… anonymously e-mail the link to this item by Geoff Colvin in Fortune magazine to your company’s CEO.
Businesspeople love to tell me their problems, and in the waning days of this recession they keep describing three of them more than any others. They have to do with vanishing leadership, changing corporate culture, and talent.
With only modest quibbles, Colvin is dead right on all three items.
My leader won’t lead
Colvin says the problem with disengaged leadership is … they’re busy. One hopes so, but there is more to it than that. Thanks to the almost 3-decades long economic run kicked-off by Ronald Reagan, few corporate leaders have seen much in the way of hard times; literally, they are unprepared and, often, got where they are thanks to corporate gamesmanship rather than real vision and can-do. That is, they never got winnowed out as they should have been. The result? More than a few are all but catatonic as problems mount.
Our culture won’t let me adapt
See the item above. A lot of these guys fear individual initiative from below because they know nothing but bureaucracy; they are themselves the creatures of bureaucracy.
We can’t get rid of C-players
A downturn is the right time to get rid of the lower third, but that’s not how it works out in poorly-managed companies. There, sycophancy carries the day and the company emerges back into the newly sunlit world with won’t-rock-the-boat ass-kissers who can be relied upon to do as they’re told — even if they’re told to make haste for the falls.
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