Book Preview: Jim Parker

“Leadership is about making things happen, and the responsibility for leadership must permeate all levels of a high-performance organization,” Jim Parker writes in his upcoming book. Do the Right Thing: How Dedicated Employees Create Loyal Customers and Large Profits (Wharton School Publishing).

The former CEO and vice chairman of the board of directors of Southwest Airlines, Parker devotes two chapters of his book to the need for great leaders at every level of an organization. He specifically cites the work of Professor Deborah Ancona and her colleagues at the MIT Leadership Center who developed the Distributed Leadership Model in describing how successful leadership works.

During Parker's three-year tenure at the head of Southwest, Fortune magazine named the airline one of the three most admired companies in America three times. Parker, who serves on the Advisory Council of the MIT Leadership Center, was Morningstar.com's Co-CEO of the Year in 2001 and made Institutional Investor's list of the best CEOs in America in 2004.

In his book, Parker uses the Allies' World War II invasion of Normandy as an example of the strength of distributed leadership. Once Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower set D-Day in motion, Parker writes, “the future of the world lay in the hands of leaders at other levels.”

Virtually nothing went according to plan that day as bad weather scattered soldiers all over the French coast. But the Allied leaders didn't wait for instructions from headquarters. “Wherever they were, they gathered whatever troops and weapons they could find and began the war right there,” Parker writes.

In contrast, the German forces were hampered by a strictly hierarchical command structure. Even in the face of disaster, counterattacks were delayed while field commanders waited for approval from their superiors. Parker asserts that this lack of flexibility cost them the battle and, ultimately, the war.

Parker draws parallels between these front-line troops and the bottom ranks of a corporation. Whether a company's goals are embraced at the lowest levels depends not on “some lofty vision espoused by the CEO,” but on the messages employees get every day through their relationships with immediate supervisors, Parker argues.

“In many respects, great leadership is most important at front-line levels of an organization because this is where a business most directly touches its employees and customers,” he writes. “Yet, sadly, this is the level of leadership at which many organizations fall apart.”

Companies need to respond to a multitude of challenges every day, any of which can affect the success of the business. Parker asserts that, as in World War II, the organization that has empowered leaders at every level has the edge over organizations that remain bound to the hierarchy.

“The ultimate success of a corporate vision depends on achieving excellence throughout an organization,” he writes.