Candour - Simon Cowell's Managerial Legacy - Harvard BR Dan McGinn

I woke up this morning feeling guilty, ready to admit a journalistic lapse: I watched only about five minutes of last night's marathon season finale of "American Idol." That's partly because I've never liked the show, and partly because both the Red Sox and Celtics were playing on other channels. But I'd meant to tune in last night to watch Simon Cowell's swan song. Even though I'm no "Idol" fan, I've always thought Cowell's style, while over-the-top, is relevant for managers. Cowell rose to fame and fortune on the basis of his brutal honesty, ignoring conventions of politeness to give candid feedback. Yes, he's unnecessarily mean and nasty — hey, it's a TV show — but he's also one of the world's foremost practitioners of a word that pops up in HBR every so often: candor.

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Firing Someone: What They Don't Teach You at Business School - Harvard Business Review

When I was 24, I quit an engineering job, declined offers to attend Harvard and Berkeley for grad school, and accepted a carpenter's job in Nantucket. The house I worked on was being built for the CEO of a major multi-national corporation. Without knowing it, I had entered the world of high-end custom building and within two years, I was supervising the construction of a 29,000 square-foot mansion on a 180-acre estate in Fairfield County, Connecticut. In all, I spent nearly five years running a construction company, and in those five years, I learned how to manage. This is the first of a series of posts on that education. I will relate salient experiences in construction with lessons I teach, and lessons that play out in the real world of leadership, every day.

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