Book Reviews
Go To Hopkins & Company Homepage	Go to Executive Times Archives Go to Book Review List
Accountability Leadership: How to Strengthen Productivity Through Sound Managerial Leadership by Gerald A. Kraines, M.D. Recommendation: ••
Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com
Blame the Boss I’m usually wary of business books that propose a complete system for executives to implement. Noting Gerald Kraines’ background in chemistry and medicine, I was doubly wary of a “Doctor Answer Man” attitude that might appear in Kraines’ book, Accountability Leadership: How to Strengthen Productivity Through Sound Managerial Leadership. Given that wariness, I picked up this book and felt turned off early on by the overuse of exclamation points. I quickly judged that Accountability Leadership is mostly a sales pitch for Kraines and the Levinson Institute which he leads. On most pages, the boss is proven wrong, so if you’re guilt quotient is lower than usual, you’ll find ample refills in this book. While much of what Kraines proposes seems like it makes sense, a lot of it fails the “ability to implement” test for most readers. Unless you’re at the very top of your organization, you’re likely to be frustrated trying to act based on what’s in this book. Kraines can be quite enjoyable, especially if you like poking fun at recent fads and themes. Here’s a throwaway line, early in the book: “Pay for performance often amounts to a bribe.” If you’re involved in the concept of internal customers, here’s what Kraines has to say: “The relationship between a supplier company and its genuine customer is markedly different from the ideal relationship between an internal service giver and an internal service requester. For one thing, the vendor company’s goal with respect to a true customer should be to maximize its own value in every transaction and to decide which customers it wants to be doing business with in order to best serve its business objectives. On the other hand, an internal service-giving function is an organizational resource that needs to be optimally deployed across the entire company in order to best support the company’s overall objectives – not the function’s own objectives. This is another flagrant example of managerial abdication. Executives routinely fail to establish sound, internally consistent, and adequately ‘resourced’ managerial leadership systems. They reason that responsible, creative managers should be able to work out among themselves ways to divvy up the resources they need. And if the service-providing functions are inefficient or ineffective, then, the managers contend, ‘we’ll set up competition to pressure them into shaping up.’ Instead of taking the time to define and ‘resource’ the requirements of implementing their strategy, executives push the problem down one, two, or more levels and allow Darwinian forces to sort it out. Instead of holding the managers of each service function accountable for the quantity and quality of the service she delivers, internal customers hold their feet to the fire. What a waste of time and energy! This is clearly an irresponsible way to treat employees. The answer, again, is to define service-giving) and service-getting) as an indirect accountability. It constitutes a lateral working relationship that is a true accountability. It is an obligation to deliver a service (if the requester is authorized) exactly as specified (quantity and quality), but not necessarily within the time frame requested. A manager has the authority to re-adjust the timing of any of the QQT/Rs she delegated to a subordinate at any time. A service-getter, on the other hand, can only wait in line unless the process-accountable manager has developed a decision-making framework, within which all people who have requested services must agree to adjust their own priorities for the timing of the service. Service-giving is indirect, because the actual input into a process (the direct accountability) is usually the service getter. The service giver is indirectly supporting the process through someone else.” I think “managerial abdication” means, “blame the boss.” Kraines presents few facts to support his suggestions and he fails to provide compelling reasons to implement his proposed system. His premise is that following his approach will release potential within your organization. Take my prescription, instead of Kraines: take a pass on this book unless you really, really want to implement a complicated and unproven system for leadership. Steve Hopkins, January 23, 2002
ã 2002 Hopkins and Company, LLC