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From the issue dated October 19, 2001
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When the Buck Stops, Think ContrarilyBy STEVEN B. SAMPLEEvery day, we each make dozens, if not hundreds, of decisions -- especially if we are in positions of authority or leadership. Indeed, one of the tests of our importance is whether anyone is affected by, or cares about, the decisions we make. Decision making can be fun, exhilarating, an ego trip, a tremendous burden, agonizing, scary as hell -- and sometimes all of those things at once. The vast majority of us have been brought up with a clean-plate-and-tidy-desk mentality: That is, never put off to tomorrow a decision you can make today. This bit of conventional wisdom may be good counsel for managers and bureaucrats, but it's terrible advice for leaders. My decades as a senior leader at three public and private research universities, and my experiences as a member of 14 corporate boards, have convinced me that much of what passes for good advice about decision making is naive and shortsighted. However, teaching a course on leadership with the noted management expert Warren Bennis over the past six years has given me hope, as we've seen bright young people learn and apply contrarian principles of decision making. A few such principles would include: * Thinking gray. Most people are binary and instant in their judgments: They immediately categorize things as good or bad, true or false, black or white, friend or foe. A truly effective leader, however, needs to be able to see the shades of gray inherent in a situation. Thinking gray is an uncommon characteristic, but it is one of the most important skills that we can acquire. Its essence is this: Don't form an opinion about an important matter until you've heard all the relevant facts and arguments, or until circumstances force you to form an opinion without recourse to all the facts (which happens occasionally, but much less frequently than one might imagine). F. Scott Fitzgerald once described something similar to thinking gray when he observed that the test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two opposing thoughts at the same time while still retaining the ability to function. Generally the only time that the average person is instructed to think gray is when he is called to serve on a jury in a court of law, which may be one reason so many people regard jury duty as a colossal pain. After all, thinking gray is not a natural act, especially for people who see themselves as leaders. A binary approach to thinking may in fact be a successful strategy for some leaders, especially if they must deal daily with fight-or-flight situations. But even many of the world's most noted military leaders have been adroit at thinking gray on the battlefield. Napoleon, Washington, and Rommel all knew the value of suspending judgment about important matters, and especially about the validity of incoming intelligence, until the last possible moment. There are three very real dangers associated with binary thinking. One is that the leader forms opinions before it is necessary to do so, and in the process closes his mind to facts and arguments that may subsequently come to his attention. The second danger is flip-flopping. Many failed leaders have tended to believe the last thing they heard from the last person they talked to, thereby putting themselves and their followers through contortions both unnecessary and counterproductive. The third danger relates to an observation by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, to the effect that people tend to believe that which they sense is strongly believed by others. A well-developed ability to think gray is the best defense a leader can have against this kind of assault on his intellectual independence. Nietzsche's point was beautifully illustrated by an experiment fashioned by the psychologist Solomon Asch a half-century ago and repeated by others many times since then. In the experiment, eight subjects, supposedly chosen at random, were brought together in a room and shown a series of cards on which were printed four vertical lines. Each subject was asked in turn to identify which one of the three lines on the right side of the card was the same length as the line on the left side of the card. The experiment was arranged so that seven of the eight "subjects" were in fact ringers, who, with conviction and sincerity, would each identify the same one of the right-hand lines as being equal in length to the left-hand line -- when in fact it was not. The one true subject in this experiment was then faced with either going along with the judgment of the group and declaring as true something he knew to be false, or taking a position at odds with the consensus opinion of his peers. Roughly three-quarters of the subjects went against their better judgment and joined in with the false consensus at least once. Granted, decisions about clothes, food, popular music, and so forth are usually made in an off-the-cuff binary way, and that's perfectly fine. However, such ordinary and routine types of decisions offer a wonderful chance to develop the discipline of thinking gray. You don't have to decide right away whether you like a person you've just met, or whether you might eventually be able to appreciate a new food you've just tried, or whether you should see a particular movie. A great benefit of this exercise is that, when a truly important leadership issue surfaces, you will have had some practice in thinking gray. * Listening gray. Listening gray allows the leader to absorb stories, reports, complaints, posturings, accusations, extravagant claims, and prejudices without immediately offering a definitive response. Just as you can think gray without ever needing to reach a conclusion, you can listen gray without ever needing to deliver an answer. Occasionally someone approaches me to complain -- in person, or by letter, fax, or e-mail -- about an experience or interaction he had with some of our staff members or students that left him angry or dissatisfied. I might quickly send a letter saying, "Mr. Smith, the