BUSINESS - Carlini's Comments

PATTON ON CORPORATE LEADERSHIP

Filed Tuesday, March 11. 2008

While many business executives at some point in their career are told to read “Art of War” by Sun Tzu, what they should also be reading is George S. Patton’s approach to operational leadership and management of resources.

Before political correctness and other “folksy euphemisms” for lackluster and mediocre operational approaches to organizational management, a general named Patton took an army of Americans from a ragtag outfit to a well-disciplined, well-supplied army that was second to none in World War II.

His approach was a winning, no-nonsense, lead-by-example attitude that was needed at the time of facing some impossible objectives. Many today in both the public and private sectors could use a few pages out of his leadership playbook along with a couple more from his management of resources.

Some people have forgotten him and younger people may have never even heard of him. He was definitely a controversial leader, but in terms of success, he “got things done faster, more decisively and … at a lower cost in that most important and cruelest price of warfare – the lives of his soldiers – than everyone else,” according to retired U.S. Air Force Reserve Major Gen. William A. Cohen.

How Do CEOs Learn From Patton?

Many business schools should take a look at Patton’s achievements. They should teach organizational management from a pragmatic standpoint rather than a conceptual standpoint that sometimes can’t be applied in real situations. Unfortunately, most management schools aren’t leadership schools.

There are several blog posts that focus on poor CEOs and their performance. One has discussed the five worst CEOs of 2007, which included those from BP, Caterpillar, GE, PepsiCo and Wal-Mart. The author wrote: “These CEOs accepted global warming alarmism without facts and failed to anticipate the unintended consequences on their products.”

Another segment would be the financial CEOs. Those would include CEOs from Countrywide Financial, Citibank and others that got crushed in the sub-prime mortgage crisis that’s now seeping into the regular mortgage market. Another CEO who could be put into this category would be Ed Zander. He was supposed to turn around Motorola.

Take a look at these CEOs across these organizations who have stagnated their

performance. If they are considered the generals of these organizations, they would have been dismissed by Patton in a heartbeat. They also wouldn’t have gotten any golden parachutes for their poor performance. Patton was not a leader who would tolerate failure let alone reward it.

The following comments are based on a book I first read several years ago as well as some other sources I have researched. The 1999 book is “Patton on Leadership” by Alan Axelrod.

Instilling a Sense of Urgency

To regain the competitiveness that some say the United States has lost, we need to bring back those executive qualities and a sense of urgency in organizations through a new breed of executives. Some of the executive facets they should have include:

A leadership attitude with a sense of urgency
A repertoire of leadership skills
A leadership image
The ability to both speak and write effectively
The ability to be creative, adaptive and flexible
The ability to understand the competition
The ability to create and maintain a quality atmosphere for production and performance
The mentoring skills to bring the most out of their subordinates
The ability to manage the impossible

There are so many books on various styles of management that you would think we would have excellent corporate executives. The truth is many have concerned themselves more with their own trappings and golden parachutes than the success of their organizations.

Since the debacles at Enron, Tyco and WorldCom, some safeguards have been put in to focus on performance. Even so, executive compensation still isn’t completely tied to performance. The book says: “Patton would tell you the only meaningful way to evaluate a leader and his or her methods is by looking at the results.”

Remembering Some of Patton’s Lessons

Patton’s lessons on leadership contain some excellent ideas for encouragement:

Do more than is expected of you
Always attack, never surrender and always push the market in business
Wars are not won by defensive tactics
In the long run, it’s what we do rather than what we say that will destroy us
Good tactics can save the worst strategy and bad tactics will destroy even the best
Select leaders for accomplishment rather than for affection
No one is thinking if everyone is thinking alike
Lack of orders is no excuse for inaction
We can always learn from each other

There are many more that you can get out of the book. If we are to get organizations back into great shape, maybe the approach of rotating one bad CEO from one company to the next should be abandoned. We should stop churning the same bad apples from one barrel to another and start bringing in new executives with fresh ideas.

If someone messed up one organization, how are they supposed to come in and be the savior for another one?

The results are pretty predictable. How many poor-performing CEOs have you seen go from one company to the next while collecting a couple golden parachutes in the process? They also mess up the careers of many subordinates through their lack of strategy and uncreative cost-cutting approach to try to show profitability.

Patton would have never allowed that. Bad management should get relieved and demoted instead of rewarded. Maybe we should start with that reform in corporate leadership.

Carlinism: No one follows hollow slogans or rah-rah approaches to management. Lead by example.