Why CEOs fail ?

In the book, Why CEOs Fail, by Dotlich and Cairo, there is a chapter titled Eager to Please. Here is an extract:

“In their quest for peace and harmony, pleasers inadvertently rob their companies of creative tension. They are so fixated on keeping everyone at peace that they send the implicit message that conflict is taboo.

In meetings, people talk calmly and rationally, without much emotion in their positions. In one-on-one discussions, they all avoid making their position “personal” — they don’t make a passionate pitch about why they believe a given approach is right.

As a result, these companies lack the combustible debates that energize teams and give rise to new ideas.”

I agree. Everywhere, but particularly in “yes boss” Asia, one of the challenges is to bring in this conflict, this passion, this stress, this tension into a team or organisation.

It’s when you get this right, you get incredible results. And, in my view, no-one does it better than Musk — a former Tesla executive once said that “everyone in Tesla is in an abusive relationship with Elon”. Perhaps Musk goes way too far — or perhaps he gets it extremely right.

But either way, docile conflict-free teams fail to achieve their potential. The highest-performing ones have high levels of passion-fuelled tension.