Leaders who Build Market Value The Right Results the Right Way
David Ulrich, Norm Smallwood
INTRODUCTION
The purpose of leadership development is to build leaders who know how to increase organization capability that delivers current and future earnings consistent with firm values. In this chapter we argue that it is the job of leaders at all levels to create sustainable shareholder value and to be able to communicate this value to all interested parties, namely, the shareholders, the investment community, the regulators, the customers and the employees of the organization. Accomplishing this purpose requires an integration of ideas from a number of different disciplines. It involves an understanding of the new role that intangibles play in company valuations and new shifts in thinking in organizational theory. It invites line leaders as well as those in Human Resources, Accounting, Finance and IT to consider new dimensions to their roles. Ultimately it challenges the reader to become a new breed of leader who can become an architect to build intangible value for his/her company. After reading this chapter, the reader will have a practical approach for designing a high impact leadership development process that builds leaders who increase organization capability to deliver results.
HOW LEADERS LOST MARKET CREDIBILITY
It’s easy to think that we used to have better, trustworthier leaders. Since the early 1990’s till late in 2001, a bull market raged throughout the global economy. Large and small investors were making good money on their equity investments in publicly traded companies and many senior business leaders were making a lot of money. We admired our business leaders because they were responsible for our swelling retirement accounts. We believed there was a link between executive pay and performance. Many executives attained celebrity status. These executives were seen as business geniuses that deserved their high pay and perks due to their performance. Ten years ago, in one of the first big windfalls, Roberto C. Goizueta, the chief executive of Coca-Cola received $80 million in pay and prepared to explain it at the annual meeting. Shareholders did not need convincing. During his speech, he was applauded four times, and no one criticized his pay since it was tied to their personal stock value as well
By late 2001 a series of bad things began to happen that has ultimately reserved at minimum and reversed in many cases faith in business leaders. The technology dot com bubble burst and a mild recession followed. Terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The situation worsened in the Middle East. The mild recession turned worse and so did other business news. We found out that Enron and Arthur Anderson had colluded to “cook the books”, falsifying earnings, revenues and expenses. The reason for the cheating? We would assume cheating was for immediate personal gain, but in fact some of the cheating was to increase the perception of business performance. Over time, increased business performance would lead to higher individual executive pay and stock options. Enron turned out to be the tip of the iceberg. Worldcom, Tyco International, Rite Aid, Imclone Systems and others turned out to be led by greedy executives who also cheated and cooked their books.
Clearly, leaders in these companies have destroyed billions of dollars of market value for their own companies and have eroded the public’s perception of the entire market. The public mood is currently one of confusion and distrust about the stock market because of the dishonest actions of a few. In a short period of time, we have witnessed the double-edged sword of how business leaders impact market value. Leaders can infuse the markets with optimism, most of them honestly, and increase the market value of their businesses. Leaders can also destroy market value through deceit and mistrust.
We believe that there has been a change in the components of market valuation that have become magnified by these recent events. The traditional viewpoint is that when a firm earns more money its value goes up. The more it earns, the more investors value it. In recent years, however, the logic has begun to twist. Firms in the same industry and with similar earnings may have vastly different market values. Increasingly, the intangible value of a company reflects its inflated or deflated stock price.
THE ARCHITECT OF INTANGIBLES – WHERE LEADERS SHOULD START
One might conclude from recent events that intangible value is a function of the economic cycle. We disagree. When the dot-com bubble burst, the recession occurred and stories of dishonesty grew, some firm’s market value fell more than others. We believe that firms that survived the market credibility crisis did so because their leaders made the intangibles tangible. These leaders met financial goals, had a strategy for growth, created core competencies aligned with strategy, and ensured organization capabilities. Intangibles often exist within an industry, not across industries, so the patterns of P/E (price to earnings) ratios of firms within an industry offer evidence of leadership intangibles in both up and down markets.