kind of behavior you described in your recent letter to me is totally unacceptable here at USC. I have asked Senior Vice President Jones to look into the matter; she will report her findings and actions directly to you and to me within 10 days." What I don't say is, "Mr. Smith, what happened to you is terrible," because I do not in fact know what happened to him, and I won't be in a position to form a judgment on that question until the other side, or sides, of the story have been heard. The discipline here is to not be dismissive or unresponsive on the one hand, or rush to judgment on the other. My reply is sympathetic and indicates that Mr. Smith's values and mine are in close harmony. But my response also makes it clear that I am not necessarily accepting his rendition of what happened. After I assure the complaining party that I've taken notice of his concerns, I send a note to the appropriate senior officer asking her to look into it. I don't send her a searing message telling her to fix the problem; I simply say something like, "Mr. Smith claims to have been mistreated by some of our students. I have no idea if his claims are true, but if they are, please tell me what you are going to do about it." Another aspect of listening gray is that a leader shouldn't make up his mind about people's credibility unless and until he has to. Many failed leaders felt they had to decide right away whether someone was worth listening to. They tended to write off apparent fools, only to find that inarticulate people sometimes have the most valuable things to say. Various observers have said that Eckhard Pfeiffer's tenure as chief executive officer of Compaq ended abruptly in significant part because of his tendency to divide people into an "A-list," to whom he listened, and a "B-list" to whom he paid little or no attention. When he set the company on course to become a leader in e-business, his inability to hear the good ideas of B-list people resulted in a loss of direction and confidence that, in turn, resulted in his startlingly swift fall from grace. * Procrastinating artfully. A bit of artful procrastination -- for example, never making a decision today that can reasonably be put off to tomorrow -- can serve a leader extremely well. Almost all sophisticated leaders are artful procrastinators to a greater or lesser extent, but Harry Truman personified this trait. Whenever a staff member would come to him with a problem or opportunity requiring a presidential decision, the first thing Truman would ask was, "How much time do I have?" Truman well understood that the timing of a decision could be as important as the decision itself. A long lead time opened the door for extensive consultation and discussion; a very short lead time meant the president could look only inside his own soul, and then just briefly, for an answer that might affect millions of people. Truman also had to sharply question, and sometimes even bully, a subordinate to learn how much time was really available. That's because almost every subordinate who comes to a leader for a decision prefers to have the decision made quickly. First, a quick decision allows the subordinate to get on with his business and not waste his time waiting around for the leader to make up his mind. That can and should be an important factor in the leader's thinking, but it should never be allowed to control the timing of a decision. Second, every subordinate knows that if he comes to the leader with a question and can get a quick decision, the chances are fairly high that the decision will be to the subordinate's liking; after all, the subordinate will probably be the only person whom the leader will consult on the matter. But one must recognize the difference between artful and cowardly procrastination. It is one thing for a leader to delegate a decision to a lieutenant, but an entirely different -- and unacceptable -- thing for him to surrender a decision to fate or to his adversaries. General George McClellan is a wonderful example of a cowardly procrastinator. Named by Lincoln to command the Army of the Potomac in 1861, McClellan wasted numerous opportunities to seriously engage and perhaps even defeat the Confederate forces. As the historian Garry Wills observed, "For McClellan, the doctrine of predominant numbers was a principle of paralysis. He felt he never had enough troops, well enough trained or equipped." After McClellan repeatedly squandered the North's military advantage over the South, Lincoln sacked him. * Pinpointing the locus of authority. Making a good decision is hard, time-consuming work, and no leader can make many good decisions in a month's time, much less in a day or a week. So he needs to carefully reserve for himself only the most important decisions, and cheerfully delegate the rest. Identifying the really crucial decisions is sometimes referred to as distinguishing between the urgent and the important, which sounds easy in theory but isn't in practice; sometimes the most important decisions have to do with apparent trivia. At some point back in the 1960s, when public morals were considerably more stringent than they are today, a major flap occurred at a Midwestern university over the publication by one of its professors of a sexually explicit poem. The president of the university rightly understood that this ostensible tempest in a teapot in fact posed a major threat to both academic freedom and the university's budget. The president therefore chose to invest an enormous amount of his personal time in making all decisions concerning the controversy. However, many aspiring leaders get chewed up by overreaching the bounds of their jurisdiction. They make brilliant decisions about matters that lie within the domain of some other leader or official, and in the process squander a great deal of their credibility and legitimacy. In the late 1980s, when I was president of the State University of New York at Buffalo, our law-school faculty decided to ban representatives of the military's Judge Advocate General Corps from recruiting in the law-school building because of the federal government's policy prohibiting homosexuals from