The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership Powered Company (J-B US non-Franchise Leadership) [ハードカバー]

What do General Electric, Citigroup, and Marriott International have in common? They have built on the original conceptual work by Walt Mahler at General Electric to establish sustainable methods to developing management breadth and depth. This valuable book outlines the key principles of that current best practice.

At a time when more and more companies are relying on headhunters to bring in leaders and management turnover is soaring among young talent, "growing your own" leaders is about to become a necessary core competence for the future. While almost everyone who is interested in the subject has read glossy articles about what General Electric does at its Crotonville facility, this book provides the core of the broader management process behind those articles.

The first part of the book focuses on six key transitions that help a leader develop. The second part shows you how to diagnose how individual leaders are doing, and how to help them make better progress.

The six transitions are:

from managing yourself to managing others

from managing others to managing managers

from managing managers to functional managing

from functional managing to business managing

from business managing to group managing

from group managing to enterprise managing.

At each transition, what the individual values and focuses on has to change dramatically. In organizations where this transition is not made explicit, you get almost all of the managers in the organization "stuck" doing things the wrong way, still looking from the perspective of their last job. That's the stuff that Dilbert and the Peter Principle are made of.

Although the book takes a large organization's point of view, in various places the points are translated into a small organizational context.

Based on my experience with leaders at all these levels, I certainly agree with the authors' points about the key challenges involved. I also think that their diagnostic methods are good. In most cases, the root cause for the problem lies further up in the organization with someone who is not focusing or working on helping managers develop.

The key weakness of the book is that in some elements the reader with limited business experience will still not be sure what to do. For example, the step from a functional manager to a business manager requires integrating all of the functions and perspectives in order to be successful. That is an enormous leap in knowledge, expertise, and experience. Although business school cases will help those with that experience, most managers will find it impossible to make the transition unless the business is very undemanding -- something that seldom happens any more.

My own experience suggests that basic learning has to be pursued throughout the organization that emphasizes skills like problem solving, locating and implementing the next generation of best practices, and developing a deep understanding of how to create superior business processes as the foundation for this kind of leadership development program. In advanced companies, you can add the concept of having people develop skills for innovating new business models. Then, this leadership development process can become truly powerful.

However you decide to go about it, the examples of setbacks and progress outlined in this excellent book will improve your ability to think about improving leadership in your organization. I urge you to read, consider, and apply what you learn.

After you have finished thinking about and using the book, I suggest that you also think about where else in your company you do not have a management process to do something important. For example, do you have a management process to keep you aligned with powerful trends beyond your control? Do you have a management process to create superior business models?

Be all the leader you can be!

This book gives you a thoughtful and reasoned look at the upward transitions process. It does an excellent job of outlining the needs and potential problems at each career stage. The advice is usable by three groups of potential readers.

You should buy this book if you are a senior manager, human resources executive, or board member in a company of any size who wants to understand the dynamics of leadership development/succession planning in a large company. The book outlines several transitions and the changes in skills and attitudes that are needed at each one, along with relevant pitfalls.

You should buy this book if you are a manager on an upward career trajectory and you want to learn what's ahead and what skills and attitudes you need to develop as well as what possible problems lie in wait. The chapter that describes your next transition will outline what you will have to do and what you will have to do better.

You should buy this book if you supervise other managers and you want some insight into analyzing performance issues and helping your people develop.

What are the negatives?

This book is written for people in big companies. With the exception of a couple of pages early in the book, managers in small to mid-sized businesses will need to figure out how this applies to them. This is not a big issue because of the range of material covered and the clarity of the presentation, but it still will be irritating to some readers.

The big company whose shadow falls across this book is General Electric. That's not a bad thing in itself. GE does a marvelous job of leadership development. What you have to watch for, though, are unstated assumptions that other companies have the same culture and values as GE, or even that values matter as much everywhere else.

For example, the authors state that "formal training for first line managers is fairly common." That's not true in the majority of US companies today.

The authors state that "managers who aren't cut out for this role should be put on an individual contributor track." But in many companies there is no individual contributor "track." Only managing others leads you to higher status and higher pay.

While there is a lot of good material handling the various transitions, you won't find much on deciding who should be promoted in the first place. But that's the only significant gap I see in this excellent book. Judging who to promote is a key decision and a key component of the success of the promotion.

The bottom line is that this is an excellent book, filled with material that can be used by people in many different situations.

Reading this 'leadership pipeline' I became really astonished of seeing here all the ideas of Elliott Jaques and Gillian Stamp (Bioss International) just copied with no reference to them. I keep wondering how can that be done. Jaques and Gillian Stamp has written for so many years about human capability and seven levels of work complexity that are clearly repeated in this book withouth no comment to them. Even the general themes are there, for example managing other, leader of leader, managing a business unit, managing a group of business unit. If you don't beleive me, just read Requisite Organization (Jaques) and previous ones, for example, and you will learn that Jaques' ideas are being developed for more than 30 years. So, better learn with the real creative people that has really done researches around the theme.