The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive: A Leadership Fable

The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive: A Leadership Fable | Patrick M. Lencioni | A Great Companion to Good to Great!

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The Four Obsession...

	The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive: A Leadership Fable Patrick M. Lencioni Jossey-Bass, 2000 - 184 pages average customer review:based on 49 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

In this stunning follow-up to his best-selling book, The Five Temptations of a CEO, Patrick Lencioni offers up another leadership fable that's every bit as compelling and illuminating as its predecessor. This time, Lencioni's focus is on a leader's crucial role in building a healthy organization--an often overlooked but essential element of business life that is the linchpin of sustained success. Readers are treated to a story of corporate intrigue as the frustrated head of one consulting firm faces a leadership challenge so great that it threatens to topple his company, his career, and everything he holds true about leadership itself. In the story's telling, Lencioni helps his readers understand the disarming simplicity and power of creating organizational health, and reveals four key disciplines that they can follow to achieve it.

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Obviously, not all obsessions are productive and beneficial

This is one in a series of "leadership fables" in which Patrick Lencioni shares his thoughts about the contemporary business world. His characters are fictitious human beings rather than anthropomorphic animals, such as a tortoise that wins a race against a hare or pigs that lead a revolution to overthrow a tyrant and seize control of his farm.

In this instance, Lencioni focuses on a common business problem for or challenge to leaders: How to identify "a reasonable number of issues that will have the greatest possible impact on the success of [their] organization, and then spend most [their] time thinking about, talking about, and working on those issues." Presumably Lencioni agrees with Stephen Covey (among others) that executives tend to spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important. Of course, that sets a bad example for their direct reports. Viewed another way, some obsessions are productive...others are not. Extraordinary executives know the differences between the two types.

Here's the fictitious situation. Lencioni introduces CEOs of two rival firms in the Bay Area, Vince Green (Greenwich Consulting) and Rich O'Connor (Telegraph Partners) who have quite different obsessions: Green's are best revealed within the book's narrative; Green's are directly or indirectly the result what could be described as Greenwich Consulting's organizational inferiority complex insofar as Telegraph Partners is concerned. There is an early and significant development when O'Connor - struggling to cope with the pressures of trying to balance his family and his successful but demanding business - experiences what Lencioni characterizes as an "epiphany": the recognition of four basis activities ("disciplines, really") that guide and inform his leadership of Telegraph Partners thereafter. "He never certainly suspected that [his list of what become leadership obsessions] would become the blue-print of an employee's plan to destroy the firm."

Almost immediately, it becomes obvious that a new hire, Jamie Bender, "didn't seem to share the hunger and humility of his colleagues" at Telegraph Partners and that is a key point for reasons also best revealed within Lencioni's narrative. Recognizing the mistake, O'Connor must decide how to correct it. Over time, he and his colleagues become infected by what Lencioni describes as a "virus." What then happens - and does not happen - throughout the ensuing weeks allow Lencioni to dramatize both the importance of the four "obsessions of an extraordinary executive" to which the title of his book refers and the consequences when any one of them is compromised. He is a brilliant business thinker but he also possesses the skills of a master raconteur, introducing a cast of characters, conflicts between and among them, and then allowing "rising action" build to a climax (i.e. resolution) also best revealed within the narrative.

Of special interest to me is a conversation between Bender and Green when Bender explains each of the four disciplines with which O'Connor is obsessed. This conversation occurs late in the narrative and indicates that Bender understands the four disciplines and yet is unwilling and/or unable to master and then follow them. (This strikes me as an excellent example of what Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton characterize as the "Knowing-Doing Gap.") Bender's explanation seems somewhat didactic to me but, nonetheless, serves as a means by which Lencioni can summarize his key points. He adds a nice dramatic touch when O'Connor appears at Green's office and there is a brief encounter between him and Bender before he and Green meet. Although they and other executives are fictitious characters, each is credible as a human being rather than as a literary device.

As is Lencioni's custom in each of the other volumes in the series of "leadership fables," he then provides an "Organizational Health: The Model" section and supplementary material (Pages 139-180) whose value-added benefits will help his reader to make effective application of the lessons learned from the experiences shared by Rich O'Connor and his colleagues at Telegraph Partners as well as from what Vince Green finally realizes about himself and about the consequences of his own obsessions.

Those who share my high regard for this volume are urged to check out Patrick Lencioni's other "leadership fables" as well as Michael Ray's The Highest Goal, David Maister's Practice What You Preach, Bill George's Authentic Leadership and his more recently published True North, James O'Toole's Creating the Good Life, and Michael Maccoby's Narcissistic Leaders.

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A Great Companion to Good to Great!

Although The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive: A Leadership Fable was published in 2000 it is still the very best companion to Jim Collins' Good to Great. Lencioni's parable illustrates better than any other book the simple but powerful principles of building and maintaining a cohesive leadership team, creating organizational clarity, the importance of over-communicating organizational clarity, and reinforcing that clarity through human systems. This is a book that I read every year. It is one of my most "marked-up" books (the front and back flyleaves are covered with notes and quotes). If you haven't picked this one up you've missed one of Lencioni's very best.

