The Corner Office

Why “passionate curiosity”? The phrase is more than the sum of its parts. Many CEOs will cite passion or curiosity as an important trait in the people they look to hire.

They make persuasive cases for why each is important.

“What I really want to know is what kind of person I’m dealing with,” said Joseph J. Plumeri, the CEO of Willis Group Holdings, an insurance broker. “So I only ask one question. I say, ‘Tell me what you’re passionate about.’ That’s it. What ever you want to talk about. Tell me what you’re passionate about. Digging holes. Riding bikes. I’m looking to see if they’ve got a passion. I’m looking to see if there’s anything inside, other than what they do. And how passionate could they be, therefore, about being here? And how excited and involved could they be? I’m not looking for a mirror image of me. I’m just looking for somebody who gets turned on about something. If you find that kind of person, then these are the people you want to climb hills with and climb mountains with.”

Robert Iger, the CEO of Disney, said curiosity was a key quality he looked for in job candidates.

“I love curiosity, particularly in our business – being curious about the world, but also being curious about your business, new business models, new technology,” he said. “If you’re not curious about technology and its potential impact on your life, then you’ll have no clue what its impact might be on someone else’s life.”

Passion. Curiosity. Both are important. But those words, separately, fall short of capturing the quality that sets these CEOs apart. There are plenty of people who are passionate, but many of their passions are focused on just one area. There are a lot of curious people in the world, but they can also be wallflowers.

But “passionate curiosity”—a phrase used by Nell Minow, the co-founder of The Corporate Library – is a better description of the quality that helps set CEOs apart: an infectious sense of fascination with everything around them.

Passionate curiosity, Minow said, “is indispensable, no matter what the job is. You want somebody who is just alert and very awake and engaged with the world and wanting to know more.”

People with this quality are sponges for information, for insights, wherever they are, what ever they’re doing.

“I think that the best leaders are really pattern thinkers,” said David Novak of Yum Brands. “They want to get better. Are they continually trying to better themselves? Are they looking outside for ideas that will help them grow the business? I look at it in the context of their own personal development. They’re constantly trying to learn how they can become better leaders and they’re constantly trying to learn how they can build a better business. They soak up everything they can possibly soak up so that they can become the best possible leaders they can be. And then they share that with others.”

Though CEOs are paid to have answers, their greatest contribution to their organizations may be asking the right questions – a skill that starts with passionate curiosity.

They recognize that they can’t have the answer to everything – that’s why they hire specialists to handle different parts of their organization – but they can push their company in the right direction and marshal the collective energy of their employees by asking the right questions. That, after all, is where the new opportunities are.

“In business, the big prizes are found when you can ask a question that challenges the corporate orthodoxy that exists in every business,” said Andrew Cosslett, the CEO of InterContinental Hotels Group. “In every business I’ve worked in, there’s been a lot of cost and value locked up in things that are deemed to be ‘the way we do things around here,’ or they’re deemed to be critical to – in the hotel world – a guest experience. So you have to talk to people and ask questions. I just keep asking people, ‘Why do you do that?’ ”

It’s an important lesson. For all the furrowed-brow seriousness and certainty that you often encounter in the business world, some of the most important advances come from asking, much like a per sis tent five-year-old, the simplest questions. Why do you do that? How come it’s done this way? Is there a better way?

“I do think that’s something we forget,” said Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, the design consulting firm. “As leaders, probably the most important role we can play is asking the right questions. But the bit we forget is that it is, in itself, a creative pro cess. Those right questions aren’t just kind of lying around on the ground to be picked up and asked. When I go back and look at the great leaders – Roosevelt, Churchill – one of the things that occur to me is they somehow had the ability to frame the question in a way that nobody else would have thought about. In design, that’s everything, right? If you don’t ask the right questions, then you’re never going to get the right solution. I spent too much of my career feeling like I’d done a really good job answering the wrong question. And that was because I was letting other people give me the question. One of the things that I’ve tried to do more and more – and I obviously have the opportunity to do as a leader – is to take ownership of the question. And so I’m much more interested these days in having debates about what the questions should be than I necessarily am about the solutions.”

Jen-Hsun Huang of Nvidia said that his leadership style today is defined by questions rather than answers.

“It’s not possible for the CEO to know everything, but it is possible for us to add value to literally everything,” Huang said. “And the reason for that is, if you’re the CEO, you’re probably better at looking around corners than most. You probably have better intuition than most. You’re probably able to see the forest better than most. You’re probably able to deal with complexity better than most. And so you bring a perspective that is unique. By asking the right questions, you can get to the heart of the issue right away. It’s almost possible now for me to go through a day and do nothing but ask questions and have my sensibility, my perspective and what’s important to me be perfectly clear to everybody without making a statement at all.”

