Ram Charan is a name you ought to know if you don’t already. A Harvard Business School MBA and Ph.D. and former HBS faculty member, his books have sold more than 2-million copies, including one I’ve read, Execution, co-authored with Larry Bossidy.
What’s his expertise? Essentially, it’s how things get done in organizations: That is to say, getting things done more effectively. “Give me a mediocre strategy and superb execution over the reverse” could be his tagline (if it isn’t—I don’t know what his tagline would be, actually, and he’s probably above having one, at least blatantly).
He’s out this month with a new book, Know How, subtitled “the eight skills that separate people who perform from people who don’t,” and while I’m not shilling for the book I think some of the relatively widely publicized summaries of its high points are worth recapping.
Charan’s mission seems to be something along the lines of articulating the difference between often charismatic, visionary and immensely articulate “leaders,” and those who actually get things done, even if from an unassuming, self-deprecating stance. Fortune in its current print issue has a nice piece by him which summarizes it as well as anything I’ve read, but alas it’s not online yet (or maybe not on line ever; if anyone out there can explain to me what the vast all-knowing Time Inc. megamediaopoly decides in its wisdom to put online, and what not to, I’ll be able to save an acre or two of trees).
In the meantime here are two versions of his top-eight hot dots, the first from him:
Ram Charan’s insight into the real content of leadership provides you with the eight fundamental skills needed for success in the twenty-first century:
- Positioning (and when necessary, repositioning) your business by zeroing in on the central idea that meets customer needs and makes money
- Connecting the dots by pinpointing patterns of external change ahead of others
- Shaping the way people work together by leading the social system of your business
- Judging people by getting to the truth of a person
- Molding high-energy, high-powered, high-ego people into a working team of leaders in which they equal more than the sum of their parts
- Knowing the destination where you want to take your business by developing goals that balance what the business can become with what it can realistically achieve
- Setting laser-sharp priorities that become the road map for meeting your goals
- Dealing creatively and positively with societal pressures that go beyond the economic value creation activities of your business.
If that seems a little terse—it does. And ever so slightly Delphic (read: inscrutable) in its brevity. So I’ll give you the longer (still essentially Cliff’s Notes) version, courtesy of CIO Insight:
1. Positioning the Business to Make Money.
You have to keep the business in sync with your customers at all times, and ahead of the external environment. Figuring out what to add, what to take out, what new opportunities might arise for profitable growth and which technologies to adopt are among the most demanding requirements of the twenty-first century leader. It is a challenge, for example, now facing publishers of magazines and newspapers as they see their decades-long stable positioning shattered because of the Google phenomenon and the resulting decline in advertising revenue.2. Connecting the Dots by Pinpointing and Taking Action on Patterns of External Change.
Your success depends on your ability to detect emerging patterns of change clearly and precisely. You have to look at the business very broadly and from the outside in and have the tenacity and imagination to fill in the gaps until the foggy picture becomes clearer and more complete. This know-how is how you get ahead of the curve and on the offensive instead of constantly putting out fires.3. Getting People to Work Together by Managing the Social System of Your Business.
Your biggest untapped opportunity for success is shaping the way people work together. Your own performance depends on your ability to get other people to coordinate their actions and work toward a common goal. Managing what I call the social system is how Bob Nardelli was able to transform Home Depot from its “stack it high, watch it fly” culture to one that delivers on its new performance requirements.4. Judging, Selecting, and Developing Leaders.
You need the right people in the job, but getting the right match depends on your ability to judge people accurately, based on the carefully observed patterns of their decisions, actions and behaviors.5. Molding a Team of Leaders.
You may have stars working for you, but the next challenge is persuading them to submerge their own agendas in the interest of delivering overall results. Molding a team of leaders is a huge multiplier of your capability for making better decisions and getting things done.6. Determining and Setting the Right Goals.
Too often, goals are chosen by looking in the rearview mirror and adding some incremental adjustment. Goals must be set relative to the opportunities that lie ahead, and the organization’s ability to achieve them.7. Setting Laser-Sharp Dominant Priorities.
The right priorities keep the truly important things from being driven off the radar screen. When the priorities are unmistakably specific, people know what should be getting their attention and follow-through, and what distractions they should ignore.8. Dealing with Forces Outside Your Control.
Anticipate which outside forces might throw a monkey wrench into the forward movement of your business. Prepare for the issues outside constituencies raise, and judge the risks they may pose to your business model.
I’ll add an observation of my own: Too often we super-verbal presentation mavens who love to hog the spotlight (I’m talking about lawyers)
behave as though the activities of meeting and talking, preparing documents, developing mission statements and policies for our firms, and planning, substitute for, or even supersede, action. After all, weren’t we trained starting with the Socratic case method in law school that stature and approbation went to the smooth, the glib, and the assertive?
So where does this leave us?
Simply here: We (yeah, lawyers again) are if anything hyper-trained in verbal sparring and analysis, while at the same time we’re often brokers, or agents (“hired guns” in the vernacular) for those who are actually making the decisions, launching the deals, creating the patentable inventions or protectible intellectual property, pushing the envelope on tax code interpretations, or initiating strategic litigation with goals other than and above from its superficial causes of action.
I’m here to tell you that when it comes to managing your firm, this won’t cut it. Give me the mediocre strategy superbly executed? Analytic response: “We despise mediocrity here.” Street-smart response: “When we’re done, they won’t know what hit them.”