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Great simple insights in a pleasurable format

I have read or listened to a number of Patrick Lencioni's books. The fable format makes them entertaining, and the simple management principles ring true. I gave this four stars because it is eclipsed by another one of Pat's books that shares some of the principles and has a better story line to bring it home. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

In the four obsessions book we learn that the secret of company success is
1. Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team
2. Be very clear about your message/mission/values
3. Over communicate your message/mission/values thoughout the org.
4. Set up systems that reinforce this organization clarity.

Of course that are more details with the above (which I have paraphrased).

Pat adds a helpful review of the model at the end of the fable. I really recommend this book!!

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Did the extraordinary executive get it wrong?

Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive is Patrick Lencioni's second book written in 2000, again it is a fiction as well as a management book. The readers would be eager to know the obsessions of that very successful person. CEO is supposed to be rational and sensible. It is curious to note that such a person could be obsessed with anything. In fact, on very important issues, we had better be obsessed rather than let them off the hook lightly.

The story looks like a novel involving commercial spies. It is a tale of two companies, similar in the industry they were in, their niche, their strength, their customers, their size, their strategy. It is a matter of management style which made differences in their culture and organization health. The story evolves around a virus which attacked a company. It set off suspicion and created a crisis. The story told the strength of a cohesive team of good organization health and how it fought off the virus. The virus revealed the secret of the obsessions to the CEO of the rival company who thought otherwise. You will guess the ending about the future of these two companies.

The interesting part is the virus, who is the VP of HR, kind of like a very capable EO specializing in our professional area. The problem with him was that he did not participate actively in discussions, was not willing to share his views, and not wholeheartedly merged with the management team. He liked to hide himself and revealed his opinion last, and in a non-committal way. He appears to me as having the attributes of some civil servants. The virus was exposed as not being able to align with the culture of the company. I wonder if this is a sin for civil servant for not being able to align with the culture of the government, or the department, or the grade.

The thrust of the story is the obsessions. They are actually very simple and concern the organization culture, its core values, its identity, direction, strategy and objectives. The obsessions are how the CEO took these in mind and action. He was obsessed with being cohesive, being clear, over-communicating and reinforcing. These are the four disciplines to be upheld.

1st discipline: Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team - We all know that it is desirable to have team members working happily together. But the obsession went a step further of letting team members know one another's unique strength and weakness, openly engaging in constructive ideological conflict, holding one another accountable for behaviours and actions, and committing to group decisions. As a result, the cohesive and healthy team was able to fight off the virus which tried to contaminate the team spirit.

2nd discipline: Create organizational clarity - Writing up vision and mission statements is a common practice in setting up the identity of the company and its long term goal. It was trendy a few years ago and everyone did it. The CEO of the rival company said it was mentioned in Build to Last which all management people knew well and could readily recite. But these statements are just empty slogans only fit for display as decoration on the wall. The obsession is to make these organizational identity, culture, strategy and responsibilities very clear, that action plans could be formed without confusion based on them.

3rd discipline: Over-communicate organizational clarity - Over-doing anything is an obsession. But for issues as important as the organizational clarity, there is no thrift in over-communicating them. The obsessed CEO conveyed messages on organization clarity repeatedly on every occasion, using simple language to eliminate confusion and inconsistency, using multiple media to meet different level of reception, and cascading the messages down the ranks until the message was heard by all.

4th discipline: Reinforce organizational clarity through human systems - At the end of the day, it is human that preserve or undermine culture. The CEO was obsessed with sustaining the health of the organization by making sure that the human systems were used to reinforce organizational clarity. All staff were tested and reinforced of their alignment with the organizational culture through the recruitment process, performance management, rewards and recognition, and dismissal.

We all claim that culture is hard to change. But the reality is that culture is also hard to maintain. When the CEO found a culture that was good for the company, he was obsessed to preserving it, or seen the other way round, obsessed to changing the behaviour of the staff to align with the culture. Or you may say that he was changing other cultures or sub-cultures to align with his culture. This is very hard to do, and it really takes an obsessed CEO to keep the company on the track.

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Interesting View of a "Healthy Organization"

Patrick Lencioni, utilizing his engaging fable-as-lesson writing style, covers his view of the four "Disciplines" of a healthy organization in "The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive." The fable...and the "Model" underlying the fable...stresses the importance of clarity in a healthy organization.

As in a number of Lencioni's other books, the simplicity of the framework covered in this book is stressed...as is the difficulty in actually implementing the framework.

I found this book a worthwhile read due to its simplicity, its straightforward messages and its blending of a story with managerial ideas. Furthermore, I appreciated the fact that the principles espoused in the book are laid out in a manner that directly connects the managerial ideas to actions that can be taken within an organization.

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