The concept of intangibles has a history outside business. Successful sports teams are often characterized by intangibles: the drive among teammates, the quality of coaching, the ability to win, and the like. Leaders of sports franchises build intangible value by promising and then delivering on successful seasons. They invest in PR and often make key players larger than life- modern day heroes and heroines. Then they sell memorabilia that further solidifies their fans’ identification with their team. They work hard at selecting the best coaching and player talent possible and then invest even more in building a team culture for winning. Players and coaches are held accountable for performance. High performance results in big salaries and longer tenure. Poor performance leads to trades with other teams or getting cut.
In business settings, understanding and being able to leverage intangibles is of enormous interest to leaders. When intangibles are defined, leaders may make choices that affect not only what happens inside their firm, but also how investors value those decisions. Other work offers more precise financial definitions of intangibles. We define intangibles as either the positive or negative value of a company not accounted for by current earnings. Companies with high intangible value have higher price/earnings multiples than their competitors. They have earned the perception that they can be trusted to deliver on their promises about the future. Companies can also have negative intangibles when their market values decline with negative reputations.
The vast majority of the research about intangibles has been aimed at trying to measure them. Baruch Lev, a professor at NYU is the foremost authority in this area. We highly recommend his books and articles. Our interest is elsewhere. We want to understand how leaders build intangible value for their firms. As a starting point, we propose Figure 1.1, the Architect for Intangibles.
This figure suggests four layers of intangibles in which leaders make choices that have impact. In our consulting work, we have witnessed leaders use the ideas with great impact. The CEO of a large insurance company explained his e-business growth strategy to investors using the framework. The next day analysts wrote up the presentation in the trade journals using phrases such as, “At last, XYZ company is putting its money where its mouth is” and “XYZ has a significant insight into how to build these new distribution channels.” The financial impact-$1.7 billion dollar increase in market value! Unfortunately, XYZ did not invest in building real capability and within a few months had lost the entire gain. Others have told us that this framework helps them understand Jack Welch’s behavior at General Electric. He became a master of building intangible value. His secret? The market trusted him to keep his promises. He told customers, investors and employees exactly what he planned to do and then he worked very hard to ensure that real capability was put in place to deliver it. Earnings were delivered as promised. No excuses. GE leaders at every level have spent the last twenty years building strong capabilities for speed and accountability that outpaces competitors. Over time, GE leaders have earned a brand identity for developing leaders who deliver on promises. When Jeffrey Immeldt succeeded Welch and two senior GE leaders left for Home Depot and 3M last year, the stock of Home Depot and 3M increased at a much faster rate than the rest of the market due to raised expectations about future success.
Bob Hargadon lives in Paris and is a senior Human Resources executive with Boston Scientific. Bob is using the Architect for Intangibles to redefine the role of HR at his company. He has partnered with line executives to understand the firm’s strategy. Based on this understanding, he has crowned HR responsible to deliver on the two organization capabilities most critical to implementation of the strategy. This includes coordinating with Finance, Accounting and IT in a much closer way and deploying global “centers of excellence” led by HR. Within these centers of excellence HR professionals will provide education, coaching, tools, and consulting aimed at increasing impact and value.
With the Architecture for Intangibles, leaders can hype their company and get a temporary blip in value or they can use the Architect for Intangibles to get leaders at every level clear about how they must contribute to build a stronger organization that is differentiated from others in their industry. The hype will be short term and gains will be lost; the sustained intangibles come from leaders actively engaging in and changing the items in the Architecture for Intangibles.
The implications of the Architect for Intangibles are enormous for leadership development. An overall implication of increasing intangible value is that market value is measured at the corporate level where the company stock is traded while intangibles are developed and built by every team and individual throughout the company. This means that senior leaders must clearly articulate where the company is going and what it stands for and that other leaders at every level must do their part to fulfill that promise to employees, customers, and shareholders. Earnings must be delivered as promised. Financial and intellectual capital must be invested where it builds business competencies consistent with strategic direction. Organization capabilities of speed, talent, collaboration, shared mindset, and accountability must be delivered not discussed. To do this requires building better individual leaders and also building a leadership system that ensures that all leaders understand their part in what value should be built, their role in delivering it and a process for developing their capability to succeed. Building value is a job for everyone and success in that job benefits everyone.
