Couple Great Leadership Examples from McKinsey CEO Excellence Book

I hope sharing couple good examples are ok.

A great game changing story : Mastercard’s former CEO Ajay Banga:

He shares his game-changing vision and how it came about: “I was walking through the office and saw this slogan written in a staircase: ‘Mastercard, the heart of commerce.’ It made me think, ‘But commerce is mostly in cash, right?’ I realized that in the company nobody talked about cash. If anything, they talked about Visa and Amex and China UnionPay and local schemes. “That led me,” he continues, “to figure out the percentage of transactions in the world that were happening with cash. That number exceeded eighty-five percent just for consumer transactions. From then on I talked about our vision as being to ‘kill cash.’ Instead of fighting for a piece of the fifteen percent of transactions that were electronic, we fought for a piece of the eighty-five that weren’t (yet). We then converted the vision of killing cash into strategies for growing the core, diversifying our client base, and building new businesses.”

Another good example from Adidas: We help Athletes to achieve their best

Hainer (Ex Adidas Ceo) was well aware that the financials were vital, but he didn’t lead with them. Instead, he reframed the company’s vision to be all about helping athletes fulfill their potential. As he describes, “The goal wasn’t to be the biggest and the richest, it was to start creating products that help athletes perform better, so the runner can run faster, the tennis player and the soccer player can play better. If we did that and provided good service to our consumers, the financials would follow. All we had to do was help people achieve their personal best, and by doing so we’d also be making the world a better place. I wanted to give the company the belief that this is more than just a revenue game and we are more than just a revenue company.”

People support what they help create

Nobel Prize–winning Israeli psychologist Daniel Kahneman conducted an experiment that provides a memorable answer. Kahneman ran a lottery with a twist. Half the participants were randomly assigned a numbered lottery ticket. The remaining half were given a blank ticket and a pen and asked to choose their own lottery number. Just before drawing the winning number, the researchers offered to buy back all the tickets. They wanted to find out how much they’d have to pay people who wrote down their own number compared with people who were handed a random number. The rational expectation would be that there should be no difference in how much the researchers have to pay people. After all, a lottery is pure chance. Every number, whether chosen or assigned, should have the same value because it has the same probability of being the winner. The answer, however, is predictably irrational. Regardless of nationality, demographic group, or the size of the prize, people who write their own lottery ticket number always demand at least five times more for their ticket. This reveals an important truth about human nature. As Medtronic’s Bill George puts it, “people support what they help create.” In fact, they’re some five times more supportive than those who aren’t involved. The underlying psychology relates to our desire for control, which is a deep-rooted survival instinct.