Harvard Business Review Announces 2000 McKinsey Award Winners.

Harvard Business Review has announced that Robert Goffee and Gareth Jones are the first-place winners of the 2000 McKinsey Awards for their article “Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?” (September-October 2000). The annual awards, sponsored by the McKinsey Foundation for Management Research, recognize the best articles published each year in the Harvard Business Review.

In their ground-breaking article, Goffee and Jones argue that in an age of empowerment, people need very clear reasons for following leaders. The authors identify four unexpected qualities that help leaders inspire their employees: they selectively reveal their weaknesses, they rely heavily on intuition to gauge the appropriate timing and course of actions, they manage employees with tough empathy, and they capitalize on their differences to create social distance and signal separateness.

“Goffee and Jones ask an unsettling question–and answer it with profound insights into what it takes to be an effective leader,” says Steve T. Jurvetson, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson and one of the judges on the independent McKinsey panel. “They argue, with originality and clarity, that effective leaders possess not just superhuman qualities like vision and authority–but also a strong sense of humanity and the ability to connect emotionally with the people they lead.”

Two articles tied for the second-place award: Michael Maccoby’s “Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons” (January-February 2000), and Juan Enriquez and Ray A. Goldberg’s “Transforming Life, Transforming Business: The Life-Science Revolution” (March-April 2000).

“It’s an honor to publish such powerful works by such original thinkers,” says Suzy Wetlaufer, editor of Harvard Business Review. “All three of these articles represent the kind of definitive, authoritative, and carefully researched thinking that business leaders are hungry for today.”

In “Narcissistic Leaders,” anthropologist Michael Maccoby takes a close look at the larger-than-life CEOs who are transforming today’s industries–and delivers a surprising appraisal of their leadership style. Productive narcissists, Maccoby argues, have the audacity to push through change and effectively lead their companies in bold new directions. But Maccoby warns that narcissists can just as easily become destructive–and offers advice on how they can be saved from their own worst tendencies.

In “Transforming Life, Transforming Business,” authors Enriquez and Goldberg argue that genetic breakthroughs are setting off an industrial convergence that will radically transform the global economy–and draw a range of new businesses, from agribusiness to chemicals to health care, into the life-science industry. In this brave, new world, the authors argue, companies will have to rethink nearly every aspect of their business strategies, make massive R&D investments, and win over a public that is a skeptical about genetic engineering.

About the Authors

Robert Goffee is a professor of organizational behavior at London Business School, and Gareth Jones is director of human resources and internal communications at the British Broadcasting Corporation. They are the founding partners of Creative Management Associates, a consulting firm in London.

Michael Maccoby, an anthropologist and psychoanalyst, is president of the Maccoby Group, a management consultancy in Washington, D.C.

Juan Enriquez, the former CEO of Mexico City’s Urban Development Corporation, is a researcher at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ray A. Goldberg is the George Moffett Professor of Agriculture and Business, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School in Boston.

For the past 42 years, the McKinsey Foundation for Management Research has offered awards recognizing the two best articles published each year in the Harvard Business Review. These awards, judged by an independent panel of leaders in the business, academic, and consulting communities, recognize outstanding works that are likely to have a major influence on the actions of business managers worldwide.

For more information at http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu