The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives

Habit # 1: They see themselves and their companies as dominating their environment
This first habit may be the most insidious, since it appears to be highly desirable. Shouldn’t a company try to dominate its business environment, shape thefuture of its markets and set the pace within them? Yes,but there’s a catch. Unlike successful leaders, failed leaders who never question their dominance fail torealize they are at the mercy of changing circumstances.They vastly overestimate the extent to which they actually control events and vastly underestimate the role of chance and circumstance in their success.

CEOs who fall prey to this belief suffer from the illusion of personal pre-eminence: Like certain film directors, they see themselves as the auteurs of their companies. As far as they’re concerned, everyone else in the company is there to execute their personal visionfor the company. Samsung’s CEO Kun-Hee Lee was so successful with electronics that he thought he could repeat this success with automobiles. He invested $5 billion in an already oversaturated auto market. Why? There was no business case. Lee simply loved cars and had dreamed of being in the auto business.

Warning Sign for #1: A lack of respect

Habit #2: They identify so completely with the company that there is no clear boundary between their personal interests and their corporation’s interests
Like the first habit, this one seems innocuous, perhaps even beneficial. We want business leaders to be completely committed to their companies, with their interests tightly aligned with those of the company. But digging deeper, you find that failed executives weren’t identifying too little with the company, but rather too much. Instead of treating companies as enterprises that they needed to nurture, failed leaders treated them as extensions of themselves. And with that, a “private empire” mentality took hold.

CEOs who possess this outlook often use their companies to carry out personal ambitions. The most slippery slope of all for these executives is their tendency to use corporate funds for personal reasons. CEOs who have a long or impressive track record may come to feel that they’ve made so much money for the company that the expenditures they make on themselves, even if extravagant, are trivial by comparison. This twisted logic seems to have been one of the factors that shaped the behavior of Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco. His pride in his company and his pride in his own extravagance seem to have reinforced each other. This is why he could sound so sincere making speeches about ethics while using corporate funds for personal purposes. Being the CEO of a sizable corporation today is probably the closest thing to being king of your own country, and that’s a dangerous title to assume.

Warning Sign for #2: A question of character

Habit #3: They think they have all the answers
Here’s the image of executive competence that we’ve been taught to admire for decades: a dynamic leader making a dozen decisions a minute, dealing with many crises simultaneously, and taking only seconds to size up situations that have stumped everyone else for days. The problem with this picture is that it’s a fraud. Leaders who are invariably crisp and decisive tend to settle issues so quickly they have no opportunity to grasp the ramifications. Worse, because these leaders need to feel they have all the answers, they aren’t open to learning new ones.

CEO Wolfgang Schmitt of Rubbermaid was fond of demonstrating his ability to sort out difficult issues in a flash. A former colleague remembers that under Schmitt,” the joke went, ‘Wolf knows everything about everything.’ In one discussion, where we were talking about a particularly complex acquisition we made in Europe, Wolf, without hearing different points of view, just said, ‘Well, this is what we are going to do.’” Leaders who need to have all the answers shut out other points of view. When your company or organization is run by someone like this, you’d better hope the answers he comes up with are going to be the right ones. At Rubbermaid they weren’t. The company went from being Fortune’s most admired company in America in1993 to being acquired by the conglomerate Newell a few years later.

Warning Sign for #3: A leader without followers

Habit #4: They ruthlessly eliminate anyone who isn’t completely behind them
CEOs who think their job is to instill belief in their vision also think that it is their job to get everyone to buy into it. Anyone who doesn’t rally to the cause is undermining the vision. Hesitant managers have a choice: Get with the plan or leave.

The problem with this approach is that it’s both unnecessary and destructive. CEOs don’t need to have everyone unanimously endorse their vision to have it carried out successfully. In fact, by eliminating all dissenting and contrasting viewpoints, destructive CEOs cut themselves off from their best chance of seeing and correcting problems as they arise. Sometimes CEOs who seek to stifle dissent only drive it underground. Once this happens, the entire organization falters. At Mattel, Jill Barad removed her senior lieutenants if she thought they harbored serious reservations about the way that she was running things. Schmitt created such a threatening atmosphere at Rubbermaid that firings were often unnecessary. When new executives realized that they’d get no support from the CEO, many of them left almost as fast as they’d come on board. Eventually, these CEOs had everyone on their staff completely behind them. But where they were headed was toward disaster. And no one was left to warn them.

Warning Sign for #4: Executive departures

Habit #5: They are consummate spokespersons, obsessed with the company image
You know these CEOs: high-profile executives whoare constantly in the public eye. The problem is that amid all the media frenzy and accolades, these leaders’ management efforts become shallow and ineffective. Instead of actually accomplishing things, they often settle for the appearance of accomplishing things.

Behind these media darlings is a simple fact of executive life: CEOs don’t achieve a high level of media attention without devoting themselves assiduously to public relations. When CEOs are obsessed with their image, they have little time for operational details. Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski sometimes intervened in remarkably minor matters, but left most of the company’s day-to-day operations unsupervised.