serving in the armed forces. The matter was quickly appealed to me. Rather than jump precipitously into the hornet's nest of gay people in the military, I decided first to find out who actually had the authority to ban various persons from using a particular university building. Was it the faculty for which that building was home? The president? The SUNY at Buffalo Governing Council? The chancellor of the SUNY System? The SUNY System Board of Trustees? Eventually everyone, including even the law-school faculty, agreed that the authority to prohibit certain groups from using university facilities lay exclusively with the president. The process of pinpointing the locus of authority automatically transformed the law faculty's action from an actual banning of the JAG corps to a simple recommendation to the president that the JAG corps should be banned. That transformation in turn changed the nature of the decision I had to make, because in academic circles it is one thing for a university president to decline to approve a faculty recommendation, and quite another for him to overturn a decision which faculty members feel is legitimately theirs to make. The foregoing example is instructive as to why a leader should avoid, whenever possible, engaging in a two-front war when it comes to decision making -- that is, quarreling simultaneously over who has the authority to make a particular decision and what the decision should be. Presidents John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon fought two battles at once with respect to Vietnam -- the actual shooting war in Southeast Asia, and the political war at home over whether the president had the authority to be fighting the North Vietnamese in the first place. As a consequence, none of the three was able to either win the war or honorably disengage. By contrast, President George Bush the elder avoided a two-front war -- one with bullets, the other political -- by first laying out the pros and cons of the war in the Persian Gulf for the American people, and then asking Congress to vote on the matter. * Ignoring sunk costs. How often have we heard the sad story of a compulsive gambler who feels he must continue to bet in order to "win back his losses"? Those of us who are not compulsive gamblers may smile patronizingly at the scenario. But conventional human behavior in this regard tends to be highly irrational. Consider the chief executive officer who has spent $100-million of his company's capital to acquire an asset that has proved to be very unprofitable, and who now has an opportunity to sell this asset to someone else for $25-million. Rationally the executive should sell, unless he genuinely believes the asset is worth more than $25-million or will soon appreciate in value. But time and again, people in this position have retained the bad asset in order to avoid having to admit to themselves -- and to their boards and shareholders -- that their initial investment was a mistake. The same foolish tendency to permit sunk costs to influence a leader's decisions can manifest itself in many other ways -- from his being unwilling to dismiss a subordinate whom he appointed and who is clearly not working out, to his continuing to attack an enemy's impregnable position after he has squandered several thousand troops in the attempt. * Simply showing the flag. On occasion, a leader should appear to be making decisions when in fact he is not. In late April 1992, Los Angeles became engulfed in a bloody riot. The rioters left the University of Southern California untouched, but at the height of the disturbances we fully expected to suffer widespread arson, looting, beatings, and even murder. What was the president's role during the three days of rioting? I walked around and showed the flag, so to speak. I shook hands, chatted with students and staff members, asked questions, listened to people tell their stories, and gave out copious compliments and reassurances. Everyone thought I was in charge, making 17 decisions a minute, but I really wasn't. Instead, all the decisions were being made by people who had been trained for months in the handling of an earthquake or other catastrophic emergency. Was my presence on campus useful? Yes, very. The fact that the president was highly visible night and day gave everyone a sense of security, which probably helped reduce panic and improve cooperation among our students and staff members. But in terms of decision making, I had delegated everything to lieutenants while taking full responsibility for whatever might go wrong. Beyond all those elements of decision making, you can't ignore chance -- or, more accurately, probabilities. Most wouldbe leaders are horrified to think of decision making as a form of gambling, but alas, such amateurs delude themselves. As Machiavelli noted in The Prince, slightly more than half of the outcome of any bold undertaking is due to luck. Finally, when making really important decisions, a contrarian leader listens carefully to his conscience or, if he is religious, to his God. The operative word here is "listens." When most people try to carry on a conversation with their inner voice, they wind up doing all the talking. That's because we naturally fear that inner voice -- we're afraid it might tell us something we don't want to hear. Nonetheless, listening carefully to that voice for 20 minutes or so through contemplative prayer or silent meditation is often a key factor in making good decisions in the long run. Decision making calls on all the traits that I've described, and weaving them all together is an art in itself. When it is done well, the result is a powerful tool for effective leadership. Steven B. Sample is president of the University of Southern California and a former president of the State University of New York at Buffalo. This article is adapted from his book The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership, published this month by Jossey-Bass/Wiley. ©2001 by Steven B. Sample. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B11
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Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education