BUILDING A LEADERSHIP SYSTEM
In the two other books we have written together, Results-Based Leadership (Harvard Business School Press, 1999) and Why The Bottom Line Isn’t: How to Build Value through People and Organization (Wiley, April 2003) we describe the content for how leaders can deliver balanced, strategic results and increase market value. Rather than repeat this, we will describe how to set up a leadership development process that supports this content and impacts positive market value- a process that delivers the right results the right way.
Our approach to develop leaders has six components that are depicted in the following figure. Each of these components is interdependent with the other components. We have numbered each of the components because there is a sequence to the data collection required for each component in order to optimize individual development and business impact.
Figure 1.2 Leadership Development Process For Business Impact
Step 1. Build a Case for Change
Money to invest in leadership development too often comes from the “it’s the right thing to do” fund. Building a case for leadership change is usually skimmed or even skipped altogether. When it is clear that leadership matters to the company’s success, investment in leadership is sustained. A case for leadership creates a baseline for measurement and shows how better leaders relate to the company’s future success.. Stakeholders of the leadership development process must understand the value of their investment in order to continue investing when money gets tight.. When the case for leadership is made, leaders willingly allocate time and resources to, improving the quality of leadership. Building a case for the importance of leadership comes by identifying the current state, desired state, and the value of bridging the gap between the current and desired states.
Ideas for conducting a case for change:
Current State:
What is our current market value?
What are our top five change initiatives?
Describe cases where we have not kept our promises to employees, customers and investors and the impact.
Describe the current level of alignment at each leadership level: from the boardroom to the front line.
What are our most significant business challenges?
Desired state:
What would our market value be if we increased our price to earnings multiple by 10%?
What is the impact of successfully implementing our five top change initiatives?
What is the impact on customers, employees, and investors if we had a track record of keeping our promises with them?
What is the value of getting alignment at all leadership levels about what performance really matters?
What is the value of resolving each significant business challenge?
Value of Bridging the Gap:
For each delta between the current state and the desired state, take a shot at describing both the tangible and the intangible value of closing the gap.
Step 2. Tie Leadership Development to Existing Business Initiatives
There is nothing wrong with leadership education for its own sake. However, this type of education does not have as much impact on the business as education that is tied to business needs. A first step towards greater impact is to have knowledge about the current, important initiatives that are critical to your company. Once these initiatives are identified, leadership development can be tied to these initiatives. For even greater impact, key initiatives should be tied to action learning projects formulated as part of the leadership development process. Skills, tools and a shared language can be taught to leaders at every level for implementation of key initiatives.
For example, we are familiar with a large manufacturing company that has three major initiatives:
Grow revenue by $10B;
Cut expenses by 10%;
Achieve Six-Sigma quality standards.
These initiatives should drive the selection of action learning projects in leadership development. They also suggest key business and organization capabilities that leaders must build in order to deliver on these expectations. Finally, these initiatives demand alignment around priorities and resource allocation for growth, cost reduction and defect elimination.
Step 3. Articulate One Theory of Leadership for Leaders at Every Level
A theory of leadership is simply a way to talk about leadership in general, and specific leadership outcomes and attributes. There are many theories of leadership to choose from: Situational leadership, Competency and principle-based leadership, Great man theory of leadership, Theory X and Theory Y and so on. We advocate a theory we call Leadership Brand. Leadership brand occurs when a sufficiently large number of leaders exhibit distinct leadership practices over time. . As a result, the organization creates leaders who are branded—that is, distinct from leaders in other firms.
Leadership brand lies at the heart of a firm's identity. Imagine observing two leaders at any level doing much the same job at competing firms. How long before an investor, customer, or employee could distinguish one firm from another because of the leader being observed? Branded leadership communicates to all stakeholders both the means (how work is done) and ends (what the goals are) for any firm.
