Stanford Business

MAY 2006


About This Issue

When Leadership Counts

Kathleen O'Toole, Editor
Kathleen O'Toole
Editor

The city was in the middle of a crack epidemic, with bodies of murder victims stacked up at the morgue. The local newspaper, meanwhile, was writing about white-collar crime.

When I made the decision to transfer reporters from the street-crime beat to the white-collar beat, it seemed smart, but the mounting murder tally was becoming hard to ignore. One night when the front-page news editor and I were pouring ourselves more coffee, he pointed to a copy of that morning’s newspaper with a tiny, buried story about three murders the night before and said, “My group can’t put big headlines on local murders if your group doesn’t gather the facts.” He didn’t say it, but I heard his inner voice asking me how cheap was I willing to let life become in our city’s most economically deteriorating neighborhoods.

This issue of Stanford Business magazine is packed with articles that touch on the difficulties of leadership. As I edited these stories, I could not help but think back to my leadership experience during the crack epidemic, which struck a number of cities in the early eighties when their manufacturing bases were also declining. How do you quickly turn around an organization that you have just steered in the opposite direction? Will you lose all credibility as a leader if you change your mind? Is personal credibility worth thinking about when you are weighing life-and-death issues for some of your customers against spreading fear and its many ramifications to many more?

I could have benefited then from the advice of Professors Pfeffer and Sutton in their article on the half-truths of leadership. Professor Gruenfeld’s observations about how power affects the psychology of leaders would have troubled me but also helped me figure out, perhaps, how to go about turning the ship. As it was, my instincts and experience led me to mostly follow the advice that Peter Georgescu, MBA ’63, gives. When working with creative people, he says, “the enlightened leader subscribes to the management style of ‘we’; the ‘I’ word loses power, meaning, and impact.”

We—several dozen editors and writers—put our minds and hearts into covering that exceptional period of murder, which was partly fueled by intense drug-dealer competition, in Oakland, Calif. I devised a plan, but before I could fix the typos, others modified it. A brilliant staffer suggested our best lifestyle writer spend a day in the house of the dead—the morgue. A sportswriter investigated how to buy handgun, and court reporters tallied the plea bargains to manslaughter, concluding the typical killer’s sentence then was three years.

According to Pfeffer and Sutton’s advice, I should not be shy about telling you that our group was partly responsible for bringing a serial burglar-murderer to justice. The first murderer to be put to death after California reinstated the death penalty got caught because he took our newspaper and used the full-page chart of murders to brag to others about the ones that were “his.”

That seems like a sad thing to take some credit for, but it illustrates, as Pfeffer and Sutton say, that leadership matters some of the time, and one way it works is for leaders to learn “when and how to get out of the way.”

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