Five Leaders on What It Takes to Get to (and Stay at) the Top
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Whether
you are scaling the world's fourth-highest summit, running the world's
second-largest company, or trying to restore the tarnished reputation of a
government-backed mortgage securities company, some leadership traits seem to
be universal. These include, for example, a belief in teamwork and the
ability to look beyond the moment to map a course for the future. In this
section, Knowledge@Wharton reports on recent conversations with, or
presentations by, a diverse group of leaders, including Microsoft CEO Steve
Ballmer; Thia Breen, president of Estee Lauder Americas; Richard Syron, CEO
of Freddie Mac; Richard Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, and Rodrigo
Jordan, chairman of Chile's National Poverty Foundation and a world-class
mountaineer.
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For Microsoft, 2006
was a year of new product introductions: the Windows Vista operating system, a
new version of Office and the Zune music player, to name a few. For Microsoft
CEO Steve Ballmer -- who spoke at Wharton recently as part of the school's
Leadership Lecture series -- these new products serve as a reminder of his
goals: Convince customers that Microsoft's latest products are
ground-breaking, transform a company with $44 billion in sales into an agile
innovator, compete against new business models and recruit enough talent to
keep the software giant relevant 25 years from now.
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In her keynote
address at the 28th Annual Wharton Women in Business Conference in
Philadelphia, Thia Breen, president of Estee Lauder Americas and head of
Global Business Development, told the audience that she was nearly fired from
her first job. "That was the moment I started to understand: I am
totally responsible for my own success," said Breen, whose first job out
of college was unloading shipments of toys at Marshall Fields.
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Richard F. Syron,
chairman and CEO of mortgage-securities giant Freddie Mac, says he remains
"bearish" on the housing market and sees a rising tide of mortgage
defaults and foreclosures on the horizon. He doesn't believe a rebound will
happen until late summer 2007 when the nation's housing inventory, bloated
from weak sales, gets whittled down. Syron spoke with Knowledge@Wharton
before delivering a Wharton leadership lecture.
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When Richard
"Dick" Fuld took charge of Lehman Brothers as CEO in 1994, the firm
was famous on Wall Street for the bitter internal feud between traders and
investment bankers that had cost Lehman its independence a decade earlier.
Fuld, who had sided with fellow traders in the battle, knew he would have to
make peace with the bankers and create a culture based on teamwork if the
firm wanted to compete in a new era of integrated financial services.
"The early Lehman Brothers was a great example of how not to do
it," he said in a recent Wharton Leadership lecture.
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Rodrigo
Jordan, a management professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of
Chile, is a world-class mountaineer. He has led, written about and filmed
Chilean expeditions to Mount Everest, K2 and Antarctica, and has drawn on
these experiences to found Vertical S.A., a company that uses outdoor
education to teach leadership and teamwork. Jordan was recently named chair
of Chile's National Poverty Foundation, a non-governmental organization (NGO)
dedicated to social development. Knowledge@Wharton offers an edited version
of an interview with Jordan on leadership, tackling poverty and his recent
climb up Lhotse, the world's fourth-highest summit.
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http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/special_section.cfm?specialID=61
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