How - Dov Seidman [158]
Like a ship’s sextant aimed at the stars, this lens—the Leadership Framework—can help you navigate your way through a world of HOW. By developing a leadership disposition and focusing your efforts and perspectives on the areas we have discussed, you will begin to fill the synapses around you with trust, alignment, transparency, inspiration, and passion. You will begin to make Waves, perhaps little ones at first, but their effects will be immediate and long lasting. More than just a way of seeing, the Leadership Framework has all the qualities I have tried to put in this book: It is a system whose many parts are mutually reinforcing; it is a framework of ideas on which you can build structures of understanding; it is a constitution, informed and driven by a values-based approach to the world; and it is steeped deeply in the notion of self-governance, the thought that ultimate success will never come from without, but rather from within.
As the Leadership Framework circles back on itself, so too now does this book. We began our journey together with the story of Krazy George Henderson and the first Wave, and if you flip back now to that first story and reread George’s description of that fateful day, you will see that without consciously knowing it, George was as alive to the ideas of the world of HOW and the Leadership Framework as you now are. He knew that there was a way of pursuing his goals—a set of HOWs—that was more powerful, more effective, more self-sustaining, and more significant than other ways. I would reprint that story for you here, but it is probably easier for you to just flip back to the Prologue and read it again.
Besides, everything has to end somewhere.
THE LEADERSHIP FRAMEWORK
Afterword
We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge but we cannot be wise with other men’s wisdom.
—Michel de Montaigne, essayist (1533-1592)
You would expect a restaurateur to understand service, but Danny Meyer, founder of New York City’s Union Square Cafe, one of America’s most successful culinary restaurant organizations, goes further. “We are in a very new business era,” says Meyer in his book, Setting the Table. “I’m convinced that this is now a hospitality economy, no longer the service era. If you simply have a superior product or deliver on your promises, that’s not enough to distinguish your business. There will always be someone else who can do it or make it as well as you. It’s how you make your customers feel while using your products that distinguishes you. . . . Service is a monologue: we decide on standards for service. Hospitality is a dialogue: to listen to a customer’s needs and meet them. It takes both great service and hospitality to be at the top.”1
Hospitality. How your customers feel. These concepts transcend the restaurant business and apply to all business in a world of HOW. Meyer is talking about an experience. In a dialogic society, answering the phone on the second ring or always having a smile on your face is no longer enough; a connected, transparent world now looks past the proxies of service and looks to how the companies and people with whom they do business engage and interact with them. Experience matters in a world where interrelationships matter. And not just customer experience, but supplier, employee, colleague, vendor, competitor, regulator, and media experience matters, all the interactions with everyone you encounter throughout the business day. Experience is becoming the great differentiator.
Can you do experience? Can you write a guidebook of best practices that deliver a consistent interpersonal experience throughout your organization or team? Is experience something you do, or is it something more ephemeral, more dependent on each individual’s ability to act independently and consistently in the group’s best interest?
Let me ask a different question. In their seminal study of the habits and practices of visionary companies, Built to Last, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras survey