As we’ve all learned, most of life’s lessons don’t travel in a neat formation accompanied by bugles and cavalry. They arrive filthy and unkempt, prominent in the mess we’ve made around our foxhole. These lessons are typically the offspring of hubris, naivete and ignorance … or from overlooking the land mines hidden beneath our feet.
Every Tuesday, we’ll share valuable and practical leadership tips and tools to help you BE a better leader so you can BECOME a better leader. Remember … you won’t BECOME a better leader until you start BEING a better leader … implementing NOW the changes necessary to adopt the proven strategies of successful leaders. You might start by building on the communication matrix and making sure you’re defending the castle to get done what only you can do. Make some time so you’re thinking past today.
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You probably know someone, don’t you, who is a star performer who believes that her achievements go unrewarded? If so, you probably also know an underachiever who gets more than he deserves. Is there any greater disincentive to the high performer than knowing that under-performance seems to be equally rewarded?
I’ve talked about the value of incentives before, but it keeps coming to mind as I talk to senior executives who don’t seem to have spent any time at all considering whether their incentive plans are working as intended … or whether they need to be revised.
In some ways, it reminds me of the comment that Bloomberg attributed to Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, during the $20 billion bonus scandals during the 2008-2009 financial meltdown. According to Bloomberg, this was his comment …
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Nothing in life travels in a neat formation accompanied by bugles and cavalry. A lot of it shows up filthy and unkempt, prominent in the mess we’ve made around our foxhole. These lessons are typically the offspring of hubris, naivete and ignorance … or from overlooking the land mines hidden beneath our feet.
Every Tuesday, we’ll share valuable and practical leadership tips and tools to help you BE a better leader so you can BECOME a better leader. Remember … you won’t BECOME a better leader until you start BEING a better leader … implementing NOW the changes necessary to adopt the proven strategies of successful leaders. You might start by building on the communication matrix and making sure you’re defending the castle to get done what only you can do. Make some time so you’re thinking past today.
The week just ended is my favorite sports week of the year. Some of you will say, “Nah, you got your calendar mixed up. Baseball season opened the previous week.” Of course, I could say, “but the home opener for the Giants was that week” and then you’d say, “OK, so you’re a big Giants fan. I get it.”
A few of you may suspect that’s not the reason. Not that I don’t love the World Champion San Francisco Giants and all … but honestly? That didn’t even occur to me as I braced for the greatest sports week of the year.
There are a lot of reasons why I love this past week.
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As we’ve all learned, most of life’s lessons don’t travel in a neat formation accompanied by bugles and cavalry. They arrive filthy and unkempt, prominent in the mess we’ve made around our foxhole. These lessons are typically the offspring of hubris, naivete and ignorance … or from overlooking the land mines hidden beneath our feet.
Every Tuesday, we’ll share valuable and practical leadership tips and tools to help you BE a better leader so you can BECOME a better leader. Remember … you won’t BECOME a better leader until you start BEING a better leader … implementing NOW the changes necessary to adopt the proven strategies of successful leaders. Start by taking a look at our communication matrix to make sure you’re working at improving your communication success.
How many times have we asked Are Distractions Destroying Your Brain? Whatever happened to that blank sheet of paper you were going to use to THINK, you know, that old-fashioned approach to problem solving and the creative process? Do we agree that Google is making us stupid?
These are but variations on a theme … our increasingly short term focus. We’re trying to do too much, keep track of a lot of stuff, fend off the intruders that keep pouring over the horizon … fighting today’s fires but missing the extraordinary value of a long term perspective.
We’ve talked about Warren Buffet’s most recent shareholder’s letter. He’s well known for his long-term perspective, which infuses such homilies as “At Berkshire, our time horizon is forever” and “that to finish first you must first finish”.
The key is to balance the need for short-term performance with the long term perspective that creates a lasting business. In our discussions about leadership, we have often referred to what only the CEO can do to focus on those special things that ONLY YOU can do.
Peter Drucker in The American CEO (full article requires WSJ login), supplemented by A.G. Lafley, former CEO of P&G, have written about what only the CEO can do … and one of their key findings is the importance of the balance between short and long term objectives. (Full article must be purchased from HBR.)
It’s correctly identified as one of the most important roles that a CEO must fulfill … because no one else has the knowledge, both inside and outside of the organization, to provide that balanced perspective.
What would you do differently as a leader (and in other aspects of your life) if your time horizon was truly long term? How would you make business decisions if you were thinking about what your business would look like in 5-10 years rather than next week?
My bet is that your decisions would be quite different. Try it this week. When a salesman asks you about how to get a higher price on a particular deal, stop and reflect on how it might affect your long term relationship with that customer.
Are you trying to squeeze every last nickel out every time?
Is your salesman focused only on maximizing his commission?
Is this really the best deal for the customer in every way?
Many of you are thinking … easy for you to say.
“If we don’t get these next few sales this month, we may not be able to make payroll” … or some variation on that theme.
