Talk to Noel Teach

Crotonville, a small location in Osning, New York, USA, has become a mecca for developing business leaders. In 1956, General Electric established its management training center here. After Jack Welch became GE CEO in 1981, Crotonville reinvented itself, continuing to develop leaders at all levels of GE and turning it into a direct drive for change. a powerful engine.

In 1985, at Welch's invitation, Noel Tichy, a professor at the University of Michigan Business School, came to Crotonville to lead the General Electric Training Center for two years. In the past two years, he has witnessed, participated in, and promoted the transformation of GE, and is fortunate to have the largest and best leadership laboratory in the world. Teach said he has learned more about leadership in these two years than in the previous 15 years.

Now, as a well-known leadership guru, Teach is teaching the leadership he has learned at the University of Michigan Business School, in numerous Fortune 500 companies, and in the U.S. military, schools and nonprofit organizations. Teach's leadership thinking has two cores. First, leaders need to be teachers and have a "teachable point of view." Second, successful organizations are teaching organizations, not learning organizations, built around a "virtuous cycle of teaching." Teachable perspectives and a virtuous cycle of teaching are two key words in Titch's leadership thinking.

A teachable point of view means that a leader not only has a point of view, but also knows how to articulate and communicate it.

A virtuous cycle of teaching means that leaders are not only teaching, but also learning, and at every level of the organization, everyone is both teaching and learning. Teaching organizations are built on a virtuous cycle of teaching.

Leadership is change

Liu Lan: How do you define leadership? I have read two statements in your book, not sure if it is your definition. One: Leadership is the ability to see reality as it is and to mobilize appropriate responses. Another is: Leadership is the ability to change the way others think, inspire action, and in doing so achieve things.

Teach: I'll start with the second statement. What I usually teach others is this: leadership is through others to achieve things that would not have happened without you. This doesn't ask for a formal position, it asks, "Have I accomplished something?" A true leader accomplishes things through others, and without him this would not have happened. These are the basic criteria to be met to become a leader.

To be a good leader, I get into the topics I've talked about: you have to have a teachable perspective, you have to be able to develop leaders, etc.

Lan Liu: Many business thinkers distinguish between leadership and management. How about you?

Teach: There's a simple saying: "Managers do things right, leaders do the right things." I think leaders need management skills, but just having management skills doesn't necessarily make a good leader. So, I also distinguish between leadership and management. But at the end of the day, I come back to this statement: If you are a leader, you accomplish things in the world that would not have happened without you.

Liu Lan: Don't managers also achieve things through others? This is what we expect managers to do well.

Teach: In the book Leadership, James MacGregor Burns distinguishes between transactional and transformational leadership. Transactional leadership is management, transformational leadership is leadership.

Based on Burns, I wrote a book called Transformational Leadership, which is why Welch hired me to work in Crotonville. It was the mid-1980s, and the simple assumption at that time was that we were in a historical era that required transformational leadership. I think we are back in those times now, and always will be. Transformational leadership fundamentally transforms an organization, taking it to a different level, and not going back later. Even if the transformational leader leaves, the organization remains the same.

Transforming an organization is dramatic action. Change brings fear and hope, and change brings change and resistance. In my book, I say that change is a three-act play: The first act is to awaken the organization to change. The second act is to give the vision you want to achieve. The third act is to restructure the organizational structure, human resources, etc. according to the vision. By the time you finish the third act, the world has changed again, and it will start all over again.

My entire framework is built around helping people become transformational leaders. At the end of the day, I'll go back to Burns' statement that managers are transactional leaders. I'm talking about transformational leadership.

Leadership is from top to bottom

Liu Lan: In the preface of the book "Leadership Engine", you said that leadership is the key determinant of success, and it is not process, culture, Technology, scientific management, but a dynamic, visionary leader. How would you respond if someone said you put too much emphasis on leadership?

