When ‘More, Bigger, Faster’ Is Not Better

DALIAN, China â€" What quality ought we value most in leaders?

That’s the question I’ve been thinking about all week at the World Economic Forum‘s annual meeting here, known as Summer Davos. It brought together some 1700 chief and senior executives from 90 countries around the world.

At a workshop titled “Reinventing the Workplace,” the desirable quality that came up most frequently among the 70 or so leaders who attended was authenticity. When we think of authenticity, we typically think of honesty, openness and realness. But is authenticity a virtue by itself?

Any virtue overused eventually becomes toxic. Too much honesty, for example, turns into cruelty. What we really want from leaders is authenticity tempered by compassion. We do want our leaders to acknowledge their frailties and missteps, but excessive vulnerability and openness starts to feel treacly and unnerving.

What we want most of all, I believe, are leaders capable of embracing their own opposites â€" and our own â€" with nuance and subtlety. In corporate speak, that is no easy deliverable. It requires a level of self-awareness and reflection that has been neither expected from corporate leaders, nor especially valued. What’s been valued instead is decisiveness: a bias for action, transaction and speed.

I experienced this over and over as I wandered through the soaring, swooping, yet surprisingly sterile new convention center here in Dalian. It’s an impressive architectural achievement, but for me at least, it felt cavernous and eerily empty inside. In much the same way, I couldn’t help but be impressed by the external achievements of the group gathered here. They think fast, talk fast and move fast, and yet something still seemed missing.

The 23-year-old chief executive of a technology start-up told me about how, over the last couple of years, he’s regularly slept two to four hours a night as he builds his company. A 67-year-old futurist told me with a hint of pride about flying between a half-dozen cities in the United States, Europe and Asia in the last 10 days. A fiercely intense 30-year-old woman who founded and serves as chief executive of a fast-growing oil and gas company described her life’s ambition as “building a much bigger version of what I have now.”

For 200 years now, ever since the Industrial Revolution, the prevailing mantra in corporate life has been “more, bigger, faster.” For many of the leaders I met this week , younger and older alike, growing means building
bigger and bigger companies.

“A business cannot truly evolve,” John Mackey, a co-founder of Whole Foods Market, has written, “if its leaders, particularly the C.E.O., are not learning and growing as well. Companies can become blocked from essential organizational evolution if their founder is psychologically and spiritually stuck.” To become a conscious leader, you have to aspire to be one. Personal growth is no easy thing and usually involves some pain.

It’s easy to dismiss this sort of talk as soft-headed and self-indulgent. Indeed, staying endlessly busy is a way to avoid the issue all together. But it’s also possible to define growth concretely and substantively. It means becoming progressively more conscious and capable, much the way we do as children growing up.

Adult development doesn’t have to end at the age of consent, or when we finish our formal education. We can learn to see more deeply, through our fears and self-deceptions; more widely, beyond our self-absorption to
a more inclusive capacity for care and concern; and longer term, past our immediate preoccupations and short-term cravings.

A leader’s job is not simply to do this work for personal benefit, but also to serve as a role model and a source of inspiration to others.

At the most practical level, seeing more serves as a source of competitive advantage in a world in which even the most extraordinary product breakthroughs quickly become yesterday’s news. Just ask Apple.

I did see signs of leaders becoming willing to challenge their own limits. For example, I spent some time with the 50-something chief executive of an old-economy Fortune 100 company. He told me that focusing on the mental and emotional well-being of his employees was his company’s next challenge and biggest opportunity. And he plans to do the same for himself. He is beginning to hold his own opposites â€" taking care of himself and others, focusing both on inner and outer life.

It’s never too late. If Rupert Murdoch can take up transcendental meditation at the age of 82, anything is possible.

About the Author

Tony Schwartz is the chief executive of the Energy Project and the author, most recently, of “Be Excellent at Anything: The Four Keys to Transforming the Way We Work and Live.” Twitter: @tonyschwartz