• Bill Clinton - by satellite for a 30 minute speech & 60 minutes Q&A;
• Allan Leighton - Chairman Royal Mail & former CEO Walmart Europe; 
• Mikhail Gorbachev - in Russian with simultaneous translation! 
• Lou Gerstner - on turning around IBM.

• Clayton Christensen - on disruptive innovation;
• Madeleine Albright - former US Secretary of State;
• Sir Ranulph Fiennes - the world's greatest living explorer.

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Notes from Leaders in London.

What do you stand for? 

This was the unifying theme presented by the MC for the two days of the conference.  I found it useful to think about this in two pieces?

Firstly, the ‘what’.  Each of the high profile leaders really had an essence that was easily possible to characterise, even before they’d finished speaking.  For example, (and these are my opinions of course – no one actually said this) Bill Clinton stood for ‘Hope – hope for a better world through collaboration’, Allan Leighton (the head of the British Royal Post Office) stood for ‘Getting the Job Done Inclusively’, Lou Gerstner stood for ‘Driving Change by Understanding the Motivating Culture of the people involved’.  I couldn’t help but hear such clarity and be slightly disappointed that I couldn’t quickly articulate something equally noble or succinct for myself.  Even at the end of Day One I promised myself that I would come up with something.  You should hold me to that.      

The second piece of ‘What do you stand for?’ is the ‘standing for’.   And this was very powerful too.  Every one of the leaders whether quiet or outspoken made it very clear that leadership is a choice – a very active choice – and one must choose to be stand up and counted.  It’s fine if you don’t want to be a leader – lots of people aren’t.  But if you are in a position of management, then you can’t presume that’s the same as leadership.  The former is a title conveyed by promotion - deserved or not.  The latter is something that is actively pursued – it takes energy, drive and belief – not only for oneself, but having energy, drive and belief sufficient for the team as well.

There are plenty of text books that give bullet points of leadership, and indeed my summary below  of the key points from each speaker may end up parodying that, but in the interests of keeping it simple (one of those many bullets below)...If you want to be a leader…Work out what you stand for and actively choose to lead.

What I’m going to cover…

For me the entire event was filled with thought provoking moments, but I’m not confident in my ability to convey them with sufficient narrative force to keep you reading if I go through it all in detail (phew!).   Instead I’ll go into detail about two of the speakers – Bill Clinton on Day One and Professor Clayton Christensen from Day Two – and then try to give a quick summary of the learnings from the other speakers.

The framework I’m going to use is that of Jim Collins in his book 'Good to Great'  – specifically breaking Leadership broadly into the buckets of Connection and Conviction.

Bill Clinton – Connection, Connection, Connection.

I’ll be honest – I always thought Bill Clinton was intelligent – I mean the guy was a Rhodes Scholar and they don’t tend to give that title to just anyone, but I’d always found him to be a bit too slick – a bit too polished to be credible – I didn’t know if I could trust him.  I’d always heard about this magical ability to connect with each and every person as though they were the only person in the room, but it’s hard to really see that in a ten second sound bite on the evening news.   It’s also quite possible that no longer having the pressures of public office, being a little older and having gone through some health challenges have made him more mellow and wiser.   Whatever the reason, I think everyone at the conference, regardless of what they thought about Bill Clinton before his session, walked away from it profoundly touched and feeling they had just witnessed something undeniably great.

The format was a thirty minute talk followed by sixty minutes of Q&A.  It was all by satellite, but in memory it seems he was in the room with us.

There is still no doubt he is bright – the guy is super bright beyond belief and later on Day Two Madeleine Albright told us he used to do crosswords while being briefed on matters of state but still absorb everything brilliantly (I’d actually struggle with even just one of those – although in my defence she didn’t say if he usually got the crossword right) - but at the end of the day it was about his ability to connect with people and his honest empathy for them that was the perhaps obvious insight.  There is no one in the world who could now convince me that Bill Clinton’s empathy is faked – even though before hand there was probably no one in the world who could have convinced me it was genuine.

