Looking at Life from the Perspective of Others

As it turns out the first guest speaker for my HKUST course, aimed at full-time international MBA students, was from Silicon Valley and has spoken in my SCU courses on many occasions. Ken Wilcox, CEO/President of Silicon Valley Financial Services, was in Hong Kong visiting with some of their local executives and customers and made the time to stop by and share his perspectives on leadership, in the segment we call “Being a Leader – Personal Perspectives on Leading by Leaders.”

He started by pointing out how his own views of leadership are influenced by where he grew up: Flint, Michigan, which has been tied to the fortunes of the automobile industry for many years (and GM in particular). For example, Ken doesn’t believe in layoffs (which is the reality of what life was like growing up with the auto industry being the dominant employer in your community). GM laid people off in bad times and hired them again in good times. Ken’s view was that GM, in particular, lost its leadership position through negligence (and some arrogance) because their leaders stopped paying attention to their competitive environment. The counterpoint was his own father’s advice: “Look at life from other people’s perspectives rather than from your own or even for yourself alone.”

“The fate of organizations is more dependent upon leadership than anything else,” claimed Ken. And, he believed that anyone can be a leader, that it is learned. The problem for organizations, however, he said, was that too often people got promoted because they were great at doing something (functionally or technologically) rather than because they were good at leadership. What’s required if you are to be a leader, according to Ken, is that you (a) need a vision (“stand for something”) and (b) a genuine appreciation for people (“people won’t follow someone who doesn’t care about them.”). After these there are some technical skills one can learn to help you do the job as a leader but the first two have to come from within. Finally, Ken maintained that the primary responsibility of a leader is to communicate with people – about where we are headed (the future), where we’ve come from (the past) and how we are doing right now (the present).

On final insight was Ken’s “Rule of 3.” He said that about one-third of the people will buy your vision, one-third won’t, and the final third are just “not sure.” So his advice was to put your energy into working with the first third so that the ones in the middle (“not sure”) who desire that same attention from you will move in the direction of your vision. If you try to change the minds of the people who don’t “buy-in” than you risk losing the ones in the middle and you probably won’t change any of the former, so this becomes simply a lose-lose situation for leaders.

Finally, Ken reminded us that “lending money” is mostly a people-oriented business. After all, he said, it was “people who pay you back, not assets, collateral, and the like.”

It was an exciting beginning to the class. Thanks to Ken for sharing his perspective and insights.

We’re excited to see what Halloween brings us ... in Hong Kong! Hope you and yours are not haunted.

Barry