People used to love exchanging their favorite quotations from Winston Churchill, especially stories about the acerbic clashes arising from the mutual dislike between him and a powerful socialite (a favorite of mine: Her: “Sir, if you were my husband, I’d put poison in your soup.” Him: “Madam, if you were my wife, I’d drink it.”). Nowadays, it is Warren Buffett quotes – famous for his sharp, incisive wit revealing gems of management wisdom, only thinly cloaked in down-home country charm – that are eagerly collected. Just as with Churchill, it can be difficult to single out a favorite, but here is one of mine:
In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.
In today’s WSJ, Alan Murray reports on the interesting method of an investment banker to evaluate companies: listen carefully to what they say. Murray contrasts her observations of Warren Buffett’s performance at the recent gathering for Berkshire-Hathaway’s shareholders, with those she made of Motorola’s CEO speech at this year’s annual meeting.
The latter was, she said, “all generalities.” Complaining that it represented no progress or clarity from that of previous years, she offered as evidence this snippet, which she described as “Orwellian,” from the report to shareholders handed out in 2005:
Motorola’s going to own Seamless Mobility, where today’s hottest technology is converging – where the Mobile Me lives – where mobile broadband means everything everywhere and anything anywhere.
It may not be quite clear what this management team is slipping into the soup, but shareholders are certainly refusing to drink it. As the referenced item notes, the stock price has dropped by 1/3, and the sharks are beginning to circle.
Don’t be fooled by intelligence or even energy. Don’t buy – and, certainly, don’t drink – the magic elixirs peddled to teach you how to be a leader. Just go to work, learn the job, and, quite simply, learn to think – and speak – clearly and honestly about what you are doing. That, in a nutshell, is what integrity really is. And without that, everything else will just slip the leash and run away from you.
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2 Comments
Got to get in on this one, Jim. It has to do, literally, with the word “intelligence.” And this is a rule of thumb that I have shared with clients and friends.
Over the years I have watched managers and management teams agonize over someone’s poor performance, usually having to do with relational or cooperational issres. And then I found a common thread in the hand-wringing conversations: “But (s)he’s the most intelligent person we’ve got.”
When an organization starts spending lots of time and energy rationalizing the continuing employment of one person–and the operative excuse is “intelligence”–cut them loose. (It happened, ultimately, in every single case).
What has really happened? The individual in question didn’t have the personal integrity to submit to the general good; instead, the real issue was “my intelligence” is more important than “our well-being” as an organization.
That is a small–but related–departure from your main focus.
Keep writing…
Hi Steve,
Not a departure at all, I think, but a perfectly germane illustration – the people you refer to lack integrity, so their intelligence and energy run rampant, as far as the organization goes, rather than in harmony with its goals; at the very least, they are using their intelligence and energy to pervert organizational assets to their own ends. you did these organizations a great service by reminding them that assets that don’t work for you aren’t assets. And you (and Warren Buffett) are exactly right – sometimes, they just need to go.
This point is a subtheme, yes, of the overall point about managers and, in particular, top management teams and CEOs, but the moral is the same – sometimes, they’re just kidding themselves and us, and we (at whatever level the issue is relevant – board/CEO or deeper in the organization) need to learn to see past the potentially valuable to the vital, recognize when the latter is not there, invalidating the former, and let them go.
Thanks for the great examples and insights!
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