Executive Interviews: Interview with Allan R Cohen on Staying on Top, Always
October 2009 - By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary

Allan R Cohen
Edward A Madden Distinguished Professor of Global Leadership at Babson College.

• Similarly, what according to you are the top-10 companies in the world during the last 4-5 decades? What are the unique characteristics of these top-10 companies?
  The recent demise of the American auto companies, and numerous other big and powerful companies, makes naming the top 10 a particularly hazardous game to play. In my view, the main characteristics of the best companies are that they create many mechanisms for self renewal, so that they can keep on learning and changing as conditions change. And of course they have to be reasonably profitable along the way or they won’t get a chance to continue.

• Quite often, the terms, great companies, visionary companies, world-class companies, persistently successful companies, etc., are used synonymously. Rather, there’s some confusion amongst these nomenclature. Are they really same or does each of them have a different connotation?
  Most of these terms are trying to get at the same thing. Since different people with their own aspirations for recognition develop them, they try to add their own twists. But all the terms are trying to get at long-term success.

• For creating great companies what do you require the most – visionary leaders or visionary managers or a just combination of both of them?
  Visionary leaders without the ability to oversee and ensure implementation are just dreamers, while those who just execute without vision are like lemmings. A combination will always be necessary.

• Calling them two widely held and deeply cherished myths, James C Collins and Jerry IPorras (in ‘Built To Last’), conclude that “we found that creating and building a visionary company absolutely does not require either a great idea or a great and charismatic leader.” In fact, they present the evidence that great ideas brought forth by charismatic leaders might be negatively correlated with building a visionary company. What do visionary companies have in common and do they exhibit shared leadership?
  Collins and Porras argue that visionary companies have a vision about the kind of company they want to be, not necessarily about their products. That’s partly correct, but a company can be a wonderful place for employees and completely fail if it has the wrong products for market conditions.

  Further, great ideas may not be necessary at the start of the company, but somewhere along the line there has to be a number of great ideas,with appropriate evolution, for the company to continue to succeed.

  There are certainly many people who think that leadership starts with charisma. But I agree with Collins and Porras that charisma is certainly not necessary for effective leadership. In his next book, Good to Great, Collins makes the case that humility and persistence aremore important. I believe that it is necessary for effective leaders to have the functional equivalent of charisma, however. They have to believe in and convey some future state which appeals to followers and inspires them to give thier full effort. But the inspiration comes primarily from the appeal of the articulated future state to that group of followers, not necessarily from the personal charisma of the leader.

  Finally, shared leadership is a complex idea. Onemeaning is that no leader does it alone, which is certainly true in any organization of any significant size. There is a lot of mythology about the great visionary entrepreneurial leader, but many of the most dramatic ones who try to do everything themselves end up hurting their companies once they get past 50 or 100 employees, or have to move to several product lines. From outside however, it may look as if the leader of a large organization is making all the decisions, but that’s because we don’t see all those who contribute.

  Another meaning of shared leadership, which I have written about in Power up; Transforming Organizations through Shared Leadership, is for the top person of the unit to build a team of direct reports with whom he or she shares the toughest decisions. In most top teams, at best members serve as advisers to the leader, not really expected or allowed to share responsibility for making the largest and toughest decisions. As organizations become increasingly complex, technologies change rapidly, markets shift, competition increases, leaders will have to engage more as partners with their direct reports and shared leadership will become a central part ofwhat effective leaders do.