This was probably best exhibited when he did something very unexpected.  Earlier in the day a question had been asked of Mikhail Gorbachev by a very vocal, long winded and hard to understand lawyer from Italy.  She spoke in a loud, accusative tone that had us all looking at our feet and hoping someone would take the microphone away from her, and to this day most of us still don’t know what she was going on about, but I’m sure we all momentarily wondered if it would require some type of SWAT team to prise the microphone from her hand and remove her from the room.

To our surprise, she managed to get the microphone again and lambasted Clinton for about 45 seconds to booing from the crowd.  Clinton on the other end of a satellite delay was understandably confused.  The situation was solved when her mike was turned off and someone else asked a question which was then repeated for Clinton and order was restored.

Maybe twenty minutes later when there was a momentary lull in questioning – Clinton interrupted the MC to say “I want to go back and address the question from the lady that seemed to frustrate you all….”   This was amazing to us who were in the room with her – we hadn’t even realised there was a question in her rant – let alone to know what it was.   Yet he reached out to her and talked for a couple of minutes on what he believed her question to be and received a long round of applause in response.  He’d done what none of us in the room had been inclined to do and that was to listen and try to understand an individual’s concerns.  We were humbled by his humility.

In turn we felt his pain when he admitted that he had paid a high price in the form of humiliation while pursuing his dream of achievement through public office.  Our empathy for him was a fair trade and we begrudged him none of it.

Noticeably, questions that had until this point begun with the words “Mr Clinton” now began with the words “Mr President”. 

Game over.   Everyone began to compose in their heads what they’d say to their friends and perhaps even their grandchildren about the day they listened to President Clinton – or more importantly the day President Clinton listened and spoke to them

The lesson: Connection based on self awareness and mutual respect.  If a guy at least three times as smart as me can pay attention to each and everyone in the room, then what’s my excuse??

Allan Leighton – Connection and Conviction personified.

Allan is the head of the Royal Post – the equivalent of Australia Post or the US Postal Service – not surprisingly the press call him the Post Man.

He’s a tall guy with an even bigger voice and has the reputation of pulling up a milk crate to address his employees on the working floor.  I’d work for this guy in an instant.  I suspect that in a former life he was actually the Duke of Wellington!

His funniest lesson was talking about how as a management trainee he had to try to sweep up honey comb balls that had fallen off the Malteezer assembly line and how he struggled for hours to contain them with a broom as they rolled away from him and bounced all over the factory floor.  That was how it proceeded until the factory hands showed him how to stamp them flat first and then sweep them up at one’s leisure!   The moral of the story was that operators in the heart of the business know much more than management – so listen to them and learn!

The quote that did it for me – ‘Leaders do the right thing, Managers just do things right.’

The lessons:  Keep it simple, connect with all your people, when in doubt just do the right thing and above all execute!

Mikhail Gorbachev – Conviction beyond belief.

I’d admit this session was slightly disappointing, but it wasn’t anyone’s fault really.  I had naively supposed he would talk in English - that’s how it always seemed on the news – but actually he doesn’t speak English and used a simultaneous translator.  It was my first experience of that and the acoustics of the building made it very hard to pick out the English from the Russian that seemed to be at roughly the same volume.  Eventually I had to close my eyes and focus on the English – if I watched him I ended up tuning into the wrong sound track.

I guess the reason I raise this is that for me his talk was actually in the voice, tone and emphasis of his translator – which I have no doubt prevented us really getting at the essence of the man who almost single handedly ended the Cold War and put into motion the programs that culminated in the opening up of Eastern Europe.

Despite all this I got a great sense of his humility and conviction and had no doubt I was in the presence of a great man who had achieved the unthinkable and actually lived to tell the tale.

The two quotes that did it for me – ‘The Twenty First Century requires that political power be infused with humility’ and ‘Leaders should reflect the real people but stand taller.’

The Lesson: A leader’s conviction can move mountains.

Lou Gerstner – Conviction connected to culture.

Wow this guy just reeked of power.  Unlike many of the other leaders he was maybe a little shorter than average, but very broad shouldered and hypnotically powerful – in another life he may have actually been Julius Caesar (although I doubt he'd put up with being assassinated).

