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Feb
23
Managers, Ministers, Manipulators
Filed Under Brad Works, Leadership | 1 Comment
For those of us who work regularly in environments that are church/para-church related, it’s not unusual to participate in moments that are rare elsewhere. I have yet to find a job in another industry that makes prayer, worship, devotional time and communion a part of the regular rhythm. This integration of faith into the workplace can be good and bad, especially when it comes to the leadership within these kinds of organizations.
I’m seeing three types of leaders found in church/para-church organizations…
Managers
Whether brought up from within, imported from the mainstream workplace, or transferred from a similar organization, good managers understand how to lead people well. They understand what it means to be a corporation, establish a healthy culture, pursue a worthy cause and promote good communication. They like integrating faith into the workplace, but they struggle with how best to do it. A good manager is trusted for their competence and appreciated for their care and concern for people, not just projects.
Ministers
These are the leaders within an organization that can be so focused on the cause, that the corporation, culture and communication aspects to their job tend to take a back seat. Ministers are often seen as the top of the food chain because they are the pinnacle of perspective. They must be closer to God because how else could they serve so sacrificially, so often! They love integrating faith into the workplace because they are uncomfortable otherwise. A good minister is trusted for their care and concern for people, and forgiven for their lack of competence in key areas.
Manipulators
Manipulators are the leaders who are managers on the inside and ministers on the outside. They can’t figure out who they want to be, so they try and do both. They like the esteem that being a minister brings, and they love the results from being a manager because things seem to be getting done. These insecure leaders have a difficult time differentiating between their will and the will of God which makes faith in the workplace very confusing. A good manipulator is not trusted for their competence, or care and concern for people, because no one knows who they are.
I’m still sorting through the implications of these different leadership styles and, more importantly, what might be a better approach to leading these types of organizations. I’m intrigued by the concept of Prophet, Priest and King from the Old Testament. Perhaps more, later.
Jan
11
Unity to Begin, Not End
Filed Under Leadership | 3 Comments
As I participate in and observe various leadership contexts, I’ve been noticing an odd occurrence as it relates to the principal and pursuit of unity. I think most people would agree that unity is valued among leaders and their teams. Some I suppose would argue that a team isn’t really a team unless it has some sense of unity. (My use of the word unity is meant in the collaborative, coordinated, communal sense and not meant to imply unison or oneness of thought or ideas.)
In my observation–and I’m sure this is nothing new, just new to me–it seems as though leaders see unity as the measuring stick for success instead of the starting point for reality. In other words, if everyone is unified at the end of a conversation, meeting, project or pursuit, success has happened. I may be wrong, but this feels backwards. It seems to me that unity should be the place where everyone begins. With unity in place from the beginning, a leader would not be focused on making sure he ends at unity but that he ends with a clear and shared understanding of the new reality everyone worked toward. Unity may not be possible at the end because the outcome may not be desired by some on the team.
With unity in place from the beginning, trust has been established and people will feel greater freedom to contend for their perspective to be heard. Otherwise, if everyone feels like unity is the ending point, trust has not been established and people will be less inclined to contend for their perspective to be heard.
Jan
6
George Barna’s Tribes and Leaders
Filed Under God, Faith & Spirituality, Leadership, Reading Room | 1 Comment
I had never read much of George Barna until Revolution was published in 2005. I loved the controversial conversations Revolution sparked. In my opinion, Revolution was the book that expanded George Barna’s reputation–for better or worse–from purist researcher to passionately opinionated preacher. It was not a subtle shift!
Faith Tribes
Last year I read Barna’s The Seven Faith Tribes: Who They Are, What They Believe, and Why They Matter. Once I got past George’s over-the-top American love-fest, the rest of the book was quite enlightening. It appears George was looking for some sort of angle to write about what Americans believe. 
Although I might have picked a different angle, he chose to write a book “about the renewal that the United States needs at this moment in history.” “The future of America depends more upon the compassionate engagement with society by devoted Christians than upon their persistent insistence of their moral supremacy.” Nonetheless, if you’re looking for a well-researched easy introduction to the faith tribes that exist in America, this is it. “We need to stop competing, comparing, complaining, and condemning, and we must start cooperating, communicating, collaborating, and contributing. It’s time to stop fighting and start loving. It’s time to stop taking and start giving.”
Master Leaders
George’s latest book, Master Leaders: Revealing Conversations with 30 Leadership Greats is a gem. It’s still got plenty of George: he’s the self-deprecating ringleader of a Green Room stocked with gurus and goodies. 
Master Leaders is packed with nuggets from some of today’s great leadership thinkers. Although the topics and conversations from the book are not anything new or groundbreaking, it’s novel in the way George brings together disparate points into a steady stream of serendipitous sunshine. It’s all your favorite leadership principles (and principals) under one roof.
