برتری استراتژیک :: تواضع به عنوان یک منبع مزیت رقابتی

Including humility and competitiveness in the same sentence may seem an oxymoron to many business leaders. Humility is frequently associated with shyness, lack of ambition, passivity, or lack of confidence. We argue quite the opposite—that humility offers strategic value for firms by furnishing organizational members with a realistic perspective of themselves, the firm, and the environment. In fact, we propose that humility is a critical strength for leaders and organizations possessing it, and a dangerous weakness for those lacking it. Our perspective on humility can be exemplified by Norberto Odebrecht (founder and now honorary chairman) of the Odebrecht Organization—a successful Brazilian corporation of 36,000 employees working on four continents in several areas of engineering and construction. In an international meeting of the organization's executives, Odebrecht (then chairman) explained that the corporation was delivering outstanding performance. He sounded, however, very concerned. He worried that, precisely because of its excellent results, the company might be at the risk of falling into “the success trap.” That is, they might be forgetting the qualities – particularly the virtue of humility – that allowed the firm to become successful in the first place. Similarly, Konosuke Matsushita, the founder of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. in Japan, has been of interest to business writers because of his determination to eradicate complacency and arrogance in his company. Although Odebrecht and Matsushita come from different cultural backgrounds, these two leaders share the belief that developing humility at both the individual and organizational level is critical to achieving success in their industries. Other examples of top-level executives recognized for valuing humility in their businesses are Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart Stores; Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay Inc.; Herb Kelleher, president of Southwest Airlines Co.; Darwin Smith, former chief executive officer (CEO) of Kimberly-Clark Corporation; C. William Pollard, former president and CEO of ServiceMaster Industries Inc.; and Ingvar Kamprad, founder of the IKEA Group.

The overall purpose of this article was to address the current misunderstanding in the business community about the value of humility, and to position it as a strategic virtue for firms possessing it. We join previous efforts to underscore the positive side of humility and to define it as accurate self-knowledge and a realistic perspective of the self in the context of others. We built on the strategic leadership and competitive advantage literatures, and the emerging work on organizational virtues and human strengths, to develop a model of the positive effects of humility on the processes of organizational learning, high-quality service to the firm's stakeholders, and development of organizational resilience. Humility is a valuable and scarce resource. Our model includes practical ways in which firms can develop and support humility in their organizational members and culture. Finally, we used examples of leaders and organizations that have made humility a critical element of their culture and strategies and, ultimately, a key factor for their firm's success. We hope this paper will compel readers to embrace humility in their lives and in their organizations.