Conceptualizing a firm’s brand to include the image of branded leadership helps us to extend the current thinking about what makes an effective leader. When we run leadership workshops, we often start by asking participants to fill in the open-ended statement, "In the future to be successful at this firm, a leader must . . . .” The responses are consistent with current thinking about how to be better leaders: set a vision, have energy, energize others, mobilize commitment, manage teams, coach, have integrity, think globally, and so on. After we generate this list of what we call attributes of leadership, we ask, "Who is surprised by this list?" No one is. The list makes sense and can be turned into behaviors, which can then be assessed through 360-degree feedback and woven into development experiences. But then we ask, "What if we did this exercise in twenty companies?” Or: “Compare your list of attributes with the competency models of other companies? Would they differ?" And the answer we inevitably get is, "No, they are much the same."
Many of the current efforts to be or build better leaders have fallen prey to the trap of generic models of leadership. Even the rigorous competency models based on key informant methodologies with high reliability and validity tend to generate similar lists of behavior-based competencies that might be expected of leaders in any number of firms. These competency models fall short because they are not linked to customers, shareholders, and business results. They are often tied to past behaviors and not to future performance. They focus on what leaders are like rather than on what they accomplish.
For leadership to be a brand, leaders must exhibit more than generic competencies. Generic brands do not receive a premium price; they do not attract customers; they do not commit employees. Likewise, generic leaders who demonstrate universal competence cannot deliver the unique results they are expected to deliver. Turning generic into branded leadership is both simple and complex.
At a simple level, branded leadership requires a new definition of leadership: attributes * results.[i] Our redefinition of leadership as the outcome of both attributes and results explains some of the causes of ineffective leadership and the challenges faced by effective leaders. Leaders who either embody attributes or achieve results will not have sustained success.
Leaders who score high on the attribute (or character) side of this equation but low on results do not truly lead. These leaders do good works, relate well to others, and act with honor and integrity. However, even when people exhibit the behaviors most expected from leaders, if they fail to deliver desired results, they will not be seen as effective leaders. They are generic and not branded leaders, having mastered the language of leadership but not the essence.
Other leaders who score high on results but low on attributes also face enormous risks. They often take or receive credit for results they did not produce, so they have difficulty replicating or extending those results. They lack the leadership goodwill required to get results in the face of obstacles. They find the going tough when they try to focus attention on new initiatives or strategies. These leaders do not create long-term legacy because their results cannot be sustained by their behaviors.
Effective leaders need to have both attributes and results. All the integrity, character, and goodwill in the world will not cover a lack of results. But in delivering results, leaders must also do it in the right way. As evidenced with the lack of confidence in many business leaders, building character sustains results, particularly when the getting of results is difficult. So to leaders who get high scores on employee surveys or 360-degree feedback, we say, be wary. Leadership is more than a popularity contest. Without clear and visible results, leadership cannot endure.
Leaders who demonstrate attributes and deliver results become branded leaders. Branded leaders possess appropriate attributes. They have a point of view about the future of their business, build teams, manage change, and have personal integrity. But they are also able to turn attributes into specific results required for their business to succeed by answering the "so that" query for each attribute they demonstrate. Focusing on results requires understanding the unique competitive requirements of a firm. Firms win with strategies that differentiate them to customers and the financial markets; results should reflect these differences. For example, leaders at Qantas have a vision so that traveler satisfaction will stay high enough to gain a sizable share of frequent travelers’ dollars spent. Leaders at the Olympics have a vision so that they attract committed employees and volunteers who will manage the large masses of event attendees. Leaders at Disney have a vision so that guests will return home from the Disney theme park experience with positive memories and stories for their friends. Each "vision" becomes branded when it is coupled with a "so that" statement that makes it specific to the unique requirements of the business.
