Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [40]
World-class performance means nothing less than market dominance and financial results that are the envy of one’s competitors. Aspiring to this level of performance is a necessary condition for building a liberated company. This aspiration provides a vision that people can emotionally embrace. True, most leaders, once they are in charge of a company’s destiny, worry about its performance. However, there is an important gap between worrying about performance and the desire to become world-class. Take an example from the world of sports.
Some NBA coaches, even if they would never admit it, coach to have a good team—and franchises that are merely “good” still make a lot of money for their owners. For example, Lenny Wilkens, who has more wins—and more losses—than any other coach in the NBA, “is known for his quiet, sensible, and optimistic coaching style.”1 But “his career was marked by consistent records rather than by championship cups.” Other coaches, such as Phil Jackson, the Los Angeles Lakers coach who has won nine NBA titles, want to build championship teams, to make basketball history—and they leave if the owners or the team don’t share this goal. Jackson did exactly that in 2004, when he walked away from his job with the Lakers. When he was ready to return to coaching, several teams, including the New York Knicks, tried to hire him. But Jackson returned to the Lakers in 2005—not out of sentimentalism, but because he believed that they were a team that could win the NBA championship, even though they weren’t playing very well at the time. In 2008, he nearly succeeded, going all the way to the finals, and in 2009, he won his tenth title—the most in NBA history.
Many good corporate leaders are like Lenny Wilkens. This is no insult—Wilkens won one championship, in 1979, with the Seattle SuperSonics. They compile solid records of achievement and do fine by their stockholders. This, however, is not the same thing as world-class performance.
The desire to build a world-class company is only one of the two necessary conditions required to launch a liberation campaign. The other is what we call “freedom values.” Sure, a world-class-seeking leader could just as well apply other approaches and see if those worked. Robert McDermott, who as CEO liberated the insurer USAA, tried difference tactics at the Air Force Academy, when he led that organization. And Jim Collins’s book Good to Great describes several now-famous cases of leaders taking their organizations from good to world-class. None used a radically free approach. But our liberating leaders didn’t try to achieve world-class performance by trying to restructure a “how” company. Though aware that “how” companies can be made world-class, their freedom values made them lose faith in this type of culture. They believed that a radically different—freedom-based—environment was needed. What they lacked was a particular experience to trigger their break with the “how” culture and drive them to start the liberation campaign. Our research revealed two such triggering experiences: One was exasperation with the consequences of trying to manage the “how;” the other was admiration for other liberated companies.
KITCHEN-TABLE LESSONS IN LEADERSHIP
Jeff Westphal always believed in the importance of freedom but couldn’t envision how to apply his values to his business, even after becoming, in the early 1990s, a senior executive of a small tax software company owned by his father. An eager reader, he familiarized himself with many approaches that questioned the “how” environment, including Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. But he didn’t apply any of them to his company until, in 1993, a key software-development project turned into a fiasco. While preparing to use his executive power to tell the team