DAVID PACKARD: Universal Characteristics in His Leadership

  Integrity, decisiveness, a performance orientation, administrative competence, diplomacy, and collaborative team integration as universal characteristics of effective leadership were derived from the 2004 and 2014 GLOBE studies.   The idea for the GLOBE project was conceived in the summer of 1991. The late Professor Robert J. House from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, who was a visiting professor at the Gustavson School of Business at the University of Victoria in Canada, conceived the idea of a large-scale international study of cultural, leadership, and organizational practices.   His host at Gustavson was Dr. Ali Dastmalchian.   Dr. Ali Dastmalchian and his colleague Dr. Mansour Javidan began collecting data for the GLOBE project in the Middle East.   In 2004, Culture, Leadership, and Organizations: The GLOBE Study of 62 Societies was published, based on results from 17,300 middle managers in 950 food processing, financial services, a...

  Table 1 - GLOBE Universally Endorsed Positive Attributes of Effective Leadership   Integrity Trustworthy, just, honest Connection to a spiritual foundation and commitment to ethics   Performance Orientation, Decisiveness, Administrative Competence Excellence orientation, decisive, and administratively skilled Focus on self-development   Diplomacy Worldly, win-win problem solver, effective bargainer, smart negotiator, alliance builder, peacemaker Indispensability of relationships   Collaborative team integration Loyal, consultative, group oriented, shared purpose, gets input, teamwork, open door, learns from others Sensitivity to organizational culture Excerpt from  The Universal Characteristics in the Leadership of David Packard Available at  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B081J7JDBH  

  The leadership of David Packard encompassed integrity , a performance orientation , decisiveness , administrative competence , diplomacy , and collaborative team integration .   As will be explained later, his leadership displayed integrity in his relationships with individuals and groups.   He stressed that supervisors were expected to set high standards of behavior, indicating that the examples managers set were important.   The focus of the objectives of the HP Way on employees exhibited an orientation toward performance and excellence, decisiveness, and administrative competence.   David Packard’s focus on company-wide quality provided evidence of an orientation toward performance and excellence as did his focus on quality relating to HP’s Japanese joint venture.   Finally, providing consistency in corporate performance, including steady growth in earnings and equity as a responsibility to HP shareholders was evidence of an orientation toward perfor...

  “The world we have made, as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far, creates problems we cannot solve at the same level of thinking at which we created them.” From Des MacHale (2002) Wisdom .   This Albert Einstein quote came at the end of World War II.   A key challenge was facing leaders at that time.   Ideas such as nationalism, imperialism, and militarism – having contributed to two world wars – had the potential to lead to a third one, possibly threatening the survival of humankind. Today, Albert Einstein’s quote is relevant because, despite a plethora of leadership theories, focused on how leaders lead, the largest number of corporate scandals in the history of American business marred the years 2001 and 2002.   In addition, a financial crisis emerged in 2007, which, in 2009, destroyed $34.4 trillion of the total market value of publicly traded companies—more than the combined 2008 annual gross domestic product (GDP) of the United Sta...

         For as long as I can remember, I have been intrigued with how leaders lead.   While earning a BA and an MIA at Columbia University, an MBA at New York University, and a DM at Colorado Technical University, I read the autobiographies and biographies of numerous leaders in politics and business.    As a research associate at PaineWebber (now part of UBS) and Hambrecht & Quist (now part of JP Morgan Chase) and Brundage, Story & Rose (now part of Bessemer Trust) and a financial analyst at IBM, I explored firsthand how leaders led in the technology industry.   As a professor at Colorado Technical University, I studied the shortcomings of leadership during the financial crisis of 2008.   This conceptual research evolved from those experiences and my doctoral dissertation on the characteristics of leadership. This conceptual research contains an examination of the degree to which each universal characteristic is displayed in ...