Teach: Too much emphasis on leadership—how is that possible? Seriously, what are you trying to say - I put too much emphasis on leadership and not enough emphasis on processes, structures, institutions?

Lan Liu: Henry Mintzberg once wrote an article about Lou Gersterner turning things around at IBM. He asked: Is it just the credit of one person? Without the contributions of others at IBM? He is critiquing the myth of charismatic leadership. His point is that you can't fully credit Gerstner for IBM's resurgence.

Teach: As you can tell from my work, I believe in leaders at every level. There must be one person at the highest level, the greatest leader and teacher. What I've been advocating is developing thousands of people as leaders in an organization, but it's not going to happen without that leader at the top.

Mintzberg has launched an anti-leadership movement. And Jim Collins, who also has some anti-leadership views. This does not correspond to reality. In Welch's case, most of his time and energy is spent developing leaders at every level. Crotonville is about making everyone—young people fresh out of school, those who are first-time leaders—as leaders, and many CEOs at every level. That's what AG Lafley did at Procter & Gamble.

None of this would be possible without that leader at the top of the organization. But just because someone is at the top of the organization doesn't mean there's an autocratic, single leader. Gerstner mobilized thousands of others, and this is my answer.

Liu Lan: You once said in an interview: "Bottom-up is nonsense."

Titch: Absolutely. I haven't seen it in my life, it doesn't exist. Paradoxically, the upper layer must first mobilize the lower layer in order to have a bottom-up idea. In order to go from bottom to top, you have to go from top to bottom first.

Leadership is teaching

Liu Lan: I think most people would instinctively agree that leaders should be learners. You say leaders should be teachers. You probably have three books on the subject. Can you briefly explain why?

Teach: I used to say, half-jokingly, half-seriously, that learning can be selfish and not so noble. Peter Senge used to build a learning organization at DEC (Digital Equipment Company), and DEC died.

Learning must enhance organizational performance. Learners must turn learning into teaching after learning, and teaching is for the better of everyone. Learning is necessary, but not enough. What I'm talking about teaching is not one-way command and control, but creating a virtuous cycle of teaching.

Liu Lan: People would probably agree that the leader should be the teacher, or that the teacher should be one of the roles of the leader. What you are actually claiming is this: the teacher is the primary role of the leader. Is it right?

Titch: The more you get to the top, the more important it is, because if you don't, you won't be able to do your job well. At GE, Jeff Immelt doesn't make airplane engines or anything, but invests in the organization's human capital. He is the greatest teacher. Every day, his job is to help organizations become smarter and more vibrant.

One of the amazing things Immelt has done is not only invested billions of dollars in R&D, but built a "little Crotonville" in the R&D center, requiring all business leaders People and their teams, go there four times a year to communicate with scientists. To me, he is such a role model: build a stage where leaders become teachers and build a virtuous cycle of teaching throughout the organization.

Liu Lan: You advocate teaching organizations, and Peter Senge advocates learning organizations.

Titch: So DEC died, and that was an example of a learning organization.

Liu Lan: But everyone knows the term organizational learning, and the term organizational teaching you advocate is not widely known.

Titch: Yeah, that's what I do every day. At Shell, 70,000 people are being taught by their leaders, at Ford there are 40,000 people, and at ATMI, a small high-tech company, and at Hewlett-Packard. But 90% of companies don't.

Liu Lan: Later, you also added learning to the teaching organization. You said in your later book The Leadership Cycle that The Leadership Engine misses a point: Teachers learn too.

Titch: Exactly. Compaq's Eckhard Pfeiffer is a one-way command-and-control leader, so he's never been able to learn from the leadership cycle. I realized: oh, I left that out. If you are an authoritarian teacher, you will eventually fail. In today's world, you need to learn from the people below the organization. You are absolutely right.

Liu Lan: So it should be a learning organization plus a teaching organization, right?

