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Don’t Be A Founder Who Won’t Let Go

January 17, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

You’ll never get a potential successor to take your job if you’re going to be peering over her shoulder constantly and talking to employees directly about what they’re doing.

When you have a case of the founder’s syndrome, you’re addicted to running the show, and you’ll have a hard time separating yourself from the company you’ve built. When there are conflicts, you’re often at the center of it and hold your vision and experience over the leadership’s heads.

In the long run, your compulsion to have a say in all the nitty-gritty of your company will undermine the future of the very company that you’ve devoted your life to. The best thing you can do for its future is to back off and give your successor real control.

Establish a timetable to disengage yourself from the operating decisions and set some firm rules about this transition. Spend increasingly more time away from the business and pursue other interests. Start to envision a world in which your next ventures or leisure activities will become the principal focus of your life.

Idea for Impact: Know when your work is over and when it’s time for you to move on to other things. Grooming exceptional talent to take over the business you’ve built and gradually letting go of control is one of the most challenging things a founder will ever do. If done well, it’s the most transformative you can do for your business.

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Filed Under: Leadership, Mental Models, The Great Innovators Tagged With: Change Management, Entrepreneurs, Leadership Lessons, Perfectionism, Personality, Starbucks, Transitions

Two Leadership Lessons from United Airlines’ CEO, Oscar Munoz

December 12, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

United Airlines announced last week that CEO Oscar Munoz and President Scott Kirby would transition to new roles as executive chairman and CEO respectively in May 2020.

Two Leadership Lessons from United Airlines' CEO, Oscar Munoz Munoz was very good for the airline. He deserves kudos for getting United back on track, for improving the company’s culture, employee morale, brand image, and customer experience, and for hiring Kirby.

  • Munoz, who came to United from the railroad company CSX, had hitherto gained considerable experience while serving for 15 years on United’s (and its predecessor Continental’s) board. But, when he became CEO in 2015, he stated that he hadn’t realized how bad things had got at United. That admission reflects poorly on his board tenure—board members are expected to be clued-up about the day-to-day specifics of the company and have more visibility into the pulse of the company’s culture beyond its senior management. Alas, board members not only owe their cushy jobs to the CEOs and the top leadership but also build long, cozy relationships with them.
  • Munoz will be remembered chiefly for the David Dao incident and the ensuing customer service debacle. The video of Dao being dragged out of his seat screaming was seen around the world. While the dragging was not Munoz’s fault (the underlying problem wasn’t unique to United,) the company’s horrendous response to the incident was. However, Munoz is worthy of praise for using the event as a learning exercise and an impetus for wholesale change in United’s operations and employee culture. In the aftermath of the incident, many customers vowed to boycott United flights, but that sentiment passed as the backlash over the incident waned. Even so, the David Dao incident need not have happened for United’s operational and cultural changes to materialize.

Scott Kirby is a hardnosed, “Wall Street-first, customer loyalty-last” kinda leader. Even though Kirby has made United an operationally reliable airline, his manic focus on cost-cutting has made him less popular with United’s staff and its frequent fliers. Let’s hope he’ll keep the momentum and preserve the good that Munoz has wrought.

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Filed Under: Effective Communication, Leadership, The Great Innovators Tagged With: Aviation, Change Management, Ethics, Governance, Leadership Lessons, Learning, Problem Solving, Transitions, Winning on the Job

Microsoft’s Resurgence Story // Book Summary of CEO Satya Nadella’s ‘Hit Refresh’

July 10, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Leader as Sense-Maker and Cultural Curator

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is an exemplar of a leader as sense-maker. He has revitalized how Microsoft’s strategy, mission, and culture connect people, products, and services—inside and outside his company.

'Hit Refresh' by Satya Nadella (ISBN 0062959727) Nadella has a success story to tell, and his Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone (2017, with two co-authors) highlights how he is a different kind of leader transforming Microsoft into a different kind of company.

Hit Refresh‘s broad objective is to lay out a vision for the future of the company. The book is aimed at people who work at or with Microsoft. Many employees were given a special imprint of book with Nadella’s faux-handwritten annotations in the margins and highlighted snippets.

The book’s narrative arc shifts from a personal memoir to a management how-to, and then to technological futurism. The latter—and perhaps the least interesting—portion features Nadella’s forethoughts on artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and quantum computing, as well as their socio-economic implications.

Satya Nadella Shook Things Up by De-Ballmering Microsoft

Nadella took Microsoft’s reins in February 2014 after long-time CEO Steve Ballmer resigned in August 2013. Under Nadella’s watch, Microsoft quickly became more open and more nimble as an organization. Its cloud computing, Office 365, and gaming platform franchises are all running remarkably well.

Microsoft pivoted its business model around subscription products that produce recurrent revenue. It acquired Mojang (creator of the popular Minecraft videogame title,) LinkedIn, and GitHub. It ditched Nokia and embraced open source software—it’s even including a Linux kernel in a future Windows release.

