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CORE THESIS: "Why and how is leadership dangerous? How
can you respond to those dangers? And how can you keep your
spirit alive when the going gets tough? We are both straightforward
about the hazards of leadership, and idealistic about the importance
of taking these risks. Many books are all about inspiration,
but downplay the perspiration. We respect how tough this work
is... This book is about putting yourself on the line, responding
effectively to the risks, and living to celebrate the meaning
of your efforts."
WRITING STYLE: Direct and conversational, not theoretical
or academic. Heavy on applications for individual situations.
The final three chapters then veer toward the amorphous and
mystical. Bursts of "coaching talk" appear throughout
the book, although the effect is not jarring.
FRAMEWORK: Strategies backed by stories. Minimal data and
graphics. Indeed, the authors use six pages to assault "the
myth of measurement" -- another reason their book is far
more valuable for individual leadership than to whole organizations
or industries (the bigger you are, the less you can afford to
slight the measuring).
ABOUT THE AUTHORS (condensed from pages 251-52):
RON HEIFETZ co-founded the Center for Public
Leadership at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of
Government. His book Leadership Without Easy Answers
is in its 12th printing has been translated into many languages.
A graduate of Columbia University and Harvard, Heifetz is both
a physician and a cellist. He lives in the Boston area with
his wife, Sousan Abadian, and their two children.
MARTY LINSKY has been on the JFK School of
Government faculty since 1982, except during 1992-95, when he
was a top aide to Massachusetts Governor William Weld. A graduate
of Williams College and Harvard Law School, Linsky started out
as a politician and then a journalist. He was Assistant Minority
Leader of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, a Boston
Globe reporter and editorialist, and editor of The
Real Paper. Linsky has three children and lives in NYC
with his wife, Lynn Staley.
WHO NEEDS THIS BOOK: (a) Innovators in large organizations
who don't yet "think politically" -- the title of
one of the chapters -- and are too embarrassed to go find that
sort of mentor. And (b) people in government who think that
altering the law or the regulation is nine-tenths of the game
of change. Except in the tax field, it's no more than 25%.
WHO SHOULD STEER CLEAR OF THIS BOOK: Data-hounds, Sensors,
software-programmers and auto mechanics (because this isn't
a manual or a blueprint, it's a guidebook).
REVIEWER: Frank Gregorsky -- FrankGregorsky@aol.com
-- on behalf of the Public Governance Institute, Alexandria
VA.
KEY THEMES via REPRESENTATIVE
PARAGRAPHS
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And now, for those expecting the traditional book review,
we move into it...
LEADERSHIP ON THE LINE
by Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky
Well-paced, full of stories tied to lessons, personal without
being gushy -- it's not hard to like this book. The authors
bring together corporate and political risk-management without
trivializing either. They offer strategies without turning them
into formulas. All "theory" in here is applied and
personified, as opposed to rarified or terrified.
So it's a collection of "war stories"? You bet --
and that can be a risky mode. Luckily, those in ON THE LINE
average under two pages apiece; and sometimes the authors snapshot
themselves.
On page 47, we find that Linsky took a job in the Massachusetts
Governor's office as "chief secretary, responsible for
personnel and politics." His single-issue friends, more
liberal than the Republican Governor, "pushed [Linsky]
to do more and go further, which appeared to him to be the price
for their continuing approval. Instead of pushing back on the
advocates to depend less on him and broaden their base of support
and leverage, Marty opted for the special status he needed to
feel significant in his role."
"Pushing back" is one of the book's many sound advisories:
You should "give the work back," or at least some
of it, so your so-called allies don't ride you into the ditch.
Instead of doing that, Linksy slips into a mix of narcissism
and causism. "As a result, his voice within the councils
of the Governor's office narrowed and his tone sounded more
shrill as he pressed the issues harder. His effectiveness seeped
away, day by day... Confined more and more to being the carrier
of unpopular causes, he slowly but inexorably became less successful
in moving them along, and increasingly was cut out of the conversation
on other issues."
Such anecdotes obviate the need for jargon, heavy theorizing,
and demented diagrams. Think of some "bleeding-edge"
management treatise you've tried to get through, with charts
and diagrams worse than the math equations in your college econ
textbook. No such thing here. LEADERSHIP ON THE LINE has just
one diagram, and two ultra-terse tables. No matrices. (No cartoons
either -- the authors do mean to be taken seriously.)
