AFTER THOUGHTS – On Following Fool and So-called Servant-Leader Now Former CEO of Briggs & Stratton Todd Teske Down The Rat Hole

 

Some quotes from the September 28, 2020 WISCONSIN EXAMINER:  Briggs & Stratton’s demise: greed, mismanagement, blaming others

“Just days before filing for bankruptcy in July, Milwaukee’s Briggs & Stratton Corp., at one time the largest producer of small engines in the world and employer to 11,000 union production workers making a solid, middle-class living, handed its top executives $5 million in bonuses, calling them “retention awards.” 

“Like vultures picking a carcass clean, these bonuses in the run-up to bankruptcy have become an all-too-frequent way for corporate executives to gift themselves with one last, egregious payday before stiffing their workers and creditors.”

“The story of how Briggs got to this point is a morality tale about modern American industrial capitalism. Briggs embodies the anti-union race to the bottom characterized by contempt for hourly workers, mismanagement and misjudging markets.” 

“Declining sales, looming debt payments, then the COVID-19 pandemic  with its dramatic drop in lawnmower sales all combined to finally push the company into Chapter 11. Sales for the second quarter of 2020 were down by $107 million, or 18%, over the same period last year. The third quarter results are expected to be even worse.” 

“Despite obvious mismanagement, Briggs’ board of directors in July made “cash retention awards” of $1.2 million to CEO and Chairman Todd Teske, $600,000 to Senior VP Mark Schwertfeger and lesser amounts to other executives. Although the new owners abruptly dismissed Teske on Sept. 22, he could still hang on to some or all of his $8.8 million golden parachute, bankruptcy attorneys suggested to the Milwaukee Business Journal.”

“The day before filing for bankruptcy, Briggs’ board voted to terminate the health and life insurance benefits of the company’s retirees. Then, in late August, Briggs and the United Steel Workers local 7232 (the successor to AIW 232) agreed to a severance package for the workers who will lose their jobs. Most will get less than $5,000.”

“Briggs’ demise has, in reality, directly resulted from its executives’ mismanagement, greed and pathological animosity towards the unionized workers who had made them rich.”

 

THE END

STOP FOLLOWING THE LEADER – Even If He Claims to Be Ecological

 

I have decided to put an end to my life long trivial pursuit of following-the-leader.  One of the signs that it was time for this divorce came to me this summer while I was out for a walk with my wife.  We had stopped by a mountain stream to soak our feet, and I noticed a group of preteen boys jumping into a pool in the river upstream from us.  I was a bit confused about why one after another the boys would take turns launching themselves from a large rock and leap into the air, where they then contorted their bodies in such a way that when they reached the water surface their faces and crotches smacked into the water in what appeared to be a very painful impact. 

At first, I thought maybe the poor kids were in need of some diving lessons.  Then I saw a group of similar aged girls on the shore of the river who seemed to mostly be ignoring the antics of the boys, and I wondered if the painful water flops were some sort of attempt to catch the girl’s attention.  But then it dawned on me as I watched the boys one after another repeat a new version of the twisted-plop, that the boys were simply following the rules for that profound childhood game of Follow-The-Leader. 

You would think the pain and humiliation of repeatedly playing this game would be enough for a growing boy to find something better to do with his time.  But like the boys in the game, I have had a hard time letting go of what has amounted to a lifetime of basically following fools.  Twenty years ago, I even got a leadership related masters degree, somehow thinking that if I better understood the theories behind the leader, than perhaps the game would come to hold greater meaning for me.  Once I graduated, I even figured I would find a job where I could work for a more enlightened leader, or perhaps even join the ranks of the hallowed leaders myself. 

Eventually, I did figure out that 30 years or more of being a professional follow-the-leader-er did have some rewards, and I was able to quit my paid gaming days and live off the pension my life of folly had provided me with.  However, like all professional game players, I have had a difficult time just sitting on the sidelines watching everybody else continuing to get smacked around, because their leaders instructed them to do so.  So, I continued to look for ways to get back into the game, on a volunteer basis.  I clung to the idea that maybe there could still be good leaders, who were guided not by the paycheck, but by looking out for the people, and the planet. 

After some extended, long winded efforts to prove that leaders could indeed be worthy of following, I realized that in a healthy ecosystem, there really are no leaders.  None of the participants need to be told or guided by some more powerful or wiser entity how to behave.  They quickly learn to get along, and any smackdowns they might receive reminded them to cooperate with the other players, or suffer the ultimate penalty, which is ejection from the ecosystem in one form or another. 

I am not sure where this conclusion will take me, but my experiments in ecological-leadership have hopefully come to an end.  I post this final summation of my findings not to tell anybody else what to do, but hopefully to remind myself that if I am feeling like I was smacked in the face and groin again, it is likely the result of picking up my old habits and following some fool.  For anyone interested in finding out where this fool has gone, you may follow any of my newfound foolish antics I feel like sharing at my Places I Am blog.  

Note to self - so long follower, and may your journeys always be guided by yourself, and not some fool like me.  

CAN CORPORATE CEO’S REALLY BE SERVANT LEADERS? - PART IV

What Are Peoples Highest Priority Needs and How Are They Manipulated To Increase Profits as Told By Servant Leadership Prophets?

In the last part of this discussion on the servant-leader practices of corporate CEO’s, I introduced Robert Greenleaf’s “best test” of the servant-leader.   Before I get into testing Todd Teske’s servant leadership claim, it is important to take a bit of a detour to delve into what is meant when Greenleaf suggested in his “best test” that the difference between leader-first and servant-first leaders is manifested “in the care taken by the servant first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served”.  I would also like to point out the other side of this, that the leader first would manifest themselves by revealing how their practices deny other people’s highest priority needs from being served.  The critical part in this best test is understanding what is meant by “people’s highest priority needs”. 

I am not aware of Greenleaf explaining in detail what he meant by “people’s highest priority needs”, perhaps he took it for granted that these needs were obvious.  Greenleaf’s lack of explanation might play a role in why when many professors of servant leadership write or talk about their own takes on the path to servant leadership, they will often cite Greenleaf’s best test and then ignore the reference to serving peoples highest priority needs.  At best, they tend to go off on a tangent about what they think the path to servant leadership is, leaving Greenleaf’s thoughts on the shelf. 

