How do companies and managers lead in tough times? At Infosys Technologies Ltd’s Strategy and Action Plan conference at Mysore on 9 January, Jeffrey Lehman, an independent director on the company’s board, spoke on this subject. Lehman, the former president of Cornell University and the former dean of the law school at the University of Michigan, is currently the chancellor and founding dean of Peking University’s School of International Law, Shenzen, China. In the background of Infosys’ results for the third quarter announced Tuesday, which have exceeded most analyst expectations, Mint presents an edited excerpt of the speech
I am not in a position to offer you mandates or enlightenment; rather, it seems to me, I should offer you some provocation. I want to stimulate your thinking with some ideas that you might, upon reflection, reasonably choose to reject.
At the same time, I do not intend merely to play devil’s advocate. I want to provoke you with ideas that I believe are ultimately sound. These are ideas that grow out of my belief that leadership in difficult times is different from leadership in easy times.
The tough get going: Lehman says that in hard times, it is often up to the leader to keep hope alive and be persuasively inspiring so that colleagues continue to believe that it is worth their while to give 110%
I will structure my comments in three parts:
First, I will try to clarify how I am using the phrases, “difficult times” and “easy times”.
Second, to ensure that we are working from the stating points, I will allude to the qualities that are often associated with successful leadership in easy times.
And finally, I will turn directly to the more provocative part, suggesting four ways in which difficult times might lead you to recalibrate your leadership styles.
So what exactly do I mean when I speak of easy times and difficult times? I want to resist the temptation to say that this is a false distinction—that whatever differences may exist between easy times and difficult times are only matters of degree, and that it is misleading to apply such broad and simple labels to inherently complex phenomena. Instead I want to assert that easy times and difficult times are qualitatively different, requiring leaders to act in different ways.
Easy times are times when resources are relatively abundant and the environment is relatively stable.
In easy times, resources are plentiful. Money is available and you have access to it, through external or internal capital markets; there is always working capital available to deploy in support of a good idea.
Other resources are plentiful, too. Easy times seem to breed human energy—wherever you look you see talented people who are excited and committed, eager to chip in and help. And easy times mean you are surrounded by potential customers who are flush with cash, willing and able to buy your product if you make an effective case.