Harvard Business Publishing

First, I would like to better understand your definition of success. In your paper you refer to the work of Jim Collins, widely published in Good to Great (2001), and say that you extend and complement it. But Collins looked at companies that had attained extraordinary results, outperforming the market 6.9 times on average, independent of industry, over fifteen years. Your study looks at CEOs for companies who happened to be involved in private equity transactions in one five year period ending in 2005. How can you compare the two? Collins also points out that mergers and acquisitions play no role in going from good to great--"two big mediocrities joined together never made one great company."

It is hard to discern exactly what you mean by "success" from your paper. Your metrics are: (1) direct appraisals of CEO success by the PE firms that invested and hired the CEOS; (2) direct appraisals of financial success of 68 investments by the PE firms; and (3) a combination of the PE firm appraisals and publicly available data. Many of the characteristics used in the appraisals are circular: "has proven track record of success in this area." What exactly, then, constitutes success? Over what time period? It is not clear to me exactly how the CEOs in your study were assessed, for what definition or measure of success, and by whom.

Without having any hard, independent data to back up my claims, I would guess that the softer skills you are referring to come into play over the long-term, and that their importance would vary greatly depending on how you define success. Organizations are going to have to do a lot more than attract private equity to succeed in this century, and we are going to need them to step up and face much bigger challenges than short-term gains for investors. True leadership, I believe, is going to rely on much more than an aggressive, "look at me" stance: the softer skills of listening, waiting, adapting, deflecting credit, responding to criticism (aka learning), motivating and energizing will serve leaders to build a sustainable legacy much bigger than themselves.

Lisa Post, Mariposa Leadership

The time horizon over which you are defining success or results is a critical variable which has not been addressed in the brief article provided. Factoring time horizons into the equation would change the theory.

Joseph Kaminski

One of the things I find interesting about these types of discussions is the underlying assumption that "hard" and "soft" skills are independent of one another. I believe the assumption that any one person must choose between moving quickly when necessary and building consensus when it makes sense is invalid. Today’s successful leaders are highly adaptable and aware and therefore able to tune their approach to the situation at hand.

Attempting to say one is better than the other is like saying Tiger Woods doesn't need BOTH brute strength AND a soft touch.
Authentic Leadership requires both hard and soft skills, perfectly integrated to lead in all conditions. Being either "hard" or "soft," and not both, is being handicapped.

Eric Patrick Marr
EPM@TheAionicCompany.com

Just like using the carot and the stick or force and diplomacy, the successful leader is someone able to combine the so called "hard" and "soft" skills and use them approprietely in accordance with the circumstances at hand.

I hope you are confused between the definition of soft skills and hard skills..and above all both the skills are equally important and one cant survive in th ecorporate world even if one of them is missing.