Leadership Brand: Developing Customer-Focused Leaders to Drive Performance and Build Lasting Value

by Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood

Book Overview

Your company's brands hold intangible value and differentiate your firm from rivals. So does your leadership brand--a shared identity among your organization's leaders that differentiates what they can do from what your rivals' leaders can do. In Leadership Brand , Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood show how branded leadership delivers unique value for firms' investors, customers, and employees--elevating market value and creating a sharp competitive...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1422110303
• ISBN13: 9781422110300
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.6" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

"The journey to leadership brand begins with the self."

In the Preface, Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood make this affirmation: "We believe that leaders matter, but leadership matters more. We have all experienced a gifted leader who engaged all of us -- our hearts, minds, and feet. Dynamic leaders enlist us in a cause, and we willingly follow their counsel. But leadership exists when an organization produces more than one to two individual leaders. Leadership matters more because it is tied not to a person but to the process of building leaders." By no means do Ulrich and Smallwood question the importance of individual leaders. On the contrary, they assert (and I agree) that one of the most important obligations of being a leader is to strengthen or at least sustain a process by which to identify, hire, develop, and then retain high-impact leaders at all levels and in all areas throughout her or his organization. With regard to this book's title, Ulrich and Smallwood offer another affirmation: "We believe that all organizations have a leadership brand, either explicitly crafted and deployed or implicitly perceived and randomly perpetuated...[Therefore] leadership brand is the identity of the leaders throughout an organization that bridges customer expectations and employee and organizational behavior." I've noticed that in recent years, several of the same companies (e.g. Berkshire Hathaway, FedEx, GE, Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, and Toyota Motor) appear on the annual lists of those Most Valuable as well as those Most Highly Admired. These exemplary companies all have high-impact leadership that consistently produces superior results. I've also noticed that the U.S. military services and their academies are also renowned for the high quality of their leadership development programs. However different these organizations are in most respects, they do share this in common: Each has devised a high-impact leadership program that is appropriate to their specific needs and objectives. As Ulrich and Smallwood correctly point out, a brand combines an identity with a reputation among various constituencies. "Leadership brand is the identity of the firm in the in the mind of the customers, made real to employees because of customercentric leadership behaviors. In other words, leadership brand occurs when leaders' knowledge, skills, and values focus employee behavior on the factors that target the issues that customers care about." The challenge for any organization (whatever its size or nature) is to formulate a program ensuring that everyone in that organization embraces the values, gains the knowledge, and strengthens the skills needed to drive performance and build lasting value. After briefly explaining the "what" in Chapters 1 & 2 (i.e. what leadership brand is and why it is important), Ulrich and Smallwood devote the remaining chapters to "how," answering questions such as these: 3. What is a "brand statement"? 3. How to prepare one? 4. How to assess leaders against the bran

The Meta-Brand That Matters More Than Ever

Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood are breaking open an enormously important concept. As the companion "meta" brand to an organization's perceived commercial identity,the intangible asset of a leadership brand is an underappreciated competitive factor today. The idea that leaders should through deliberate means create and refine a brand to hold the reputational assets of what leadership does and means within an organization is new. Yet it will become more important as organizations look to their human capital as the source of sustained competitive advantage. Most organizations today don't realize that leadership can become a branded asset that can help deliver growth and value. I'm specifically going to share this book with my clients who approach leadership development in a haphazard way. This book is an outstanding and original contribution to the leadership literature.

New Leadership Paradigm

This is not your typical leadership book. Ulrich and Smallwoood have gone beyond repackaging the same old motivational look at leadership. Leadership Brand creates a much broader view of what is required to inculturate a whole organization from the top and link it to strategy. They have done a great job of translating the customer view into management actions and results. As usual, they provide concrete examples, practical steps and tools for making it real to employees and those accountable for results. I'd recommend this book to anyone who is not just a student of leadership, but who is serious about creating lasting impact and value for their organization.

Leadership is more than individual leaders

Thousands of books have been written for leaders. Like a leader that stands out from the pack, a new leadership book must present some significant new insights to prosper in this crowded marketplace. Hard on the heels of their last successful book, How Leaders Build Value, Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood produce another winner. How's that? A mix of reliable advice combined with some new insights which include: Leadership is more than individual leaders. "An exceptional individual leader may deliver outstanding results for a while, but the quality of leadership is what sustains results ... Leader emphasizes the qualities of the individual and how he or she leads and engages others ... leadership emphasizes the quality of leaders throughout an organization." It focuses on results, not on the traditional personal characteristics of leaders. "Our study of leadership began with a simple premise: leaders must deliver results ... the leadership field has become so enamored with competencies and personal characteristics of leaders that the leader's job to also deliver results was almost forgotten." Its leadership focus is from the"outside/in instead of the inside/out." "Outside in means that customer (and investor) expectations should frame, focus, and influence leader behaviors. When leaders know and do things that add value to customers, they are more likely to be doing the right thing." It uses the metaphor of a brand (like those of Pepsi, Lexus and Nokia) to reframe the power of leadership. "Leadership brand is the identity of the firm in the mind of the customers ... Leadership brand occurs when leaders' knowledge, skills, and values focus employee behavior on the factors that target the issues that customers care about ... it shows up in the behaviors and results of leaders throughout a firm in a manner that bridges employee and customer commitment." A leadership brand must pervade an organizational culture and its processes--(think GE/Jack Welch or Walmart/Sam Walton.) "A leadership brand bridges the firm's identity in the mind of those outside (customers and investors) with the behavior of its employees. When an organization has a leadership brand, customers have positive images of the firm, investors perceive the firm as possessing intangible value, employees feel more committed, and leaders are creating enormous value." Supporting these insights are numerous examples, models, assessments, and other practical tools. This book models what is becoming the Ulrich-Smallwood brand: new insights combined with the best of the old, supported by easy-to-read, pragmatic implementation support. Sounds like a sustainable brand for leadership in the leadership field.

GREAT book

I spent the weekend reading this book and loved it. Really. I think this is their best book--it was accessible; it gave great new insights that I hadn't considered; and I really liked the tools they used. I'm going to use this book a lot in the work I'm doing. These guys are great! Kendall