Conversations With
About the conversations
This special "Conversations With " article appears courtesy
of Lessons in Leadership/WYNCOM Inc. It was done to promote the "Worldwide
Lessons in Leadership Series," a series of satellite broadcasts presented
by FORTUNE magazine and 130 of America's leading colleges and universities.
The four-part series was broadcast Sept. 12, Oct. 1, Oct. 23 and Nov. 15
to 180 locations in the United States and 150 locations in more than 40
countries around the world. For more information, call (800) 233-0937.
Stephen Covey
Stephen Covey is the author of several highly acclaimed books. His The 7
Habits of Highly Effective People is ranked as the No. 1 international best
seller by the New York Times-having sold more than 9 million copies in 28
languages and 72 countries.
The Covey Leadership Center is Covey's organizational legacy to the world-a
700-member international firm whose mission is to empower people and organizations
to significantly increase their performance in order to achieve worthwhile
goals.
Covey has an MBA from Harvard University and a doctorate from Brigham Young
University. For more than 25 years, he has taught millions of individuals
the transforming power of principles rooted in unchanging natural laws that
govern human and organizational effectiveness.
QD: The global marketplace and global competition have already
become intellectual buzzwords. How can readers get real about how global
competition will affect their business in the short term?
Covey: There are three constants, three realities that always
exist. The first reality is change, and global competition is an embodiment
of change. It's analogous to permanent white water, which is a turbulent,
disheveling, noisy world that cannot be predicted in any way. And everyone
is living in that kind of a world-in a level of change, and a rapidity of
change, beyond any possible imagination. It is governed largely by technology
and the impact that it has on economics, and then on political forces, and
then on social and, ultimately, cultural forces.
The second reality is principles. It never changes, and the ability to deal
with change is a function of having a changeless core inside our cultures,
our organizations, our families, our personal lives. And that changeless
core is natural law or principles. I use the compass a great deal to show
that this technology has not changed for centuries-people use the compass
to find magnetic direction, and that's exactly what principles are. They
will never change, and they ultimately control and govern.
The third reality is choice. That is the internal power that we each have
as individuals to choose how we will deal with these principles, these law-like
controlling forces, and how we will adapt to the changing realities of the
permanent white-water world. And this is the ultimate source of leadership:
the internal capacity to change to applied principles in a changing environment.
QD: What do you believe is the most important issue facing businesses
today?
Covey: The building of relationships. With all the problems associated
with these profound changes, what happens is that it negatively begins to
affect the trust in relationships. People become more formalistic, more
legalistic and less synergistic. And I've often said, and believed deeply,
that the major problem we face is not any particular problem. It's the process
we use to solve these problems. We use basically an adversarial and, at
best, a negotiation process, but what we need is a synergistic process.
QD: You've been in a number of different countries around the
world recently speaking to business leaders and heads of state. What about
your message seems to ring true with these audiences?
Covey: The thing that rings truest as I travel around the world
is the universality of principles: that these principles transcend culture,
religion, race, any local customs or cultures, that the principles are deep
within the hearts and souls of all people. A local culture may develop value
systems that are contrary to these principles, but when you get people in
a reflective mind-set where they are interacting freely with each other,
ultimately these deeper values that are principle-based and principle-centered
seem to emerge.
I am amazed at how common these principles are and how self-evident and
common-sensible they are everywhere. The priority put on these principles
or on different value systems does vary, but inevitably, the principles
deal with the four areas of life: our economic or our physical world; our
well-being, which really revolves around the principle of fairness; our
relationships with one another, which revolve around the principle of kindness
and respect, along with the development and use of people's talents; and
the spiritual principle of looking for meaning and of allowing integrity
to form the basis of these other principles.
QD: Asia is becoming a rapidly growing economic giant. What is your
observation of what they are doing in Asia, and why should the rest of the
world pay attention to it?
Covey: I was just in Asia, and I was absolutely amazed at what
is happening there-particularly with the middle classes in India, as well
as the burgeoning countries in Asia itself. I think what's happening is
a growing awareness of this global economy and the efforts to upgrade organizations,
their cultures, their capacities to produce and to sell goods and services
to meet these world-class standards. This is driving a process of empowering
people at lower and lower levels so that they have this commitment to this
level of quality in service and speed and flexibility.
All of these forces are causing an upgrading of their cultures, their products,
their services. They are becoming a formidable force in the global economy.
QD: As this growth continues and these issues that you describe come
to bear, how do we deal with the issues of diversity and cultural customs
in these different areas?
Covey: Diversity is synergistic only if there is a common vision
and a common set of values that are principle-centered. Otherwise, diversity
will be counterproductive. And even though it will be a buzzword and people
will give lip service to it, deep inside themselves, they will want to clone
themselves and won't come to appreciate, value and celebrate differences.
But if there is a common vision, a common purpose, a common set of principles
that they can agree upon, then diversity becomes enormously unleashing of
human talent, human potential, human creativity because how you get from
here to there doesn't make any difference as long as you get there within
the guidelines of a principle-centered value system.
QD: What would be the most important piece of career advice you
could give to employees?
Covey: I would say get relevant and go back to school. Not necessarily
in a formal school setting, but see life as an education, as literally a
lifelong endeavor. Plan to invest hours every week, and perhaps a day or
two every month, on nothing but intensive training and education. This training
develops particularly the capacity to continue learning, the capacity to
become more and more literate with today's technologies and the capacity
of developing a culture that can also continually learn and grow to adapt
to all of these new realities.
I believe that about one-fourth of the work force today is obsolete or almost
obsolete, and that this is getting worse as the old paradigm persists that
school is over when you finish school.
QD: What do you recommend to CEOs?
Covey: I recommend that CEOs get involved in a real commitment
over time to the training and development of their people, to a major investment
in people and in relationships, and to see people as an investment and not
as a cost. Also to become deeply aware of the importance of supporting their
communities and the education of the next generation-the families of their
employees and the whole supportive network of all of their stakeholders.
By these means, they begin to think in terms of a 360-degree trust toward
everybody. The only way they can do this is to really have their leadership
centered upon principles.
QD: Would you like to add anything?
Covey: Write your mother and clean your closets.
Tom Peters
Tom Peters describes himself as a gadfly, curmudgeon, champion of bold failures,
prince of disorder, maestro of zest, professional loudmouth, corporate cheerleader,
lover of markets and capitalist. His unconventional views led Business Week
to describe him as business' "best friend and worst nightmare."
Peters followed up on the phenomenal success of In Search of Excellence
with three more books-A Passion for Excellence, Thriving on Chaos, Liberation
Management-which ranked at or near the top of the New York Times best-sellers
list for years.
Peters is a graduate of Cornell (B.C.E., M.C.E.) and Stanford (M.B.A., Ph.D.),
served on active duty in the U.S. Navy in Vietnam and Washington, was a
senior White House drug abuse advisor in 1973p;1974 and worked at McKinsey
& Co. from 1974 to 1981.
QD: The global marketplace and global competition have become buzzwords.
How can readers get real about global competition and how it will affect
business in the short term?
Peters: The real issue is how it will affect the individuals
who are there in the audience because the biggest thing that's going on
right now is that the whole notion of job security is changing radically,
and changing for people who are vice presidents and managing directors,
as well as people who are making automobiles and VCRs. We've seen it in
the United States in this political season, and we're seeing it in Germany
and Korea and Japan.
QD: What would you say, then, is the most important issue that domestic
and international businesses will face?
Peters: The end of hierarchy, the end of careers as we knew them and
perpetual job insecurity is the simple and terrifying answer. Literally,
the information technology, the literal arrival, buzzphrase or not, of the
global village, where no one is literally more than six-tenths of a second
away from anybody else in communication terms, is changing the nature of
what it means to do things together, do work together, do church together,
do nonprofits together, do government together, in the most dramatic way.