So, is it political or marketing strategy? I doubt that either
campaign managers or advertising execs will know what to do
with this book. Rather, the content is tailor-made for executives
in corporations or in exposed public-sector roles, from big-city
mayor on down. That means the "political" coverage
in ON THE LINE is internal, as opposed to national governance.
(If you want to tackle "managing change" at the highest
and most rigorous level, which means dealing with populations
as opposed to small groups, you will need to turn to Daryl Conner
and his two outstanding books from the 1990s.)
In fact, the striking thing about ON THE LINE is the way the
authors fuse realism and idealism. The assumption is that (a)
you want to get something ambitious done, while (b) a good chunk
of the world is set up -- and not always malevolently or even
consciously -- to stop you. "When exercising leadership,
you risk getting marginalized, diverted, attacked, or seduced."
They cover all four, very well, in a 17-page chapter.
So this book can show you how to transform a company, or rework
a hot policy issue? Not really; it's too...well, INDIVIDUALISTIC
for that. LEADERSHIP ON THE LINE is also not for legislators
-- because it's concerned with implementing focused change as
opposed to taking an array of symbolic stances. As the reader,
you are expected to take action, using the formal power, or
informal leverage, that you have right now.
Technical versus Adaptive Change
The core of LEADERSHIP ON THE LINE is the distinction that
marked the first Public Governance Institute white paper (November
2002). We called it "installation versus realization."
The former is when you alter the policy or regulation or computer
system, the latter when (or if) you realize most of the benefits
of the original change.
Messrs. Heifetz and Linsky have a similar dichotomy: Technical
versus adaptive. Although their "adaptive" isn't synonymous
with our "realization," much of the same work occurs
in each.
"How do you know whether the challenge is primarily technical
or primarily adaptive?" First, "you know you're dealing
with something more than a technical issue when people's hearts
and minds need to change, and not just their preferences or
routine behaviors. In an adaptive challenge, people have to
learn new ways and choose between what appear to be contradictory
values." (That's jives nicely with the outstanding research
and framework offered by Daniel Yankelovich in Coming to
Public Judgment.)
Second way to clarify the adaptive demands is "a process
of exclusion: If you throw all the technical fixes you can imagine
at the problem and the problem persists, it's a pretty clear
signal than underlying adaptive challenge still needs to be
addressed. Third, the persistence of conflict usually indicates
that people have not yet made the adjustments and accepted the
losses that accompany adaptive change."
To dramatize technical versus adaptive, the authors head for
the Middle East. Not a good move. Leaving aside their human-scale
norm, they try to sum up a thousand years of culture and conflict.
For nearly six months starting in August of 1990, Kuwait was
occupied and terrorized by Saddam Hussein's military. After
praising the "large and diverse [pro-Kuwait] coalition"
forged by President Bush Sr., the authors contend that liberating
Kuwait was a "technical problem": Half-a-million U.S.
servicepeople, smart bombs, building bases in the Saudi desert,
lobbying at the U.N., obtaining $55 billion from the allies
-- lots of work, but pretty much cut and dried: "A technical
problem."
Really? That's a stretch.
Then they say, regarding the clamor to free Iraq once Kuwait
was secured: "Wiping out Hussein instead of just pushing
him back into his geographical box represented an adaptive challenge
that would have threatened the alliance. Finishing the job would
have meant the humiliation and likely death of thousands of
Iraqi troops -- shown every night on television sets in the
homes of everyday Arab people in, the Arab coalition countries.
The authorities of those nations would have had the daunting
challenge of helping their own people adapt to an uncomfortable
new reality -- that it was in their interest to tolerate and
even support the killing of thousands of Arab soldiers by Westerners."
The authors list other would-be "adaptive" demands,
this time on the U.S. side, including making amends for "colonial
and missionary activity going back to the Crusades." But
even the two centuries of the "Crusades" were mostly
reactive. Some 500 years before that, "Islam announced
its birth with sweeping conquests, overrunning vast territories
from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic," notes Ilya V. Gaiduk
in his quite moderate 2003 book The Great Confrontation.
"From the first Arab invasions of the European continent
until well into the 17th century, Christendom found itself on
the defensive against the advance of Islam."
Okay, need to go there in this review. Point is, the authors
did not need to go there either. A book with a coaching style
for individuals in communities and companies doesn't need to
get carried away by a time machine.
Besides, we now know the sequel. A year after this book came
out, the U.S. and Britain went into Iraq. It was March '91 again,
but Bush Jr. opted for the Phase Two his father had let pass.
