12

Executive Presence

She was losing control of the room.

Her R&D team was around the conference table, a group of some twenty research scientists and biomedical engineers drawn from two separate sectors of the firm. They’d spent months together, agreeing to disagree, thrashing out solutions to problems for which there was no proven approach because the whole venture was new. Now they’d reached an impasse, and Hui Zhong, who believed in leading by consensus, couldn’t coax them past it. Worse, the senior team, including the global sector leader who’d hired her to lead the joint venture, was in attendance. “They all saw me having a not-so-good moment,” she recalls. “I was trying to get everyone to agree, but it was futile.”

When the meeting broke ...

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