In 1987, American business was spending over $40 billion a year to “educate” more than 8 million “students,” a research team at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) noted, citing a training journal. The team had spent five years on a different question: where did people near the top say they had actually learned to lead?
A blank page and two questions
The work began in 1981 and 1982, when four corporations teamed up with three CCL researchers, Morgan McCall, Michael Lombardo and Ann Morrison. It grew from there, helped along by Bob Eichinger, then at PepsiCo. In the end it covered 191 executives from six major corporations, five of them in the Fortune 50, all seen by their companies as high-potential or as having lived up to their potential. Seventy-nine usable interviews came from three companies, and 112 open-ended surveys from three more. The executives averaged 46 years old.
Each got some version of the same request: “Please jot down some notes for yourself identifying at least three ‘key events’ in your career: things that made a difference in the way you manage now.” Then two questions. What happened? What did you learn from it?
The answers came back as 616 stories and 1,547 lessons. One manager had been made production superintendent of the division’s largest plant, where there had been “threats, bodily injury, sabotage” and “two hundred outstanding grievances against us.” Another moved overseas, from marketing to manufacturing, without speaking the language. “I was in charge of 7 plants in 7 countries,” that executive recalled.
What made the list
The researchers sorted the stories into 16 kinds of event. The most common was a big jump in responsibility, which they called a change in scope: 104 events, described by 78 of the 191 executives. “For some successful executives,” the report said, “it was the first time they had run up against a job that was larger than they were.” In the biggest jumps, managers had to build systems and work processes to get things done instead of doing the job themselves. Turnarounds, start-ups, task forces, setbacks such as mistakes and demotions, and bosses good and bad filled much of the rest.
Formal courses, the thing companies were spending billions on, made up 38 of the 616 stories. Thirty-five of the 191 executives named one. Even then, the report found, “the major outcome is not the content, but the confidence engendered by the experience.” The courses that made a big difference dealt with a relevant issue and came at a good time for the manager.
The caveats and the shorthand
The technical report, Key Events in Executives’ Lives by Esther Lindsey, Virginia Homes and McCall, came out in October 1987. The non-technical companion book, The Lessons of Experience by McCall, Lombardo and Morrison, followed in 1988.
The report listed its own limits. The 191 might not represent other executives or companies. “All of these data were self-report,” it said, and the researchers had “no way of knowing for sure that the events happened as they were described, or that the executives actually learned what they claimed.”
Years later, Lombardo and Eichinger condensed the findings into one line in their 1996 Career Architect Planner, as quoted in a 2014 ATD article: lessons learned by successful managers are “roughly” 70 percent from tough jobs, 20 percent from people, mostly the boss, and 10 percent from courses and reading. CCL’s website now calls it the 70-20-10 rule.