INTRODUCTION The Market Value of Leadership

You’re considering investing in a firm; how do you know what it’s really worth? Helping investors answer this question has occupied a good part of my past decade. I’ve drawn ideas from the vast and multifaceted financial literature, the emerging and complex intangibles literature, and the broad literature of leadership. This book shifts investor attention from financial measures to intangibles (like strategy, brand, operations, and customer service) to leadership. This book integrates theory and research to address the question of how to add leadership to your view of firm valuation.

The results will be useful to many audiences. Looking at leadership through investors' eyes—the main thrust of the book—will of course benefit investors themselves, but it will also benefit the rating agencies who create indices to report value, the government monitoring bodies who work to ensure that business standards are maintained, the trade associations who promote the interests of their members, the boards of directors who steward and oversee value-creating firm behavior, the executive teams who succeed by delivering value, and the leadership development professionals and human resource professionals and others who build value through leadership and organization processes.

In much of my writing, I tackle large and messy problems, like defining how human resources can be adapted to deliver business performance (HR Champions, HR Transformation, HR Value Proposition, HR from the Outside In, The Rise of HR), how organizations can change their culture and create new capabilities (Organization Capability, GE Workout, Boundaryless Organization, Learning Organization), how leadership can be codified, improved, and tied to customers (Results Based Leadership, Leadership Code, Leadership Brand, Leadership Sustainability), and how employees can find more meaning from their work setting (Why of Work). My goal has been to shape future conversations that solve relevant business questions through integrating innovative and complex ideas in a simple way.

Leadership matters, and most acknowledge that leaders affect an organization’s value. Almost every activist investor recognizes the importance of leadership for firm success and can point to iconic leaders who have created great value. However, just by observing that a particular leader is visionary or inspiring, by focusing only on the person at the top and ignoring the larger leadership team, or by failing to assess whose leadership capability is woven into the organization’s DNA, investors make simplistic and intuitive assessments of leadership value. The main title of this book, The Leadership Capital Index, draws on a useful metaphor for how to include, conceive, and audit leadership in the assessment of firm value. A leadership capital index is like a financial confidence index—Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s. Rather than assessing a firm’s likelihood of paying its debts, however, the leadership capital index offers a more thorough way to assess a firm’s present and future leadership. The subtitle of this book, Realizing the Market Value of Leadership, promises a more comprehensive and rigorous way of evaluating leadership as part of a firm’s overall value.

One reason this book has taken a decade to write is the difficulty of articulating a simple solution to the complex task of judging leadership quality as an outside debt or equity investor. I started by trying to help investors go from instinctive to rigorous leadership assessments. I wanted the leadership capital index in this book to take investors from a present 5% confidence in their assessment of leadership to a 90% confidence level, but I eventually concluded that this goal was naïve on my part.

Instead, I have chosen to write an MVP—minimum viable process—book, picking up a concept from software development. In software, innovators get started, go public, share ideas, receive critiques, experiment, and continually improve. In the same vein, my leadership capital index is not yet perfect—but it offers a simple and already helpful approach to the question of assessing genuine value. This MVP logic is like software version 1.0, knowing that 2.0 and 3.0 will follow. But 1.0 becomes the critical first draft that will define and shape the conversation. Creating this rigorous way to define and assess leadership through the eyes of investors is a significant step forward.

My hope is to frame a dialogue about something that investors and others will use in a disciplined way. The leadership capital index will be used to assess firm value, but it will also become part of conversations about risk, social responsibility, governance, mergers and acquisitions, and leadership selection or development. This is a lot to ask of one book, but the ideas presented will make real progress on this journey.

Most popular business books start with stories of beloved companies and try to uncover insights from those exemplars. These insights might come from in-depth narrative on a few companies or from research on many companies designed to discover what respected companies do. I have written a number of such books. The benefit of this approach is that the stories (and the research) are compelling and interesting, offering details that bring the insights alive. The downside is that the stories and research reflect a point in time. However excellent or great they are now, companies may not continue to be so in the years (or even months) to come. Starting with stories, either as individual cases or as research based on lots of cases, runs the risk that events will overtake the author’s insights and lead readers to doubt the inferences the author has drawn.

While not focused on specific companies, we wanted to figure out how active investors can better assess leaders, so my colleagues and I wanted to get inside the investor’s mind. Norm Smallwood and I interviewed dozens of thoughtful investors around the world; ran a number of focus groups with four to eight investors in Brazil, Singapore, Canada, Norway, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Middle East, and the United States; and surveyed more than four hundred investors (and published these results). We found that investors were intrigued with the concept of leadership, acknowledged it as a missing ingredient (some said the holy grail) of investment assessment, but were unsure how to approach it with more than casual observations.

