John Hillen - What Happens Now?: Reinvent Yourself as a Leader Before Your Business Outruns You

Table of Contents

photograph Mike Cohen

Mark Nevins (left) and John Hillen

John F. Hillen, DPhil, is a leadership and strategy professor in the School of Business at George Mason University, a consultant, and a director for many companies. His views on leadership draw from his experiences as a CEO of public and private companies, a board chair and director, a US Assistant Secretary of State under President George W. Bush, and a former US Army officer and decorated combat leader. He holds degrees from Duke and Kings College London, received his MBA at Cornell and his doctorate from Oxford. A Washington Technology columnist, he writes regularly on leadership and strategy, both of which he teaches in George Masons MBA program. Recently recognized as one of the one hundred most influential business leaders in the Washington DC area, Hillen is the winner of a number of prestigious leadership awards in the military and business and the author or editor of several books on international security.

Mark D. Nevins, PhD, is a consultant and advisor to top executives, teams, and organizations. Earlier in his career he was responsible for learning and development globally for Booz Allen Hamilton, and for organization development and human resources globally for Korn/Ferry International. He has coached and advised a broad range of executives from the C-suite to high-potential vice presidents at large corporations such as American Express, Citibank, NBCUniversal, and Time Warner, as well as at smaller companies, high-growth startups, and top-tier professional and financial services firms. A Harvard PhD (alma mater College of the Holy Cross) and former literature professor, his views on leadership and business are informed by universal themes of the human condition as well as extensive pragmatic work with hundreds of executives and senior managers across almost all industries as well as the higher education, not-for-profit, and military sectors. Nevins has worked, taught, and travelled in more than sixty countries. An author and business writer, his previous work includes The Advice Business, a book on management consulting.

The insights Hillen and Nevins share in this book build on their thought leadership in some of worlds most prestigious venues. Over more than twenty years, they have led, helped direct, or consulted with hundreds of companies and executives in many different types of businesses. They originally met at the Aspen Institute, where they served as executive seminar co-moderators, leading intensive week-long seminars for leaders from around the world. They are united in their passion for helping all leaderseven the most skeptical of executivesto discover the root causes of stalls and to develop their mastery of sophisticated leadership.

W e owe a great debt to the many people who have helped us write this book.

First, wed like to thank the many leaders and executives who over the years have shared their stories with us. Those hard-won experiences and insights helped us perceive and formulate the arguments we are making in this book. Some of these wise people are clients and some are colleagues, and we count all of them as friends. Without them, we couldnt have seen just how frequently leaders are threatened by stallsand in turn how the best leaders summon the courage to reinvent themselves to be successful.

We would especially like to thank a number of people who spent significant amounts of time sharing with us their personal experiences and challenges in great detail: Michael Barnett, Hector Batista, Trevor Boyce, Jonathan Bush, Jim Burrows, Sid Fuchs, Dawn Halfaker, John Hassoun, Chris Howard, Dev Ittycheria, Ron Jones, David Kriegman, Frank Lavin, Dominique Malard, Ali Manouchehri, Taryn Owen, Kim Pendergast, Jean-Franois Poupeau, John Rogers, Jeff Rubenstein, Herv Sedky, David Singer, Gary White, and Bob Zoellick. Each of these leaders detailed his or her experiences, often with a humbling degree of vulnerability, and many of them appear as illustrations or case studies in this book.

Wed also like to thank the hundreds of clients, colleagues, employees, students, peers, and friends who have contributed in so many ways to our thinking on leadership and on life. In particular, we wish to express our appreciation to the many leaders we have dialogued with in the Aspen Institute executive seminars we have co-moderated over the years. Aspens intensive and original approach to values-based and sophisticated leadership has had an enormous impact on us. The lessons weve learned from those seminars and in our work together are woven throughout the book.

We have been blessed to be influenced at close quarters by some of the best minds of our time on the subject of leadership. We have learned from these bold and energetic thinkers to understand leadership as its own competencynot just as a facet of something else. They led us to study and teach leadership in addition to our work of applying it. What Sir Isaac Newton said about standing on the shoulders of giants seems an apt description for our experience of building on their discoveries.

There are too many of these great leaders and thinkers to call out by name here, but John was especially touched in his leadership life by the late Phil Merrill, and Mark would especially like to express his appreciation to Jim OToole for decades of mentorship and friendship. For each of us, these great men have been our most profound teachers of leadership.

We would also like to thank our content, editorial, publishing, and marketing team: our researcher, editor, and guide, Bill Birchard; our agent Carol Mann; our publishers Kenzi, Kenichi, and Nancy Sugihara at SelectBooks; our copyeditor Lucy Zepeda; our photographer Mike Cohen; and our publicity team at Cave Henricks Communications, especially Nina Nocciolino, Kimberly Petty, Jessica Krakoski, and Barbara Henricks. Without the help of all of these amazing professionals, this book could not exist. Mark would like to offer special thanks to his colleague and thought partner of many years, Kristina DiStasio, whose ideas and creativity have informed more than a few examples in this book. Jay Marshall and Steve Gladis, two leadership gurus whom we intensely admire, were kind enough to read early drafts of the book and provide helpful guidance.

Friends, clients, and companies with whom we are affiliated, especially Laurence Belfer, SOS International, Big Brothers Big Sisters of NYC, and IAP Inc., lent us conference rooms in various cities in which to work and where much of the writing of this book was done. And we must also thank Buddy Dive Shop in Dominica, which provided the conference room and the terrace where we came to one of our main epiphanies.

Finally, we would like to thank our families, from whom we stole too many evening and weekend hours to complete this book. Thank you for your support, patience, and love, Maria, Ndingara, Jack, Chris, Katie, Olivia, and Declan.

JOHN HILLEN

MARK NEVINS

March 2018

Just because we dont understand doesnt mean that the explanation doesnt exist.

MADELEINE LENGLE, A Wrinkle in Time

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of geniusand a lot of courageto move in the opposite direction.

E.F. SCHUMACHER, Small Is Beautiful

T revor Boyce has been a CEO for thirty-five years. A surfer who once made annual pilgrimages to a secret spot in Puerto Rico, he has observed firsthand how, as in surfing, at many junctures in the life of a leader the waves get bigger in ways you dont expect. The same skills, the same knowledge, and the same behaviors from the past dont deliver the results needed