Typically these tangents include suggestions to:  wash people’s feet or follow other examples of some other religious, or corporate, or management consultant guru who will deepen the followers spiritual life; love the people they serve by performing acts of charity or martyrdom; become a better listener; hold more brainstorming type meetings; love their wife and children; refer to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in order to become a more enlightened leader; or simply follow other aspects of their unique outline or esoteric flow chart to becoming a servant leader.  Although these tangents can lead to interesting reading, they mostly distract the reader (or listener) from really understanding what it means when people’s highest priority needs are satisfied and what the consequences are when they are not. 

Another possible explanation for ignoring the call to empower people to meet their own high priority needs in the corporate world might be the impact that that sort of behavior would have on the corporation’s bottom-line ability to generate profit and grow, but then again maybe that is just more distracting conjecture on my part.  Ignorance is not however an excuse for laziness when it comes to exercising Greenleaf’s “best test”, so it is worth some more effort to clarify what constitutes a high priority need. In order to get back on track, I will go off on my own tangent and provide an explanation that I believe is an effective model to understanding how best to serve people’s highest priority needs.

The best source I have found on defining human related needs comes from one of my favorite economic gurus, Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef.    Max-Neef outlined what he believed constituted human needs in his book HUMAN SCALE DEVELOPMENT.  Max-Neef’s ideas on human needs were a response to trying to address development problems in Latin America that he believed were related to economic policies imposed on it from its northern economic super-powered neighbors to the north.  These policies did little to promote self-sufficiency of the Latin American people and instead indebted them as a means to ensure the growing wealth of the leadership of the super-powered neighbors.  As a possible solution to what he termed “a world in crisis”, Max-Neef proposed what he called Human Scale Development, which focused on “satisfaction of fundamental human needs, on generation of growing levels of self-reliance, and on the construction of organic articulations of people with nature and technology, of global processes with local activity, of the personal with the social, of planning with autonomy”.  

As an alternative to the pillaging and plundering that was typical of the economic system that dominated the world in order to increase the profits of the privileged, Max-Neef proposed an economic system designed to serve nine real human needs: Subsistence, Protection, Affection, Understanding, Participation, Idleness, Creation, Identity, and Freedom.  Unlike Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, there is no hierarchy in Max-Neef nine needs, with the satisfaction of each need just as important as all the others. 

Each of these needs than has four attributes or ways in which the need needs to be satisfied: Being, Having, Doing, and Interacting.  From this there can be a large range of options in how that need might be satisfied by what Max-Neef calls the satisfiers.  For example, the Subsistence/Being need might be satisfied by the human who achieves physical, emotional, and mental health; Subsistence/Having by obtaining food, shelter, and work; Subsistence/Doing by working, feeding, procreating, clothing, resting, and sleeping.  Max-Neef summarized this concept of human needs in what he called the Matrix of Human Needs and Satisfiers.  The possible satisfiers of the human needs could be quite large in theory, with some being more effective than others in satisfying the need in question.  

Satisfiers of the needs are categorized into one of five types:  

Synergic – satisfiers that in the process of satisfying one need also satisfy or help to satisfy other needs.  Community gardens where people have access to land to grow their own food are an example of a synergic satisfier that satisfies multiple needs.  Besides providing food that satisfies the Subsistence need to eat and to exercise the body; activities in the garden could also contribute to needs like Protection where users would know they could go to obtain food; Understanding where the gardeners could expand their knowledge of plants and how to grow them, Participation where gardeners could interact with other gardeners, Creation where gardeners could create beautiful gardens, and Freedom where gardeners would be free to grow whatever sorts of plants and food they desired. 

Singular – satisfiers that satisfy only one need and remain neutral as far as serving other needs go.  Welfare sorts of programs where those served are given coupons to buy food at certain markets in order to satisfy one aspect of the subsistence need to eat falls into this category.

Inhibiting – satisfiers that typically over satisfy one need and, in the process, seriously impair the possibility of satisfying other needs.  A diet consisting of mostly junk food might satisfy the caloric intake requirements for the subsistence need, but in the process other nutritional requirements are ignored and non-nutritional additives to the junk food contribute to the unset of health consuming diseases like obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure;  which then consume the consumer, their resources, and their ability to participate in processes that would satisfy other more important needs.

Pseudo – satisfiers that stimulate a false sensation of satisfying a given need, and oftentimes pursuit of the pseudo-satisfaction prevents the real need from being satisfied.  Contributions to parasitic charitable institutions would be an example of this where the contributor believes their monetary contribution is in part satisfying their own needs for Affection and Participation by showing they care by helping to pay for poor folks to get access to food, clothing or shelter to satisfy their Subsistence needs.  In the end, much of the money ends up padding the pockets of the administrators of the acts of charity, and the other real humans are left with their needs mostly unmet.

Violators and Destructors – satisfiers mostly aimed at meeting the need for Protection, that when applied not only annihilate the possibility of satisfaction of the Protection need, but also render the satisfaction of other needs impossible.  Use of pesticides and herbicides on factory farms as a way of Protecting access to Subsistence satisfiers of food not only kills the unwanted weeds and insect pests, it can kill or seriously impair the farmworkers, their neighbors, the other creatures in the environment, and the consumers of the poisoned food, thereby preventing those folks from satisfying other important needs.   

For a more detailed explanation of Max-Neef’s ideas on human needs, refer to his books: ECONOMICS UNMASKED, HUMAN SCALE DEVELOPMENT, and REAL-LIFE ECONOMICS. In the book ECONOMICS UNMASKED, Max-Neef and coauthor Phillip B. Smith laid out how the growth obsessed economics of our corporate controlled world was poisoning the biosphere, exhausting the planet's natural resources, making the already rich and powerful more wealthy, and combined with growth in human population destroying the habitats of other species.  This conclusion had a similar ring to what Greenleaf was experiencing and hoped to address in his SERVANT AS LEADER essay.  Towards the end of the essay he pointed out that his goal at the time was to make changes to a society plagued by “the disposition to venture into immoral and senseless wars, destruction of the environment, poverty, alienation, discrimination, overpopulation” which existed because of “human failures”, and in particular failures in the dominate leaders of society. 

