Leadership the Hard Way

Leadership the Hard Way presents a method of living and working that can truly facilitate the learning of leadership. Their method shows how to go against the current, fight conventional wisdom, and embrace the unexpected. It is about trusting oneself and valuing intuition, principles, and imagination as much as hard skills and analysis. Frohman combines his counterintuitive ideas with experiences from his own background?from escaping the Nazis as a child to becoming a leading innovator in the semiconductor industry?to show how readers can build their own leadership abilities. A leader?s values and personality, he ultimately reveals, are the only sure source of stability in a world of continuous change.

Foreword xi

Introduction: Flying Through a Thunderstorm xiii

1. Insisting on Survival 1

2. Leading Against the Current 17

3. Leveraging Random Opportunities 35

4. Leadership Under Fire 53

5. The Soft Skills of Hard Leadership 69

6. Making Values Real 85

7. Bootstrapping Leadership 99

Epilogue: Knowing When to Let Go 111

Notes 115

Acknowledgments 119

The Authors 123

Index 125

"... can truly facilitate the learning of leadership." (Public Net, Friday 1 August 2008)

Dov Frohman, a pioneer of the global corporation, is the founder and former general manager of Intel Israel and widely respected as a leader and innovator in the worldwide semiconductor industry.

Robert Howard is a former senior editor of the Harvard Business Review. A veteran writer on work, technology, and management, he is the author of Brave New Workplace and the editor of The Learning Imperative: Managing People for Continuous Innovation.

Praise for Leadership the Hard Way

"If leadership is defined by the number and quality of followers, and by their ability to do better than they—or anyone else—thought possible, Dov Frohman's career is the epitome of leadership. This book portrays his style—pragmatic, unassuming, persistent—in a genuine and entertaining way. Reading it is like going along for the ride."
—Andy Grove, former CEO, Intel Corporation and author, Only the Paranoid Survive

"Dov Frohman and Robert Howard say that leadership cannot be taught—at least not in classes and slides—but it can be learned, especially in turbulent times, with brilliance and open-spiritedness.?Our best evidence is Frohman himself, whose fascinating decisions—as computer scientist and pioneer CEO—stud this stimulating, practical, elegant book."
—Bernard Avishai, contributing editor, Harvard Business Review and author, The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace At Last

"Leadership the Hard Way reads like a report from the front by a solider who is a hero. A must-read for leaders in today's tough and uncertain economy."
—George Stalk, senior partner, The Boston Consulting Group and author, Hardball: Are You Playing to Play or Playing to Win?

"In a highly personal style, yet with nuanced insight and useful principles, Frohman and Howard expertly navigate the necessary tensions of leading on the edge: how to be both an insider and an outsider, stay true to a vision yet listen to dissent, see things differently in order to do things differently. I could not put this book down."
—John Seely Brown, former chief scientist, Xerox Corporation and former director, Xerox PARC; coauthor, The Social Life of Information and The Only Sustainable Edge