In his recent NYT op-ed on CEO personalities’ impact on management efficacy David Brooks draws a contrast between staid operationally focused personalities and empathetic and charismatic leaders. As a Brook’s fan I was excited  he took on the topic.

The Corporate Challenge Isn’t Homogeneous

The corporate challenge isn’t as singular as the article casts it however; just as there are variations in leadership styles, there are also variations in business challenges. The simple one David could have called attention to here is change.

Most markets don’t change hyper-actively and the laws of positioning and category leadership confer enormous competitive benefits (brand, habit, channels) on incumbents. The market itself seems to demand more continual improvement than radical change; and it is under these circumstances where operationally focused executives such as Marc Hurd & Don Grantham @ HPQ thrive.

Scope Is the Story

Saying a dull CEO is ideal is clearly reductive.  Instead most compelling insight of his editorial is the scope differential between political and corporate leaders. While political leaders grapple with massive and abstract social change most CEO’s have ten or so top revenue producing products they need to grow, cycle and optimize.

There is no magical cultural difference to the leadership challenge, the scope is just logarithmically different in scale and abstraction. Charisma is most important when there are no hard facts for the foot soldiering citizen or worker to grasp.

The personal passion, empathy and charisma of the leader, the attributes discounted in Mr Brook’s summary, power the organization through uncertain and abstract challenges. Charisma, far from being useless in the business world, is simply reserved for its most trying times.

Would Apple have rebounded from its near death crisis without the charisma and personal creativity of Steve Jobs? He personally restored faith in Apple’s strategy with both customers and employees. One doubts a ‘dull’ and operationally driven CEO could easily step in and take his place.  Apple needs a leader like Mr Jobs precisely because it is driving massive change in the market with inventive, creative and new ideas.

At the same time Mr. Brook’s observations may have been useful when Sun Microsystems selected a CEO to replace Scott McNealy; perhaps the articulate and fiery blogger Mr Schwartz might have been the wrong man to guide them through a low growth, profit wringing, phase of their UNIX systems business life-cycle.

Takeaways

1. Leadership challenges vary dramatically based on scope. Judge how abstract the challenge is before choosing a leader.

2. Growth/change/new is the sexy part of business most mid-upper managers want to be around for personal growth; David’s article rightly points out just how mundane many business challenges can be. Perfect your continuous improvement management skills above all.

3. A lot of strategic dissonance comes from reductive thinking and terminology; always look at the second and third variables.