Titch: Yes. I prefer to say this: The learning organization is the foundation of being a teaching organization. You engage in continuous learning and then have the responsibility to teach others, teaching a virtuous cycle of teaching.

The Benchmark of Leaders

Liu Lan: Jack Welch is a controversial figure. Fortune once had a cover story with the words: "Sorry Jack, your rules are out of date!" And you said: Welch and Alfred Sloan were Two business leaders most worthy of being remembered and respected in the 21st century.

Teach: That Fortune article was a bunch of nonsense. What it calls the new leadership style is actually the Welch style of leadership. It makes up a Welch in the form of a "strong man", which is nonsense. It imposed the old command-and-control leadership on Welch, which Welch never was.

Welch initiated the "Crowd-and-Help" project, which involved thousands of people at every level in thousands of factories. He was always teaching and inspiring others in Crotonville. That article was a joke.

Liu Lan: What do Welch and Sloan have in common?

Titch: They both made history in their respective eras. Sloan is the quintessential manager, creating multi-divisional organizations that implement creative scientific management in a positive sense.

But change is like a pendulum, and the solution at one point becomes the next problem. GM eventually became a model of bureaucracy, not management. The same goes for General Electric, which Welch inherited.

Welch really unleashed the human element of the organization, removing as much as he could—though never completely—bureaucracy and unleashing leadership at all levels of the organization. Sloan was the representative of his time, and Welch was the representative of his time.

Leadership failures

Liu Lan: You also mention and praise other leaders in your book. I have questions about some of them. Take Dick Brown, the former CEO of EDS, who was later fired. Or Bob Nardelli, the former CEO of Home Depot, who was also fired. What do you think of these two people?

Titch: I know them well. Brown is a good man. He's not a great manager, he doesn't pay attention to details.

Liu Lan: You mean he's a great leader, but not a great manager?

Teach: I think to be a great leader, you have to be a great manager. Brown had some elements of leadership, but lacked the necessary cornerstones, so things got out of hand.

Nardelli's situation is different. He's a very tough manager, like Welch. But Welch has the ability to develop people, and Nardelli is just a hammer. That's why he didn't fight at GE because the organization was strong enough to accommodate some very tough leaders while remaining resilient. He wanted radical change when he was CEO of Home Depot, and he pushed hard. I think he got out of the human side of the organization, so we saw what happened afterward.

Liu Lan: By the way, Welch wrote in his autobiography: When he notified the two candidates who failed to take his class of his final decision, one of them lost his popularity. I guess it was Nardelli.

Titch: That's Nardelli. I am familiar with these people. Jim McNerney said: "I'd be happy if I could, but life goes on and I have a lot of opportunities. When I saw Nardelli three years later, he was still angry: Why not choose me?

Lan Liu: The other person I have questions about is Larry Bossidy. He is the former CEO of Honeywell. But after he left, Honeywell immediately underperformed, and he had to play again. That doesn't seem like a hallmark of a great leader, does it?

Teach: I know Bossidy very well. He didn't build a deep enough leadership pipeline at Honeywell. Could he do better at developing leaders? Maybe. But he's only been there 10 years, and building a leadership pipeline takes many years.

By the way, when Larry came back out, the solution was to bring in another GE guy, David Cote, as CEO. Kurt was built on GE's leadership pipeline.

Indeed, the fact is that Larry did not develop a CEO successor at Honeywell. Does he develop leaders? right. Did he run many leadership programs at Honeywell? Have. Why didn't he end up with an internal successor? I am not sure. Maybe he doesn't have enough time. Maybe he made some mistakes. The fact is that Kurt came airborne.

Developing leaders

Liu Lan: You just said that 10 years is not enough to build a leadership pipeline.

Titch: Yes. When I work with organizations and build leadership pipelines, I talk about the journey it takes to go from a 22-year-old fresh out of college to a future CEO: from individual contributor to first-time leadership role, to Functional leaders, to the person in charge of a functional department, to the person in charge of a business.

