24 OCT 2023 HBS CASE
From P.T. Barnum to Mary Kay: Lessons From 5 Leaders Wh
Changed the World
by Avery Forman
What do Steve Jobs and Sarah Breedlove have in common? Through a series of
case studies, Robert Simons explores the unique qualities of visionary leaders and
what today's managers can learn from their journeys.
What makes a leader great?
A dose of luck, for sure. But specific leadership traits mark extraordinary individuals time and
time again and help elevate the standouts from the vast middle.
That’s the overarching takeaway from an extensive and growing collection of biographical case
studies by Robert Simons, Baker Foundation Professor and Charles M. Williams Professor of
Business Administration, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School.
“PEOPLE ARE ATTRACTED TO OPTIMISM AND HOPE IN
LEADERS.”
On the surface, Steve Jobs and Sarah Breedlove don’t appear to have much in common. One, a
child of the 1960s Bay Area counterculture, and the other, a daughter of former enslaved people
born after the Civil War, both built iconic companies by passionately championing their ideas
and pushing for growth. They’re two of the 23 profiles that Simons wrote for his MBA course,
“Changing the World,” whose life stories contain pearls of management wisdom for today’s
executives looking to lead with excellence.
“Without exception, all these people are opportunity seekers,” says Simons of the leaders
profiled, which include former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and baseball and Civil
Rights legend Jackie Robinson. “They wake up every morning and see the glass as half-full not
half-empty. People are attracted to optimism and hope in leaders.”
Here, Simons discusses five leaders and what made them management legends.
Mary Kay Ash: Praise is powerful
Growing up in 1920s Texas, future cosmetic industry pioneer Mary Kay Ash learned about hard
work, strict priorities, and the power of positive reinforcement firsthand. When she was seven,
her father contracted tuberculosis, becoming housebound and requiring constant medical care.
Always stretched for time, Ash recalled, “Throughout my childhood, I knew that in order to get
something, I had to give up something else.”
Her mother worked at a restaurant to support them, and Ash would call her for instructions on
cooking and other household tasks. Her mother patiently motivated her young daughter with
praise and reinforcement, saying over the phone, “You can do it, Mary Kay, you can do it.”
When she launched her own firm, Beauty by Mary Kay, she leaned on the early lesson her
mother taught her about motivation to inspire her salespeople. “Especially in the beginning, the
consultant needs praise for everything she did right… I find that if you must criticize, it’s best to
sandwich it between two thick layers of praise,” Ash said.
Leadership Lesson 1: “Mary Kay was a master of harnessing the power of recognition,” Simons
observes. “We talk about compensation, but at every level, she gave prizes and they had to be
given onstage. She believed you could praise people to success.”
Bill Wilson: Eliminate ego
Bill Wilson isn’t a household name in business circles—and that’s intentional. The founder of
Alcoholics Anonymous was adamant that successful organizations need a decentralized
leadership that keeps big egos at bay.
Born in the backroom of a Vermont saloon in 1898, Wilson was drawn to drinking after his
parents divorced, leaving him with grandparents and a deep insecurity that he didn’t belong.
Driven and charismatic, but falling down drunk much of the time, the case describes how Wilson
built and lost fortunes during the Roaring 20s and Great Depression. A stable and supportive
marriage was a rock, as was a friend who helped him see and spread the idea that alcoholism
wasn’t a moral failing, but a disease. Once sober, Wilson started support groups that later
became A.A. built on an idea that “there could be leaders but no bosses.”
As Wilson expanded the organization nationwide, he instilled strong boundaries and a rigid sense
of ethics. He insisted that all major decisions be made by local chapters. Wilson turned down
Time’s Man of the Year profile and wouldn’t claim authorship of the Alcoholics Anonymous “Big
Book” he wrote and that eventually sold 35 million copies, “to keep our fool ego from running
hog wild at A.A.’s expense,” Wilson reflected.