Step 4. Assess Your Leaders Using Your Leadership Brand as the Goal
The use of 360 feedback instruments to assess leaders is a trend that we believe will, and should continue. However, traditional 360-tools measure behaviors linked to a company-specific competency framework. As we have already pointed out, these are usually generic not unique leadership competencies. 360 Feedback should be tied to a statement of the company’s desired leadership brand.
Building a statement of desired leadership brand involves the articulation of five business issues. First, you need to be clear about your strategy. Strategic clarity exists when leaders, employees, and customers have a clear and shared sense of the how the firm allocates resources to win in the future.
Second, the strategy should lead to a shared mindset. A shared mindset represents the firm brand, or identity, to the best customers in the future. Crafting a shared mindset comes when leaders think about what they want their organization to be known for in the future by their best customers. Building unity of mindset helps shape a unique culture inside the organization and a firm brand outside the organization.
Third, articulate desired leadership attributes. Others have studied the attributes and behaviors of leaders extensively. For example, in recent work, James Kouzes and Barry Posner have synthesized over twenty years of research around the world with thousands of leaders. They find that over time, admired leaders seem to have four enduring characteristics: honest, forward-looking, competent, and inspiring. Other characteristics are important, but they are not as consistent over time: intelligent, fair-minded, broad minded, supportive, straightforward, dependable, cooperative, determined, imaginative, ambitious, courageous, caring, mature, loyal, self-controlled, and independent.[ii] Similar lists have shown up in other studies. One of the more interesting approaches to attributes comes from research by Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman. They find that leaders judged as more successful in 360-degree instruments focus on their strengths to pull them to success more than on their weaknesses. In focusing on strengths, Zenger and Folkman describe “competency companions,” areas where strength in any single competence may not ensure high performance, but the combination of competencies yields multiplicative effects. These competency companions are not intuitive. For example, if a leader scores low in technical skills, one of the ways to improve this perception is to increase the perception of interpersonal skills.
Attribute models should be tied to the future, not the past; link to strategic goals, not be generic; and focus on behaviors, not ideals. In addition, attribute models should be integrating mechanisms for HR practices. With a clear leadership model, leaders can be hired, promoted, trained, developed, appraised, and compensated against the criteria implied in the model. Attribute models are more likely to be used by leaders who participate in creating them than by those who have the attribute model created for them by a human resource team or outside consulting firm.
Most firms we know have explicit or implicit leadership competency models. In speeches, 360-degree feedback instruments, and performance appraisals, the attributes become a part of a firm’s theory of leadership. But, as we noted earlier, attributes are only half of a leadership brand statement. Too often, they are generic, not tied to the business strategy or results. One test of a leadership brand is the extent to which the statement that completes the phrase “what makes an effective leader here is—” is not a generic list of ideal behaviors but a clear statement of how leaders can and will help accomplish the strategy. By reading the statements about expected leadership, employees, customers, and investors should be able to know the firm’s strategy. Too often leadership statements are too generic and fail to distinguish one firm’s strategy from another. By reading the leadership brand, anyone should be able to discern the strategy of the organization in which the leader works.
Fourth, define desired results. Branded leaders possess attributes and produce results. While most efforts to be better leaders focus on the attributes of leadership, leaders also need to turn their attributes into sustainable results. But because results themselves can be difficult to see on a day-to-day basis, it helps to look for their vital signs, much as a doctor uses selected tests to assess human health. Clinical experience has shown the medical profession that among the hundreds of available tests, some work best as leading indicators of overall health—pulse rate, blood pressure, blood composition, EKG results, and so on. Likewise, vital signs of leadership results can be specified. Based on recent theory and research on balanced scorecards and our own hands-on experience, we suggest four domains for leadership vital signs that should be defined, assessed, and manifested for every results-based leader: employee, organization, customer, and investor. Leaders generate employee results when they identify specific ways to increase both employee competence and commitment. They achieve organizational results by assessing the capabilities needed to win and then creating those capabilities, thereby ensuring that the organization has a unique identity. Leaders generate customer results when they identify target customers, customize their services for these customers, and integrate customers into HR practices such as staffing and training. Finally, they produce investor results by managing their balance sheet through profitable growth, reduced cost, and increasing shareholder value through management equity. Branded leaders master and can be measured by vital signs in each result area.