Perhaps the most famous consultant to CEO transition in the world and he presided over a remarkable turn around – IBM is the only main frame and mini computer manufacturer in the world that survived the transition to the PC era and Gerstner was the guy that made it happen.

As is natural for a consultant – he started with a strategy and held firm to it with laser focus, but he also excelled at execution and understood that to get an organisation to change the way it acts he had to help change its culture.  Easier said than done, but this guy is living proof is possible even in IBM.

He gave great sound-bites – amongst them…

‘Great companies are not managed, they are led.’

‘Culture isn’t one aspect of the game – it is the game!’

‘People don’t do what you expect, but what you inspect.’

This guy exemplifies Jim Collin's Level Five Leader - Absolute conviction, executed through real connection with his teams.

The lessons:  Focus on customers and ensure your organisation does also by managing and paying them that way. 

Clayton Christensen – Disruptive Innovation.

I must apologies and I hope you don’t feel cheated but I’m going to write separately on him at a later date.  His work was a little different from that of the others and I don’t want to view it through the lens of Leadership, but rather as a model for Entrepreneurial Management.

(Ironically given the way blogs are ordered with more recent work first, and depending upon when you are reading this, you may have already read about him in other detail above.  If that is the case then I feel no need to apologise to you – in fact you really should visit my Space more often!)

Madeleine Albright – Absolute conviction  with frank communication.

Public office is temporary, but class is forever and Madeleine Albright has it in spades.  She is a great role model for all of us – male or female - on being an expert in your field and retaining an absolute conviction in the things that can be achieved through simple and honest communication.

Her’s was an interesting story with many angles; Born in Poland, moving to the US aged eleven with her asylum seeking parents, winner of an Ivy League Scholarship; a woman who’d held part-time jobs doing photocopying and making coffee while raising her family before eventually rising to the rank of Secretary of State.

She had something in common with all the other great leaders who talked to us – they all had the ability to put something complicated into everyday language and in doing so attach it to the listener’s emotions.

‘Rational thought leads to conclusions, but emotion leads to action.’

The lessons:  Hold your ground, know your facts, explain things simply and connect outcomes with emotions.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes – Conviction beyond the limits of pain.

If you can associate with sitting in a small cardboard house buried in Antarctic winter snow at 180 degrees below zero just waiting for the sun to come up again so you can begin dragging your four hundred pound sled for several months of sunshine across an uncharted crevasse field…or running seven marathons in seven days on seven continents while still sporting stiches of post operative wire used to close your chest cavity two months earlier during double bypass surgery…or maybe expending 8000 calories a day but only being able to carry enough food to eat 5000 per day for 97 days and slowly starving to death while the only way out is to walk on raw feet that have no skin left on any of the toes…you may be able associate with Sir Ranulph Fiennes.

I’m not sure this guy even gets a positive score for connection – his dry stoic humour keeps the world at a safe distance so we can only guess what he is really about.   But when it comes to conviction, I figure him at about 390.

Out of 100.

The stories made us laugh – thank god – if we’d thought about the details we’d have run shrieking from the room.  We’ve seen it on movies – heroes do this sort of stuff to save heroines all the time.   But this guy was the real thing and he could do it for months on end, years in fact – with one or two colleagues in close quarters, physically suffering in ways we can only imagine and he simply calls it his job.

I can’t even do justice to the things he’s done.  Look him up on MSN Search!

I can tell you that at the end of our small group session he wanted to get around a row of chairs that were in his way and instead of walking around them he lept two feet up onto a garden bed and then bounced over the back of the chair before landing lightly on his feet on the other side and striding away.  All in a three piece suit, without a run-up and he’s no spring chicken.

A quote I couldn’t resist…in answer to being asked what he thought about at times when facing possible death…’I remember when I’d neglected to attach my harness and plummeted down a bottomless crevasse.  I accelerated into the darkness only to have my exhilarating ride stopped rather abruptly by my ski pole becoming jammed between the two walls of the crevasse.  All that prevented me falling was the fact I was wearing a glove that was tied to that ski pole.  I remember thinking – I hope that glove doesn’t come off.’

The lesson:  Leaders come in all shapes and sizes and not all are extroverted and outspoken.