Contrasting Jobs and Fiorina at Leadership

Leadership

To contrast leadership styles, it might be instructive to take a look at two tech giants whose paths went in very different directions in the mid-2000s. One is Apple, which was wildly successful, and the other was Hewlett Packard, which struggled to keep up with the times. Apple under Steve Jobs was successful in large part because he was involved actively in the company's strategy, and in guiding his team to perform to a standard that he felt was acceptable. He would be the final arbiter of what was good enough, but was also able to communicate those standards effectively. Essentially, Jobs would push his team to perform at high levels, but ensure that they knew what that meant, and that they had the tools to do the job. This constant sense of challenge would ultimately motivate and inspire the team. One of Jobs' hallmarks was his insistence that the team would write its own reality -- ideas about what could and could not be done were to be rejected and rewritten if necessary (Kalla, 2012).

At Hewlett Packard, the company was structured as a conservative company with bureaucratic layers, where actions were bound by what had been done before. Under the leadership of Carly Fiorina, HP failed miserably to transition to a faster-moving technology company. This was not because Fiorina was unwilling to take the company there, but because she was unable to demand a higher standard from her employees. She was disinterested in the actual nuts and bolts of organizational change, and left the day-to-day change to her underlings, most of whom lack the vision and passion for the changes. As a result, the company essentially went nowhere, and struggled during her tenure to find any sort of identity for itself in the 21st-century economy (Tabrizi, 2015). One of the essential roles as leader is to ensure that your followers are pushing themselves to bring about your vision, and in this role Fiorina performed poorly, evidence disinterested in holding people to account and guiding them to the right path.

There are a couple of leadership lessons to be drawn from this. While one might be tempted to see Jobs as a micromanager, Apple's success during that period stemmed from his vision and his ability to get the entire company (and its customers ) to buy into that vision. I am not sure that I would personally want to be as controlling as Jobs was, and would prefer to empower my followers more. But that itself is a cautionary tale, because Fiorina empowered her followers substantially but then failed to provide the needed oversight. As a result, the followers lost track of the vision, and the company foundered. One does not have to manager in the style of Steve Jobs to appreciate that maintaining control over one's vision, and holding followers to account when they veer from the right path, is also an important element. Strategy formulation is important, but so too is implementation, and control is part of the implementation process.