Fifth, link results and attributes into a leadership brand statement. Any leader trying to be more effective must have both the right attributes and the ability to get results. Sometimes leaders start with attributes that then must be turned into results; at other times, leaders start with results that must be accomplished through attributes. By linking attributes and results, leaders create a brand that distinguishes them from leaders in other firms. Part of the brand comes because leaders can choose from the potential result vital signs in each of the four areas and pick those that are most aligned with the goals of their business. With results clearly defined, leaders can then ensure a virtuous cycle that connects attributes and results by starting either with attributes or results but then ensuring the connection of the two.
When individual leaders are assessed against their company’s leadership brand, they get specific development feedback that points them to where they should build on their strengths in areas that have been pre-defined as having the most value. Further, it is straightforward to aggregate this feedback data to find out areas of strengths as well as areas needing improvement for all leaders.
A complementary leadership assessment approach is what Dave Hatch, former Vice President of Executive Development at Pepsi and at IBM calls Experience-Based Assessment. Experience-based assessment methodology identifies existing skills and experiences that a leader has developed and matches these experiences against the experiences, skills and capabilities required for future leadership roles. These experiences can be overlaid against critical leadership transitions to identify potential gaps and missing experiences. These transitions include individual contributor to new supervisor; supervisor to functional manager; functional manager to general manager and general manager to officer/multiple businesses.
Step 5. Targeted Investment in Leaders
Step five is where most leadership development efforts start. With the information and buy-in from the previous four steps, this step is much more likely to have a significant impact on business results. There are at least four areas to target for investment:
a) Leadership Development;
b) Leadership Selection;
c) Performance Management;
d) Retention of highest performers
Leadership development efforts build a shared language and common tools accessible to leaders at every level. A common mistake is to provide different language and tools to different leadership audiences. If leadership actions are to be coordinated and have impact on key initiatives, then it is critical that leaders can talk to each other and apply a common set of tools.
Job assignments can be a critical source of leadership development. Leaders can be systematically rotated through jobs that might give them experience in different business settings. Jobs can be classified along a series of dimensions, then emerging leaders given job assignments that familiarize them with diverse work settings: growth versus turnaround, line versus staff, small versus large, capital intensive versus service oriented, consumer focus versus business-to-business focus, start-up versus mature business, and so on.
Effective leadership selection efforts include the integration of desired attributes and firm values into the selection process. It is much easier to select leaders with the predisposition to certain attributes than it is to develop them. Nordstroms selects leaders and staff based on their predisposition towards a service orientation. Southwest Airlines selects leaders who have a “fun DNA” and who find ways to celebrate employee success.
Performance Management practices must appraise and reward leaders for acting consistently with leadership brand intentions and for implementing the right results in the right way. Finally, it’s critical to retain leaders who embody the leadership brand. This means there must be assessment tools that allow leaders to identify and keep the right talent.
Step 6. Measure Impact of Investment in Leadership Development
There has been much progress in measuring the impact of investments in training and development over the last few years. Some researchers describe five levels of measurement to assess the impact of education:
1. Reaction and planned action- Measure the extent to which participants enjoyed the experience;
2. Learning: Measure the extent to which a skill or competency was improved;
3. Application: Measure the extent to which learning was applied to the participant’s actual job;
4. Business impact: Measure impact of learning through impact on the business with tools like the Balance Scorecard or certain performance measures or quality improvements;
5. Return on Investment (ROI): Measure a return on the investment of leadership development dollars spent such as cost reductions or revenue improvements.
There is a sixth level that can be measured-
6. Impact on Market Value: Measure the extent to which leadership development activities can be tied to building the capabilities that will deliver future results and increase investor confidence.