What happened then? None of the "adaptive" demands
listed in ON THE LINE caused the trouble after Baghdad was liberated
on April 9, 2003. The grueling change work wasn't "wiping
out Hussein" or having to explain past centuries to other
Arab rulers. It has turned out to be building democracy in Iraq.
All the savagery and tribalism, plus heroics and breakthroughs,
are right there, in one historic land.
So that's my first problem with ON THE LINE. Messrs. Heifetz
and Linsky have put together a photograph album, and a great
one; but it can't handle the work of a documentary. It does
manage to acquaint Americans with overseas success stories,
though. How? By keeping it personal, and focusing on the individual
journey, governing insight or sustained act of courage. Consider
the way they call on Lee Kuan Yew, going back 40-plus years:
"Lee left home and traveled widely to see firsthand the
progress these other founders had made as they guided their
new nations. But what he saw disturbed him. By tying their anticolonialism
to anticapitalism, many founding fathers were impeding economic
progress in their countries and preventing a decent standard
of living for their people... Unlike most fighters for independence,
he embraced free markets. Between 1965 and 2000, Singapore went
from being a poor and racially divided city to an integrated
community with one of the world's most competitive economies.
None of Lee's contemporaries, who were stuck in ideologies based
on reactions to colonial trauma and who demonized export-driven
free-market economies, achieved anything remotely similar."
Agreed, Singapore's development is more complex than that.
Still, Lee Kuan Yew is the single most important figure in the
modern story of that nation. Showing us how inverting the perspective
of a future or current leader can result in great change is
one more way this book delivers.
What the Fact-Checkers Missed
"We imposed shamelessly on our friends and colleagues
to read part or all of the manuscript [and] received extremely
detailed and constructive page-by-page feedback from" --
and the Acknowledgements go on to name 22 people. Which brings
us to my second gripe about ON THE LINE: Somehow, that whole
team let stand the following errors:
Page 42, re the 2000 campaign: The authors attribute GOP vice-presidential
candidate Dick Cheney's vulgarity about a reporter to ticket-leader
George W. Bush. Yet this incident happened while the authors
were working on this book. No research needed, just short-term
memory.
Pages 118-19 err on key details of U.S. House Speaker Newt
Gingrich's 1995-96 leadership, even though the book draws reasonable
conclusions about "pacing the work."
Page 135 recounts the "malaise speech" of President
Jimmy Carter on 7/15/79: The authors say he "fired his
cabinet" the next day and stepped on his own recovery story.
Well, okay: Carter's approval rating jumped 11 points because
of that speech -- it was not a failure, nor was it at all wimpy.
But the speech did not use the word "malaise," and
no President in history ever dismissed an entire Cabinet. In
Carter's case, only five of the 16 officers were let go.
Page 148 refers to the diplomatic stance of "the former
Soviet Union" as the first Gulf War began "in early
1991." That's when it started, but the U.S.S.R. remained
intact until August of the same year.
Are any of those mortal sins? Probably not. But then we find
this passage from page 191: "When Bill Clinton successfully
reached across party lines in 1993 to fashion with Newt Gingrich
a crucial deficit-reduction bill that raised taxes and reduced
government spending (contributing to a decade of prosperity)..."
And they footnote this bit of unreality -- supposedly it comes
from David Gergen's memoir Eyewitness to Power.
Time to check what Gergen actually wrote. His book explains
how "Clinton won that August [1993 vote] by the tiniest
of margins. In the House the tally was 218 to 216, with no Republicans
in support." Gingrich was the #2 House Republican that
year. Whatever got lost in the translation, the authors are
responsible.
Perhaps they meant to say the passage of NAFTA, where Gingrich
and Clinton did work together, later that same year. Gergen
again: "Our biggest ally turned out to be Newt Gingrich,
who promised that if Clinton delivered a passel of Democrats,
he would produce at least 100 Republican votes." Again,
that was for NAFTA, not a federal budget built around tax increases.
Factual errors -- ones a reviewer can pick up in passing --
make me wonder what other mistakes are not easily detected.
Too bad, for the gallery of helpers the authors called on did
their job in another critical zone: ON THE LINE flows very nicely,
and all its core components -- strategies illustrated with stories
and then turned into "coach talk" -- come together
into one coherent guidebook.
