Sunday, May 20, 2007
Leadership Lessons from World Bank Woes
The World Bank woes made me flash back to graduate school. I remember reading articles by a the neoconservative bunch, including Condoleeza Rice, when I was at The Claremont Graduate School.
I was studying foreign and defense policy at the Center for Politics and Policy. I became familiar with diverse thinkers, from Jean Lipman-Blumen (crisis management) to Paul Kennedy (The Rise and Fall of Great Powers) to Paul Wolfowitz himself (I read about some of his earlier work, which focused on strategic access to Persian Gulf oil).
Fast forward to May 20, 2007. When I typed "Paul Wolfowitz" into Google, my search results yielded 7.7 million hits. This blog entry will be 7,700,001, I suppose!
Paul Wolfowitz is often cited as the architect for the Bush Administration's Iraq policy, and remained one its staunchest advocates, even as the Iraq war dragged on. Wolfowitz seemed fixated on the idea of success and impatient with indicators that the big vision needed revision, that new voices and strategies were required to address failures in the original policy.
According to a New Yorker article, "The Believer," published in November 2004 commented on Wolfowitz's unswerving support of the Iraq war:
"Wolfowitz’s critics accuse him of naïveté, of setting out a vision that fails to consider fully the complex and unpredictable regional dynamics..." Hmm. Failing to consider complex dynamics. Sounds familiar.
Wolfowitz went on to become president of the World Bank, ending his tenure in scandal, after he created an unauthorized and highly lucrative compensation package for his girlfriend, Shaha Riza. It didn't help that his staff felt alienated or that he was often at odds with his board.
Some see the derailment of Wolfowitz's World Bank career as a single, while admittedly-bad, ethics transgression.
In leadership, there's practically no such thing as a single bad call. Instead, there's a history of how a leader pays attention and practices. There's a history of how a leader enrolls the rest of his or her team to support the big vision , how a leader reads whether the strategy for the vision is working or not.
Every day, corporations pay out billions on "big vision" plays that were never linked to the devilish details of execution or changing conditions.
Think of the ebullient acquisitions made by WorldCom (its most notable acquisition was MCI in 1998, making the deal the then-largest merger in US history). However, massive debt, incompetent integration of operations across acquired companies, and accounting scandals led to bankruptcy a mere five years later.
Worldcom. Wolfowitz and the Iraq policy. Wolfowitz and the World Bank. Big visions gone awry have a lot in common.
Leadership Lessons: Beware the"big vision" that is fully mapped out in advance and creates impatient evangelists who fail to read cues in their always dynamic environments.
Focus on cultivating a culture of sensing and responding to changing conditions -- in people and the environment.
I was studying foreign and defense policy at the Center for Politics and Policy. I became familiar with diverse thinkers, from Jean Lipman-Blumen (crisis management) to Paul Kennedy (The Rise and Fall of Great Powers) to Paul Wolfowitz himself (I read about some of his earlier work, which focused on strategic access to Persian Gulf oil).
Fast forward to May 20, 2007. When I typed "Paul Wolfowitz" into Google, my search results yielded 7.7 million hits. This blog entry will be 7,700,001, I suppose!
Paul Wolfowitz is often cited as the architect for the Bush Administration's Iraq policy, and remained one its staunchest advocates, even as the Iraq war dragged on. Wolfowitz seemed fixated on the idea of success and impatient with indicators that the big vision needed revision, that new voices and strategies were required to address failures in the original policy.
According to a New Yorker article, "The Believer," published in November 2004 commented on Wolfowitz's unswerving support of the Iraq war:
"Wolfowitz’s critics accuse him of naïveté, of setting out a vision that fails to consider fully the complex and unpredictable regional dynamics..." Hmm. Failing to consider complex dynamics. Sounds familiar.
Wolfowitz went on to become president of the World Bank, ending his tenure in scandal, after he created an unauthorized and highly lucrative compensation package for his girlfriend, Shaha Riza. It didn't help that his staff felt alienated or that he was often at odds with his board.
Some see the derailment of Wolfowitz's World Bank career as a single, while admittedly-bad, ethics transgression.
In leadership, there's practically no such thing as a single bad call. Instead, there's a history of how a leader pays attention and practices. There's a history of how a leader enrolls the rest of his or her team to support the big vision , how a leader reads whether the strategy for the vision is working or not.
Every day, corporations pay out billions on "big vision" plays that were never linked to the devilish details of execution or changing conditions.
Think of the ebullient acquisitions made by WorldCom (its most notable acquisition was MCI in 1998, making the deal the then-largest merger in US history). However, massive debt, incompetent integration of operations across acquired companies, and accounting scandals led to bankruptcy a mere five years later.
Worldcom. Wolfowitz and the Iraq policy. Wolfowitz and the World Bank. Big visions gone awry have a lot in common.
Leadership Lessons: Beware the"big vision" that is fully mapped out in advance and creates impatient evangelists who fail to read cues in their always dynamic environments.
Focus on cultivating a culture of sensing and responding to changing conditions -- in people and the environment.
# posted by Cindy Marteney @ 8:05 PM 
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