Bystanders

Business leaders cannot be bystanders.

— Howard Schultz

Bought anything lately?

Corporate waste and failure seem the norm.

Appointments aren't kept. Emails go ignored. Phone calls aren't returned. Quotes are inaccurate. Packages never arrive. Products don't work. Bills are wrong. Customers are scolded. Customers are spammed.

Everything is broken.

They wouldn't be, if business leaders stopped confining themselves to the corner office, indifferent to the constant missteps their employees make.

They wouldn't be if business leaders started leading alongside their employees, and stopped being bystanders.

Far too many business leaders are bystanders today, content just to manage risk, instead of serving customers.

An incident recounted in Nightmare Scenario, the new book about the Trump Administration's mismanagement of the Covid-19 outbreak, brought the problem home to me.

You will recall how, last February, the same month Trump tweeted, “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA," the Atlanta-based CDC issued hundreds of test kits—kits that turned out to malfunction by producing false positives.

In hindsight, the failure came just when accurate testing was most needed.

And what did the leaders of HHS do? They convened in Washington for three weeks to debate not what, but who was to blame, and how to cover up the failure.

Only when the head of the FDA at last sent an immunologist to Atlanta to see how the kits were being assembled did those leaders learn who was to blame—and, most importantly, why.

CDC's own lab techs turned out to be the culprits. Unsupervised, they were assembling the test kits on the same tables where they were examining samples of Covid-19, contaminating the kits with the live virus. That stupid mistake guaranteed the kits would produce false positives.

How many cases of Covid-19 might have been prevented if the leaders of HHS, instead of bystanding for nearly a month, had visited the CDC lab right away?

For the sake of contrast, consider Churchill, a boots-on-the-ground leader.

Schooled as a cavalryman and war correspondent, Churchill was obsessed with fact-finding, an obsession that served him well during World War II.

In his Memoirs, Churchill's chief advisor "Pug" Ismay recounts how, at the slightest hint of a snafu, the peripatetic prime minister would rush to the scene of the action, often to his bodyguards' chagrin.

During the war, Churchill inspected air fields, air raid shelters, rifle ranges, gun encasements, tank factories, dock yards, shipyards, submarine pens, encampments, fortresses, battlefields, smashed villages, fallen bridges, and countless bombed-out buildings.

During one Nazi air raid over London, he visited fighter command’s ops room to observe the progress of the battle on a huge plotting board, whispering to Ismay, "Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few."

Churchill would say that his fact-finding trips were "reconnoiters" rife with the "refreshment of adventure."

Before Churchill, Lincoln—the only sitting US president to come under enemy fire during a war—behaved in a similar way. 

Lincoln was literally a boots-on-the-ground leader.

CEOs, please take a page from Churchill and Lincoln.

Don't just be bean-counting bystanders. There's more to business than risk management. There are—duh—customers.

Get out of the corner office once in a while.

At the first sign of trouble, get your damn boots on the ground. 

Lead alongside your employees—and fix what's broken.