New Twists plus Intellectual Honesty
When's the last time you heard two Cambridge academics --
the authors of LEADERSHIP ON THE LINE -- say positive things
about a right-wing Chilean dictator? In this case, that surprise
comes immediately after comments (positive, of course) about
Franklin Roosevelt's Depression-era leadership of the U.S.:
"General Augusto Pinochet of Chile came to power in a
1973 coup and like Roosevelt he found the level of chaos (rampant
unemployment, labor strikes, inflation) intolerable. Indeed,
his rise to power was an explicit effort to restore order in
a nation caught between superpowers and riven with conflict.
He used his authority -- that is, military might and political
repression -- to restore order. The cost in human lives and
individual freedom was enormous. However, Pinochet understood
that too much order would make meaningful change impossible.
So while he treated dissenters brutally, he used the stability
he created to challenge the traditional power elites on the
economic front. He proceeded to turn up the heat on the private
sector, eliminating protective tariffs and government subsidies,
thus forcing business to adapt to international competition
or die."
The above passage told me the authors are in deadly earnest
about learning from real-world leadership. Why? Because they
have set aside ideology, not to mention part of their social
circle. (Half the people at Harvard might refuse to buy this
book because of the two pages on Chile!)
Heifetz and Linsky conclude that Pinochet's "technique
for restoring order was savage and criminal, but there is no
denying that [he knew how to use various leadership paths] to
accomplish needed economic change. Chile is growing again, with
a modern economy more productive than before."
In other parts of LEADERSHIP ON THE LINE, the authors use
the rigor of their method to put new spins on old disasters.
They already show you exactly how to lead in a variety of political
and corporate settings. As a bonus, a reader can further learn
from the "what if" back-testing of some of their strategies.
From pages 137-38: "The protests of 1968 illustrate the
complexity of communicating through action. The beating of men
and women by Chicago policemen during the 1968 Democratic National
Convention did not help the cause of the anti-Vietnam War protestors.
Inadvertently, it probably helped the more hawkish presidential
candidate, Richard Nixon, win the election. It made the Democratic
Party look chaotic and unable to manage its followers, a party
of rioters and overzealous police, especially since Democratic
stalwart Mayor Richard Daley was responsible for law enforcement
in the city."
That paragraph is the most candid and complete short piece
of text you could want about the events of August 1968. As noted
above, both extremes -- rioters plus overzealous police -- were
actually part of the same political coalition. America's swing
voters pulled away in disgust: By mid-September, Republican
nominee Nixon was 16 points ahead of Democratic rival Hubert
Humphrey (although the campaign would get extremely close by
election day).
Never mind the political specifics, though, since all such
stories in ON THE LINE go back to some point of strategy. Heifetz
and Linsky explain:
"The Chicago police used violence unnecessarily and outrageously,
but both sides acted provocatively, and neither side was directly
connected to the issue: Chicago cops versus a group of kids
led by adults, most of whom were beyond military draft age.
Rather than draw attention to the tough issues facing the society,
the protesters created a side issue, law and order. The actions
were easily misinterpreted and the work easily displaced, as
the television audience watched the proxies battle it out on
a side issue. In other words, the protests failed to install
in the American public a sense of responsibility for the war."
Nice! That's the sort of refreshing "new spin" on
old events one gets when applying a model that has a different
standard: Not left versus right, or people versus establishment,
or one generation versus another, but responsible change versus
distractions and blame-gaming. ON THE LINE offers six or eight
innovative interpretations like that. They show the value of
bringing together political experiences -- whether national
or personal (even if this book does better on the latter) --
with a non-ideological change-management model.
Did someone say "change-management"? Yes, that's
our specialty here at PGI. And we intend to summarize and recommend
books that break out of a dreary box -- the "box"
of formulas reflecting neither diligent research nor human nature.
The bulk of the change-management and related leadership books
we have seen are too rooted in big business and/or technological
determinism. First, only one-fifth of the adults in our home
country work for the Fortune 500; second, new technological
devices usually do what a population wants them to do, not the
other way around. LEADERSHIP ON THE LINE has next to nothing
to say about technology (fine with me) and most of its methods
should work whether you're in an organization with 12 people,
1,200 or twelve thousand.
In that sense, this is a book rooted in people and the present
-- how to advance change smartly and responsibly, this month
-- rather than a bet on theory, or futurism, or hardware. Take
it seriously, and you will become both more responsible and
more effective. We strongly recommend it, and we wish the authors,
Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky, well in their future coaching
and writing.
______________________________________________________
RECOMMENDED FOLLOW-UP: If you read this book and have
public-sector stints or case studies that seem to fit -- especially
non-U.S. experiences -- we encourage you to write us at PGI,
and we just might use what you offer to create a series of sublinks
from this review. |
