A Strategic Leader’s Roadmap: Where So Many CEOs Have Gone Wrong

By Harbir Singh and Michael Useem

Drawing on our new book, The Strategic Leader’s Roadmap, academic research, and the disasters recently witnessed in companies as varied as BP, Volkswagon, Mylan, and Wells Fargo, we suggest a more mindful formula for strategic leadership when it really counts.

BP chief executive Tony Hayward complained that he wanted “his life back” in the aftermath of the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and its spewing of crude oil into the Mexican Gulf. Later, Volkswagen chief executive Michael Horn blamed his company’s adoption of a “defeat device” on miscreant engineers for falsely reporting low-emissions to auto owners and government regulators. The Mylan CEO Heather Bresch quintupled the price of its EpiPen, a drug dispenser for reversing allergic reaction to bee stings and peanuts, because she could. And Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf censured his ranks for creating 20 million improper consumer accounts over a decade.

We might be astonished by the CEOs’ finger-pointing or we might attribute their personal lapses to quirks of their characters. But perhaps more shocking, and certainly more consequential, were their professional shortcomings. Each company faced enormous downdrafts, a moment when strategic thinking and leadership would be most visible, most consequential, and thus most paramount for the enterprise. Yet the CEOs opted for a game of blame, deflecting responsibility from themselves.

To outsiders, the rhetorical “What were they thinking?” comes quickly to mind. Their self-serving actions are, in our view, precisely the opposite of what strategic leaders do. If you have responsibility for anything other than yourself, thinking and acting strategically on behalf of the company, whatever the personal consequences, is one of most vital of all the foundational elements, and that is the dictum we should be teaching in business school and what executive advisors should be preaching from their pulpits.

In The Strategic Leader’s Roadmap, we explore what it takes for leaders to successfully and effectively integrate strategy and leadership. We see how Carlos Ghosn, longtime CEO of Nissan Motor Co. and Renault, successfully applied both to become a truly strategic leader over the long term. We witness Cisco CEO John Chambers keep his firm at the forefront of multiple generations of technology. We watch Alibaba CEO Jack Ma outperform eBay in China on his way to the largest IPO ever at $25 billion. Our main finding from these strategic leaders is that they have all effectively combined company strategy with personal leadership—and that they each mastered that ability through deliberate, self-directed learning.

Ghosn’s remarkable capabilities arose from a career of repeatedly honing his skills from experience. He started his career with the tire manufacturer, Michelin, after completing an education in engineering at École Polytechnique and École des Mines de Paris. At Michelin, he early faced the challenge of turning around its struggling operations in Brazil at a time of hyper-hyperinflation. There, he learned how to create cross-functional teams to build bold goals and then to achieve them with equal parts of strategy, leadership, and execution. Later, he came to run Michelin’s American subsidiary, where he was called to integrate the struggling Uniroyal Goodrich Tire Company, further refining his understanding of how to become a more strategic leader.

Ghosn’s greatest challenge came in Japan when Renault deployed him to turn around the near-bankrupt Nissan. Here, he developed the Nissan Revival Plan, with bold goals to reduce costs and raise revenues while bringing out a host of new models. Most observers felt his goals were too ambitious for a company near insolvency, but with an inspiring vision, Ghosn built a clear and operational value proposition for customers. He recruited high-potential managers to unlock a host of creative ideas that had been unrealized in the company, empowering a new generation of leaders to innovate, leading to the Nissan Leaf, one of the first electric cars by a major producer, and expanding Nissan in China ahead of its rivals.

Nissan finally had an executive at the helm whose ideas for strategic redirection were matched by his leadership capacities. The holy grail of an integrated combination of strategy, leadership, and execution had found their champion in Carlos Ghosn. He learned it all from experience, and we believe that managers everywhere can similarly become more strategic leaders as well.

Adapted from The Strategic Leader’s Roadmap: 6 Steps for Integrating Leadership and Strategy, by Harbir Singh and Michael Useem, copyright 2016. Reprinted by permission of Wharton Digital Press.