The book “The New Global Leaders” talks about three famous European Leaders viz., Richard Branson, founder of Virgin group, Percy Barnevik, the designer of ASEAN and Brown Boveri merger and David Simon of British Petroleum. The book presents Branson as a builder who created an organization named Virgin from scratch. Barnevik is presented as great integrator who created the ultimate global organization ABB. Simon is a transformer who cured the ailing BP Company by correcting the structure of the organization.
All though all three of these leaders have apparently quite different personalities and unique styles of operations, the underlying theme of their working has been always the same – giving importance to people more than the business profit, show tolerance to failures and so on.
The major leadership qualities displayed by all these leaders are:
- charismatic
- agents of change
- action oriented
- restless and energetic
- articulate their vision
- build alliances and connect with people
Concepts – improving organizational effectiveness:
This book will help in many ways the existing and upcoming leaders and organizations in becoming more effective by learning various ways displayed by these leaders:
From Branson we can learn:
- Being creative, thinking differently, out of box thinking, ready to take risk.
- Delegating the responsibilities to sub groups thus forming the company as a federation of groups
- Open communication, easy access to the employees. Employees can contact Branson directly with ideas and problems
- Open mindedness to criticism
From Barnevik we can learn:
- Being well prepared for the task to be done, doing thorough research before coming to conclusions on how to solve a problem.
- Meeting customer needs
- Taking action – it is better to be roughly right. Need not analyze till the last detail. In the process we may loose opportunities…
- Respecting ethic
- cooperating – Managers need to sort out any issues laterally instead of reaching out to vertical ( higher ) management, unless the matter is of common good for the organization. Barnevik used to fire fighting managers instead of supporting one of them. The lesson is that people should always help each other and solve the problems instead of looking for individual gains.
- Prefers work satisfaction in employees to making money
- Humility
From David Simon we can learn:
1. Reaching out to people at all levels , being friendly and warm
2. Listening - gathering the perspectives of various people.
3. Define the target and measure the progress
4. Understanding the culture and adopting himself to the needs.
The Strategic business planning techniques promoted by these leaders are:
- Be lean and effective: cut down the excessive resources if needed.
- Acquire businesses to expand across the globe.
- Barnevik acquired various companies spread across
- Branson however differed by preferring organic growth to acquisition. The Virgin group thus ventured into various innovative businesses starting from selling records to running a transatlantic airline. Employ complementary colleagues – Branson had strong executives such as Draper, Powell; Barnevik picked his own group when he joined ASEAN, by inviting many of his old colleagues from his previous job at Sandvik. Simon got Browne to his help as CEO who looks into the internal matters while he concentrates on the external matters as chairman of the BP Company.
- Culture tolerance – Simon proved this by being successful with the conservative culture of the
- Removing bureaucracy and decentralizing: flat structures – lateral communication rather than vertical. Operational autonomy. ABB is made up of 5000 profit centers; Branson’s Virgin consists of a number of small, autonomous units run by self managed teams.
- Build communication - make people feel special, encourage them to be original, motivate them to perform well, reward excellence.
- Gaining power by sharing power - empowers people, create sense of ownership.
- Fostering shared values.
- Continuous transformation and change.
- Staying on top of technology and focusing on customer needs.
- Speed – act fast and respond fast to customers, employees and any situation.
In addition to these, these global leaders also exhibited ‘social responsibility’ by creating jobs, responding to social causes like AIDS and environmental issues.
All these leaders could command respect and loyalty by not being autocratic, yet authoritative thus inspiring confidence in people. People enjoy working with them always.
A leader is the one who develops people, show them direction, and motivate them to excel who in turn become leaders in the process. And so did Branson, Barnevik and Simon.
Summary:
Overall the book makes a good reading. The narrative is interesting and informative.
The questions framed in the personal interview sounded repetitive since the same points were already narrated in the main case study.
The book is divided into three sections each discussing one global leader. The first two parts were well written giving the details of the career graphs of the leaders, their crucial points in their endeavors and their personal profile too. Where as the part three on David Simon of BP was more about the crisis in BP during the transformation period, failure of Simon’s predecessor Robert Horton and then David Simon’s takeover as CEO of BP.
David Simon’s early career and critical times which proved his leadership style were not detailed as was done in the previous parts on Richard Branson and Percy Barnevik.
