Some world leaders and chief executives might envy US President Donald Trump’s ability to sign dozens of executive orders without impunity. They are issued, and sometimes retracted, at a speed that wrongly suggests they are a form of chaos rather than a carefully executed plan.
The Economist magazine forewarned its readers back in July 15, 2023. ‘How MAGA Republicans plan to make Donald Trump’s second term count’ outlined what victory in 2024 would mean: “… a team of practised demolition experts would prime their explosive ideas. The deconstruction of the administrative state could begin. The vain and tyrannical whims of an emperor-president would emerge from the rubble.”
The plan, as we now know, meant sacking 50,000 top civil servants and replacing them with America Firsters whose personal loyalty to Trump was beyond question. The aim, according to The Economist, was to prevent the “unelected bureaucracy from stymying the programme of an elected president”. In the US, the public service has no protection from the checks and balances in the constitutional design of the three branches of government it enshrines.
Trump and his acolytes had learned their lesson from his first term, which could be accurately described as chaotic in its inability to make appointments and prevent the many legal actions that followed his defeat in 2020.
In its prescient article, The Economist correctly predicted that if the Republicans won both houses of Congress, “nobody in the executive or the legislature will be in a position to stop Mr Trump”. It then warned: “If these carefully laid plans were enacted, America would follow Hungary and Poland down the path of illiberal democracy.”
One might hesitate to say it has reached that point, but it does reflect the theme of this week’s column: goal-setting, courtesy of a new local self-improvement book for managers and executives.
Deb Bailey in her 20s at World’s View, Zimbabwe.
Leadership coach
Navigate Your Impact: How to achieve goals that really matter is the second book that has been self-published by Deb Bailey, a leadership coach. (Her first was Inside Out: Why leadership starts with you, which was a Covid-era response to leaders who felt lost amid the lockdowns.)
Bailey had six years of OE in her 20s, qualifying in human resources management while working in London. On the trip home, she visited World’s View on the Nyanga Downs plateau in Zimbabwe. It inspired her to spend 22 years at Fisher & Paykel Healthcare (FPH), New Zealand’s most valuable company and one of the few of any scale based on technology. This week, it reported a record revenue of $20.2 billion for the year to March and a 43% increase in net profit to $377.2 million – by far the best performance of any New Zealand corporate.
Bailey left FPH in 2016, 15 years after Fisher & Paykel Industries split into its appliance and healthcare operations. In 2010, the latter established a manufacturing base in Mexico that supplied about half of the humidifier and sleep apnea products it sold in the US.
In her role, Bailey annually interviewed most of the country's top graduates in engineering, given the company’s scale and recruitment demands.
“I always noticed a vast difference between those genuinely interested in an engineering career and those who weren’t. Genuinely interested candidates were curious from the start. They were eager to engage with the products we showed them during the interview process.”
Those who showed little interest often had parents who were engineers themselves, prompting Bailey to observe that these “amazing young people [were] living someone else’s version of their life”. This led to a more fundamental question: “Who is this goal for?”
Fisher & Paykel Healthcare’s Mexico headquarters.
Life stages
The book lays out how this can be answered at various stages of one’s life. In her words, “[This] will help you identify and plan your goals, diagnose where you are getting stuck and show you how to move forward for the greatest possibility of achievement and success.”
Bailey says many of the principles she practices today were part of the leadership approach at FPH. “They aligned well with the culture then – particularly a strong ‘leaders as coaches’ mindset. Clear expectations, timely feedback and genuine support weren’t treated as separate events; they were part of everyday interactions.”
That has since changed at both the company and in Bailey’s own career. She completed an MBA and became immersed in the theoretical side of coaching, by writing or designing leadership programmes.
She whittles down her core beliefs into two principles: leadership tools should be simple and feel natural, not forced; and the way forward begins with clarity about the problem to be solved.
The book has three parts: the decision-making process, which involves planning and identifying; putting those decisions into action; and finally, the concepts of goal-setting, using neuroscience and research into psychology and personal development.
Some of this is controversial, such as neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), which emerged in the 1980s as a ‘new age’ practice that has since fallen out of favour. The largely negative Wikipedia entry was last updated in 2015, and the most recent primary source is 2001.
‘Three brains’
NLP has been replaced by a new field of leadership development known as mBit (multiple brain integration techniques). In the words of its two leading proponents, Grant Soosalu and Marvin Oka, this “provides leaders with practical methods for aligning and integrating their head, heart, and gut brains for increased levels of emergent wisdom in their decision-making, and for developing an expanded core identity as an authentic leader”.
They claim recent neuroscientific findings have uncovered complex and functional neural networks that give scientific credence to the growing body of leadership literature showing how the world’s best companies are guided by leaders who can tap into the intelligence of their head, heart, and guts.
Deb Bailey
Bailey distils this ‘three brains’ concept in chapters on logical thinking, emotional values, and gut instinct, along with more conventional ways people identify and set goals. She recalls how difficult it could be at FPH for leaders to have coaching conversations when a team member lacked clarity about their aspirations.
“In many cases, no-one had ever asked them what they wanted to do next, and leaders needed the tools to tackle those conversations. Without that clarity, talent development and succession planning could stall.”
I am not qualified to judge the effectiveness of these techniques. But Bailey explains them with examples from her own experience, including such life-changing personal ones as balancing a family with a career, going through a divorce, and the launch of her own business.
Out of curiosity, I asked about her experience with self-publishing, as that seems to be the only way New Zealand business authors can reach their reading public. (The last one I reviewed was former Z Energy boss Mike Bennetts’ guide for Kiwi CEOs, Being Extraordinary, published in 2023.)
Bailey said self-publishing was an “enjoyable and eye-opening journey. When I wrote Inside Out, I had no idea what I was getting into.” But with the help of an editor, designer, typesetter, printer, distributor, and publicist, she achieved a goal many aspire to but, on the results so far, few achieve.
Navigate Your Impact: How to achieve goals that really matter, by Deb Bailey. Available from June 9 from www.deb-bailey.com.
Nevil Gibson is a former editor at large for NBR. He has contributed film and book reviews to various publications.
This is supplied content and not paid for by NBR.
