corporate management disasters of our time.
But a year later she knew her hard work was finally paying off when one of her board members, the former CEO of Procter & Gamble, told her, “I never thought I would be proud to have my name associated with this company again. I was wrong.”
Mulcahy was winning the sprint. Next came the marathon. Could Xerox win that, too? Maybe it had rested on its laurels too long, resisting change and letting too many chances go by. Or maybe the growth mindset—Mulcahy’s mission to transform herself and her company—would help save another American institution.
Jack, Lou, and Anne—all believing in growth, all brimming with passion. And all believing that leadership is about growth and passion, not about brilliance. The fixed-mindset leaders were, in the end, full of bitterness, but the growth-minded leaders were full of gratitude. They looked up with gratitude to their workers who had made their amazing journey possible. They called them the real heroes.
When you look at the books written by and about CEOs, you would think so. Jim Collins’s good-to-great leaders (and his comparison not-so-great leaders) were all men. Perhaps that’s because men are the ones who’ve been at the top for a long while.
A few years ago, you’d have been hard-pressed to think of women at the top of big companies. In fact, many women who’ve run big companies had to create them, like Mary Kay Ash (the cosmetics tycoon), Martha Stewart, or Oprah Winfrey. Or inherit them, like Katharine Graham, the former head of
Things are beginning to change. Won now hold more key positions in big business. They’ve been the CEOs of not only Xerox, but also eBay, Hewlett-Packard, Viacom’s MTV Networks, Time Warner’s Time, Inc., Lucent Technologies, and Rite Aid. Women have been the presidents or chief financial officers of Citigroup, PepsiCo, and Verizon. In fact,
I wonder whether, in a few years, I’ll be able to write this whole chapter with women as the main characters. On the other hand, I hope not. I hope that in a few years, it will be hard to find fixed-mindset leaders—men
Researcher Robert Wood and his colleagues did another great study. This time they created management
Those with the fixed mindset believed that: “People have a certain fixed amount of management ability and they cannot do much to change it.” In contrast, those with the growth mindset believed: “People can always substantially change their basic skills for managing other people.” So one group thought that you have it or you don’t; the other thought your skills could grow with experience.
Every group had worked together for some weeks when they were given, jointly, the task I talked about before: a complex management task in which they ran a simulated organization, a furniture company. If you remember, on this task people had to figure out how to match workers with jobs and how to motivate them for maximum productivity. But this time, instead of working individually, people could discuss their choices and the feedback they got, and work together to improve their decisions.
The fixed- and growth-mindset groups started with the same ability, but as time went on the growth-mindset groups clearly outperformed the fixed-mindset ones. And this difference became ever larger the longer the groups worked. Once again, those with the growth mindset profited from their mistakes and feedback far more than the fixed-mindset people. But what was even more interesting was how the groups functioned.
The members of the growth-mindset groups were much more likely to state their honest opinions and openly express their disagreements as they communicated about their management decisions. Everyone was part of the learning process. For the fixed-mindset groups—with their concern about who was smart or dumb or their anxiety about disapproval for their ideas—that open, productive discussion did not happen. Instead, it was more like groupthink.
In the early 1970s, Irving Janis popularized the term
Groupthink can occur when people put unlimited faith in a talented leader, a genius. This is what led to the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, America’s half-baked secret plan to invade Cuba and topple Castro. President Kennedy’s normally astute advisers suspended their dgment. Why? Because they thought he was golden and everything he did was bound to succeed.
According to Arthur Schlesinger, an insider, the men around Kennedy had unbounded faith in his ability and luck. “Everything had broken right for him since 1956. He had won the nomination and the election against all the odds in the book. Everyone around him thought he had the Midas touch and could not lose.”
Schlesinger also said, “Had one senior advisor opposed the adventure, I believe that Kennedy would have canceled it. No one spoke against it.” To prevent this from happening to him, Winston Churchill set up a special department. Others might be in awe of his titanic persona, but the job of this department, Jim Collins reports, was to give Churchill all the worst news. Then Churchill could sleep well at night, knowing he had not been groupthinked into a false sense of security.
Groupthink can happen when the group gets carried away with its brilliance and superiority. At Enron, the executives believed that because they were brilliant, all of their ideas were brilliant. Nothing would ever go wrong. An outside consultant kept asking Enron people, “Where do you think you’re vulnerable?” Nobody answered him. Nobody even understood the question. “We got to the point,” said a top executive, “where we thought we were bullet proof.”
Alfred P. Sloan, the former CEO of General Motors, presents a nice contrast. He was leading a group of high- level policy makers who seemed to have reached a consensus. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here.… Then I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.”
Herodotus, writing in the fifth century B.C., reported that the ancient Persians used a version of Sloan’s techniques to prevent groupthink. Whenever a group reached a decision while sober, they later reconsidered it while intoxicated.
Groupthink can also happen when a fixed-mindset leader punishes dissent. People may not stop thinking critically, but they stop speaking up. Iacocca tried to silence (or get rid of) people who were critical of his ideas and decisions. He said the new, rounder cars looked like flying potatoes, and that was the end of it. No one was allowed to differ, as Chrysler and its square cars lost more and more of the market share.
David Packard, on the other hand, gave an employee a medal for defying him. The co-founder of Hewlett- Packard tells this story. Years ago at a Hewlett-Packard lab, they told a young engineer to give up work on a display monitor he was developing. In response, he went “on vacation,” touring California and dropping in on potential customers to show them the monitor and gauge their interest. The customers loved it, he continued working on it, and then he somehow persuaded his manager to put it into production. The company sold more than seventeen thousand of his monitors and reaped a sales revenue of thirty-five million dollars. Later, at a meeting of Hewlett- Packard engineers, Packard gave the young man a medal “for extraordinary contempt and defiance beyond the normal call of engineering duty.”
There are so many ways the fixed mindset creates groupthink. Leaders are seen as gods who never err. A group invests itself with special talents and powers. Leaders, to bolster their ego, suppress dissent. Or workers, seeking validation from leaders, fall into line behind them. That’s why it’s critical in a growth mindset when important decisions are made. As Robert Wood showed in his study, a growth mindset—by relieving people of the illusions or the burdens of fixed ability—leads to a full and open discussion of the information and to enhanced
