary for effective leadership. He identifies the characteristics common to Level 5 leaders: humility, will, ferocious resolve, and the tendency to give credit to others while assigning blame to themselves. Collins fleshes out his Level 5 theory by telling colorful tales about 11 such leaders from recent business history. He contrasts the turnaround successes of outwardly humble, even shy, executives like Gillette's Colman M. Mockler and Kimberly-Clark's Darwin E. Smith with those of larger-than-life business leaders like Dunlap and Iacocca, who courted personal celebrity. Some leaders have the Level 5 seed within; some don't. But Collins suggests using the findings from his research to strive for Level 5--for instance, by getting the right people on board and creating a culture of discipline. "Our own lives and all that we touch will be the better for making the effort," he concludes.

Groups don't become teams just because that is what someone calls them. Nor do teamwork values alone ensure team performance. So what is a team? How can managers know when the team option makes sense, and what can they do to ensure team success? In this groundbreaking March 1993 article, authors Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith answer these questions and outline the discipline that defines a real team. The essence of a team is shared commitment. Without it, groups perform as individuals; with it, they become a powerful unit of collective performance. The best teams invest a tremendous amount of time shaping a purpose that they can own. They also translate their purpose into specific performance goals. And members of successful teams pitch in and become accountable with and to their teammates. The fundamental distinction between teams and other forms of working groups turns on performance. A working group relies on the individual contributions of its members for collective performance. But a team strives for something greater than its members could achieve individually: An effective team is always worth more than the sum of its parts. The authors identify three kinds of teams: those that recommend things--task forces or project groups; those that make or do things--manufacturing, operations, or marketing groups; and those that run things--groups that oversee some significant functional activity. For managers, the key is knowing where in the organization these teams should be encouraged. Managers who can foster team development in the right place at the right time prime their organizations for top performance.

Examines the resignation of Philip Purcell as chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley as a result of poor performance and cultural problems, as well as his relationship to the board of directors.

Alex Montana sat at his desk pondering the career decision before him. Alex was director of the North American division of ESH Manufacturing, a $4.6 billion, Cleveland-based company with operations on three continents. ESH's CEO had just offered Montana a promotion to global vice-president. Normally, Montana would have jumped at such an opportunity, but he worried about its impact on his already strained personal life. Since his last promotion, he had trouble balancing an increasingly demanding workload with his responsibilities to his wife and daughter at home. Montana felt pressure to accept the promotion. His boss expected him to accept; in fact, his boss had emphasized that he had no second choice. He had always dreamed of making it big in the business world. Success in this new role could put him in the running for COO and, eventually, CEO. But at what cost?

The company, once an outstanding Japan-based global leader in electronics and major appliances, suffered poor performance during the 1990s. Kunio Nakamura became CEO in 2001 and sought to transform the company in a fundamental way. Examines the company's history, distinct management system, and culture as well as the challenges facing Nakamura. Also examines his initial efforts.

Supplements the (A) case.

Supplements the (A) case.

Barbara Ladao was the chief executive officer of the Neighborhood Health Clinic (NHC), a nonprofit health center located in an ethnically diverse, underserved, and complicated community. At the time, the interpersonal dynamics within the clinic had started to interfere with the ability of Ladao's staff to work effectively and efficiently together. Worse yet, she was concerned that the dysfunctional behavior (which had created a racial divide among employees) was starting to affect the clinic's patients, and ultimately could impact NHC's ability to continue expanding, raising funds, and meeting the needs of the community on a long-term basis. The "A" case explores the history, demographics, and tensions in the external environment and the impact they have on clinic operations (e.g., hiring, staff management, interpersonal relations). The "B" case evaluates specific challenges within the clinic related to language, work ethic, and discipline. The "C" case describes what course of action Ladao and her team took, the strengths of their approach, and the challenges/opportunities that still required attention at NHC.

An abstract is not available for this product.

Corey Robinson is promoted to a new position at Sprint during a time of much internal change within the company. Asks readers to consider how he sets the tone to his new management team and how effective he is in building credibility in his new leadership role. A rewritten version of an earlier case.

Supplements the (A) case. A rewritten version of an earlier supplement.

In March 2005, Mark Schneider, CEO of Fresenius, is considering the group's strategic and organizational future. The highly decentralized 7 billion euro German health care group is active in three different business units, with the largest, FMC AG, listed separately from the parent Fresenius AG and representing the lion's share of the company's revenue and profit. A decentralized approach had let the group units grow independently over the years, and Fresenius took pride in its adaptive, entrepreneurial spirit. Schneider, however, wonders whether the decentralized approach will allow the group to continue to grow in a coordinated and cost-conscious fashion. How should he combine the company's entrepreneurial and profit-oriented culture with any latent synergies in the existing organization? Although Fresenius looks healthy at the moment, Schneider knows that the company's future is tied to improved sales and profitability.

To make legitimate and effective use of vote buying, managers should act with the company's best interests in mind, say Luh Luh Lan at the National University of Singapore and Loizos Heracleous at Oxford.

Collective decisions are often better than individual ones, says researcher Laurence Prusak.