Clarke Murphy on action over perfection

What this conversation is about

Clarke Murphy spent ten years as chief executive of the leadership advisory firm Russell Reynolds Associates and now advises boards and chief executives. He wrote Sustainable Leadership, and the reason he wrote it begins at sea.

Three quarters of the way across the North Atlantic, after days in fog, he was at the wheel doing fifteen or sixteen knots when he saw what he took for a whale breaching ahead. He shouted, threw the boat sideways, and missed it by about ten feet. As they passed, they saw it was not a whale but a steel shipping container, barnacled, bleached on top from long exposure. Hitting one sinks a boat in minutes.

"So in that moment you kind of go, okay, this is real. What the hell are we gonna do about it?" — Clarke Murphy · 00:02:43

What followed, he says, was an inward reflection and then an outward question: he is in the leadership business, so what can leadership do?

Different competencies, tested

His answer is not a values statement. Murphy describes long-term chief executive successions where boards asked his firm to add sustainability competencies to the usual ones, to track and measure them in candidates, so the successor would be a commercially successful leader who could also carry that agenda.

Behind it is research his firm conducted with leaders who had embedded sustainability into culture and operations with profit. They were interviewed, assessed and tested, and they came out different from other successful executives: in handling complexity, in activating over longer horizons, and in two competencies Murphy says people think they already understand.

"We're saying stakeholder inclusion is including your competitors or your regulators in trying to make substantive change in progress." — Clarke Murphy · 00:06:47

His example is an industry consortium where rival shipping and energy firms worked together on clean fuel, on the logic that nobody competes on the engine design. The second competency goes further than the usual use of the word innovation:

"disruptive innovation where you have to challenge your own assumptions as a leader, everything you've ever known about your industry to say, what if I'm wrong" — Clarke Murphy · 00:07:47

Glenn connected it to a habit the method keeps running into:

"why do we always feel like we have to stay in our own lane as opposed to recognizing that all we have is human capacity" — Glenn Llopis · 00:09:05

The hundred percenters

Murphy’s name for the people who never start is the hundred percenters: executives who want every obstacle solved before taking the first step, and who end up furthest behind. The counter-argument is the line at the top of this page, and the discipline that follows it: pick your spot, measure it, show progress that will not be a straight line, and let that visible movement pull the organization along.

Glenn named what that fear is in the method’s terms: being stuck in standardization, where the only things you can see are the ones directly in front of you.

Acting long term in a short-term system

Glenn pressed with the uncomfortable version of the question. If one company lands at ninety percent of plan but well into its sustainability strategy, and another hits plan with none of it, who is winning? Murphy did not hedge:

"If you want long term employee retention, if you want long term investors in your company, then you must act in the long term." — Clarke Murphy · 00:19:42

He adds a detail from the investing world that gets less attention than the public arguments: private capital firms have quietly hired heads of sustainability to work with the companies they own, because they expect better operations and culture to produce higher valuations when they sell.

On the backlash, his read is that it is mostly a reaction to being preached at rather than to the results themselves. He describes pressure arriving from both ends, boards and investors at one end, employees and consumers at the other, which is why he thinks the direction holds.

Seeding the next harvest

One chief executive he quotes said their business has only eight harvests left in which to make a real difference, a line Murphy says focuses the mind. It also lands on Glenn, who once ran a food business with growers in Mexico and learned to think in seeds and yields.

"That is what the boardrooms and the CEOs are trying to do is seed and develop the next harvest of great leaders except do it faster." — Clarke Murphy · 00:23:09

His last chapter is about the people he calls nudgers, the younger employees already pushing this work forward on nights and weekends, often further ahead than the executives above them realize. The task, as he frames it, is to find them earlier, develop them faster, and reward them for it.

Glenn closed with the line that runs through the archive:

"opportunities are everywhere yet few have eyes to see them." — Glenn Llopis · 00:24:24