Executive View by Marshall Loeb: A Guide to Taking Charge

Executive View

People who wonder what it takes to be a leader would do well to listen to Charles Knight. His father, Lester B. Knight, 72, who is one of the premier management consultants, programmed young Chuck to be a leader ever since he grew up on Chicago's gilt-edged North Shore. At 15, Dad packed his only son off to a client's foundry in a small Canadian town for a summer's work to learn blue-collar life. After that there were summer jobs in Switzerland, Germany and Argentina, engineering and business studies, varsity football and tennis at Cornell. In his early 20s, Chuck Knight headed the European operations of Lester B. Knight & Associates, Inc.: in his early 30s, he took charge of the whole company. Then, startlingly, he revolted against Dad's grand plan.

At 36, Knight skipped away from his family's company to join a valued St. Louis client, Emerson Electric, of which he soon became chief executive. Father was furious. The breach has healed in the seven years since then, in part because Chuck Knight has shown how well he learned his lessons. Emerson is on most short lists of the best-managed companies in the country, and, with its sales having risen steadily to $2.6 billion last year, it is challenging bigger General Electric and Westinghouse in many product areas. Now 44, Knight is one of the youngest chairmen of a major U.S. corporation.

Knight believes that in business, in politics, indeed in any venture at all, leadership consists of ten basic ingredients. Some of them, he concedes, sound obvious, even corny, but together they make a compelling package. Here is Knight's list:

No. 1: You have to be able to set priorities. I always remember my father said, "Chuck, your health comes first; without that you have nothing. The family comes second. Your business comes third. You better recognize and organize those first two, so that you can take care of the third."

No. 2: You need an ability to grab hold of tough problems and not delegate them. It's not fair to let the guy below you take the brunt of making the hard decisions. The leader has to get deeply, personally involved in challenging issues and set the policy.

No. 3: Set and demand standards of excellence. Anybody who accepts mediocrity—in school, on the job, in life—is a guy who compromises. And when the leader compromises, the whole damn organization compromises.

No. 4: You need a sense of urgency. It is absolutely better to do something, recognizing that it may not be the right thing, than do nothing at all. If you don't have a sense of urgency, the bottom drops out of the organization.

No. 5: Pay attention to details. Getting the facts is the key to good decision making. Every mistake that I made —and we all make mistakes—came because I didn't take the time, I didn't drive hard enough, I wasn't smart enough to get the facts. You can't get them all, of course, but the last 5% or 10% of the facts may not really matter.

No. 6: You need commitment. You can always pick out the guy who has a commitment. He is the fellow who does not fly into town on the morning of the meeting but flies in the night before to make sure that he gets there.