Was Bill Ford “Leader A” to Alan Mulally’s “Leader B”?
A while back I got into a discussion with Tom Peters over Carly Fiorina’s role in reshaping Hewlett-Packard. He held that Mark Hurd’s success in improving HP’s operations would have been impossible without the groundwork that Fiorina laid to remake the company’s culture — and to give HP enough scale, through its acquisition of Compaq, to go toe-to-toe with both Dell and IBM.
Peters liked my eventual formulation of Fiorina as “Leader A,” the one who starts the revolution, and Hurd as “Leader B,” the one who implements the needed changes that build out and sustain that revolution.
Now I’m wondering if something similar has happened at Ford. Consider this excerpt from a comment Wally Bock left the other day:
[Mulally] benefitted from being hired by Bill Ford after Ford had done the CEO job for a while. Both parts of that are important. Bill Ford, as a Ford and key stockholder, had a leverage that no “hired hand” could ever have, inside the company, inside the family, and inside the board room. But it’s also significant that he had tried on the CEO job and had an idea of both how tough it was and what was needed. A year earlier, I’m not sure he’d have made as good a decision.
What do you think? What other examples of this phenomenon come to mind?
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Related:
- Ford’s Sustainability Focus.
- Would you give up scale for quality?
- Mark Hurd’s 3-minute management clinic.
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I agree. They’re like two halves of the corporate brain. There’s the spatial, synthetic, wholistic brain of the visionary. He sees where they should go, inspires others to follow him, disrupts the old out of date models and habits, communicates the vision, etc. Maybe that’s CEO-A with Carly and Bill being examples. Then there’s the analytic, rules based, scientific mind needed to actually… get in the trenches and implement that vision. Go out on the shop floor and talk about processes and engineering and work rules and product features, prices. The details. That’s CEO-B with Hurd and Mulally being the examples.
The great brands, the great companies, the ones that thrive over a period of time find a way to have both leaders present at the same time: Berkshire-Hathaway with Buffett and Munger, Hewlett-Packard with Hewlett and Packard, even Microsoft w/ Bill Gates and Steve Balmer come to mind.
Thanks, good post.
Zane — You make very good points about wholism versus process (or right-brained versus left-braines, we might say). But in some cases, it need not even be as sophisticated that. In some cases, Leader A’s job is to break certain pieces of crockery, and Leader B’s job is to clear out the debris, fix what’s worth fixing, and restock the china shop.