Leadership Lesson 2: “There is always this danger as people succeed and rise up the hierarchy
that they start to think that they’re infallible, that their egos start to dictate how the organization
is run, that everyone’s kind of afraid to say anything until the boss clears what he or she is going
to say,” Simons says. “Wilson didn’t want ego and hierarchy to overcome the power of individual
initiative.”
Sarah Breedlove: Networks matter
The child of formerly enslaved people born in Louisiana in 1867, Sarah Breedlove was an
orphan by seven and a widowed single mother by 19. She was determined to escape the poverty
and violence of her childhood, and moved to St. Louis with her young daughter to build a better
life.
There, the stress of a doomed relationship caused her hair to thin. Breedlove found a product
that revitalized it, and started selling the tonic, leaning hard on family and friends for labor and
customers. “I was convinced it would be a success,” she said of the hair-care business she
founded that went on to achieve great success, the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing company.
Breedlove chased growth, picking up and moving first to Denver, then to Pittsburgh, then to
Indianapolis. Her strategy: Look for locations where she could tap into vibrant African-American
networks, and where shipping hubs could accelerate distribution to meet her aggressive growth
targets.
Leadership Lesson 3: “As an individual manager, it’s so important to build these networks both
inside your own organization and externally, with customers, suppliers, and stakeholders,”
Simons says. “Sarah was always adaptable and willing to move to where the opportunities were.
Every one of those moves were driven by looking around the corner and seeing an opportunity or
way to grow or a new angle. Willingness to uproot yourself is even more important today as
opportunities expand.”
P.T. Barnum: Know your audience
P.T. Barnum, renowned for his famous circus, was in fact the father of modern advertising,
Simons’ case shows. As a child working in his father’s general store, Barnum learned to hustle,
promote, and barter. He didn’t care if his tactics earned him jail time as long as they drew a
crowd or earned press coverage.
For the launch of his museum of curiosities, Barnum painted the five-story building with
pictures of exotic animals, draped flags from the roof, hired a brass band to play, and shone
beams of light from the roof. His exhibits included a “Fejee Mermaid” stitched together from an
orangutan and fish, advertised with posters of bare-breasted blond women. Barnum bought a
rival museum but concealed his ownership to drum up competition between the sites.
Leadership Lesson 4: “We know a lot of the stuff we read in the news or on the internet is
biased, inflated, or untrue, but we still all read it. And Barnum was the one who said, ‘we can
turn this into a business,’ and he did this with enormous success,” says Simons. “He had an
absolute eye on the customer. He knew what the customer wanted, and he gave it to them.”
Steve Jobs: Be demanding
Today’s tech world considers Steve Jobs, Apple’s founder, a wildly successful icon. But what got
him to the top was an unconventional attitude built on persistence and passion.
In high school, enamored of electronics, Jobs set out to build a frequency counter—but realized
it wouldn’t work without parts from Hewlett Packard. He looked up the phone number of Bill
Hewlett, then the company’s CEO, and called him at home. Caught off guard but intrigued,
Hewlett chatted with Jobs for 20 minutes and gave him a summer position.
Several years later, a similar tactic worked at video-game company Atari, when a shaggy-haired
Jobs camped out in the lobby until HR called the head of engineering and said, “We’ve got a
hippie kid in the lobby. He says he’s not going to leave until we hire him.”
Leadership Lesson 5: Steve Jobs was a demanding and unrelenting boss. “There’s a danger of
complacency as we try to be everything to everyone, everywhere. We forget at our peril to the
extent we are operating in competitive markets where someone is trying to leapfrog us or steal
our customers,” Simons says.
“The more there’s risk of disruption in your industry, the more there’s a danger that someone who
is an outlier in terms of management style or approaches might actually turn your entire
business upside down. We all want to work in places that are happy and polite, but there are
expectations for performance, so if you cannot find ways of motivating people to bring their very,
very best, your business sooner or later will be overtaken by someone who can.”
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Feedback or ideas to share? Email the Working Knowledge team at hbswk@hbs.edu.
Image: AdobeStock/SockaGPhoto and HBSWK