Learn
Strategic leaders are the focal point for
organizational learning. They promote a
culture of inquiry, and they search for the
lessons in both successful and unsuccessful
outcomes. They study failures—their
own and their teams’—in an open, constructive
way to find the hidden lessons.
A team of 40 senior leaders from a
pharmaceutical company, including the
CEO, took our Strategic Aptitude Self-
Assessment and discovered that learning
was their weakest collective area of
leadership. At all levels of the company,
it emerged, the tendency was to punish
rather than learn from mistakes, which
meant that leaders often went to great
lengths to cover up their own.
The CEO realized that the culture had
to change if the company was to become
more innovative. Under his leadership,
the team launched three initiatives: (1) a
program to publicize stories about projects
that initially failed but ultimately led to
creative solutions; (2) a program to engage
cross-divisional teams in novel experiments
to solve customer problems—and
then report the results regardless of
outcome; (3) an innovation tournament
to generate new ideas from across the
organization. Meanwhile, the CEO himself