subject: What Makes Good Leadership Good [print this page] In this age of logistics systems, fleet management software, mobile devices, and GPS it is reasonably easy to see how the leadership of global organizations can cope with thousands of moving parts. But one has to marvel at the level of managerial skill that it must have taken to manage a large operation, such as a shipping company or railway, in an age before computers, when data was not nearly as available as it is today.
The drama of the rail line in "Atlas Shrugged" is thrilling, revealing the struggle of will in the executive offices of a sprawling, nationwide transportation company. The novel focuses on the characters that occupy the seats of the board room because those characters placed an indelible mark on the organizations they ran. Today, leadership has changed because its tools are different.
At the core of that change is the surging importance of data. Every year computers get more powerful. Every year they are more able to store and organize information. For decades there have been efforts to feed loads of information into computers, creating a reality in which we can build a reliable statistical model for just about anything.
Statistics remove the guesswork from decision-making. If your model tells you that one strategy has a 91% chance of success and that another strategy has a 47% chance of success, it doesn't take perseverance and drive to elect for the higher-probability course. If something goes wrong with the chosen strategy, the leadership can't be blamed. The error must be in the statistics.
The removal of guesswork also removes a considerable amount of risk, and when companies do take risks they generally hedge their bets enough to ensure that someone else absorbs the pain if the risk doesn't pan out. In many ways, that makes it a lot easier to be a successful executive today - as long as "success" is defined by making gains and avoiding losses.
Unfortunately, that definition of success doesn't stand up to an historical perspective. History's most successful entrepreneurs defied statistical models. They took long shots. They were the biggest winners, but many of them were also the biggest losers. A look beyond the accomplishments for which they are known usually reveals plenty of risks and ventures that failed.
Those entrepreneurs didn't have so much data to tell them what they could (or couldn't) do. What they did have was vision, and that vision compelled them to do what was necessary to achieve great success in the end. As data has become an increasingly important part of how businesses are run, vision has become a less important part; and that takes away a key core value from would-be leaders.
There's nothing wrong with data. Just think what Dagny Taggert would have done with logistics systems, fleet management software, mobile devices, and GPS systems helping her on the rail line. But those systems should support the natural role of leaders in an organization. Every organization will eventually face an insurmountable obstacle, and a spreadsheet will never be able to inspire its members to do the impossible.
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