The Corner Office: How Top CEOs Made It and How You Can Too. Adam Bryant

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СКАЧАТЬ what have you learned, what have you demonstrated, what behaviors do you have? Have you shown intuition? Have you shown the ability to synthesize and act? Have you shown the ability to step up and make a choice? How have you dealt with the hand in front of you, played it out?”

      Green told a story of how one job candidate stood out from the crowd for him.

      “I was recruiting at Babson College,” he said. “This was in 1991. The last recruit of the day—I get this résumé. I get the blue sheet attached to it, which is the form I’m supposed to fill out with all this stuff. His résumé is very light—no clubs, no sports, no nothing. Babson, 3.2. Studied finance. Work experience: Sam’s Diner, references on request. It’s the last one of the day, and I’ve seen all these people come through strutting their stuff and they’ve got their portfolios and semester studying abroad. Here comes this guy. He sits. His name is Sam, and I say: ‘Sam, let me just ask you. What else were you doing while you were here?’ He says: ‘Well, Sam’s Diner. That’s our family business, and I leave on Friday after classes, and I go and work till closing. I work all day Saturday till closing, and then I work Sunday until I close, and then I drive back to Babson.’ I wrote, ‘Hire him,’ on the blue sheet. He’s still with us, because he had character. He faced a set of challenges. He figured out how to do both. It’s work ethic. You could see the guy had charted a path for himself to make it work with the situation he had. He didn’t ask for any help. He wasn’t victimized by the thing. He just said, ‘That’s my dad’s business, and I work there.’ Confident. Proud.

      “What critical behavior interviewing does,” said Green, “is get at people’s character, and you get to see where work fits in their value system, where pride fits in their value system, where making hard decisions or sacrificing fits in their value system. I mean, you sacrifice and you’re a victim, or you sacrifice because it’s the right thing to do and you have pride in it. Huge difference. Simple thing. Huge difference.”

      People don’t have to climb Mount Everest or run the 135-mile Badwater Ultramarathon through Death Valley to develop battle-hardened confidence. Nor do they need to wish that they had faced more challenges growing up. Battle-hardened confidence starts with the right attitude. And attitude is the one thing that anyone can control, even if it seems like everything else is outside of their control. If you tackle challenges, building a track record of success, then battle-hardened confidence will follow.

      A first step, though, requires developing a healthy relationship with failure. Many CEOs recognize that failure is part of success—particularly for people pursuing an ambitious goal—and they embrace failure and value it and learn from it. It can be a hard lesson to learn, particularly for teenagers shifting from high school, where they perhaps grew accustomed to acing exams, to college, and then into their careers.

      John Donahoe, the CEO of eBay, said he learned from a mentor how to be more accepting of failure.

      “A really valuable piece of advice early in my career was from a guy named Kent Thiry, who was another of my early bosses and is now CEO at DaVita,” Donahoe said. “I didn’t know it at the time, but I was suffering from a real fear of failure. Kent said, ‘You know, John, your challenge is you’re trying to bat .900.’ And he said, ‘When you were in college, you got a lot of A’s. You could get 90, 95 percent right. When you took your first job as an analyst, you were really successful and felt like you were batting .900.’

      “But he said, and this is probably five years into my career, ‘Now you’ve moved from the minor leagues. You’re playing in the major leagues, and if you expect to bat .900, either you come up at bat and freeze because you’re so afraid of swinging and missing, or you’re a little afraid to step into the batter’s box. The best hitters in Major League Baseball, world class, they can strike out six times out of ten and still be the greatest hitters of all time.’ That’s my philosophy—the key is to get up in that batter’s box and take a swing. And all you have to do is hit one single, a couple of doubles, and an occasional home run out of every ten at-bats, and you’re going to be the best hitter or the best business leader around. You can’t play in the major leagues without having a lot of failures.”

      Video games have been criticized in some quarters for creating slothful kids. But Jen-Hsun Huang of Nvidia said they taught him a valuable lesson about failure.

      “I’ve never beaten myself up about mistakes,” he said. “When I try something and it doesn’t turn out, I go back and try it again, and maybe it’s because I grew up in the video-game era. Most of the time when you’re playing a game you’re losing. You lose and lose and lose until you beat it. That’s kind of how the game works, right? It’s feedback. And then eventually you beat it. As it turns out, the most fun parts of that game are when you’re losing. When you finally beat it there’s a moment of euphoria, but then it’s over. Maybe it’s because I grew up in that generation and I have the ability to take chances, which leads to the ability to innovate and try new things. Those are important life lessons that came along.”

      Learning from failure, and recognizing failure quickly, is part of the culture at Nvidia, Huang said.

      “This ability to celebrate failure needs to be an important part of any company that’s in a rapidly changing world,” he said. “And the second part of our core value is what we characterize as intellectual honesty—the ability to call a spade a spade, to recognize as quickly as possible that we’ve made a mistake, that we’ve gone the wrong way, and that we learn from it and quickly adjust. Now it came about because when Nvidia was first founded, we were the first company of our kind, but we rapidly almost went out of business. We built the technology and then it just didn’t work. And so we did everything differently.

      “It was during that time that I learned that it was okay for a CEO to say that the strategy didn’t work, that the technology didn’t work, that the product didn’t work, but we’re still going to be great and let me tell you why. I think that’s what’s thrilling about leadership. When you’re holding on to literally the worst possible hand on the planet and you know you’re still going to win. How are you still going to win? Because that’s when the character of the company really comes out. And it was during that time that we really cultivated and developed what I consider to be our core values today. I don’t think you can create culture and develop core values during great times. I think it’s when the company faces adversity of extraordinary proportions, when there’s no reason for the company to survive, when you’re looking at incredible odds—that’s when culture is developed; character is developed.

      “And I think ‘culture’ is a big word for corporate character. It’s the personality of the company, and now the personality of our company simply says this: If we think something is really worthwhile to be done and we have a great idea, and it’s never been done before but we believe in it, it’s okay to take a chance. If it doesn’t work, learn from it, adjust, and keep failing forward. But every single time you’re making it better and better and better. Before you know it, you’re a great company.”

      John T. Chambers, the CEO of Cisco, said that the adversity he faced both as a child and as a CEO were among the most important leadership lessons he had learned.

      “People think of us as a product of our successes,” Chambers said. “I’d actually argue that we’re a product of the challenges we faced in life. And how we handled those challenges probably has more to do with what we accomplish in life. I had an issue with dyslexia before they understood what dyslexia was. One of my teachers, Mrs. Anderson, taught me to look at it like a curveball. The ball breaks the same way every time. Once you get used to it, you can handle it pretty well. So I went from almost being embarrassed reading in front of a class—you lose your place, and I read right to left—to the point where I knew I could overcome challenges. I think it also taught me sensitivity toward others.

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