It is my opinion, for whatever that is worth, that the problems Greenleaf was trying to address 50 years ago, have not gotten better, but exponentially worse.  And it is because of this that I find it dangerous when people in leadership positions today try to cloak their own leader-first styles with the moniker of “servant leadership” while they ignore the impacts of their institutions on real people.   As a possible route to avoiding this ignorant form of leadership, I propose that Greenleaf’s concept of the manifestation of servant leadership via focusing on “people's highest priority needs” and determining what the impact of the actions of leadership are on people becoming “more autonomous”, be combined with Max-Neef’s ideas on Human Scale Development focused on “satisfaction of fundamental human needs” and increasing people's autonomy.   In the next part of this evaluation, I will attempt to apply this refined “best test” to CEO Todd Teske’s Briggs and Stratton Corporation. 

CAN CORPORATE CEO’S REALLY BE SERVANT LEADERS? - PART III

Servant-leader Best Test (Or How to Analysis the Walk of the Talker)

Previously in this series, we reviewed Todd Teske's tales of his ascent to the servant leader throne while serving as CEO of Briggs and Stratton Corporation.  To really figure out where leaders like Teske fall on the leadership ladder, Robert Greenleaf in his wisdom proposed a test, which is often referred to as “the best test“ of the servant-leader.  The test could be used to determine whether a leader was leader-first or servant-first.  Here is a repeat of the test that comes from Greenleaf’s THE SERVANT AS LEADER essay: 

The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served.  The best test, and most difficult to administer, is this:  Do those served grow as persons?  Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?  And what is the effect on the least privileged in society; will they benefit, or, at least, not be further deprived?

In all the talks I have heard or books I have read, from self-proclaimed servant leader CEO-types, I do not recall the talkers sharing any “best test” results backing up their claims.  One explanation for a lack of test results might be as Greenleaf pointed – the difficulty in administering the test.  There may also be some confusion on the part of the CEO’s on whether they should only apply the test to their private lives by focusing on the warm and tender love they have for their families, and ignoring the test when it comes to understanding the impacts of the tough love tactics they need to apply when running a profit driven corporation whose primary test is limited to shareholder value.

Despite the legal protections offered the corporations in granting the institution virtual “personhood” status and at the same time shielding the real people who actually run the corporation (or profit from it) from responsibility for the “corporate” actions, Greenleaf did not recommend a separate easier to pass test for such folks when it came to the servant-leader status.  He did however recommend a restructuring of the corporate hierarchy in which the CEO be replaced by a first-among-equals type of board of peers. 

This idea was highlighted in the second of Greenleaf’s “servant-essays” titled THE INSTITUTION AS SERVANT.  In the section headed “Organization: Some Flaws in the Concept of the Single Chief” he clarified that “To be a lone chief atop a pyramid is abnormal and corrupting.”   He goes on to point out many reasons why the lone wolf corporate CEO does not make a good leader, which I summarize as the pyramid structure isolates the chief from the reality of what is going on at the bottom of the pyramid.  This unbalanced power structure results in a top-down one-way dominated communication, no matter how hard the CEO tries to listen to the soft distorted echoes from below that might somehow reach the high tower that holds the ears of the CEO. 

In the end, the biggest difficulty I see in administering the best-test to the CEO-led corporation is in accepting the reality of the answers and what those answers would lead the administrator to conclude about the outcomes of the practices of the CEO-led institution as a whole.  For I believe that it is the structure of the institution (which meets the specifications of those who benefit the most from such a design), which determines the outcomes, and not who the leader is or what leadership style he or she professes to follow.  For as someone once said power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, at least a long as power is doled out to a few foolish leaders, who are unable or unwilling to hear or see what is happening below them. 

When your world is defined by the blinders of shareholder value, despite what your mission may say, awareness on other impacts of the corporate-leadership style are not possible.  And I would argue that CEO’s and the Corporations they lead would fail the best-test with flying colors every time they took it.  In other words, the CEO’s have mastered the fine art of talking the talk of servant leadership, but they are unable to walk the walk when it comes to passing the best test. 

Since Corporations like to hide behind their personhood status when it comes to responsibility, I believe it is more meaningful to apply Greenleaf’s “best test” to the Corporate-Leadership “person” than the leadership style of the figurehead CEO and his family oriented life guided by love-leadership, who seem to come and go with the changing tide or the ups and downs of the market.  That leads me to PartIV of this topic where I will attempt to apply the best-test as best as I can to the walk of the corporate-person of Briggs and Stratton Corporation, as led by its Chief Executive Officer Todd Teske, which is easier said than done. 

CAN CORPORATE CEO’S REALLY BE SERVANT LEADERS? - PART II

Todd Teske’s Servant LeadershipTalk (With Tom Talking Between The Lines)

In Part I of this topic, I provided a lead-in regarding how to determine if a leader is a servant as told by Robert Greenleaf.  Following that introduction, here is Tom’s two cents – on multimillionaire CEO Todd Teske’s talk on what he calls his servant leader journey, for what it is worth. 

At his first job out of school at Arthur Anderson (the accounting firm that found itself in hot-water for cooking the books for Enron) Teske’s motivation was to “make money” and to “show the world I was going to make it”.  He continued down that path while at Arthur Anderson until he got married and began asking himself “What kind of life do I want?” His answer in part was to “save up enough money to buy a house and have a foundation to start a family”.  Then his daughter was born and “all of sudden this bundle of joy comes along and now I’ve got responsibility for that”.  And he gave up on “being this driven I wanted the next job, I want the next promotion so I can make more money”, and decided to abandon the sinking ship of Arthur Anderson, to go and work for small engine and associated equipment manufacturer, Briggs and Stratton Corporation.    

While at Briggs, his son was born, and Teske continued refining his leadership style to one that mirrored his family life.  Teske believed that “servant leadership starts with parenting.  It starts with your family.  Leading your family.”  As his kids grew and entered the world of after school sporting events to learn the fine art of competition, Teske wanted “to be that dad who was there for his family” and make it to those after school baseball games and swim meets to watch their failures and successes unfold. 

He built on his family-first leadership style when he was promoted to President of the Products Group at Briggs. Starting out in that role he asked himself “What does a President do?” and realized he didn’t want to “go out and tell everybody what to do , because I have no idea what they should do”.  He choose the non-command and control method (the stick instead of the carrot?) path of focusing on trying to be “helpful”.  Being helpful to him meant getting “out of my office” and “sitting in meetings” where he “didn’t say much and listened a lot” and “then started offering suggestions”.  “And all of a sudden the people went; ok this is sort of interesting”.  And even though Teske’s tells us that his suggestions apparently didn’t have anything to do with the turnaround, he takes credit with the team by proclaiming, “we turned the business around”. 