I'm inclined to say these changes are happening in the most profound way
in several thousand years because the basic ideas of hierarchical organizations
to get things done were really invented by the Chinese that many years ago.
QD: When you speak in these other countries, what seems to ring most
true for the audiences from your perspective?
Peters: It's a double-edged sword. I am a great respecter of
cultural differences. I am a great believer in cultural differences, and
so Koreans and Singaporeans take what I say with a grain of salt. I've lived
in Silicon Valley for the last 25 years, and New Yorkers and Texans take
what I say with a grain of salt, and they should. Individuals will have
to take much more responsibility for their lives than they have in the past,
whether they are Japanese, German or Korean.
That's a tough sell in a lot of countries. I mean, the United States was
founded on the basis of individualism. People call our economy "cowboy
capitalism." I don't think it is quite deserved, but certainly it's
true relative to the highly controlled Korean economy or the relatively
highly controlled French economy or what have you. Given the new technologies,
a lot of issues are transcending national borders in a way that they haven't
in the past.
QD: You said in The Pursuit of WOW! that the "It's not important
unless it happens here" attitude from the United States is becoming
a problem. What is Asia doing?
Peters: "It's not important unless it happens here"
is an American problem, and it's also a German problem and a Japanese problem.
The Japanese are just about as bad as we are in saying there is only one
way to do things, and it's the Japanese way; and we say there is only one
way to do things, and it's the American way. All of us have got to learn
to open our eyes to a much more pure form of globalism.
But, back to the basic thrust of your question, I don't think many of us
are taking Asia seriously enough. The world population as you and I speak
is 5.8 billion people, and 3.6 billion of those people live in Asia. Asians
are young: Something like 52 or 53 percent of the Asian population is under
the age of 25, which is a dramatically different demographic statistic than
that in western Europe or the United States. Literally 1.7 billion new Asian
workers are coming on line in the next 20 years, and two-thirds of them
are literate, and this will change everything.
QD: How are we going to deal with this diversity in cultural customs
as we interact in these different environments?
Peters: Gingerly. A Dutch management consultant by the name of
Fon Trompenaars wrote a fabulous book called Riding the Waves of Culture
a couple of years ago. The book's first paragraph says, "For gosh sakes,
don't ever listen to Peter Drucker or Tom Peters because they purely talk
Americanism. Nothing that they're saying makes sense if you're outside of
the United States." The Koreans are radically different from the Indonesians.
The Japanese are radically different from the Chinese, and we're all different
from the French, and we are all different from the Americans.
And so there is an absolute requirement that we not even take big-word attitudes,
like issues of trust as saying that the American version of trust, is the
same as the Japanese, or Korean or Chinese version of trust, because it
isn't. Now, having said that, at the end of the day there's a lot to human
beings that is relatively similar.
The first training program that I really ever put together after In Search
of Excellence, something called Toward Excellence, went around the world,
and people in India said it was the first program that was ever based on
the principles of Hinduism. Some other group said it was the first one that's
based on the principles of Islam. Somebody else said it was based on Catholicism,
and here I am a lapsed Presbyterian.
The real point was that Bob Waterman and I, in In Search of Excellence,
said respect for the fundamental dignity of the individual person, individual
worker makes a heck a lot of sense. So there is a lot of commonality, and
there are a lot of differences.
QD: That's encouraging. It actually sounds like we can interact
constructively without getting lost in those issues that are overplayed
in the media.
Peters: Yes, you really do have to ride about 100 miles an hour down
the track in opposite directions. That is being phenomenally sensitive to
differences and at the same time-and I think Stephen is particularly good
at this-being a little bit insistent about the fact that listening is listening,
and, at some level, trust is trust, even though there are some ramifications
that are very different from country to country.
