LEADERSHIP SPECIAL Guru Speak Anthony Mayo, Director, Leadership Initiative, HBS - Why some business leaders have a shelf life

Guru Speak  Anthony Mayo, Director,  Leadership Initiative, HBS  - Why some business leaders  have a shelf life  Empathy is a key quality that successful business leaders need  to cultivate to  stay on top, says Harvard's Anthony Mayo Ragged Dick isn't a book even the most voracious of bibliophiles  would have read or even heard of. Yet, when the novel was first  published in 1868, soon after the  American Civil War, it went on  to become a bestseller. It has a straight forward plot: the protagonist,  Ragged Dick, an honorable 14-year-old boot polisher,with a few  vices (drinking, smoking etc), decides to turn a new leaf. He rescues a drowning boy, whose father offers him a suit and a job. Young Ragged Dick accepts the both gratefully,  assumes a stuffy  sounding name (Richard Hunter) and becomes respectable. The novel was penned by gentleman called Horatio Alger Jr who  penned 120 books  which had one recurring theme: young men  working hard to find their way from rags  to riches. Basically, the American Dream. Alger's stories served as a muse for Anthony Mayo, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School (HBS) who specializes in leadership and business history. “The basic premise of the Horatio Alger stories was that anybody  with pluck,determination and drive could be successful in America. It is the American dream. We wanted to see if it was true or not,“ says Mayo.“Unfortunately,  it's not true.“ Mayo, along with HBS Dean Nitin Nohria, compiled the Great  American Business Leadersdatabase ­ a chronicle of 1000 odd leaders  of American business in the 20th century.  Everybody from Jack Welch to Sam Walton to Bill Gates are on it. “Guess how many women turned up in that list?“ asks Mayo. “Only 40, in a list of 1000 business leaders.“ Another 40-odd were  non-white.“The elite circle of business is a closed group.  Some argue that they have wonthe ovarian lottery...that they have been  born into schooling at the top tier schools  and they follow this path,“  says Mayo, who has dealt with this topic at length in his book  Paths to Power: How Insiders and Outsiders Shaped  American Business Leadership. Are things changing in the 21st century? Will the list look any different if it was compiled again 15 years  from now? Mayo mulls over the question for a while before answering. “In the past, if you were not a part of the elite group,you had to make  your fortunes by serving your own constituency. Of the 40 women in the database, 39 women created businesses that  served other women,“  he says. But, with access to education getting  wider, a newer set of people arelikely to emerge as the next generation  of business leaders. “Fifteen years from now,if you look at it  demographically, in the US, I expect a lot more people of color,  a lot more foreign nationals and many more women to make it to the list,“  adds Mayo. Contextual intelligence in leadership is another area of research for Mayo. “When people talk of leadership, they focus on what's in front of them,  on current challenges. Contextual leadership is about having a periphery  vision,“ he says. Business people who have contextual intelligence understand the context. They either seize the context and shape it for their business or learn to  adapt.“When you look at the database of great American business leaders, you see that these people captured the zeitgeist of the times. They were risk takers and many of them failed. Many of them were flawed human beings but for most part they  recognized the context and were able to create business opportunities  out of that,“ says Mayo. Which companies and business leaders exemplify contextual intelligence? Mayo picks Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, Steve Jobs and  Apple Computers as great examples of contextual intelligence at work.  "Steve Jobs reinvented himselfover time. He wasn't successful in his first  run as CEO but adapted himself and eventually  succeeded in the role  (in his second stint at Apple),“ says Mayo. On the other end of the spectrum is eBay, which pioneered the e-commerce business but has  since struggled. Meanwhile, upstarts like Jack Ma's Alibaba have done remarkable things  in that space.  So, do business leaders, like the products, have a shelf life, given that  context constantly keeps changing?  “Success can be a double edged sword. Sometimes business leaders can  get arrogant about their way of operating, and if they think that there's  only one way to do things, then eventually the context will change and  they will become irrelevant,“ saysMayo, who believes empathy is a  quality business leaders need to work on. “Research shows that the higher up somebody, the lesser empathy they  have,“explains Mayo.  Why is that the case? Partly because they aren't creating a context where they get honest  feedback. Business leaders start believing in their own myths and feel that they  don't need to look at somebody else's point of view. “When you are on top, you find that people tell you what you want  to hear. It is important that you have trusted allies who will tell you  things you don't want to hear. Sometimes that's painful,“ he says.

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