Teske doesn’t tell us what that turnaround entailed, but the team-led results apparently played a role in getting the President of the Products Group promoted to Corporate “Chief Operating Officer and all this other stuff”.  It was there he “learned a lot along the way as a servant leader”.  He also does not tell us what sort of rewards the rest of the team received for their part in the turnaround, but maybe it is safe to assume they got to keep their jobs on the team, or at least most of them did if they survived any future downsizing or streamlining that might play out, or perhaps it is better not to jump to those sorts of conclusions.  The servant leader he was then was profoundly promoted to the CEO of Briggs where he was “ultimately now being in charge, being the CEO of a 2-billion-dollar company – and understanding at the time that there is 7000 people that now relied on me!”

He made light of his new found power position by joking with his now much bigger “team” that his real job was to “shake hands, kiss babies, cut ribbons, and give speeches”.  But then he would clarify for them, after the laughter and after shutting the plant down and making all the workers come out and shut-up and listen to his speech, that – ”You are the people on a day in and day out basis that, you are the ones that matter, whether we are doing good in the world.  I can make decisions, but ultimately what it comes down to is the decisions you make on a day to day basis, making those engines, making those products, that is really what matters.”  And switching hats from the servant leader to the mission-driven-leader he also told them – “ You’re the ones that fulfill our mission of providing power to people to get work done and make their lives better.”, which I wonder if the Briggs advertising teams ever looked into making a jingle out of based on the song POWER TO THE PEOPLE by John Lennon.  That mission also makes mowing the lawn or snow blowing the driveway sound pretty darn revolutionary and important. 

The workers apparently went back to the assembly line making engines with renewed zest and zeal and Teske tried to figure out what to do about all the new potential pesky perks his latest promotion offered. “Because all of a sudden, I started getting all these people inviting me to these cool things.  The Masters, I am a big golfer, I love golf.  I am terrible at it, but I love it.  The Kentucky Derby, the Packers in the Super Bowl.”  Regrettably, despite how much people wanted him, and cared about what he had to say, his passion for competitive professional sports would have to be put on hold as he was not able to “go to any of those, because they violate our integrity policy.” 

At first I felt a bit sorry for Teske at having to turn down all the free tickets, but realized that if he really wanted to go, he probably could have afforded to buy his own tickets (probably even in the luxury boxes, not the cheap bleacher seats) with the new found good fortune of the multi-milliondollar compensation  that came with the CEO title and the restrictive integrity policy.  Teske concluded this phase of his leadership journey tale by throwing at the audience the other sorry side of being a CEO – “You know CEO’s as a group are just slightly above politicians when it comes to respect and values and everything else, except individually people show you a lot of respect, wow I must be really important.”  I was wondering if he ever asked himself why that was the case – the lack of respect for the CEO issue, not his new found realization of the importance of CEO’s.

Teske’s struggles with power along his path to leadership, and the bragging he heard from former CEO’s, taught him to tell people that “being a CEO is what I do, […] not who I am!  Who I am is a leader, a servant-leader.  Who I am hopefully is a really good dad.  Who I am is hopefully a really good husband.  Who I am is somebody who wants to do things in the community to make the community better.”  And with a tip of his servant leader hat to the remaining workers at Briggs and Stratton, he pointed out that “at the end of the day it is about all these people that work at Briggs and Stratton today.  It is about all these people in the community who want to do good things in the community to make the communities better.”  He didn’t mention it, but an internet search reveals that during his tenure as CEO, employment had gone down from the 7000 folks who he said worked for Briggs in 2010 when he started, to just over 5000 in 2019 when he gave the talk.  My guess is that the 2000 or so folks who lost their jobs while Teske was out “kissing babies, cutting ribbons, and making speeches” probably weren’t integral to the “doing great things” that Briggs and Stratton was all about on that day. 

The grand finale of Teske’s talk was another tip of the hat to the Big CEO in the Sky who seems to be his ultimate guide in leadership.  In the beginning of his talk he temped the audience to listen to the rest of his talk by sharing from this ultimate source – “If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy, but don’t love, I am nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate.  If I speak God’s word with power revealing all His mysteries and making everything plain as day, if I have faith to say to a mountain “jump” and it jumps, but I don’t love I am nothing. “  He put his love-leader hat back on and wrapped things up by revealing that the opening  quote was from 1^st Corinthians Chapter 13 as cited in the “MISSION” and that the final verses reminded the listener-reader that “’love never gives up’, and there it is – ‘Love cares more for others than for self. ‘“

Teske didn’t clarify what his reference to the “MISSION” was, but it might be the book MISSION-DRIVEN LEADERSHIP – MY JOURNEY AS A RADICAL CAPITOLIST written by Mark Bertolini the  former Chairman and CEO of Aetna(the large health insurance agency who took away Bertolini’s CEO title after merging with CVS pharmacy).  Bertolini’s tale of CEO success and failure was apparently shaped in part by his own run-ins with mountains where he suffered serious injuries in a downhill skiing accident that forced him to rethink his own motivations as CEO.  Bertolini chose the more eastern-empire inspired paths of yoga and meditation to guide him to his tough-love or mission-driven leadership practice.  Unless I decide to go to the market and fork over some cash to get Bertolini’s book I may never know for sure where Teske got his inspiration for the Corinthian quote.  Doing a search for the term “love-leader” on the internet reveals that there are quite a few other former CEO types who jumped on the love-leader bandwagon by following the leader Saint Paul who is credited with writing the first guide on the importance of using love to navigate your way to success in the then Roman dominated empire.      

After this analysis of Teske’s talk, what I heard was that he was indeed a typical leader-first (as defined by Robert Greenleaf) power and money motivated guy, just like the rest of his fellow corporate CEOs.  He tried to temper his motivations for material goods, money and power by following policies that portrayed him as loving his family, his teams, and the communities where his corporation resided.  But in the end, money talks and leads to promotions and more money and power, along with some other temptations that should not be mentioned in front of corporate boards.  However, this is not the end of the story, but merely my opinion.  Stay tuned for the next part of this story to be told in a coming post where we will look into Robert Greenleaf’s “best-test” of the servant-leader and figure out if Teske was more of a “creaking gate” or a love-lead-leader.

