The Ideal Company

"Whosoever desires constant success must change with the times." ~ Nicolo Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy

What I have come to believe is that the "ideal" company looks forward and reinvents itself as necessary '" It remains focused on its mission and core values and sets goals (planning) congruent with that mission and those values. It structures itself to best achieve those organizational goals (organizing). It leads by demonstrating the value of the goals to organization-members. Management decisions are made on the basis of performance toward those goals and the measuring of the results (controlling). The ideal company possesses a solid understanding of the planning, organizing, and controlling functions, and allows managers to lead (Jones-George-Hill, 2003). Over time, the people who lead and comprise the organization build a culture around these values to reinforce them.

Most important to the success of the organization is the leadership of those at the helm of the organization. How those managers lead the organization toward that overarching mission makes the difference in the success of the organization. Leadership is a personal enterprise, based on the leaders' individual beliefs '" success or failure of the leaders' ability to move people to the goals of the organization is a personal judgment (Kouzes, 2003). Leadership matters to getting the work of the organization done.

"Leadership is personal. It's not about the corporation, the community, or the country. It's about you. If people don't believe in the messenger, they won't believe the message. If people don't believe in you, they won't believe in what you say. And if it's about you, then it's about your beliefs, your values, your principles." (Kouzes, 2003)

Organizations are collections of people working in coordinated effort to achieve a goal. Leaders are those people who take the organizational mission, transform that mission into a goal, create the structure to support the achievement of the goal, and bring those collections of people together to coordinate their efforts most likely to result in efficient, effective performance toward that goal.

The essence of leadership then is a mission-driven, goal-orientation focused on creating value for the company. How a leader creates this value, delivers the goal-expectations and conforms to the mission of the company is through the motivation, coordination and energizing of the organizational-members to achieve the organizational goals which then has measurable results.

The ideal company has the right goals and strategy '" the "vision" '" in place. It knows how people will best work together to achieve those goals. It creates a motivational environment to energize organization-members to achieve the goals. It measures the results of the organizational activity and reevaluates. While Steve Jobs was on his last medical leave of absence from his position at Apple, Inc., Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook made the following statement at a January, 2009 press conference. I share it here to personify a company which has the right balance of planning, organizing, leading, and controlling:

Figure 1 We believe that we are on the face of the earth to make great products and that's not changing. We are constantly focusing on innovating. We believe in the simple not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution. We believe in saying no to thousands of projects, so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us. We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot. And frankly, we don't settle for anything less than excellence in every group in the company, and we have the self-honesty to admit when we're wrong and the courage to change. And I think regardless of who is in what job those values are so embedded in this company that Apple will do extremely well. (Lashinsky, 2009)

This is a remarkable statement inasmuch as Cook is not generally seen as the inspirational leader of the organization, but is a manager whose personal goals are in-line with those of the organization. Had Steve Jobs been the person uttering this statement, it could be seen as one leader communicating a vision. Tim Cook making this statement is demonstrative of the depth of Apple's commitment to excellence and embodies the totality of traits of the ideal company. It has become part of the DNA of the organization. It demonstrates a clear commitment to having selected for core values and competencies. For those counting there are 13 "wes" and 3 "us/ours" represented in that 165-word quote. This is clearly the engrained culture of the company, and that the leadership have been chosen for their belief in these values.

In the ideal company then, a managers' best skill-set are the skills associated with all of these traits, regardless of the role that manager has within the organization. As we witnessed in the first session, a "leading" skill set will serve to motivate the other members of the organization to energize and coordinate the achievement of the organizational goals, but if the planning of those goals are flawed and without the reassessment served by the controlling function, the leadership is wasted on highly effective execution of a poor set of organizational goals. In the absence of a leader who has the finely honed skill-set to encompassing all of these skills, the best skill-set is the managers' self-awareness and willingness to surround herself with highly skilled others, and the ability to harness those skills while building the capacity of those with whom she associates and maintaining self-awareness by accepting the feedback of those others.

Niccolo Machiavelli notes in The Prince, that the intelligence and discernment of a leader can be seen in the people who surround that leader.

A running theme within the literature of effective leadership is self-awareness. A leader who accepts feedback and listens models behaviors for the entire organization, and creates a self-aware organization which understands its own strengths and weaknesses. (Musselwhite, 2007). The self-aware leader admits mistakes and acknowledges when he/she does not have the answer. This self-awareness leads directly to the credibility Kouzes and Posner discuss.

A manager in this ideal company must have a vision of what is success and must know what constitutes success. This manager must be informed as to what is going on in the external environment, what is happening in the task environment, and what is happening in the organization (Jones-George-Hill, 2003). A successful manager in this company shares the mission and goals of the organization. Again, Machiavelli shares wisdom on this subject when he advises a leader to know the territory she rules especially the nature of the land.

We hear the same advice, implemented in slightly different form, from Tom Peters (2010) who talks about "MBWA" '" management by walking around '" the practice institutionalized by Hewlett Packard of consciously going to where people were doing the work and of making oneself available, and how important it is to building the relationships that make the organization run. The class as a whole saw how effective the practice is through our research on Southwest Airlines. Machiavelli may have been one of the first to articulate the importance of knowing the territory, but it is no less true in twenty-first century business leadership.

To be an effective leader '" to be that manager that can push forward the mission, goals, organization '" one must be, above all else, credible. Kouzes and Posner (2003) state that leadership is in fact a relationship between constituents and leaders based on mutual needs and interests. In other words, the job of leader is to garner the buy in for the message through personal demonstration of its importance. The most frequently mentioned attributes of effective leaders: Personal integrity, forward looking, inspiring, competent.

The ideal company, then, is a mission-driven organization, comprised of members who believe in the mission and lead by managers who articulate goals, organize the company, fully engage organization-members, and re-assess the work which, over-time, becomes ingrained into the culture of the company.

Works Cited

Jones-George-Hill. (2003). Contemporary Management, 2/e. In L. Zivic, Management. Fitchburg: McGraw-Hill/Primus.

Kouzes, J. &. (2003). Credibility: How Leaders Gain and Lose It, Why People Demand It, Revised Edition. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

Lashinsky, A. (2009, January 22). The Cook Doctrine at Apple. Retrieved February 17, 2011, from Go West: CNN Money.com:http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/01/22/the-cook-doctrine-at-apple/

Machiavell, N. (2003). The Prince. New York: Bantam Books.

Musselwhite, C. (2007, October 1). Self Awareness and the Effective Leader. Retrieved February 16, 2011, from Inc.com: http://www.inc.com/resources/leadership/articles/20071001/musselwhite.html

Peters, T. (2010). The Little Big Things: 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence. New York: Harper Studio