Liu Lan: It will take about 20 years.

Titch: Yes.

Liu Lan: This is not good news for Chinese companies. China's economy is growing rapidly and in many cases it is easier to make money, so Chinese companies don't make the effort to develop leaders. Even in a bad economy, if you tell them it takes 20 years to develop leaders, they'll just be dumbfounded.

Titch: I'll tell you an interesting example. We're helping an organization in Dubai grow from a few thousand employees to 120,000 employees in the next three years. Instead of hiring airborne troops from outside, it decided to build a leadership pipeline. This is more challenging than the situation in China.

There is no easy answer in this matter. Senior leaders must invest more time and energy. Fast enough or not, you have to have a start.

Liu Lan: You advocate that the CEO should be the biggest teacher.

Titch: Absolutely, or it won't work.

Liu Lan: What if the CEO is not good at teaching? Maybe he has some teachable points, but the specific teaching still requires skill.

Teach: Leaders who genuinely want to develop people by teaching others, we can teach them skills. Will they be world-class teachers? Will not be, nor need to be.

The example of Welch

Liu Lan: I once wrote an article called "What to Learn from Welch" (see the book "10 Truths of Management"). China's CEOs are learning the wrong thing from Welch, the article said. They learn "number one and two", learn forced ranking, learn Six Sigma. However, the most important thing to learn is to develop leaders in the organization. You had firsthand observations of how Welch led GE and concluded that he was a world-class teacher. Can you be more specific?

Teach: He understood from day one that the level of organizational success depends on how many leaders you have and are fully committed to. We are all products of our own circumstances. Welch grew up in a working-class family. As he was growing up, he was always building teams. In middle school, he was the captain of the hockey team. His worldview is that you win by building a team, developing a team and investing in it.

He took over General Electric, a huge bureaucracy. At the time, it seemed paradoxical that he was streamlining the organization while investing in developing future leaders. In one example, Welch was laying off workers while spending $45 million to build a training center in Crotonville. People ask: How do you explain it? Welch's answer: That's for tomorrow, for our leaders in the 21st century. We must not do things to survive, but also invest in the future. This is classic Welch. He took a tough line on the one hand, and invested heavily in developing people in Crotonville on the other. It turned out he was right.

Liu Lan: You said that when you were in charge of Crotonville, Welch lectured every two weeks without interruption. This can be impressive.

Teach: As far as I know, only former PepsiCo CEO Roger Enrico is better. He devotes more time and chairs projects for longer time periods. I showed Welch the Fortune story about Enrico and joked to him: You think you are, and in fact Roger is the real Olympian. He took the article and distributed it within GE, saying: You're right, we should do more teaching.

Liu Lan: Over the years, you have worked with many leaders and observed them closely. Do you still think Welch is the most outstanding of them all?

Titch: Absolutely. A few others are good too - Jorma Ollila of Nokia, Roger Enrico, David Novak of Yum, McNerney, and Mark of Hewlett-Packard Mark Hurd will also prove himself to be one of them. But none of them were quite like Sloan — who set the standard in that era.

Apparently, Welch also set the standard. He manages one of the most complex companies in the world, has impacted many different industries, and developed more leaders than anyone else. There were some people who didn't make it, like Nardelli, who got another chance at Chrysler. Kurt was at Honeywell, McInerney was at Boeing shortly after Steve Bennett stepped down from Intuit... Probably 25 to 30 ex-GE managers People are running big companies. No one has such a record. It wasn't there before, and it's here now, and that's because Welch is focused on leadership.

Liu Lan: This may be an argument for other companies not developing leaders: we can poach people from GE or Pepsi.

Titch: I think Welch would answer this: It's the shape of a pyramid. I will train as many athletes as possible, but only send three to the Olympics. However, that doesn't mean I'll stop building pipelines. If I want to win the Olympics, I have to have more and better athletes, even if some of them end up going somewhere else.