THE SECRET TO LEADERSHIP SUCCESS David Dodson’ s research into entrepreneurs and leadership came up with some eye-opening results. So what exactly are the traits shared by the world’s most influential business people? Here, he shares the benefit of his experience D espite earning an economics degree, working at McKinsey & Company and then receiving an MBA from Stanford University’s business school, no one taught me the skills necessary to successfully lead an organisation. In spite of my MBA training,
JCPenney, Kmart, Sears and Target. Walton had no business getting into the department store market and competing against the combined force of those four institutions. Like Zuckerberg, Walton invented nothing. Yet if alive today, he’d be the wealthiest person on the planet. Consider that Je Bezos built Amazon during a time when almost every retailer in America was also building an online strategy. He did not invent taking orders online and shipping goods through the mail and he had no proprietary technology. Incumbents with existing brands, access to capital, lower cost of goods and existing distribution systems should have annihilated him. But leaders like Bezos were fanatical about execution – building organisations capable of getting things done. We like to think of Bezos with a red cape, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but in fact his superpower was his ability to execute, to get things done. This was true even for the most iconic leaders. It might be surprising to know that Apple did not invent the personal computer, portable music, the smartphone or the mouse. While a biography describing Steve Jobs’ skills in the context of their day-to-day execution would be dull to read, it is in fact why Apple became the most valuable company in the world. What I learned is that the leaders I studied mastered five fundamental skills of execution: a commitment to building a team; a fanaticism about managing their time; a willingness to seek and take advice; a process to set and adhere to priorities; and an obsession with quality. There were no exceptions to this rule. Assembling the right team Creating a great team is the reason why people with the same number of hours in the day as anyone else can manage organisations with thousands of employees. They only need to apply the wisdom of my former Stanford colleague, Jim Collins, who espoused the phrase “Always think first about who and then about what”. These managers wasted no time in pursuits that added little to no value to their business, putting in place guard rails that expanded the quantity of hours they had as well as the quality of that time. They understood that the
no professor had taught me how to delegate e ectively, let someone go, provide useful feedback or create an annual operating plan. I quickly learned that credentials do not equate to skills. Having now backed more than 100 entrepreneurs and taught several thousand MBA candidates at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, I know that my early experiences were not unique. Which is why I became obsessed with understanding the truth about why some leaders consistently win in the marketplace. It took three years of research – and the results surprised me. Let’s begin with Mark Zuckerberg, who started Facebook when he was far behind Friendster and Myspace. Facebook began by accident in a Harvard dorm room, two years after Friendster, which was founded in the heart of Silicon Valley by the two renowned venture capital firms, Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers and Benchmark Capital. Friendster soon skyrocketed to in excess of 115 million users. Before Facebook was even available to the general public, Myspace was adding nearly 200,000 new users every day and enjoyed near-infinite access to capital from its parent, News Corporation. Zuckerberg had the same suppliers as Friendster and Myspace, was fighting for similar users and used nearly identical technology. Yet Facebook crushed every competitor. Seeing no breakthrough insights or Churchillian leadership style, as well as so many initial disadvantages, the di erence I discovered was that Facebook’s team out-implemented every competitor. Five fundamental skills This was a pattern I observed over and over. When Sam Walton opened his first Walmart store in 1962, he was surrounded by four iconic companies:
48 | Ambition DECEMBER 2023/JANUARY 2024
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