Asking questions. Showing genuine enthusiasm. Being interested in the world. It sounds so simple, yet not everyone displays those qualities, particularly in a business culture that values jutjawed certainty. Top executives who are passionately curious can also spot like-minded people from a mile away. They will pick them out of a crowd, and even hire them on the spot – another sign of how rare this quality is.

“I once hired somebody who wasn’t looking for a job,” said Nell Minow of The Corporate Library. “A guy called to ask me some questions about some corporate governance issue and I just thought he was so bright. I said, ‘I’ll put some materials together for you and put them in the mail.’ And he said, ‘Can I come over and pick them up right now?’ I said, ‘Are you looking for a job?’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m in an internship right now. I just graduated from college and my internship is going to finish up at the end of the summer.’ I told him, ‘If you are looking for a job when the internship ends, I’m going to hire you.’ And I did.”

James J. Schiro, CEO of Zurich Financial Ser vices, said he sometimes picked assistants – to travel with him and help him get things done – just by keeping his eye out for young people who are “smart, bright, energetic.”

“The person who works with me now I met on a road show,” Schiro said. “He was one of the bankers, and I said, ‘I’d like to talk to him.’ He came in, and I said, ‘Philippe, how would you like to work for me?’ He said, ‘Doing what?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I’ve watched you. You understand this industry. You know more about this industry than I do, and you can just work for me for a year, and then after that year, somebody in this organization will hire you.”

Some CEOs worked early on as an assistant – a right-hand man or woman – to a top executive. Did they then ultimately rise to top jobs because of that early experience as an assistant, seeing the world through a CEO’s eyes at a young age? Or were they chosen for those assistant jobs because top executives had a keen eye for people who displayed passionate curiosity? Undoubtedly both are true.

The early career of Ursula M. Burns, the CEO of Xerox, is a case in point. She was noticed by top executives early on, and promoted to a level in the organization that few get to see at a young age.

The sharp inflection point in her career at Xerox came in 1989, when she was working in product development and planning. She was invited to a work-life discussion. Diversity initiatives came up, and somebody asked whether such initiatives lowered hiring standards. Wayland Hicks, a senior Xerox executive running the meeting, patiently explained that that was not true.

“I was stunned,” Burns said. “I actually told him, ‘I was surprised that you gave this assertion any credence.’ ”

After that meeting, she revisited the issue with Hicks, and a few weeks later he asked her to meet with him in his office. She figured that she was about to be reprimanded or fired. Instead, Hicks told her she had been right to be concerned but also wrong for handling it so forcefully. Then he told her he wanted to meet regularly with her.

“She was enormously curious,” Hicks explained. “She wanted to know why we were doing some things at the time, and she was always prepared in a way that I thought was very refreshing.” He offered her a job as his executive assistant in January 1990, when she was thirty-one. She would travel with Hicks, sit in on important meetings, and help him get things done. She accepted, and they talked a lot about leadership during downtime.

Burns continued to speak her mind and ask questions inside Xerox – particularly on an occasion in mid-1991 when the stakes were unusually high. At the time, Paul A. Allaire, Xerox’s president, held monthly meetings with top managers, and Burns and other assistants were invited to sit in, but off to the side.

Burns noticed a pattern. Allaire would announce, “We have to stop hiring.” But then the company would hire a thousand people. The next month, same thing. So she raised her hand. “I’m a little confused, Mr. Allaire,” she said. “If you keep saying, ‘No hiring,’ and we hire a thousand people every month, who can say ‘No hiring’ and make it actually happen?” She remembers that he stared at her with a “Why did you ask that question?” look and then the meeting moved on.

Later, the phone rang. Allaire wanted to see her in his office. She figured that it was not good news. But Allaire wanted to poach her from Hicks, so she could be his executive assistant. They, too, talked often about leadership. Allaire didn’t want to discourage her candor but, like Hicks, he offered tips about how to be more effective—“like giving people credit for ideas that they didn’t have but you sold to them, to give them ownership,” Allaire recalled advising her. Allaire saw in her the right mix of energy, confidence, and curiosity – an eagerness to learn.

Burns was forceful about asking questions on her way to the corner office. “You have to learn and you have to be curious,” her mother always told her.

And how does Burns describe her role today as CEO? “The job is exactly not about having the right answers,” she said. “The job is having great questions asked and great people helping you answer them. Not all the right questions come from you, either. But I have a perspective and a purview that allow me to have a different set of questions. If somebody comes to me with a problem, almost surely I’ll send it back and say, ‘Think about this. How about this? How about that?’ ”

As these CEOs have shown, asking good questions can help at every stage of a career, for people just starting out and for those in charge of an international corporation. It bears repeating. They show interest and enthusiasm, and they ask questions. They focus on being interested rather than trying to be interesting, as the saying goes. People who show this kind of initiative will find that it leads to important relationships – at work and outside of work. That’s how people find mentors, and how they connect with leaders of the company.

