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4 Things Every Business Leader Should Know (But Most Don’t)
One of the things I’ve learned over the years is just how hard it is to get things right. As a CEO just about every decision I made was one that couldn’t have been made lower down. They were the tough calls with no easy answers. As an author, I spent countless hours fact checking along with my publisher. We corrected hundreds of errors.
Yet read through the business press and you’ll find no shortage of simple rules and slogans that supposedly unlock success. We’re told to “innovate or die,” to fight a “war for talent” and to “find our why.” Yet as Philip M. Rosenzweig points out in The Halo Effect, many of these notions break down under more rigorous analysis.
The truth is that leadership is the art of managing the ambiguous, or as Stanley McChrystal has put it, “a complex system of relationships between leaders and followers, in a particular context, that provides meaning to its members.” In other words, things are never simple., but here are some things I wish someone had told me a long time ago. I hope they help.
1. Innovation Is Never A Single Event
The apple that fell on Isaac Newton’s head. The chance observation that led to Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin. Steve Job’s insight about “a thousand songs in my pocket that led to…