I also looked at dozens of studies by consulting firms and experts who attempted to put substance behind the assessment of leadership. Very talented colleagues have approached the challenge of assessing how leaders can be more effective. In general, these studies offered deep insights on one piece of the leadership puzzle. Some focused on compensation practices, others on personal style, and still others on organization governance and design. None attempted to prepare a comprehensive approach to leadership capital as a whole.

It’s just as well that I abandoned the idea of starting with stories of investors' successfully assessing leadership—such stories are rare, and those that exist are often incomplete or even more transitory than the usual story of business excellence. Instead, my focus is on stimulating ideas that will deliver investor rigor in assessing leadership capital. Throughout the book, I refer to insights from investor interviews, focus groups, and surveys, but concentrate on the ideas and frameworks rather than the stories. I put myself in the place of an investor who has done financial and intangible analytics and is now seeking insights on leadership that will inform the final decision.

When I discuss this leadership capital index, people often demand, "Show me the measures on the existing balance sheet and income statement.” I struggled for years to do this, but then the obvious hit me: current income statements and balance sheets were designed to give investors financial information to assess a firm’s value—not information on leadership capital. Nonetheless, investors and others who are serious about long-term value creation will seek the additional insights that come from a thorough assessment of leadership—the sort of assessment this leadership capital index begins to provide. The measures of this index come from more in-depth observations, interviews, surveys, and other data about leadership. The value of this book is that it provides you with the right questions to ask and the right indicators to track.

So this is an ambitious and sweeping book. When you see leadership through the eyes of investors, you will build new insights into how you can better realize the full market value of a company. The proposed leadership capital index offers a rather simple (but not simplistic) approach, with ideas, tools, and diagnostic questions that can be used with increasing amounts of granularity (one could audit two domains of leadership, ten elements, or fifty-nine items). Using this leadership capital index, investors can hope to move from 5% to 30% or even 40% confidence in their assessment of leadership. By offering a leadership capital index, I will take a major step forward to shape the discussion to realize the market value of leadership.

The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 (Why and How Leadership Matters to Investors), in Chapters 1 and 2, provides the context for the leadership capital index. These chapters summarize previous work on firm valuation and leadership, present the rationale for leadership as an increasingly important part of market value, and define a leadership capital index to advance and assess quality of leadership with two domains: individual and organizational elements of leadership. Part 2 (The Individual Elements of the Leadership Capital Index), in Chapters 3 through 7, presents five elements of individual leader behavior that investors can monitor, then identifies specific competencies and indicators for these five elements. These five chapters will help investors determine the quality of individual leaders within an organization. Part 3 (The Organization Elements of the Leadership Capital Index), in Chapters 8 through 12, presents five elements of organizational systems that shape leadership that investors can monitor and identifies specific dimensions and indicators of these five human capital systems. These five chapters will help investors realize the value of the organization that creates leadership. Part 4 (Application and Action), in Chapters 13 and 14, pulls together all of the ideas and show how investors, regulatory agencies, boards of directors, C-suite executives, and leadership development professionals can apply these ideas to improve the quality of leadership of companies they assess or work in.

I am deeply indebted to many colleagues who have shaped the ideas in this book. My insights draw on exceptional thought leaders in diverse disciplines including finance, market valuation, organization systems, human capital, human resources, and leadership. I am particularly indebted to those who have worked to bring investment-level rigor to the assessment of traditionally "softer” organization issues. The list of these colleagues is too long to mention, but they are cited in Chapters 1 and 2. I have learned firsthand about the elements of leadership capital and organization capability from working with hundreds of clients over many decades. I am grateful to these clients for allowing me to observe and co-learn with them. My personal intellectual guides on this work include remarkable insights from cherished colleagues including Justin Allen, Dick Beatty, John Boudreau, Wayne Brockbank, Bob Eichinger, Allan Freed, Peter Goerke, Marshall Goldsmith, Lynda Gratton, Gordon Hewitt, Steve Kerr, Dale Lake, Ed Lawler, Mark Nyman, Jeff Pfeffer, CK Prahalad, Ray Reilly, Norm Smallwood, Pat Wright, and Jon Younger. Each has directly contributed to my understanding, and I clearly have assimilated their ideas.

I am indebted to Hilary Powers for her extraordinary assistance in developmental editing. She has an incredible gift for making abstract ideas accessible. None of my books would be the same without her remarkable editing. I am very grateful for Steve Piersanti and his amazingly talented team at Berrett-Koehler, who are not only professionally gifted but also show personal care. Clearly, this book and other work-related activities would not happen without the incredible support of Ginger Bitter, my assistant for over twenty-five years, who not only manages unwieldy logistics but is also a dear personal friend. Yet my most heartfelt appreciation and gratitude goes to my wife, Wendy, who continues with positive patience to support and shape my professional and personal lives in ways that I could not begin to imagine without her: plus que hier, moins que demain.