Hack:
The Value Focus of Leadership

During an era of recession or slowing growth, in global corporations where operation is complex and influenced by different interests, finding the right focus of management thinking and ensuring that management decisions are executed as they are meant is essential to hold companies on the right track. This is even more so if you have to take into account the different shareholder and stakeholder expectations, like revenue/profit growth, sustainability and value creation.

To highlight how complex the situation is we have to mention all the tools and applications that are aimed to assist managers and leaders in their supervisory and decision making activities. These tools can be a great help and a major distraction at the same time. By using the business information tools managers can get detailed insight into the whole operations of their company. Choosing the wrong set of data or sticking to data too much can distract managers from what they really should be focusing on.

Problem

It is not by accident that Stephen Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People became and still is a top-selling business book. His first major statement is that the focus of management in the second half of the 20^th century shifted into a wrong direction. The leadership thinking in the 150 years before World War II. focused on “character ethic” attributes such as integrity, humility, courage, patience and the Golden Rule. These basic principles of effective living and true success depended on integrating these principles into one's character. One of Covey’s favorite authors was Ben Franklin, whose autobiography was representative of this kind of literature. Covey noticed a significant shift in the leadership success ideas published after World War II. He realized the world had moved away from the character ethic toward what Covey calls the “personality ethic”, where success was more based on personality, technique, appearance and having a positive mental attitude. In my understanding the personality ethic shift also involves what leaders take responsibility for and how. Covey’s last book addresses this question and highlights the need of thriving for greatness, beyond being effective.

While vision is emphasized by leaders a lot, their real focus is on quarter by quarter execution and figures. There lies the catch of management information systems and their misuse. MIS gather immense volumes of information about the company and present it to higher management in a clear and understandable way. It is so irresistible to be informed about everything in the company and to be presented with the most important issues of business that MIS data and especially Balance Score Cards become the sirens of top managers and board directors. They know that their role and responsibility is to govern the corporation being liable to all stakeholders [3] but analyzing excel charts, making decisions on red/green fields on management reports is so comfortable and risk avoiding. The management consultancy industry has great responsibility in sustaining this situation. Instead of confronting their clients with essential questions the majority of consultants share “best practice” advice based on red/green excel tables. The generation and analysis of these excel tables isn’t just resource consuming at all levels of the company, in most cases it is unnecessary and distracting for top managers if done in such extent.