CAN CORPORATE CEO'S REALLY BE SERVANT-LEADERS? - PART I

Servant-First Versus Leader-First

Over the years I have read a number of books written by and listened to talks given by Chief Executive Officers of Corporations and other upper management types, who are proud to announce their adoption of the “servant leader” moniker.  It is my opinion that the title proclamation has little if anything to do with the servant-leader as defined by Robert Greenleaf.  Greenleaf came up with the hyphenated version of the name and clarified what he meant by it in his 1970 essay THE SERVANT AS LEADER. 

Greenleaf answered the question “Who Is the Servant-Leader”, by describing two extremes of leadership that he believed existed.  There is the servant-first version where “becoming a servant-leader begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, serve first.  Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead.”  And then there is the opposite extreme of the leader-first who follows the leadership path because of “the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions.  For such people, it will be a later choice to serve – after leadership is established.” 

The other day I received an email from the Wisconsin ServantLeadership group that contained a link to an excerpt from a talk titled Who I Am Vs. What I Do from Ted Teske with the tagline “Servant-Leader and CEO of Briggs & Stratton”.  As a former student of servant leadership, the email perked my interest so I clicked on the link and watched Teske’s talk.  Finding the excerpt interesting, I went to the Wisconsin Servant Leadership’s web page and found another link to Teske’s entire talk and listened to that as well.  You may read a transcript of Teske’s talk that I produced here.   

Teske’s talk provides some good insights into the life and thought of a corporate CEO and how the journey of leadership unfolds based on life changing events.  It also reveals the many leadership hats CEO’s can choose from in adorning their corporate head with as they guide their vessels around or into the rocks. And I also believe it reveals some of the inner motivations of CEO types, and that despite Teske’s claims to servant-leadership fame, he and his fellow CEO’s are really not worthy of the title as defined in the writings of Robert Greenleaf discussed above.  It is my belief that for corporations to be successful in their ultimate mission of serving the share-holder and growing the corporation through profits, mergers, and acquisitions, a leader-first  CEO must follow the path of power, profit, and material possession if they want to succeed in the world controlled by global corporations, even if who they are is not what they do. 

The successful corporate leader needs to be flexible in the image they portray to the selected audience if they hope to remain on top of the ladder, and so they have to be willing to change their leadership hat many times to keep up appearances.  But in the end what the audience should pay attention to is not the hat the leader is wearing, or the talk that they talk, but rather to look back at the path they have followed and find out what has or has not been trampled along the way.  For it is the walk they walk that defines them, not the talk they talk.  More on determining what the CEO walk is, after the talk, which includes some of my color commentary in Part 2 of this topic. 

Arrogant-Leader

Ar-ro-gance – a feeling or an impression of superiority manifested in an overbearing manner or presumptuous claims

Lead-er – a person who has commanding authority or influence

To proclaim oneself a leader is a declaration of arrogance.  Perhaps the best one can hope for following such a proclamation is for the pro-claimer to profess the arrogance in order to avoiding leading anyone except the leader down the path the leader chooses to follow.  In other words, I best just foolishly follow my own path, and warn the few potential followers of my chosen path of the folly they face in following me.  Anything less is nothing less than something used to lead fish into a trap. 

Todd Teske CEO Briggs and Stratton Servant Leadership Talk Transcript

What follows is a transcript of a talk from Todd Teske, The Chairman, President, & CEO of Briggs and Stratton Corporation on his servant leadership journey.  The talk was presented on April 2, 2019 at the Wisconsin Lutheran College in Milwaukee Wisconsin at the Wisconsin Servant Leader City Tour Series.  The transcript was written based on the video recording of the talk available at the following website:  
https://vimeo.com/wiservantleadership .  I will be posting some thoughts on this talk regarding Teske's version of servant leadership soon.  

So, let me just share something with you if I could.  “If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy, but don’t love, I am nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate.  If I speak God’s word with power revealing all His mysteries and making everything plain as day, if I have faith to say to a mountain “jump” and it jumps, but I don’t love I am nothing.  If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned martyr, but don’t love, I have gotten nowhere.  So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I am bankrupt without love.”  And that is where Steve ended.  

And so when Dick called me up, I have a tendency to be in front of people quite a bit, whether it’s video blog at Briggs, or something like this, or quarterly meetings in front of all our employees, that sort of thing it is always about the message – what do I want to convey.  So, when Dick contacted me about servant leadership, I jumped all over this one because this topic is really important to me.  And he asked me to share my journey.  

Now here is the problem Tom, there is no I in servant leadership, so I tried to figure out how to do this thing without using the word I, and unless I referred to myself in the third person which is kind of weird, I got to use the word I, so I apologize.  

So, what it caused me to do though is think about my life.  And how did I get on this servant leadership journey.   So, I am going to give you some specific dates, I am not going to take you all the way back from when I was born, don’t worry about that.  But ultimately there are some really important dates that speak to me in terms of my journey.  

The first one is June 15th 1987, that’s the day I started with Arthur Anderson.  Now growing up, my folks did not have a lot of money,  I was never wanting for anything, but we didn’t take vacations or anything like that, so what I really wanted to do, and I had to reflect on why did I think the way I thought, why did I act the way I acted was I was excited.  I was going to go make money, I couldn’t wait to go make money because I never had a lot of money when I was a kid.  So, I remember getting in my suit, and having the brief case and driving downtown to the Seven Seven Wisconsin Building and I was on my way to show the world I was going to make it.  And that is what it was about.  I never thought about servant leadership back then. 

The second date is June 16th 1990.  That’s the day I got married.  So, I married this really, really wonderful woman.  Who for now almost 29 years has put up with all my issues and faults and she has been a really great partner in life.  Did I mention she has been a really, really great woman?  She is here today; I got the date right.  You know what that was important, but it was still about, Kim and I were planners and what Kim and I wanted to do was save up enough money to buy a house and have a foundation to start a family.  

