The BBC World Service has been playing a fun game on its books programme, The Word. It has been asking listeners to sum up their lives in six words - an idea borrowed from Smith, a US magazine.

There have been some wonderful mini-memoirs sent to the BBC, my favourite being “squandered more chances than others get”, submitted by a mournful man in the Netherlands.

It made me wonder whether the same approach might work in summarising the leadership style of top managers. 

For instance,  I’m a big fan of Philip Bowman, the new chief executive of Smiths Group. Much of this admiration is based on the artful way in which he secured a good price for Allied Domecq, the drinks group he led between 1999 and 2005.  Given that his next employer, Scottish Power, was bought shortly after he arrived, perhaps his leadership style could be summed up as: “Expect sale before six years elapse.”

Allied Domecq was bought by Pernod Ricard, the pastis maker that is living proof of how some parts of France have mastered globalisation. Part of its success lies in its willingness to devolve power to local arms around the world. One could therefore reduce the management philosophy of Patrick Ricard, its chairman, to: ”Decentralise decisions and growth transcends Frenchness.”

And then there’s Jeff Bezos. I interviewed him back in 2000, on a day when he had lost $1bn on paper because of a big dip in the Amazon share price. At the time there were fears that the internet retailer would run out of money and its founder’s determination to guffaw at every opportunity seemed really phoney.

Now I realise that I had seen only the first half of his six-word biography: “Had fake laugh - and last laugh.”

If you’d like to submit a six-word summary of your or somebody else’s management style or career, please post it as a comment below.

March 14th, 2008 in Leadership | Permalink