The business wizards of Oz

I have always enjoyed watching The Wizard of Oz and, for some perverse reason, I particularly enjoy the scene where Dorothy and her three companions enter the wizard's castle in the Emerald City and discover that he is a mere mortal behind a curtain pulling levers on a machine. No wizard at all really; just an old man with a method. Of course, he was a good guy; he gave the frightened lion a bravery medal, the empty tin man a heart-shaped watch, and the silly scarecrow an honorary degree in thinkology.

Which brings me to the subject of business leadership in this country (or elsewhere, for that matter). There was, literally, method in the wizard's madness; his contribution to the situation was ordinary and obvious, but it was thoughtful, practical, and benevolent. So it is with our business leaders. None of them are magicians and business leadership is not some sort of arcane black art; a form of wizardry or witchcraft that only a rare few can practice. It is 70 per cent method and 30 per cent attitude, and these things can be learned and practiced.

This is not what the 'experts' would have us believe; they make business leadership into something that is complicated, difficult, and highly personal. The business academic Henry Minzberg, for example, apparently argues that successful strategies are mostly 'cooked up' by individuals informally in hallway conversations or in quiet moments of reflection on long airplane flights.

The idea of leadership as art really took wings with the publication of Max De Pree's book Leadership is an Art in 1989. De Pree was president of the famed Herman Miller company so he wrote with some authority and he concluded his book by saying "Leadership is much more an art, a belief, a condition of the heart, than a set of things to do”. Yet many, if not most, of the things that De Pree advocated in the book were more method than art, including the first responsibility of a leader, to 'define reality'.

We underestimate the power and importance of good process in business, not just at lower levels in the organisation but right at the top. Take strategy, for example, which lies at the core of 'defining reality'.

Following the Minzberg approach places all of the accumulated wealth of the business, wealth built up over perhaps 20, 50, or 100 years, at the mercy of the current CEO. That is a really stupid and irresponsible thing to do as few individuals are blessed with the ability to make consistently good strategic choices. Strategy must flow from a considered process that draws on the wisdom and imagination of the whole organisation. Most businesses put a lot of effort into strategic planning, despite the 'clunkiness' of current planning processes, because they instinctively understand this. What is needed in the field of strategy is not more art but better method.

What then of the role of the leader as culture bearer, as the creator and chief witness of the company's beliefs? Isn't this art? Well, no actually. Let's consider values, which are often viewed as the chief expression of a company's culture and which CEO's are encouraged to focus on by the business academics.

Values are things we care about, or that matter to us for their own sake; that have intrinsic worth. Yet, to express them as goals is to misunderstand their nature; we name the wrong god. In business, values are the result of behaving in a certain way over a period of time. The pathway to creating values is a strategic pathway and values are a result of taking the journey.

This is why values statements, expressed as things we will seek, have such a hollow ring to them. We have a sense that they are important but we are not sure why, or what to do with them. They are important, but only as measures of success, not as goals.

Again, what is needed here is not the distillation of values 'in vacuo' as a result of some artistic process, but good strategic method; method that includes a strong focus on capability.

I have asserted that business leadership is 70 per cent method and 30 per cent attitude, so what about the 'attitude' bit; isn't this art? Not really. The attitude that effective managers (dare I say leaders?) bring to the job – the attributes of a 'nice wolf' – can also be learnt. This is the restless, questioning disposition that is always looking for edges, always determined to find and focus on what is real. Early on in my management career I had to acquire this attitude or I would not have survived. I came to realise that putting on the 'nice wolf' habit was something that could be learnt and practiced until it became second nature. It helps if there are some older wolves around to learn from, which was true in my case, but the role models are normally there if you look for them.

What the Australian business community needs, if it is to drive the prosperity of our great country in the years ahead, is much more rigour in its thinking. We should recognise the 'mystery' of leadership for the nonsense that it is. We need to get serious about strategy through outstanding method, not art, and we need to acquire effective attitudes through observation and practice. Then we will become true business wizards.

Christopher Tipler is a Melbourne-based management advisor and author of Corpus RIOS – The how and what of business strategy. His web site corpusrios.com contains more material on this and related topics.