The real date that started servant leadership for me was August 3rd 1995, that was the day my daughter was born.  You see up to that point it was all about I want to be a partner at Arthur Anderson, I want to make all kinds of money, I want that kind of lifestyle, then all of a sudden this little bundle of joy comes along and now I’ve got responsibility for that.  And then Kim decided she was going (she was a teacher) and she decided she was going to be a 24-7 mom.  So, what was happening was all of a sudden, I went from being this driven I wanted the next job, I want the next promotion so I can make more money to what kind of life do I want.  

So, in April of 1996 I made the decision to leave Author Anderson.  I didn’t see my daughter, I didn’t like the lifestyle, so I left.  I went to Briggs.  And ultimately on August 2, 1997 was when our son CJ was born.  And so now all of a sudden, I had to decide, what did I want.  I never wanted to be CEO of Briggs at that point in time.  But it was important for me to be a leader to my family, to be a leader for my kids.  Because I contend that servant leadership starts with parenting.  It starts with your family.  Leading your family.  I wanted to be the dad that was there when CJ struck out and when CJ hit the home run.  I wanted to be the dad that was there when Taylor missed the flip turn in swimming and then got her personal best in a different meet.  I wanted to be that dad who was there for his family.  

So then continuing on at Briggs, on August of 2003 was another profound date for me, that is when I became president of our products group.  Now up until that point I was pretty much in finance, accounting, it was all about the rules it was all about the numbers, did the debits equal the credits, all about the good stuff for all the accountants in the room.  But ultimately this one was different, because I remember going up to Jefferson where my office was located and I sat in my office and I went – what am I supposed to do?  What does a president do?  So, I thought about it and I thought here is what I don’t want to do – I don’t want to go out and tell everybody what they should do, because I have no idea what they should do.  But you know there are some people that would do that, you guys referred to it early this morning, when you talked about command and control and things like that. So, I thought no, no, no, how can I be helpful?  

So, I just got out of my office and started sitting in meetings, didn’t say much and listened a lot.  And then started offering suggestions, I didn’t tell them what to do.  And all of a sudden people went, ok this is sort of interesting.  And this was a turnaround situation, and I didn’t have anything to do with the turnaround.  The team did, we turned the business around.  

And then I went on to be the Chief Operating Officer and all this other stuff and learned a lot along the way as a servant leader.  

But the next really profound date was January 1, 2010.  That was the day I became CEO of Briggs.  That was an interesting day, not the day itself, but ultimately now being in charge, being the CEO of a 2-billion-dollar company.  And understanding at the time that there is 7000 people that now relied on me.  

But here is what is funny about it, I relied on them.  You see I joke with the team all that time that my job is to shake hands, kiss babies, cut ribbons, and give speeches.  So today I have shaken hands, now I am giving a speech, I am working really hard today.  But I go in to our plants and we shut the plant down and we bring everybody together and I tell them that and they all laugh, right?  And I say no, no, you don’t understand.  You are the people on a day in and day out basis that, you are the ones that matter, whether we are doing good in the world.  I can make decisions, but ultimately what it comes down to is the decisions you make on a day to day basis, making those engines, making those products, that is really what matters. You’re the ones that fulfill our mission of providing power to people to get work done and make their lives better.  

Now what’s interesting about being a CEO is you have a choice.  I learned this early on, right after January 1st.  Because all of a sudden, I started getting all these people inviting me to these cool things.  The Masters, I am a big golfer, I love golf.  I am terrible at it, but I love it.  The Kentucky Derby, the Packers in the Super Bowl.  By the way I didn’t go to any of those, because they violate our integrity policy.  So, don’t go back to Briggs and tell them I went to those, because I didn’t.  But people wanted me to go with them to places, wow that’s really cool.  People wanted me to come up and speak.  Wow people care about what I have to say.  You know CEO’s as a group are just slightly above politicians when it comes to respect and values and everything else, except individually people show you a lot of respect, wow I must be really important.  

You see to this day, here is what I fight, every day.  Being a CEO is what I do, being a CEO is not who I am.  Who I am is a leader, a servant-leader.  Who I am hopefully is a really good dad.  Who I am is hopefully a really good husband.  Who I am is somebody who wants to do things in the community to make the community better.  Because here is the deal, there is going to be a day, where I am not going to be CEO anymore.  Now if it is all about I and me, and everything else, you hear it, I hear it all the time from retired CEO’s.  Because what they do is they say “Hi I am so and so, I am the retired CEO of - fill in a big company, and you know what I did when I was there?  I did this, and I did this, and I did this”  and you want to look at him, and you are really polite, and you want to go “you didn’t do anything, it is the people that work for you that  you had the privilege of leading, I have no idea how well you lead, but you had the privilege of leading the people who did all that.  So it is not about me, and I use the word I a lot.  But at the end of the day it is about all these people that work at Briggs and Stratton today.  It is about all these people in the community who want to do good things in the community to make the communities better.  

So let me leave you with this.  What I read to you to begin with was 1st Corinthians 13.  It was out of The Message.  And let me continue on with two more versus. But I think this second verse I am going to read to you really drives home what servant leadership is all about.  What it goes on to say – “love never gives up”, and there it is.  “Love cares more for others than for self. “ 

Believe it or not.

November 1^st or All Saints Day as I recall from my days wandering around in the halls of Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic grade School was one of those days where we had to go to Mass.  This attendance was likely an attempt to force us to make amends for having spent the previous night raising hell on Halloween.  Our amends would come in the form of remembering the saints in heaven, and hopefully obtain forgiveness for gorging ourselves on candy and other sweets as we dressed up as our favorite monster, ghoul or demon the previous night.  The saints we were to honor were those holy folks who had obtained a ticket to heaven in the afterlife, which allowed them to spend eternity with God the Father with his son Jesus sitting on His right side.  Since it was “All Saints Day”, we were obviously honoring both the select few upper-case “S” Saints, along with the more numerous but lesser known lower-case “s” saints.   

We were taught that there were two existing paths that could lead to capital “S” designation – getting tortured and murdered rather than denouncing your Catholic faith, or the more convoluted path of living a relatively moral life (abiding by the Ten Commandments and that sort of thing, at least in the later part of life), followed by performance of a few documented miracles in the after-life.  Of course, the capital “S” designation could only be granted by the typesetters in charge at the Vatican, which meant those honorees had to have connections in higher places. 