Where you get into very thorny issues is, I remember reading in Trompenaars'
book this fascinating thing, for example, that if you are riding with a
friend, and the friend is speeding significantly and he or she is involved
in a vehicle accident where somebody is hurt, do you tell the truth to the
authorities about the fact that your friend was speeding when this person
got hurt in the accident, or do you protect your friend?
In the United States, everybody said tell the "truth." That is
the American version of truth about the speeding. And in several Asian countries
in particular, only about 2 percent said tell that truth. The rest said
protection of that friend, of the family, if you will, is No. 1. And so
it does get very dicey, and to not acknowledge that is the height of head-in-the-sand-ism.
QD: What career advice would you say is No. 1 given the conditions
you've just described?
Peters: My career advice to employees is to assume you are going
to be fired six months from now. The first thing the outplacement counselor
will ask you to do is put together your résumé or curriculum
vitae. How will it look? And are you working on something today that will
be one of your "braggables" at the end of the year or at the end
of 1997, or at the end of 1998?
Peter Senge
When Fortune magazine astutely predicted that "the most successful
corporation of the 1990s will be something called a learning organization,"
it had the work of Peter Senge in mind. Senge is a worldwide authority on
the emerging use of learning organization disciplines to create dramatic
advances in the effectiveness of organizational structures and methods.
His best-selling book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the
Learning Organization, touched a nerve in the international business community,
reaching numerous best-seller lists. Senge has since co-authored The Fifth
Discipline Fieldbook to meet the growing demand for practical, in-depth
exercises.
Senge is director of the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT's Sloan
School of Management.
QD: What is the most important issue facing domestic and international
businesses today?
Senge: I would say the system of management. That was the term that
W. Edwards Deming used to like to use. A whole raft of assumptions, practices,
norms: deeply embedded, highly tacit ways of operating in organizations-nonprofit
or governmental organizations every bit as much as for-profit-that are fundamentally
at odds with what will be necessary for the vitality, sustainability and
health of those enterprises in the long term.
We still operate our businesses like 17th-century Newtonian mechanists in
the sense that we tend to think and act in very particular ways. We have
very particular images about control. For most people in most companies,
what it means to be a manager is to be in control, and yet at another level,
it's like saying, what it means to be an effective parent is I'm in control
of my teenagers. Not many parents would say that. Why is it that some managers
still think that way?
I believe that a deep set of changes is called for by organizations and
those of us in organizations in terms of how we think and how we interact.
We are not used to changes at that level. Most of the changes we try to
engineer in our organizations come essentially from the outside in. Reorganizations,
new strategies, reengineering, downsizing-these are all changes from the
outside in. They are mandated usually from the top. They represent a set
of forces intended to cause people to change as opposed to reversing it
and thinking that the most profound changes really always come in a sense
from the inside out through changes in people and particularly how people
think and look at the world.
QD: Are learning organizations able to transcend cultural boundaries-and,
if so, how do they accomplish this?
Senge: First off, learning organizations aren't things you can describe
categorically and say they can do this or that, any more than you can say
a good person can do this and a person who wasn't so good could do that.
Those kinds of categorical statements miss the real point. If I could turn
your question around, might the capabilities that people are seeking to
develop in order for organizations to be more capable of learning make a
real difference in how we work across cultural boundaries, or how might
those capabilities need to be developed when we are dealing with multicultural
settings?
One of the most important areas that will determine the success and failure
of different businesses in the future will be their capacity to nurture
deep understandings that transcend cultural boundaries. Americans are probably
the least well-qualified of any advanced industrial society on the earth
to undertake this because we arguably have the lowest level of cultural
sensitivity of any major society on the earth. This really comes from a
tremendous lack of experience in dealing with culture and multiple cultures.
To really foster deep understanding across the diversity of cultures that
are getting drawn into the global marketplace is an absolutely awesome undertaking,
and we tend to think that it's going to be pretty easy.
