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 "Mental toughness is humility, simplicity, spartanism, and love…Love is loyalty. Love is teamwork…Heart power is the strength of your corporation."
- Vince Lombardi, speaking to the American Management Association
We are at the end of one age, but we are not quite at the beginning of the next. We are the people of the parenthesis, the in-betweeners who have to figure out what of the old to bring with us and what of the old to discard. This makes for a lot of ambiguity in our lives.
By its nature, management requires living with lots of ambiguity. In our attempts to escape and improve upon the present, we are forever in the process of making plans. Plans are supposed to provide a kind of road map into the future, so we can increase our chances of going in directions that we want. But planning in fast-changing times takes a special kind of approach.
Harlan Cleveland, an executive and writer, says planning
for executives today is "improvisation upon a theme." Life
in the new millennium for us will be like being a jazz musician,
improvising on the themes that are most important to us and
asking our friends to jam with us a bit to fill out the possibilities.
Living in ambiguity provides almost daily exercises in facing our fears with courage. In addition to managing by objectives and managing by wandering around, we have to manage by heart. We have to continually tell ourselves to move on out there to the edges of our vision. The future demands it of us because the old solutions, though as comfortable as an old pair of jeans, are just as worn out.
A few of my local business heroes exhibit such management courage. One is working on an innovative approach to employee ownership in which he will give up some of that comfortable control that most managers love. But by going to the edge (he's found only one other employee-ownership arrangement in the country like the one he is working on) he will empower and enfranchise his staff to create a far richer future than he can ever achieve by staying the classic majority stockholder with just a few minor investors.
 Another manager with heart is the general manager of a large manufacturing organization facing the endless challenges in transforming his plan from the old "control-the-employees-cuz-they-aren't-very-smart-and-sure-don't-care" operation to a plant with a more enlightened approach. Changing these attitudes, he says, is like trying to change the tires on a moving car, which is apt description for the acute feeling of chaos that occurs as you have to continue to produce and simultaneously change the way production is accomplished.
To go to our edges takes courage and heart, but not necessarily the kind we are used to reading about in the headlines. No, it is probably more the countless little acts of courage to try something new, to take the heat for our mistakes, and to pick ourselves up for the next round, to give up the illusion of control as a manager and replace it with employee empowerment. Winston Churchill said that courage is the greatest of all virtues because it is the one upon which all the other virtues rely, and that is what Lombardi meant when he spoke of heart power as the real strength of a corporation.
Courage and heart are qualities of spirit that our leaders and managers need in large quantities for ambiguous times. Managers in companies should take a good look at themselves and see what they've done recently that has taken some heart. And I'm talking real heart that can improve the quality of life and not risky financial maneuvers that take guts maybe, but generally lead to lining one's pockets as opposed to answering real-world needs.
The business schools would do well to spend as much time on developing heart as on the latest quantitative techniques that develop the mind, which is an argument in favor of that good old liberal arts education.
As Lombardi's quote points out, heart is as much about love as it is about courage. Managing by heart includes the courage to go to the edge and the love that is the source of all the passion that drives true leaders. The managers who understand this type of heart, and who live and model it in the big and little things that they do, are the kind who transform the work experience of their co-workers.
Working with heart can turn a job, or a means of earning a living, into a calling. Isn't it refreshing to run into insurance professionals who so love what they do and their customers that they truly think of themselves as helping provide financial security instead of schlepping policies and earning commissions? Or an engineer who so loves his science/art that he sees far beyond the blueprints and views himself as a provider of functional beauty? Or a manufacturer who wants to provide the best product at the lowest cost, instead of foisting mass-produced goods upon the public and trying to stay one step ahead of the competition.
Lombardi knew about such things. He's still the coach who, along with Knute Rockne, somehow rose above a silly game of big men pushing a pigskin back and forth into a symbolic and mythic place in the minds of Americans.
Heart power as a concept of management competence is still ahead of its time. We are still very prone to look for the obvious and ignore its root cause. But someday, venture capitalists or would-be investors will look at the financials and the ratios when they assess the health of a company. And they will look at the heart-power quotient in the company as defined by some as yet unknown set of factors. And then they'll know how the place is really being managed. |