The unnamed lower-case saints, were those folks who gained entrance through the pearly gates by leading a relatively holy life, hence passing the final judgement test issued by St. Peter.  However, their feats would remain anonymous back on planet earth since they lacked any current Vatican connections.  The odds of these folks getting into heaven were also apparently improved if those who knew them in life would chip in to have some Masses said in their name after they perished and hung out in purgatory for a while so they could finish learning the lessons they missed in life.  The lower-case saint designations were reserved for folks like grandparents and other somewhat kindly dead relatives we could be reunited with if we could achieve sainthood for ourselves. 

Later in life I learned about another option for achieving sainthood.  On this track, those with enough resources were allowed to basically buy a ticket to heaven by paying cash to designated officials.  This route was similar to the first option in that these middle road saints got their names engraved on plaques somewhere in the Vatican or other higher places of worship commemorating their heaven-worthy contributions.   This option was apparently eliminated to avoid the implication that heaven was a place only for the rich and famous – and instead clarify that besides paying, you also needed to pray, and obey. 

My take away from the all-purpose school gymnasium/lunchroom/church where Holy Day of Obligation Masses were held was that if I wanted to spend eternity with the Big Guy in the sky, then I had better fly right and follow the examples set for us by the chosen few.  Otherwise the door option I might get could lead straight to hell where I could join the ranks of those condemned to eternal damnation, who I had honored the previous night in my bloodied monster costume.   So, we hellions could continue the path of tricking and treating through life where the threat of excommunication from the Church would symbolize our ultimate damnation, or we could follow one of the paths to sainthood. 

For those of us lucky enough to be boys, the Priesthood was a pretty clear-cut path to heaven (although today’s headlines about the Catholic Church tend to indicate otherwise).  If the priesthood required Vow of Chastity was a stumbling block, we could find a married patron Saint to guide us on our way.   Despite my fifth-grade teacher Mrs. Lowry’s prediction that Priesthood would be my path, I figured that I might be better suited to following the route of the married patron saint.   

When I asked my mother which Saint she had in mind when she named me, she told me she didn’t really have a particular Thomas in mind, but if she had to pick one it would probably be the Apostle Thomas.  Doubting Thomas, I would learn obtained his title based on his skepticism outlined in Chapter 20 of John’s Gospel.  John told us that when Thomas was informed by some of the other apostles that they had met with a risen Jesus after his apparent death on the cross, Thomas proclaimed that he would not believe such a miracle unless he could put his fingers in the crucifixion nail holes in Jesus’s hands, or the gash in Jesus’s side that finished him off.  Jesus of course wasted no time in rebuking Thomas for his renewed faith after coming face to face with (or finger to hole in the hand of) the risen Savior by pointing out “Because thou hast seen me, though has believed.  Blessed are they who have not seen, and yet believed.” 

Despite that warning that Jesus did not bless the unbelievers, and after few attempts at atonement for my unbelief with forced belief, I continue to follow the ways of my patron Saint Thomas and take the low road of doubt until proven otherwise.  Life experiences have reinforced in me that blind faith in the voices from on high can lead to the following of fools.  I have also concluded that those who offer us carrot or stick motivations to live according to their prophesies don’t think much of our abilities to think  for ourselves what to believe or not.   They use our fears or desires in an attempt to jerk us around and distract us from their own “sinful” ways.  And unfortunately, these management techniques seem to dominate not only our religions, but all of our hierarchical institutions that have hidden agendas for their flocks. 

And so, I have concluded that although their may be a few saints out there that are worthy of their sainthood, that I will continue to pick and choose those I look to for inspiration, not based on their post mortem title, or their rank in the hierarchy of heaven and hell, but rather in the deeds of their life.  So, my goal on this November 1^st will be to continue to follow the gospel of Tom, where “the proof is in the pudding”.  

Backside Covering

The following is a response to an article titled “How (Not) to Run a Modern Society on Solar and Wind Power Alone” and the comments initiated by myself.  The article was written by Kris De Decker for publication in his Low-Tech Magazine and reposted on the Resiliance website hosted by the Post Carbon Institute.  The article and comments can be found at the following link:  http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-09-14/how-not-to-run-a-modern-society-on-solar-and-wind-power-alone/

I know I promised not to come back here, but I have been pondering my own and other comments from folks on this topic and felt a need to perhaps apologize (as one commenter pointed out) for getting pissed off and taking it out on the author Kris De Decker and the Post Carbon Institute, or maybe confess my own guilt in having committed the “sins” I have accused others of committing, but more than likely just gloat about my own righteousness.  Use or lose any of this as those who bother to read it see fit, or feel free to abuse me, for daring to revisit these pointless accusations. 

So, let me start over for whatever that is worth (which is probably not much), maybe clarify my points, and perhaps expand on what several folks asked for in what I would propose as an alternative. 

I believe that the thesis of Mr. De Decker’s article is contained in the opening two paragraphs where he points out: “the potential of wind and solar energy is more than sufficient to supply the electricity demand of industrial societies, these resources are only available intermittently.”  Because of the intermittency and other factors like difficulty in meeting peak demand and need for storage, he concludes that “matching supply to demand at all times makes renewable power production a complex, slow, expensive and unsustainable undertaking”.  However, “if we would adjust energy demand to the variable supply of solar and wind energy, a renewable power grid could be much more advantageous” and that “modern technology” could provide a way to take advantage of these energy sources and keep a version of our industrial society in operation into the future.  

The article then goes on to document the variable nature of both wind and solar power, via references, statistics, graphs, and charts.  It also explains how meeting existing power demands with the variable source wind and solar would require an extremely large infrastructure and backup fossil fuel plants or storage systems all of which “would be just as CO2-intensive as the present-day power grid”, “have a high impact on the land” and “require a significant amount of energy and other resources”, leading me to believe that they would not be good for the environment nor us.

In the concluding section of his article titled “Adjusting Demand to Supply”, he proposes “this doesn’t mean that a sustainable renewable power grid is impossible. There’s a fifth strategy, which does not try to match supply to demand, but instead aims to match demand to supply. In this scenario, renewable energy would ideally be used only when it’s available.”  And “if we let go of the need to match energy demand for 24 hours a day and 365 days a year, a renewable power grid could be built much faster and at a lower cost, making it more sustainable overall.”  He claims that this adjusting demand renewable energy supply system if built and operated in the United Kingdom, would only result in electricity shortages on 65 out of 365 days of the year (18% of the time). 

