"Leadership is the scarcest resource"
- sciart0
- May 31
- 3 min read
Excerpts:
"Leadership is the scarcest resource in the world.
It’s not about brands, buildings, money, or hospitals—it’s about leadership.
It’s the highest leverage activity in the world.
If I were president, I would run leadership training for all my top-level people to give them a rudimentary baseline of experience.
The assumption that leaders inherently know how to lead is a fallacy."
"...As a former cabinet secretary of the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and CEO of Procter & Gamble, Bob McDonald is one of a handful of leaders who has excelled in both the public and private sectors. Under his leadership at VA, he delivered a significant uplift in service to veterans and organizational culture, and as CEO of Procter & Gamble, he led global expansion, sustained innovation, and profitable growth.
As part of our Leadership Excellence series, he sat with Roland Dillon and Scott Blackburn to reflect on his approach to leadership, teamwork, and culture. An edited transcript of the discussion follows.
McKinsey: Bob, you’re a rare leader who has worked at the top of both the public and private sectors. What experiences shaped you the most into the leader you are today?
Bob McDonald: I would go back to my time at West Point, the United States Military Academy. Attending West Point, the preeminent leadership institution in the world, is a life-changing experience. It focuses you on the profession of leadership, and it made me an intentional and deliberate leader. As a freshman in college, when you have relied on serendipitous leadership in high school, leadership becomes a skill that you have to work hard at to hone over the years.
While many leadership books talk about different behaviors in leadership, I think culture is the one aspect that is undervalued.
McKinsey: As VA secretary, you had an incredibly important mandate. What were the hardest tests for you as a leader?
Bob McDonald: When I took over VA, veteran trust in the organization was 47 percent. Organizations are perfectly designed to achieve the results they get, so if veterans are having adverse medical conditions in Phoenix, for example, that is for a reason.
While many books talk about different behaviors in leadership, I think culture is the one aspect that is undervalued. I learned about culture in the US Army—when you’re tucking soldiers into bed at night and you’re waking them up in the morning, whether it’s in the Arctic or the jungles of Panama, you learn a lot about them.
What I found at VA was a culture of learned helplessness and a very hierarchical military culture. Everybody called each other by their last name, not their first, and generally by a title. Good news traveled up to leaders very quickly, but bad news didn’t.
One of the first things I did was to start a campaign, “Call Me Bob”—rather than call me “Secretary.” That was something I learned at Procter & Gamble. On my first day, I called everyone “Sir “or “Ma’am” since I came from the army, but colleagues said that they refer to each other by their first names, because first names lead to a relationship. That leads to intimacy, intimacy leads to trust, and trust is what makes the company very, very efficient."