Today one of my top priorities is to make sure that our billion customers, no matter which phone or platform they choose to use, have their needs met so that we continue to grow. To do that, sometimes we have to bury the hatchet with old rivals, pursue surprising new partnerships, and revive longstanding relationships. Over the years we’ve developed the maturity to become more obsessed with customer needs, thereby learning to coexist and compete.

A Renewed Sense of Purpose: The Leader’s Tone Steers the Organizational Culture

Hit Refresh‘s foremost take-away is how the tone at the top sets an organization’s guiding values. Properly contemplated, propagated, and nurtured, Nadella’s approach became the foundation upon which the culture of Microsoft has been remade.

With “the C in CEO is for curator of culture,” Nadella’s dominant mission has been to recreate Microsoft’s underlying beliefs, values, and expectations in the eyes of its employees, business partners, customers, investors, and the society. This culture is to be consistent within Microsoft and characterize all the discernable patterns of behavior across the organization.

When I was named Microsoft’s third CEO in February 2014, I told employees that renewing our company’s culture would be my highest priority. I told them I was committed to ruthlessly removing barriers to innovation so we could get back to what we all joined the company to do—to make a difference in the world.

Nadella’s playbook has consisted of challenging complacency, instituting a “growth mindset,” being open-minded enough to welcome new technology and collaborate with Microsoft’s traditional competitors (“frenemies,”) and shifting from a “know it all” to a “learn it all” mindset.

I had essentially asked employees to identify their innermost passions and to connect them in some way to our new mission and culture. In so doing, we would transform our company and change the world.

“Driven by a Sense of Empathy and a Desire to Empower Others”

Core to Nadella’s framework is his conviction that individuals are wired to have empathy. “The alchemy of purpose, innovation, and empathy” is indispensible “not only for creating harmony within organizations but also for creating products that resonate.”

Nadella describes how caring for a special-needs child and his wife Anu’s sacrifices for the family made him become conscious of the significance of empathy. Specifically, Anu helped him recast these setbacks as opportunities to expand his worldview.

Being a husband and a father has taken me on an emotional journey. It has helped me develop a deeper understanding of people of all abilities and of what love and human ingenuity can accomplish. … It’s just that life’s experience has helped me build a growing sense of empathy for an ever-widening circle of people. … My passion is to put empathy at the center of everything I pursue—from the products we launch, to the new markets we enter, to the employees, customers, and partners we work with.

The most interesting section of Hit Refresh is Nadella’s personal journey growing up in India, migrating to America, and working his way up the career ladder at Microsoft. The only child of a Sanskrit scholar and a civil servant, Nadella was hooked on cricket (it taught him how to compete vigorously, the virtue of working in teams, and the importance of leadership direction.)

Recommendation: Satya Nadella’s Hit Refresh is a satisfactory first take on his remarkable revamp of the culture of a company that had become set in its ways. Microsoft’s transformation has been nothing short of dramatic—there’s a lot more to be done and written about.

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  4. Don’t Be A Founder Who Won’t Let Go
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Filed Under: Business Stories, Leadership Reading, Managing People Tagged With: Bill Gates, Change Management, Leadership Lessons, Microsoft, Transitions

Book Summary of Nicholas Carlson’s ‘Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!’

January 10, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Over the holidays, I finished reading journalist Nicholas Carlson’s Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! This interesting book offers an account of Yahoo’s steady slide towards irrelevance and Marissa Mayer’s early tenure as CEO.

“Complex Monstrosity Built Without a Plan”

'Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!' by Nicholas Carlson (ISBN 1455556610) Carlson devotes the first third of the book to explaining Yahoo’s beleaguered history and how years of mismanagement and strategy negligence got Yahoo into the mess that Mayer inherited as CEO in 2012.

The second third is about Mayer and her brilliant career as employee number twenty at Google. In 2010, her career allegedly stalled because Mayer got sidelined after conflicts with other luminaries within Google. Relying broadly on anonymous sources, Carlson portrays Mayer’s intense nature and her personality contradictions: in public settings, Mayer is brainy, glamorous, confident, articulate, and approachable. However, in one-on-one settings, Mayer is a self-promoting, dismissive, calculating, tardy, inquisitorial individual who avoids eye contact. “There was nothing especially abhorrent or uncommon about Mayer’s behavior as an executive,” Carlson writes. “She was headstrong, confident, dismissive, self-promoting and clueless about how she sometimes hurt other people’s feelings. So were many of the most successful executives in the technology industry.”

The last third is devoted to Mayer’s initial efforts to turn Yahoo around. Within the first year at the helm as CEO, Mayer motivated Yahoo’s beleaguered workforce, launched the redesign of some of Yahoo’s major sites, and made acquisitions to make Yahoo relevant in the mobile, media, and social realms. Carlson also describes Mayer’s bad hiring decisions, habitual tardiness, tendency to micromanage, tone-deaf style of communication, and dogged devotion to establishing the universally-despised practice of tracking goals and stack-ranking employees.