Throughout the article there is little if any indication, data, statics, or hints at what the impact would be on the ecosystem of building this “sustainable” system and the new infrastructure it would need to operate.  Was this by design or neglect or simply not necessary?  I however am quite sure that the impacts would be similar to, those occurring currently and in the past from our industrialized society.  So things like climate change, spices extinctions, loss of habitat, dead zones in the oceans, wars, and other calamities will carry on as long as we treat our planet and our neighbors as resources to use to keep our technology alive and our plundering possible, even if those technologies are “renewable” or their usage is now paced to match the variable rate of supply.     

Based on this understanding of the energy supply system that Mr. De Decker was proposing, I concluded in my pissed off state of mind  that a summation of the proposal was that we could “keep our "modern" society powered into eternity with "green and clean" energy, ignoring the fact that this industrialized society that views the planet and people as resources to plunder to keep the profit in the pockets of the power-elite is the source of our problems. Ignoring the impacts plundering the planet to obtain the resources needed to build the "green and clean" infrastructure is the only way this works out with a "happy" ending. Thinking it might be time to stop following the "green washing" being put out by Resilience and the Post Carbon institute.

Several commenters responded negatively to my and other commenters labeling the article and others published or publisized by the Post Carbon Institute as “greenwashing”.  Asher Miller (who I assume is the executive director of the Post Carbon Institute) responded to this accusation with “I find comments like these truly baffling. I think anyone with an open but critical mind would be hard-pressed to lump PCI/resilience.org in the "greenwashing" or "techno-cornucopian" camp.  Usually, we're accused of being Luddites/Malthusians/doomers.  To me, comments like the above show laziness, ignorance, and/or a hardline view of collapse that is utterly fatalistic and very likely wrong. And I'm always left wondering, why do you come here?” 

Obviously Mr. Miller was indeed familiar with some of my best character traits (or worst depending on who you ask), and it was indeed my lazy nature that prompted me to react with the original abbreviated response.  It was also ignorant of me to assume that other people had the same understanding of the term “greenwash” or the other concept that came out in the commentary like “techno-cornucopian”.  I actually prefer the term “techno-fundamentalist”, and wished I would have used that term in any of my comments to point out that it is that world view that I believe dominates Mr. De Decker’s article and others I have seen publicized by the Post Carbon Institute.  And I am indeed resigned to the fact that like all the other complex civilizations before us, ours is indeed heading into an unavoidable collapse, as we too have fallen into the trap of letting fools have all the power in our society.  So, to make up for my ignorance and initial lazy response, below are some definitions that I hope clarify what I mean by these terms and the words that make them up. 

Greenwashing– “a form of spin in which green PR or green marketing is deceptively used to promote the perception that an organization's products, aims or policies are environmentally friendly.”  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing)

Technology – “the practical application of knowledge especially in a particular area”  https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/technology

Fundamentals – “any intellectual/political/theological position that asserts certainty in the unquestioned truth and/or righteousness of a belief system.” 

“technological fundamentalists are those ‘unwilling, perhaps unable, to question our basic assumptions about how our tools relate to our larger purposes and prospects.’”

(https://www.counterpunch.org/2008/08/25/technological-fundamentalism/)

Perhaps I am incorrect in applying these terms to the article in question and the Post Carbon Institute.  I do admit that I am indeed guilty of accusing them of what I know for sure I am guilty of and that is the practice of greenwashing influenced by my own technological fundamentalist upbringing.  I have worked most of my life as an environmental engineer or specialist, working for industry, consulting, and government.  I used to be convinced that this was noble work, that what I did was to preserve and protect the environment by helping to design equipment and treatment plants to clean up our wastewater and keep our rivers and lakes clean.   I kept this same ethic to guide me working for government environmental regulatory agencies enforcing the rules and regulations that I believed were designed to keep our environment safe.  About 12 years ago, after 20 or so years of doing this type of work, and seeing the state of the planet, I started to question this.  I began to wonder if that is what I was really doing.  It seemed to me that my work was much more about covering up the messes that our industrial society was creating, than it was about protecting and preserving the planet.

And to answer Mr. Asher’s question about “why do you come here?”, it was at this point in my life I was first exposed to the work of the Post Carbon Institute at a conference I attended on Environmental Sustainability.  I don’t remember the name of the speaker from the Post Carbon Institute, but I remember the thesis of his talk which was basically that in the age of peak oil and climate change we needed to rethink how we focused the goal of our societies and our priorities away from economic growth and towards meeting the needs of people.  I liked that message and I looked up the Post Carbon Institute and began following the work that folks who worked there were putting out.  It seemed like a safe and sane place to go to learn what I thought could be a new calling on how to make our way of life more sustainable.  

And I found other resources and learned about concepts like “greenwashing” and “techno-fundementalism” and I realized I had been and continued to practice them and get paid to keep doing them.  I also realized to make a living in our modern industrialized society, that if you didn’t practice them to a certain extent or believe in them you would not make a living or maintain some semblance of sanity.  In other words, despite my attempts at looking for ways to making a living in various places, I could not find any place to work in my line of work that was not guilty of these practices, nor am I aware of any such “utopias” existing within our industrialized society.   Based on this, it seems obvious to me (perhaps influenced by my own insanity) that indeed we all our guilty of these practices, whether we want to admit it or not. 

What do I propose as an alternative?  It is indeed ignorant and arrogant on my part to even assume that I can solve the worlds environmental, societal, or energy problems.  I believe that the problems with our societies and those of the past are indeed a result of giving the power to make such decisions into the hands of few people or even a few organizations or institutions.  I also do not believe that a solution will come out of the systems that have created these problems.  Looking to alternative energy fueled systems to sustain the same old but modernized version of industrial society is not where I will be looking for a solution.  The solution is also not going to come from focusing on whether we need a newer, simpler, older, or varied technology or changing or modifying our tools.  I think that the solution will come from asking ourselves what do we really need as human beings to thrive, living on a finite planet, within a fragile ecosystem?  And then individuals within societies will need to determine what tools or technology should be used to obtain what it is we all need. 

Sorry if I am wrong, and best of luck to all in finding a more meaningful way of life, as our society enters the world of collapse.  And with that I really am done.