Page 147 - How Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations That Win

THE WHY OF WORK

governments came to the aid of financially stressed compa-
nies with a “bailout,” the metaphor badly missed the real
issue. As discussed in Chapter 1, we bail out a boat taking
on water or people in jail. In either case, bailouts don’t solve
the underlying problem of the hole in the boat or the crime
committed. If the holes are not fixed or people’s lives are not
put in order, bailouts accomplish little.
One hole in the boat that led to recession was a lack of
effective leadership. We believe one of the important quali-
ties of effective leadership is humility. As shown in Figure 6.1,
when leaders act with a sense of humility, even in the midst
of success, prosperity continues. But when leaders become
arrogant, prosperity reverses and declines. In many cases the
success of companies and countries causes leaders to respond
with arrogance, taking credit for the prosperity, seeing them-
selves as invincible, or focusing more on enjoying the present
windfall than learning for the future. This arrogance is the
pride before the fall. Humble leaders continue to improve
and respond to changing conditions. And humility becomes
part of the culture of the firm—the work environment we
can sense when we walk in the door of a company.
There is a liability of success, and it causes many suc-
cessful companies to fail. There is a rapid turnover of firms
in the U.S. Fortune 500 (almost 50 percent every 10 years).
Twenty years after In Search of Excellence was published,
many of the 43 original firms had not lived up to the crite-
ria that placed them in the “excellent” category. Researchers
1
Ulrike Malmendier and Geoffrey Tate found that CEOs who
received superstar status as evidenced by public CEO awards
(from BusinessWeek, Financial World, Chief Executive,
Forbes, IndustryWeek, Morningstar.com, Time, Time/CNN,
and the like) actually performed 15 to 20 percent worse than

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