What Losers Say
The Four F-Words of Failure
Dr. Timothy Nerenz is a former
company president with almost 40
years of international leadership
experience before leaving the private
sector to research, write, and teach
MBA courses on leadership, strategy,
major change, M&A, and organizational
development in graduate schools in
Canada, the United States, and Europe.
He is the 2011 inductee into the Order
of Athabasca University in Edmonton,
Alberta and is currently a business
professor on the faculty of University of
Maryland University CollegeEurope in
Kaiserslautern, Germany.
Business Expert Press 978-1-94709-816-9 (2018)
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Timothy T. Nerenz, PhD
Abstract: When a business executive is given the new
responsibility for leading a poorly performing business
segment, either through an acquisition or a major
restructuring initiative, an urgent priority is the triage as-
sessment of the leadership cadre that has been inherited
to determine dependability and suitability for leading
change. While scholars have identified the importance
of leadership in the change process, practical guidance
for practitioners on how to quickly assess the quality of
change leadership in the inherited organization is not
as readily available. Drawing on nearly four decades
as a business executive and change agent, this article
describes the authors framework for quickly catego-
rizing inherited leadership dependability and provides
a simple technique for assessing likely dependability
of inherited leaders using word-choice analysis during
short and informal discussions. If we simply let them,
our poor leaders will identify themselves by repetitive
reliance on four F-words: feasible, fair, fault, and fixthe
language of losers. Conversely, our high performers will
identify themselves by repetitive use of four P-words:
possibility, performance, praise, and participationthe
language of winners.
Keywords: best practice, business administration,
business leaders, corporate leadership, executive,
leadership, leadership inquiry, leadership studies,
leadership theory, M&A, major change, management,
organizational development, practice, research,
turnaround
Introduction
Less than a week into retirement from my first career
as a business executive, I was asked to write and teach
a course in Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) for the
world-ranked Executive MBA program at Athabasca Uni-
versity, drawing upon four decades of experience leading
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 What Losers Say
major organizational change. The new M&A
course (Nerenz, 2013) was d eveloped from
the perspective of a CEO, where strategy,
financial, and human resource facets of the
combinant event are seamlessly integrated
throughout the entire acquisition p rocess
goal-setting, locating, targeting, v aluation,
negotiation, closing, and post-closing cultural
assimilation.
One of the course lessons that always gen-
erates robust discussions among students
with experience in leading major change
events is the one in which we c onsider the
triage of the inherited leadership struc-
turethe determination of who we can de-
pend on and who we need to quarantine in
the newly acquired organization in order for
a new direction to be developed, planned,
and enacted quickly and effectively.
A leading textbook on M&A describes these
high-quality initial leadership decisions
one of the most important, but least effec-
tively executed M&A c apabilities (Galpin
and Herndon, 2014). While a cademics and
consultants have provided many tools and
processes for HR professionals to complete
the task of staffing a newly a cquired or sig-
nificantly altered business segment after a
new leadership structure has been deter-
mined, there is little in the way of useful
how-to for practitioners when it comes to
quickly and effectively triaging leadership
dependability in the inherited organization.
To close this gap, the new Athabasca
M&A course (Nerenz, 2013) proposed a
four-quadrant framework for c ategorizing
leadership dependability and a simple
technique for determining which of
those quadrants was the likely best fit
for leaders at all levels of the inherited
organization. It is a method of leader-
ship t riage that Ihad developed over my
many years in turnaround m anagement
practice and taught in the corporate
leadership development p rogram in my
former company.
Anyone can master the technique; it
relies upon active listening for specific
word-choice patterns during informal
2 Business Expert Press 978-1-94709-816-9 (2018)
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conversations, focusing on four words
that begin with the letter F and four
other words that begin with the letter
P.For convenience, we labeled it the 4F
method.
Counting the corporate leadership de-
velopment mentees, our business partners
with whom we shared best practices
during my career, and my EMBA students,
the 4F device has been successfully used
by hundreds of executives and senior
managers across a broad spectrum of major
change circumstances.
Cant, Can, Will, and Did
In any organization there are both formal
and informal leaders who exert influence
over the people in their teams, departments,
divisions, business units, companies, or
groups. When taking responsibility for a
new organization, one of the most urgent
priorities for the new executive is d eciding
who among the inherited cadre of lead-
ers can be trusted to get new things done,
i.e.,who we can depend on.
And just as importantly we need to
identify those at the other end of the
spectrum, those who we can expect to
actively resist and undermine the changes
necessary to correct the poor performance
that precipitated the need for divestiture or
major change. We speak often of removal of
barriers when discussing improvement of
organizational performance, and we must
first recognize that each of those barriers
was erected or kept in place by a person(s)
in a position of authority who is still on the
payroll. The car does not drive itself into
the ditch.
Most of the leaders at all levels of the
organization will fall somewhere in b etween
the two extremes of dependable and
resistant; while development of leadership
potential for these inhabitants of the tall
parts of the bell curve is an important
long-term goal, it is not an urgent necessity
in the critical first days and weeks of a
turnaround situation. We focus on the two
extremities.
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 What Losers Say
We can broadly define four categories
of inherited leadership dependability by
borrowing some terms from the popu-
lar cultures description of a can-do at-
titude, placing the inherited leaders of an
organization into one of four modes of re-
sponse to major change and new executive
leadership:
1. Cant Do. The resistors and subversives
who actively thwart and undermine new
initiatives.
2. Can Do. The fence riders who wish us
luck, but avoid engagement.
3. Will Do. Those who accept new assign-
ments and execute when tasked.
4. Did. The hard-chargers who recognize
and solve problems without waiting to
be told.
Experienced managers and leaders will
recognize each of these four dependabil-
ity modes, and can likely think of current
staff who fit each description. The term
dependable may be too murky for some,
and a handy way to sharpen the edges
and add clarity is to think about the two
key characteristics found in the common
phrasewilling and ableto differenti-
ate and categorize leadership potential.
Unlike continuous improvements, which
are managed processes, a major change is
an event that must be led; the objective is
buy-in, not compliance. Willingness to lead
or actively support change is not the same
thing as ability to lead or actively support
change. People in lead roles can be willing
or unwilling to engage and commit, and
they can also be able or unable to lead oth-
ers through a major change.
We can use the familiar device of a two-
axis matrix to illustrate the framework,
i.e.,creating a grid with willingness to engage
and initiate new ideas (low to high) along
the x-axis, and ability to lead and implement
change (low to high) along the y-axis. Four
quadrants of dependability are produced to
which we can make our initial mapping of
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the inherited leadership of the organization
that will be changed.
Cant Do. Unwilling to engage and unable
to lead change
Can Do. Able to lead but unwilling to engage
Will Do. Willing to engage when tasked
but unable to self-select change leader-
ship priorities
Did. Willing to lead and able to lead change
effectively on their own initiative.
Obviously, an executive facing the
challenge of turning around a poorly
performing organization would love to
have a payroll stacked to overflowing with
willing and able Dids, but no bell curve
of human beingsnot even those accom-
plished men and women who sit around
a boardroom tablewill ever fall entirely
into that category.
The development of change leadership
capacity in the numerous Can-Dos and
Will-Dos is a long-term proposition. Over
time, many of the Will-Dos can be taught to
lead change, so that their ability matches
their willingness; and many of the Can-Dos
can develop confidence to act of their own
initiative rather than waiting for explicit di-
rection. And in many cases, we simply have
no basis to judge leadership dependability,
since a person in a management role may
have had little or no leadership experience
or development. In movie titles heaven
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