As a final negative twist, when CEOs make the company’s image their top priority, they run the risk of using financial-reporting practices to promote that image. Instead of treating their financial accounts as a control tool, they treat them as a public-relations tool. The creative accounting that was apparently practiced by such executives as Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling or Tyco’sKozlowski is as much or more an attempt to promote the company’s image as it is to deceive the public: In their eyes, everything that the company does is public relations.

Warning Sign of #5: Blatant attention-seeking
From Forbes. More Here

Ten principles of the Prophet of Islam

Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) was the most successful man in the entire human history. Being the last Prophet of Islam, he not only set a good example for the whole mankind but also showed to them how to achieve success in this world. Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, a prominent Islamic scholar, has identified 10 successful principles taught by the Prophet.


“By studying the life of the Prophet we can derive those important principles of success,” he wrote in an article. “To begin from the possible” is one of those principles. The Prophet’s wife Ayesha (may Allah be pleased with her) has explained this principle through a Hadith in which she said: “Whenever the Prophet had to choose between two options, he always opted for the easier one” (Al-Bukhari). To choose the easiest option means to begin from the possible, and one who begins from the possible will surely reach his goal.

To see advantage in disadvantage was the Prophet’s second important principle, says Khan. In the early days of Makkah, there were many problems and difficulties. But a verse in the Qur’an, “With every hardship there is ease, with every hardship there is ease,” (94:5-6) inspired Muslims. They learned from the verse that if there are some problems, there are also opportunities at the same time. “And the way to success is to ignore the problems and avail the opportunities,” Khan points out.

Changing the place of action was another principle, which is derived from the Hijrah. According to Khan, Hijrah was not just a migration from Makkah to Madinah but was a strategic move by the Prophet to find a more suitable place for Islamic work.

“Make a friend out of an enemy” was the fourth principle, which the Prophet learned from the Qur’an, which enjoined upon him the return of good for evil. The Qur’an then added, “You will see your direst enemy has become your closest friend” (41:34). “It means that a good deed in return for a bad deed has a conquering effect over your enemies,” Khan wrote in his article.

After the Battle of Badr, about 70 of the unbelievers were taken as prisoners of war and many of them were educated people. The Prophet announced that if any one of them would teach 10 Muslim children how to read and write he would be freed. This was the first school in the history of Islam in which all the students were Muslims and all the teachers were from the enemy rank. Here comes the fifth principle: Wring success out of failure.

The power of peace is stronger than the power of violence is the sixth principle. When Makkah was conquered, all of the Prophet’s direst opponents were brought before him. They were war criminals, in every sense of the word. But the Prophet did not order to kill them. He simply said: “Go, you are free.” The result of this kind behavior was miraculous. Most of them embraced Islam.

No to dichotomous thinking was another principle of the Prophet. “In the famous Muta battle, Khaled bin Waleed decided to withdraw Muslim forces from the battlefield because he discovered that the enemy was disproportionately outnumbered. When the Muslim forces reached Madinah, some commented “O Furrar” (deserters). The Prophet said “No. They are Kurrar” (men of advancement).” Those Madinah Muslims, who commented wrongly about their forces, were thinking dichotomously, either fighting or retreating. The Prophet said no. There is also a third option, and that is to avoid war and find a time to strengthen yourself to make a powerful comeback. History tells us that the Muslims, after three years of preparation, advanced toward Rome and won a resounding victory.

To bring the battle in one’s own favorable field was the Prophet’s eighth principle. Before the Hudaibiyya Treaty the unbelievers were determined to engage Muslims in fighting, because obviously they were in an advantageous position. But the Prophet, by accepting their conditions unilaterally, entered into a pact. It was a 10-year peace treaty. Until then, the meeting ground between Muslims and non-Muslims had been on the battlefield. Now the area of conflict became that of ideological debate. “Within two years, Islam emerged as victorious because of the simple reason of its ideological superiority,” the scholar said.

Gradualism instead of radicalism was the ninth principle, which is well-established by a Hadith reported by Al-Bukhari. Ayesha says that the first verses of the Qur’an were related mostly to heaven and hell. And then after a long time when the people’s hearts had softened, the specific commands to desist from adultery and drinking were revealed in the Qur’an. “This is a clear proof that for social changes, Islam advocates the evolutionary method, rather than the revolutionary method,” Khan explained.

To be pragmatic in controversial matters was another of the Prophet’s important principles, he said. During the writing of the Hudaibiyya Treaty, the Prophet dictated these words: “This is from Muhammad, the Messenger of God.” The Quraysh raised their objections over these words. The Prophet promptly changed the word and ordered to write simply Muhammad son of Abdullah. This pragmatic approach adopted by the Prophet brought peace and prosperity for Muslims and accelerated the propagation of Islam.

In Arab News. Here