How Leaders Can Move From “Chaos to Clarity”

Robert Siegel, MBA ’94, has been a lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business for more than two decades. “I’ve taught almost 20% of the people who graduated from the GSB,” he says. He has also served as an executive at Intel and General Electric, founded and led startups, and worked as a consultant and venture capitalist. And he is convinced that running a business today is more difficult than ever.

His latest book, The Systems Leader: Mastering the Cross-Pressures That Make or Break Today’s Companies, is designed to take the sting out of making the changes necessary to move from “chaos to clarity.”

For the past eight years, Siegel and Jeff Immelt, the former CEO of GE, have co-taught Systems Leadership, a course that focuses on the new skills leaders need to navigate our fast-paced, interconnected world. In addition to offering their own perspectives, the two have invited a wide array of business leaders to discuss the challenges they’ve faced and how they’ve managed them. In The Systems Leader, Siegel draws on those insights to present a new approach to leadership — one grounded in the shared experiences of leaders who have succeeded in industries ranging from banking and tech to healthcare and waste management.

“As we talked to leaders, it seemed like everybody was struggling with the same issues,” Siegel says. The good news for leaders at all levels is — slight spoiler alert — contained in the title of his final chapter: “You Can Do This.”

Siegel spoke with Stanford Business about handling pressure, “unserious” leaders, and what he’s learned from his experience as a corporate leader.

What is systems leadership, and why is it important?

We live in a world of constant crisis and increasingly rapid technological change. If we look back over the last 25 years, what have we seen? The dot-com meltdown, 9/11, the global financial crisis, the rise of populism all over the world, the pandemic, and the geopolitical instability we’re seeing right now.

This is the new normal. And leaders today feel like no matter what they do, they’re not prepared and they’re going to get everything wrong.

Leadership’s always been hard. That’s why we have a million books on it, and why so many of my colleagues on the faculty have studied it for so long. What’s different now is the speed and the strength of the dislocation we’re experiencing. Data is constantly flowing. We as humans are constantly connected. And that creates a world of increased speed and increased complexity.

Systems leadership is a way to address the things that keep coming at us from new directions at all times. It is the ability to do two things: to internally master certain dualities, and to understand action and reaction between functions inside an organization and between an organization and its ecosystem.

All this is encapsulated by what you call “cross-pressure,” the pressure to achieve seemingly contradictory goals at the same time. Five cross-pressures came up repeatedly in your conversations with business leaders, and you present them all as “both/and” propositions. What are they?

The first cross-pressure has to do with priorities: pressure to succeed at both execution and innovation. I can’t only be good at making the trains run on time. I also have to know how to manage innovation.

The second one centers around people: pressure to project both strength and empathy. We need to be strong leaders and we need to deliver and hold our teams accountable, but we can also show our humanity and see the humanity in others.

The third one is the sphere of influence: pressure to focus both internally and externally. We used to talk about the externally focused CEO and the internally focused COO. We can’t do that anymore. We need to understand internal and external factors, no matter what function we’re in, because they’ve become so intertwined.

Then there’s geography: pressure to think and act both locally and globally.

And lastly, purpose: pressure to pursue both ambition and statesmanship. How can I be ambitious yet think of myself as a steward of my organization?

Statesmanship seems like a quaint, if not antiquated, idea in this day and age. You devote an entire chapter to the rise in “unserious” behaviors among leaders, like being self-righteous or downright outrageous.

Leaders have to lead on nuanced issues in a world that has very little time for nuance. And the media rewards people for being bombastic and replacing decorum with outrageousness.

We intuitively know this is not what we want from our leaders. And my point is, be who you want to be. I believe in free will: I believe we can make choices about who we want to be as leaders, how we want to run our companies, how we want to lead our teams. The cross-pressures represent the exogenous stuff that makes it hard to lead; how we react to them is a choice we make. The leaders we see in the book are all successful by any figure of merit — what they have achieved, how many people they lead, et cetera. But none of them show the crazy behaviors that seem to be celebrated and reinforced in the media.

And let’s be clear: We’re all broken, we’re all works in progress, and we never get it right all the time. The people featured in the book are strong, ambitious leaders, but they have the humanity to say, “Yeah, I’ve made mistakes, and here’s what I learned from them.” They don’t try to be perfect, and they never pretend to be.

Is systems leadership for big companies? Small companies? Startups?

The answer is yes. If you’re running a 6,000-person company, that’s different than running a six-person company. But the cross-pressures are the same, and they are all going to hit you. That’s true for large and small companies; it’s true for old-school companies and new companies. Systems leadership really applies to leadership in the 21st century. It’s a way of thinking and a way of looking at things.

So why do you also say that adopting this mindset can be scary?

The scary part is not systems leadership or being a systems leader. The scary part is letting go of what you did in the past.

Humans hate change. It’s hard. It’s terrifying. Accepting it is scary for ourselves and for our teams. Can I adapt? Can I compete?

On the other hand, we can hold these two truths simultaneously: Today is hard, and tomorrow is going to be better. We can get through it. And we don’t have to do it alone; we can do it with our teammates.

You recount that when you were running a division at GE early in your career, you struggled to balance conflicting goals such as meeting quarterly targets and innovating for the future. Did you understand what was happening at the time?

At the time that I was going through it, I didn’t understand it. I was in my mid-30s. I was a junior executive. And I was in a culture that had historically been operationally excellent but not focused on the long-term and struggled to invest in innovation. I didn’t know that this was a cross-pressure, and I couldn’t articulate it that way.

That’s the joy of coming back to Stanford and doing research and looking at all the mistakes I’ve made in my career, looking at the mistakes that other people have made, and then trying to synthesize them and turn them into frameworks that people can understand.