Wharton
Strategic Concepts & Mechanics
Primary Evidence
"Alan Gleicher, who worked with Bill as the head of sales and operations at Intuit, had a simple way of summing up how to be successful with him. “Don’t dance. If Bill asks a question and you don’t know the answer, don’t dance around it. Tell him you don’t know!” For Bill, honesty and integrity weren’t just about keeping your word and telling the truth; they were also about being forthright. This is critical for effective coaching; a good coach doesn’t hide the stuff that’s hard to talk about—in fact, a good coach will draw this out. He or she gets at the hard stuff. Scholars would describe Bill’s approach—listening, providing honest feedback, demanding candor—as “relational transparency,” which is a core characteristic of “authentic leadership.”13 Wharton professor Adam Grant has another term for it: “disagreeable givers.” He notes in an email to us that “we often feel torn between supporting and challenging others. Social scientists reach the same conclusion for leadership as they do for parenting: it’s a false dichotomy. You want to be supportive and demanding, holding high standards and expectations but giving the encouragement necessary to reach them. Basically, it’s tough love. Disagreeable givers are gruff and tough on the surface, but underneath they have others’ best interests at heart. They give the critical feedback no one wants to hear but everyone needs to hear.”"
"Steinberg had started a computer-leasing business, Leasco, when he was just a couple of years out of Wharton, in 1961. That very profitable company’s stock had soared in the heady stock market days of the late sixties, making it possible for little Leasco to take over the conservative, 150-year-old Reliance Insurance Company, nearly ten times its size, by tendering to its shareholders a package of the highly valued Leasco paper."
"Our global MBA program draws qualified candidates from such top business schools as Harvard, Stanford, Chicago-Booth, MIT Sloan, Columbia, Wharton and Kellogg in the U.S., as well as London Business School and IESE in Europe and CEIBS in Hong Kong. In 2014, we selected 21 MBAs for the program from a pool of 642 applicants."