WWCD - What Would Churchill Do?

Great piece about one of the great leaders of our time. Enjoy!!

By Margaret Heffernan

November 11, 2010

Warren Buffett, trying to describe the importance of leadership, once called it a “secret sauce,” arguing that it makes all the difference to the value of a business, even if you don’t quite know what it is.

I was reminded of the issue last week when I was in London and visited Winston Churchill’s cabinet war rooms. As you’d expect, they’re underground, dark and rather dismal, and neither Churchill nor his staff much liked spending time in them. That the government spent so much time above ground was due not to heroism but claustrophobia.

But on one level, I envied these men and women. They had a very clear, well-defined problem with an obvious goal: Defeat Hitler. How many business leaders yearn for so simply articulated a task! What’s easy to forget, in such nostalgia, is just how daunting it was. Three days before Churchill delivered one of his most rousing speeches — “this was their finest hour” — he confessed to a colleague that he expected them both to be dead within three months. A clear goal, yes. But with only the slimmest chance of success.

How did Churchill define leadership? In his own words, what he did was “keep buggering on.” In more contemporary words, what this meant was he and his Cabinet just kept going, putting one foot in front of the other, making the best decisions they could, many of which turned out to be wrong. He never made unilateral decisions, and he spent a lot of time in that bunker arguing.

I’ve never had much affinity for the business-as-war metaphor, and Sun Tzu leaves me cold. But what I respect in Churchill’s wartime leadership was his recognition that there were no magic bullets. He had no illusion of control. Strategy, alliances, technology, and mental, emotional and operational discipline were all essential — for six long years. But there was no such thing as a quick fix.

When I meet with CEOs, they’re all eager to hear what other companies are doing. Their curiosity is driven by a lingering sense that somewhere out there must lie a solution, a quantum leap that will catapult their business out of recession and themselves out of the doldrums. They’re sick of recession, despairing of government, cynical about temporary market rallies and deeply nostalgic for the good old days of predictable if slow growth.

It’s a lesson any leader would do well to remember as we enter the fourth year of the credit crunch. If there were a magic solution, someone would have found it by now. Growth is elusive and, in a recession, more so than ever. Maintaining morale is hard but fundamental. No miracle — in the form of strategy, technology or stimulus — will substitute for mental, emotional and operational discipline. The only thing that leaders can do, and must do, is abandon the illusion of control and keep buggering on.