Since Borders declared bankruptcy last month, I’ve been really fascinated by the flurry of post-mortems. From articles and blog posts on forbes.com, huff-po, and other business magazines, to radio and TV opinion pieces – everyone seems to agree on what went wrong. Borders’ management didn’t respond quickly or broadly enough to the two critical shifts in their business: how people purchase books (online vs. in-store), and how they read them (electronically vs. ink-and-paper).
That seems like a bit of a cheap shot – kind of like saying, “Yeah, if that guy hadn’t been doing 70 on that hairpin curve
The more interesting thing, though, is – why was the guy doing 70 on the hairpin curve in the rain in the first place?
And that’s what I’m curious about: why didn’t Borders see this coming? Especially when their primary competitor did. Barnes and Noble created barnesandnoble.com – it’s not Amazon, but it’s viable, and they got it up and running pretty early on. Borders, on the other hand, actually outsourced their online sales to Amazon until a few years ago. Barnes and Noble came out with the Nook as soon as they could after the Kindle (and priced it significantly lower); Borders didn’t bring out the Kobo till last June.
I suspect that the core problem here was a failure of courage and farsightedness on the part of Borders’ leadership.
Why do I call out those two things, specifically? In working with leaders over the past twenty years, we’ve discovered that people look for certain characteristics in their leaders; we’re wired to look for simple, observable and accurate indicators of whether or not the person in question is going to be able to lead well and effectively. (If you think about it, up until a couple of hundred years ago, choosing the right leader was a question of life or death – choose badly and you could end up starving to death in the winter or being over-run by invading hordes. So it makes sense that we have a strong sense of whether someone has the personal characteristics that make for good leadership).
So, back to Borders: two of the six essential leadership characteristics we've identified are Far-sighted and Courageous. Far-sightedness is the ability to envision and articulate the future in a way that’s compelling and inclusive. That is, to have and share a vision for the future of the company that shows how everyone at the company can work together to move past current difficulties and build a successful future. Courage, for a leader, is the demonstrated willingness to do things that are personally difficult or frightening, for the good of the enterprise.
It seems clear to me that the senior leaders of Borders have been lacking in both far-sight and courage over the past few years. Perhaps now the seriousness of their current situation will catalyze new courage and farsightedness. Or perhaps new leaders will be brought in who have and will exercise these qualities.
In any case, I think the lesson to be learned, for those of us who aspire to be good leaders, is not simply that they failed to take the curve at 70 mph on a wet road, but that we can develop capabilities and skills that will help us avoid getting ourselves into a similar situation.