Some people in business refer to the 80/20 rule, a variation of a concept called the Pareto Principle. It refers to the idea that 20 percent of the people in any company do 80 percent of the work. Now, think again about those one hundred people in an organization, all at the same rank. If twenty of them are going to be the work horses of the group, there will be an even smaller number who go beyond their assigned tasks, and take an interest in the people and the organization outside their job descriptions. They will stand out.

Show some passionate curiosity – it is a simple rule with an enormous payoff.

“If you give positive vibes, if you show an interest, by and large a lot of people will react,” said Stephen I. Sadove, the CEO of Saks. “Not everybody, but people tend to react. When people show an interest in reaching out, I tend to react to them.”

Chapter 2

BATTLE-HARDENED CONFIDENCE

Consider those one hundred employees again – all vice presidents at the same company. As their bosses size up this group, some qualities are easier to spot than others. Passionate curiosity? It’s there for all to see. There’s an energy, a buzz, from people who have it, and you can pick them out of a crowd.

Other qualities are tougher to discern, especially the ability to handle adversity. Everybody faces challenges of some kind or another in their life, but some people deal with adversity better than others. And then there are those who embrace it, who relish it, who want the tough assignment when the pressure is on. These people have plowed through tough circumstances, and they know what they’re capable of handling. They have a track record of overcoming adversity, of failing and getting up off the mat to get the job done, no matter what. They have battle-hardened confidence.

The same is true for companies. Many CEOs say their corporate culture has been strengthened in painful periods when nothing seemed to be working, and the leadership had to pull everyone together to establish their core values and beliefs.

If there were some test to find out whether a person had this quality, it would be a huge moneymaker. But people, and companies, reveal how they deal with adversity only in the context of new challenges – when they are faced with potential or real failure and the status quo is not an option. The best predictor of behavior is past performance, and that’s why so many CEOs interview job candidates about how they dealt with failure in the past. They want to know if somebody is the kind of person who takes ownership of challenges, or starts looking for excuses because there are too many factors beyond their control.

People can talk a good game in job interviews, but that talk can seem meaningless when someone is confronted with a difficult task and the moment of truth arrives. In such circumstances, some people fold.

“I think hiring great people remains extremely, extremely hard,” said Jen-Hsun Huang of Nvidia. “The reason for that is this: It all comes down to how somebody deals with adversity. You can never really tell how somebody deals with adversity, whether it’s adversity that’s created by the environment or adversity that you’re creating for them. As the CEO, as a leader, sometimes you have to put people in the hot seat – not because you want them to be in a hot seat, but because the hot seat needs to have somebody sitting on it. And so you need a great player on it. When you have a difficult situation and you need somebody to take it and run with it, some people just take it and make it happen. They feed on adversity. There are some people who, in the face of adversity, become more calm. When the world is falling apart, I actually think my heart rate goes down. I find that I think best when I’m under adversity. Some people see adversity and they just cower, as talented as they are. You could ask them about the adversity they had in the past, but you never really know the intensity of that adversity.”

Many CEOs seem driven by a strong work ethic forged in adversity. Perhaps they started working at a young age and always had jobs as they grew up. Others worked because they had little choice, because they grew up in homes where money was tight. As they moved up in organizations, the responsibilities grew in scale, but the attitude remained the same – this is my job, and I’m going to take care of it, and own it. Because of that attitude, they are rewarded with more responsibilities, challenges, and promotions.

“I grew up dirt poor,” said Carol Bartz, the CEO of Yahoo. “My mom died when I was eight, so my grandmother raised my brother and me. She had a great sense of humor, and she never really let things get to her. My favorite story is when we were on a farm in Wisconsin; I would have probably been thirteen. There was a snake up in the rafter of the machine shed. And we ran and said, ‘Grandma, there’s a snake.’ And she came out and she knocked it down with a shovel, chopped its head off, and said, ‘You could have done that.’ And, you know, that’s the tone she set. Just get it done. Just do it. Pick yourself up. Move on.”

Nancy McKinstry, the CEO of Wolters Kluwer, the Dutch publishing and information company, also grew up in modest circumstances and learned to deal with the challenges of juggling schoolwork and jobs.

“I grew up without a lot of money,” McKinstry said. “My mother was a schoolteacher and my parents were divorced when I was fairly young. So I watched my mother support a family on a schoolteacher’s salary, which wasn’t very much back in those days, and I watched her persevere. What I learned from her is the value of education and that hard work can make a difference. Because we didn’t have a lot of money, I worked all the time. So when I was in college I worked two or three different jobs to fund my way through. So that ability to keep a lot of balls in the air and keep adapting to situations to try and make things happen every day was something that stuck with me.”