We are going to need different language; we are going to need to have ways
of talking that go way beyond what we can do today in English. We think
English is a common language. It's only a common language in a sense that
nickels and dimes might be recognized around the world. The quality of a
conversation falls off dramatically if you force everybody to have it in
English.
The superficiality, the discomfort that people have in expressing themselves
in English, we've researched this for years in our work on systems thinking.
If you could introduce people to a set of tools and methods that allow them
to have penetrating conversations that don't require them to be highly fast
on English, you'd suddenly find out big differences in views. These never
come out. The non-English speakers will not feel comfortable expressing
a reservation in English when they know they can't communicate their thoughts
and feelings very well.
Dialogue is a core competence for learning to occur. What dialogue really
represents is a sustained inquiry into our most unquestioned assumptions.
Culture is a set of unquestioned assumptions, taken-for-granted views of
how the world works. How can we expect to have cross-cultural conversations
if we can't even inquire into our own cultural assumptions? Tools like dialogue
and systems thinking lay a foundation for a cross-cultural learning capability.
QD: In The Fifth Discipline, you wrote about being part of a great
team, a group of people who functioned together in an extraordinary way,
who trusted one another, who complemented each other's strengths and compensated
for each other's limitations, who had common goals that were larger than
any of the individual goals and who produced extraordinary results. Why
do people find such an experience so meaningful?
Senge: There are several reasons why. When people reflect on their experience
of being part of a profound team, it really has deep meaning to them. The
first is kind of obvious, but it is worth noting, and that is that most
of us have had such experiences. If we hadn't had such experiences, then
believe me, it wouldn't have nearly as much meaning. It is a little bit
like saying, "I want to tell you about a sunset. I know you have never
seen a sunset, but let me describe it to you." You can't really reduce
experience to concept.
In the West, in particular, and in industrial societies in general, a self
is an isolated thing, separate in time and space from other selves. Experience
as a profound team takes us outside of that definition of self. We actually
experience the genuine degree of interdependence that exists in reality,
but that we normally manage to hide from ourselves.
One of the funniest examples of this is the classic icon of the American
individual: the automobile. People all around the world aspire to this standard:
I'll have my own car and I will be able to do whatever I want; I'll be the
master of my destiny from 7:30 to 8:30 every morning. The irony is that
when we drive our symbol of individualism down the highway, our lives are
in the hands of hundreds of strangers. If any of those strangers makes one
crazy move, our life is over.
Earlier, you asked me what was the most fundamental issue facing businesses.
I actually think the simplest way to respond to that is that we have business
organizations, just as we have institutions of all sorts in our society,
which have grown up based on deep assumptions of independence and are now
trying to operate in a world that is profoundly interdependent. The changes
that requires in us individually and collectively are beyond most of our
imaginations.
It is like you grew up without a family, and now someone is going to introduce
you to family life. "Oh, by the way, for the rest of your life, you
now have a family." We are going to wake up and realize, as people
knew very well 10,000 years ago, that to be alive is to be interdependent.
We will discover that an awful lot of our practices, habits, structures,
ways of doing things are profoundly dysfunctional and have been for a long,
long time. We've all been telling ourselves the same lie: That a business
is a business, and it's basically independent and as long as you please
your investors, you are OK. Well, that is nonsense.
If you offend your customers, you are not OK, and if you don't build relationships
with your suppliers, you are not OK, but it is much worse than that. If
you don't start to think seriously about the community you operate in, you
won't be OK in the long term. If you are not really concerned about the
quality of education those kids are getting in that community, you won't
have much of a future in that community because the community is not going
to have much of a future. If you don't worry about what is happening with
the families of those kids, the education system won't compensate for the
fact that kids have nobody at home. And if you don't stop to think about
the long-term effects of the things you are doing on the natural physical
environment in which we operate, we won't be OK in the long term.