“We’ve got bills to pay, investments we need to make right now. We can’t ignore that for what we might be able to achieve in 2015.“
There’s no question that current performance is life-sustaining. We can’t ignore it … but we can be mindful of our long term goals and make sure that a quick buck in the short term isn’t destroying our ability to build a lasting business. The salesman example is but one poignant reminder of the conflict between doing the right thing and thinking only of today’s success.
What are you doing to think long term? Are you encouraging your team to think long term or is this month’s performance the only thing on every one’s mind? Does it make any difference?
Maybe it’s time to lace that triple espresso with a long walk?
As we’ve all learned, most of life’s lessons don’t travel in a neat formation accompanied by bugles and cavalry. They arrive filthy and unkempt, prominent in the mess we’ve made around our foxhole. These lessons are typically the offspring of hubris, naivete and ignorance … or from overlooking the land mines hidden beneath our feet.
Every Tuesday, we’ll share valuable and practical leadership tips and tools to help you BE a better leader so you can BECOME a better leader. Remember … you won’t BECOME a better leader until you start BEING a better leader … implementing NOW the changes necessary to adopt the proven strategies of successful leaders.
Some of you probably expected this article to appear in our Productivity Tips series, and it certainly fits there as well. I included it here because I think that as good leader, you absolutely must spend more time devoted to what only you can do, as well as thinking” about what needs to be done.
Some of the techniques that can provide that untethered head space require more than productivity tools. If you can protect yourself from the casual interlopers that eat up your day,
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As we’ve all learned, most of life’s lessons don’t travel in a neat formation accompanied by bugles and cavalry. They arrive filthy and unkempt, prominent in the mess we’ve made around our foxhole. These lessons are typically the offspring of hubris, naivete and ignorance … or from overlooking the land mines hidden beneath our feet.
Every Tuesday, we’ll share valuable and practical leadership tips and tools to help you BE a better leader so you can BECOME a better leader. Remember … you won’t BECOME a better leader until you start BEING a better leader … implementing NOW the changes necessary to adopt the proven strategies of successful leaders.
Does your company have a Vision/Mission Statement that you clearly understand … and everyone knows who it belongs to?
Last week, we talked about the proposition that Leadership = Communication and I shared a communication matrix with you to help you start on a Communication Action Plan.
There’s no doubt that communication stands tall in the pantheon of business leadership, and we all probably think we’re pretty good at it. We can walk, talk, dictate, speak and even string together a few intelligible sentences. We chat with our troops, talk to our customers and vendors, share information with colleagues and shareholders. We hold meetings, BBQ’s and off-sites to talk about what’s going on. We’re all pretty good at communication . . . or are we?
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As we’ve all learned, most of life’s lessons don’t travel in a neat formation accompanied by bugles and cavalry. They arrive filthy and unkempt, prominent in the mess we’ve made around our foxhole. These lessons are typically the offspring of hubris, naivete and ignorance … or from overlooking the land mines hidden beneath our feet.
Every Tuesday, we’ll share valuable and practical leadership tips and tools to help you BE a better leader so you can BECOME a better leader. Remember … you won’t become a better leader until you start being a better leader … implementing NOW the changes necessary to adopt the proven strategies of successful leaders.
A young friend of mine called me recently and said he was being considered for the CEO position of his young but growing company. He was elated, so excited, so thrilled to be considered …. until the “be careful what you wish for” axiom popped into his head and he realized he was pretty inexperienced in leading an organization of any size.
We went on to talk about his concerns and as he began to think about his candidacy, it dawned on him
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What do you think we’d get if we asked everyone who writes about Leadership to offer up a definition? Probably need a new wing in the Library of Congress, don’t you think? For some, it’s everything and anything that has to do with influencing others. It’s communication. It’s achieving accountability. For others, it’s a body of work built around values and character and timeless qualities of integrity, passion, respect, et. al. Do you have a definition that works for you?
As we’ve all learned, most of life’s lessons don’t travel in a neat formation accompanied by bugles and cavalry. They arrive filthy and unkempt, prominent in the mess we’ve made around our foxhole. These lessons are typically the offspring of hubris … naivete … and ignorance … or simply from overlooking the land mines hidden beneath our feet.
This series is not about reiterating or re-examining the principles of leadership that so many seasoned professionals have so eloquently described. Leadership observers have extracted lessons from Julius Caesar to Patton, Jesus to Mohamed and
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Welcome to Exkalibur. I’m Lary Kirchenbauer, President of Exkalibur Advisors, Inc. Please take advantage of our resources to help you build your business ... and let me know what more we can do to serve you.
Read my latest column from the NY Times affiliate, the North Bay Business Journal.
We have a great management team that has built a very successful company. At an important crossroads, we needed more expertise on an expanded list of financial issues than we could provide ourselves. Lary brought that expertise, providing the depth of knowledge and experience that helped us develop and implement a practical solution.
Gary Imm, CEO (retired).
