Economic All-Stars
Boston College business dean and leadership expert Andy Boynton shares his picks for a dream team of leaders to help right the nation's struggling economy
Wanted: Business superstars of all stripes.
Big egos are welcome. Polite conversations aren't.
Candidates should be willing to labor around the clock. They'll be required to toil together in close proximity and at a frenetic pace. They must hammer out breakthrough solutions, putting aside politics, ignoring general consensus, and sparing no one's feelings.
Their goal: saving the US and global economy.
No matter who is elected president next month, the agenda will include righting a crippled financial system, restoring the faith of citizens, and getting the economy back on track. To oversee such a miracle recovery, the man in the White House will need a dream team.
That's the view of Andy Boynton, dean of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College. Boynton is an authority on all-star teams in business and other fields. He's coauthor of the 2005 book "Virtuoso Teams: Lessons from teams that changed their worlds," which detailed how squads of luminaries reinvigorated Ford Motor Co., created "West Side Story," and hatched Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox video game console.
Such achievements, however dazzling, pale beside the challenge facing government and business leaders today in the throes of financial shocks that have undermined the foundations of the global economy. But the virtuoso team model offered by Boynton and coauthor Bill Fischer might be a recipe for tackling the crisis.
"You have to rethink the whole financial system," Boynton said. "And if you're going to rethink the financial system, you want the smartest people in the world at the table figuring it out."
Who deserves a seat? For starters, Boynton believes Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke should be there, despite the chilly market reception to the $700 billion financial rescue plan they helped crafted. So should billionaire investor Warren Buffett, jointly praised by Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain in their presidential debate last week.
Boynton also nominates, among others, Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman; Bill Gross, chief investment officer at Pacific Investment Management Co.; Anne Mulcahy, chief executive of Xerox Corp.; E. Gerald Corrigan, managing director of Goldman Sachs & Co.; and, Charles Clough, founder of Clough Capital Partners. And, for good measure, he throws in a pair of academics: Edward Kane at BC's Carroll School and Chip Heath at Stanford University.
All have deep reserves of expertise and would put the interest of the country first, Boynton maintained. But equally important for a task demanding bold and innovative action, each is a strong-willed leader who isn't afraid to shout, argue, and spar with others in pursuit of solutions. "This won't be a smooth-sailing process," he cautioned.
Not everyone agrees that assembling a galaxy of stars is the best approach. Joseph B. Fuller, cofounder and chief executive of Monitor Group, a global consulting firm in Cambridge, is skeptical. "Notions like that are exciting and compelling at first blush," Fuller said. "But symphonies have only one conductor and concert master. Individuals who are great don't always mesh as a team."
Fuller said he'd have no objection to deputizing a few superstars like Buffett to champion a recovery plan and calm the fears on Main Street about the economic future. But the real work of recovery, he said, will require multiple teams of roll-up-the-sleeves technicians led by seasoned managers, such as Harvard Business School dean Jay O. Light or Bain Capital founder and former Governor Mitt Romney.
The financial crisis is made up of several intertwined problems, each of which must be resolved by a separate team of specialists in such arcane fields as capital flows, mortgage-backed securities, commercial paper, and financial accounting, Fuller said.
To describe the architecture of the challenge, he used the analogy of Russian matryoshka dolls. When you pull apart the outer doll (the most pressing problem), another one can be found inside.
The most immediate job for leaders is restoring liquidity to the capital markets, Fuller said. Then they'll have to establish a new set of financial reporting regulations. After that, they must create a market for mortgage-backed securities that currently can't be valued. And, finally, they must reshape the accounting system to give regulators and rating agencies a clearer glimpse at the risks in financial portfolios.
"This is a basketball game, a football game, a baseball game, and a hockey game," Fuller said. "You can't play the same team."
BC's Boynton, for his part, agreed that domain experts will have to thrash out many of the details. But the value of a virtuoso team, he said, is to operate above the fray, framing the challenge in historic terms, aiming high, and setting the tone. Without such leadership, he said, efforts to avert an economic catastrophe may founder on polite conversations, timid steps, easy consensus, and mediocrity.
"This has to be very much a contact sport," Boynton contended. "It needs to be played intimately, elbow to elbow, over and above the existing infrastructure. I don't know if any one person understands the whole problem. But you have to assemble the best minds, and they have to challenge each other and move ideas."
Not least among the challenges will be selling a remedy to lawmakers and, ultimately, to the public, Boynton said. And a team of respected virtuosos might be in the best position to do that.
"This is a problem of historic proportions," he said. "You have to give congressmen a message they can bring back home. If you say this is about bailing out Wall Street, that won't sell back in Peoria."
Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com. 