didn’t set out to be the chairman of the Royal Mail or be a
successful businessman. I think I’m exactly the same as when
I was 17, in terms of what goes on in my head and the way I
think about people and how I can talk to people. But clearly,
people’s perception of you is different. Nobody ever says, ‘Hi,
Allan, how are you?’ The standard response when I turn up is
for people to say, ‘Uh-oh, it’s the chairman.’ So I’ll go and talk
to them. They’ll give me a bit of banter, and I’ll give them a
bit back.”
• • •
How do HCHP leaders successfully manage the tension between people and performance? In the end, the answer lies
not just in what these leaders do but in how they go about
their work. These CEOs approach finding and holding a firm’s
moral and strategic center in a competitive market as a calling and an art, not an engineering problem. Because of their
passionate commitment both to their people and to achieving
superior performance, they do not make the trade-offs that
most CEOs make. They drive their firms to be more strongly
market and reality focused than their competition while at
the same time reinforcing their firms’ core values. They are
committed to delivering short-term performance while also
heavily investing in longer-term leadership and organizational
capabilities. They push to increase the diversity of their firm’s
people, even as they reaffirm the common ground of the firms’
shared purpose. These executives build the future one quarter
at a time. Because they refuse to compromise on any of these
goals, they discover powerful and integrative solutions to fundamental management tensions that other leaders too often
avoid. In this way, they build great firms.
Russell A. Eisenstat ( reisenstat@truepoint.com) is a former
faculty member at Harvard Business School in Boston. Michael
Beer ( mbeer@hbs.edu) is a professor of business administration emeritus at Harvard Business School and chairman of the
TruePoint Center for High Commitment and High Performance.
Nathaniel Foote ( nfoote@truepoint.com) is a former partner
with McKinsey & Company. Tobias Fredberg ( tobias.fredberg@
chalmers.se) and Flemming Norrgren ( flemming.norrgren@
chalmers.se) are on the faculty of the Chalmers University of
Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. Eisenstat, Foote, Fredberg,
and Norrgren are all fellows of the TruePoint Center as well as
consultants at TruePoint Partners, whose mission is to help leaders build high-commitment, high-performance institutions.
Reprint R0807D To order, see page 163.