When she’s hiring, she looks for this quality in others. They don’t necessarily need to have grown up in a house hold where money was tight. She’s just looking for evidence that they handled difficult challenges.

“I like hiring people who have overcome adversity, because I believe I’ve seen in my own career that perseverance is really important,” McKinstry said. “And if you can overcome some obstacle and keep moving up the field, it’s tremendous. In any business you’re going to be confronted with challenges, and so how you overcome them becomes important to your ability to drive the results forward. So when I interview folks, I will ask them directly: ‘Give me an example of some adverse situation you faced, and what did you do about it, and what did you learn from it?’ The people I’ve hired who have had that ability to describe the situation have always worked out, because they’re able to sort of fall down, dust themselves off, and keep fighting the next day.”

The CEOs’ stories help bring to life a concept in psychology known as “locus of control.” In general, it refers to a person’s outlook and belief about what leads to success and failure in their life. Do they tend to blame failures on factors they cannot control, or do they believe they have the ability to shape events and circumstances by making the most of what they can control? In other words, do they make the most of what ever hand they are dealt? It’s not just a sunny attitude. It’s a positive attitude mixed with a sense of purpose and determination.

Ursula Burns of Xerox grew up poor on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, watching her mother struggle to raise her and her brother and sister, controlling what she could about their circumstances. Burns embodies this quality herself – making the most of those things she can control – and she wants her employees to embody them, too.

Burns’s mother made ends meet by looking after other children. She also ironed shirts for a doctor who lived down the street and cleaned his office, bartering for things like medicine and even cleaning supplies. Burns’s mother had many sayings – and she repeated them, often in blunt terms, over and over. “Where you are is not who you are,” she would tell her children. “Don’t act like you’re from the gutter because you live in a place that’s really close to the gutter.”

She set firm expectations, Burns recalled. “She was very, very black-and-white and very clear about what responsibilities we had. One was that we had to be good people. And the second thing was that we had to be successful. And so her words for success were, ‘You have to give’—and she would say this all the time—‘more than you take away from the world.’ ”

Her mother, who died before she could see her daughter rise to the top at Xerox, also insisted that her children get a college education. “You have to worry about the things you can control,” she would say. “Don’t become a victim.”

It was a theme that Burns herself touched on in a big meeting with Xerox employees not long after she took over as CEO. The lousy economy, the past boardroom dramas at Xerox – it was time to move on. She repeated one of her mother’s sayings to a gathering of hundreds of sales reps: “Stuff happens to you, and then there’s stuff that you happen to.” Grammarians might take issue with the phrasing, but the message is clear. Don’t let circumstances or potential excuses get the better of you. Stare them down, and make things happen.

Andrew Cosslett of InterContinental Hotels Group offered another example of how this quality is shared by people at the top. Cosslett had a rough childhood, and grew up living largely on his own from the time he was about sixteen. His schoolwork suffered as he focused more on rugby and other sports, and being “the boy about town,” he said. He managed to scrape by in school through his teenage years, and grew more focused in his twenties.

Not long after he was named CEO, Cosslett was sitting with his top executives at an off-site meeting, and they went around the room, sharing stories about their backgrounds.

“It was a facilitated conversation as part of our time together, to try to understand what drove us, and our kind of purpose and meaning, what led us to be the people we are,” Cosslett said. “What was extraordinary was that of the ten people in the room, nine of them had had very challenging teenage years, either with broken homes, family divorces, alcoholic parents, mothers getting beaten up, brothers or sisters dying. So 90 percent of the people in that room had something like that in their background. And I don’t think that would be typical if you looked at the normal flow of society as a cross section. So there’s something about what happened to them as kids that sort of pushed them on. And I think it’s this thing about learning about your own strength that makes you mature more quickly and allows you to progress faster.”

He elaborated on this quality, and discussed how he tries to learn in interviews whether a job candidate has it.

“You learn a lot very quickly about managing in difficult situations,” he said. “One of the things that makes you see the world differently and forms you as an individual is if you’ve had to rely on your own wit and resources. If you’ve had a challenging upbringing, I think that’s part of it. I think rugby is another one because there’s no hiding place. It’s a physical confrontation, and there’s a moment of truth where you’re going to be tested in a game. Everybody sees you, even though it’s being done at high speed, and everybody knows whether you’re the type to back down or stand up. It’s never talked about, but everybody knows. And more than anything you know whether you’re that type or the other type.

“If I’m recruiting people for very senior positions, I will delve quite extensively into their personal lives. I will look into how many times in their life they’ve been seriously tested emotionally, physically – where they’ve had to stand on their own feet and deal with something that they couldn’t be prepared for. That could be in the business context. It could be in the family context, social context. And the ones who are the best, I’ve found, are the people who have had to confront something very difficult, and they’re the people you can rely on when the going gets really tough because they’ve been there, and they know what they can do.”