In summary, the six components ensure that the leadership development process is systemic, sequenced and integrated. Components are integrated vertically to the strategy and business needs of the firm as well as horizontally to one another. The nature of a creative development process is that there will be iterations across the components and within specific components. The framework of these six components reduces complexity and allows for clearer communication about what is going on and why with key stakeholders.
CONCLUSION
Leadership is one of the most visible intangibles. Investors, customers, and employees can identify and observe leaders and ascertain if they add value or not. Leaders wanting to create leadership depth must start with themselves. They must be the kind of leader that they want others to become. Then they must give emerging leaders the opportunity to produce leadership intangibles. When leadership intangibles exist, a leadership brand pervades all levels of the organization. To create a leadership brand, leaders need to clearly articulate strategy, translate the strategy into a shared mindset, leadership attributes, leadership results, and a brand statement. With a brand statement, leaders can assess and invest in future leaders.
Leaders who generate intangible value:
· Take personal responsibility for being effective leaders. They are willing to model the leadership that they expect others to follow.
· Craft a leadership brand that defines the attributes and results expected of a successful leader.
· Create formal and informal mechanisms to assess leaders against the brand.
· Find ways to invest in emerging leaders through training, development, and support systems.
· Ensure that the leadership brand permeates all levels of the organization.
· Encourage leaders who model the brand to be public and visible to investors, customers, and employees.
When leaders build leadership brand the right way, they increase trust in the business. Investors, employees and customers believe that the company can and will deliver what it promises, when it promises to do it. When this happens over time, market value is positively impacted. When market value is positively impacted, investors are wealthier, employees are more committed with secure retirements and customers prefer to do business with companies that have greater capabilities to give them what they want.
Ultimately this is the test of whether we have developed better, trustworthier leaders.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Ulrich has been ranked by Business Week as #1 management educator. He has also been listed in Forbes as one of the “world’s top five” business coaches. And he received the George Petitpas Memorial Award from World Federation of Personnel Management for lifetime contributions to human resource profession. David has published over 90 articles and book chapters. His books include: Organizational Capability: Competing from the Inside/Out (with Dale Lake) (published by Wiley); The Boundaryless Organization: Breaking the Chains of Organization Structure (with Ron Ashkenas, Steve Kerr, Todd Jick) (Jossey Bass); Human Resource Champions: The Next Agenda for Adding Value and Delivering Results (Harvard Business Press); Tomorrow’s (HR) Management (with Gerry Lake and Mike Losey) (Wiley); Learning Capability; Generating * Generalizing Ideas with Impact (with Arthur Yeung, Mary Ann Von Glinow, Steve Nason) (Oxford); Results Based Leadership: How Leaders Build the Business and Improve the Bottom Line (with Norm Smallwood and Jack Zenger) (Harvard Business Press); HR Scorecard: Linking People, Strategy, and Performance (with Brian Becker and Mark Huselid) (Harvard Business Press); GE Workout (with Steve Kerr and Ron Ashkenas) (McGraw Hill)
Norm Smallwood is co-founder and President of Results-Based Leadership Inc. Results-Based Leadership provides education, tools and consulting services that increase organization and leadership capability to deliver the right results the right way. He has also authored Why The Bottom Line Isn’t: How to Build Value through People and Organizations Wiley, April 2003. Dave and Norm also co-authored, Results-Based Leadership (with Jack Zenger). Norm is co-author of Real Time Strategy: Improvising Team-Based Planning for a Fast Changing World, Wiley & Sones, 1993 (which was part of their portable MBA series) and of Results-Based Leadership: How Leaders Build the Business and Improve the Bottom Line, Harvard Business School Press, 1999 (which was named book of the year by SHRM). His current book with Dave Ulrich, Why the Bottom Line ISN’T!: How to Build Value through People and Organizations will be published in April 2003 by Wiley. He has published more than 50 articles in leading journals and newspapers and has contributed chapters to multiple books.