Yahoo: The Fabled Legacy Internet Company on the Slide to Irrelevance

Yahoo: The Fabled Legacy Internet Company on the Slide to Irrelevance

Anybody who follows the internet content industry understands that the principal question regarding the then-37-year-old Mayer’s recruitment as CEO was never whether she could save Yahoo. Rather, the question was whether Yahoo can be saved at all.

Yahoo has been a mess for a long time. For early consumers of the internet, Yahoo’s portal was the internet—from the mid-1990s until the early 2000s, Yahoo was the number-one gateway for early users of the internet who wanted to search, email, or consume news and other information. Then, Yahoo floundered as the likes of Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Twitter, and Microsoft redefined the consumer internet and content consumption. Yahoo’s successive managements struggled to identify Yahoo’s raison d’etre and failed to set it apart from the up-and-coming websites. Yahoo’s management also fumbled on opportunities to harness the popularity of Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Sports, and Yahoo Finance to get advertising revenues growing again.

Mayer’s Arrival Was Too Late for Yahoo

Mayer came to Yahoo with extraordinary credentials, drive, technical savvy, celebrity, and charisma. Her tenure was centered on answering the single question, “What is Yahoo? What should become of Yahoo?”

The odds of Mayer succeeding to revive Yahoo as an independent internet content company were very bleak right from the beginning, because Mayer took on an increasingly irrelevant business with very little actual or potential operating value—either as an internet content company or as a media company. Carlson appropriately concludes,

Ultimately, Yahoo suffers from the fact that the reason it ever succeeded in the first place was because it solved a global problem that lasted for only a moment. The early Internet was hard to use, and Yahoo made it easier. Yahoo was the Internet. Then the Internet was flooded with capital and infinite solutions for infinite problems, and the need for Yahoo faded. The company hasn’t found its purpose since—the thing it can do that no one else can.

Since the publication of the book in December 2014, Mayer has dedicated her leadership to selling Yahoo’s core internet businesses and its patent portfolio. Yahoo is expected to then convert itself into a shell company for its investments in Alibaba (15.5% economic interest) and Yahoo Japan (35.5%.)

Recommendation: As a fast read, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! is great. Beyond Nicholas Carlson’s gossipy narrative and his pejorative depiction of Mayer’s management style, readers of this page-turner will be interested in Yahoo leadership’s strategic and tactical missteps. Particularly fascinating are how Yahoo missed opportunities to buy Google and Facebook when they were mere startups, the rebuffing of an acquisition bid from Microsoft, a lack of strategic focus, the leadership skirmishes with activist investors, the revolving door at the CEO’s office, and an Asian-asset drama.

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Filed Under: Business Stories, Leadership Reading, The Great Innovators Tagged With: Books, Change Management, Entrepreneurs, Leadership, Leadership Lessons, Management, Transitions, Winning on the Job

Better to Quit While You’re Ahead // Leadership Lessons from Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer

November 17, 2013 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

If you are the CEO of a large public company and the news of your exit causes your company’s market cap to swell by $24 billion on the morning of this announcement, you’ve made the right call.

On 23-Aug-2013, Microsoft’s shares gained 8.9% in pre-market trading when the company announced that Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer would retire within the next twelve months. During Ballmer’s 13-year tenure as CEO, Microsoft continued its dominance over the traditional segments of computing, but could not grasp changing consumer preferences. Despite stellar profitability, strategic missteps have forced Microsoft to play catch-up as Apple, Google, and other competitors dominated the new world of mobile devices, social media, search, and internet advertising.

In interviews with Wall Street Journal, Ballmer admitted: “Maybe I’m an emblem of an old era, and I have to move on … As much as I love everything about what I’m doing, the best way for Microsoft to enter a new era is a new leader who will accelerate change.”

Successful professionals know when to make the move: While they are ahead

There is a time limit to success at any leadership position. If a leader is any good, after the initial rush of process improvements, business turnarounds, organizational transformations, and program initiations, familiarity sets into his job. At that point, diminishing returns set in: established routines, processes, and employee networks take over the execution of the change the leader might have initiated.

There is a natural cycle of rapid growth and sustenance to most leadership roles. Stay as long as you need to establish direction, put your ideas into action, and institute the momentum of change. Then, undertake new challenges in your existing job or explore new career opportunities. Plan ahead—the right opportunity may not emerge quickly.

Don’t Hang on

Another lesson from the imminent transition at Microsoft: when you find yourself in trouble and can’t seem to make an impact despite persistent attempts at change, do not wait to get the push. It may be difficult to let go, but don’t hang on.

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Filed Under: Career Development Tagged With: Career Planning, Leadership Lessons, Microsoft, Transitions

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About: Nagesh Belludi [hire] is a St. Petersburg, Florida-based freethinker, investor, and leadership coach. He specializes in helping executives and companies ensure that the overall quality of their decision-making benefits isn’t compromised by a lack of a big-picture understanding.

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