A few of my highlights…
“Leaders really are the standard setters as far as values in an organization. The values are the foundation of behavior within an organization and within the development of organizational culture, and it is critical that the senior leaders are the champions of values. And it is just as critical that they are the ones who effectively model what those values are.”
“Never hire anybody you can’t fire.
“I think that every organization and every leader ends up defining success differently because of the peculiarity of their own mission. But there’s got to be fruitfulness in what they were there to do, and it’s got to be done in a way where people have been bettered in the process.
“If organizations get those three components—knowing what their business is, picturing the end result, and ranking values—and communicate them, everybody can understand them. Then, when you put it up on the wall, it has some meaning. And then you put the goals under that and they just come alive. It’s really powerful.”
“You know it’s a core value if you are willing to get punished for it.”
“If a leader is not vulnerable, you can’t and shouldn’t trust him or her. To be a great leader you have to be vulnerable, you have to let people know who you are. Most people do not want to take advantage of a leader who is vulnerable.”
And my favorite, with a nod to the late Peter Drucker, “You get what you measure.”
Dec
16
“You should never underestimate the man who overestimates himself.” —Franklin D. Roosevelt
This is part two from some of the lessons I learned while reading Duff McDonald’s, Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase.
Keep Lists
On a single sheet of paper, Dimon kept a number of smaller handwritten lists, including “Things I Owe People” and “Things People Owe Me.” He started this at the beginning of his career and continues to manually manage them today. As for a list of books Dimon recommends for the aspiring CEO, “he would start with Shakespeare, adding Built to Last by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, Only the Paranoid Survive by Intel’s Andy Grove, Warren Buffett’s annual letters, and Graham and Dodd’s Security Analysis.” Dimon also had a list for three components of a successful deal: business logic, the ability to execute and price.
Ego is Ugly
The strong working relationship that Dimon and his mentor, Sandy Weill, shared would ultimately dissolve, mostly because Weill wasn’t ready for Dimon to overshadow him. There was a point when Weill should have turned over the reigns of Citigroup to Dimon, but Weill wouldn’t do it.
In the fairy-tale version of Dimon’s career, he succeeds his mentor [Sandy Weill] and leads Citigroup to greater glory. In the fairy tale, Citigroup is not on the verge of extinction 10 years later, while Jamie Dimon is leading one of its only healthy competitors. The future of American banking, in other words, was shaped by this very moment. How much different history might have been had Sandy Weill done what Dimon fully expected him to—assure him that the job would soon be his. But Weill was not yet ready to think past his own career. He was living in the present, and he was sick to death of Dimon’s thinking they were equals. Dimon was his junior partner. And he didn’t need a junior partner on the board…
Put Some Skin Into Your Game
Dimon left Citigroup and spent 18 months figuring out what he wanted to do. He landed at Bank One, a regional bank in Chicago that would eventually go on to become JPMorgan Chase after several years of mergers and acquisitions. Upon his arrival to the top post at Bank One, “Dimon told the board he believed in ‘eating his own cooking’ and rewarded their confidence in him by purchasing 2 million shares of stock at $28.37 a share, for some $57 million, the day before his appointment was announced. The move showed he was all-in and from that day forward, nobody questioned his commitment to the job.”
Disciplined Thought Leads to Disciplined Action
This one is right out of a Jim Collins playbook. “A weak economy creates opportunities for strong companies,” said Dimon. During the crash of 2007-2008, “People expected me to come in and start doing deals,” says Dimon. “But that’s not me. I’m different. You can’t start a war until you have an army, and we couldn’t even run our own business well. I said, ‘No, we’re going to get this thing fixed and from that strength, if something makes sense, we’ll do it.’ You have to earn the right to do a merger.” This thinking “did not endear him to his spoiled colleagues. ‘He’s going down like cod liver oil,” one banker told Business Week magazine.” Someone else told Euroweek, “The news that Jamie is flying in is similar to being told that Ivan the Terrible is coming for tea.”
Consultants Should Not Be Used for Inside Jobs
Dimon doesn’t think too fondly of consultants. He especially dislikes the idea of thinking they can actually accomplish work that should be done from the inside. “We do still use smart people to do consulting for us. But it has to be with a very senior person and there is no phase two. By that, I mean at the end of the project, I have the brain and they have the money. I don’t need anyone to implement anything. That’s a joke. You can’t have outside people implement stuff inside companies. It doesn’t work. And by the way, if that’s going on, what the hell are your own people doing?”
Surround Yourself With People Who Speak Their Mind
Jamie surrounded himself with smart people who were not afraid to speak up. Jamie was the perfect model for this as his relationship with his mentor, Sandy Weill, proved time and again. Jamie was notorious for intense debates and verbal wars when it came to making sure decisions were made in the safety of wise counsel. “When you worked for Jamie Dimon, he expected you to speak your mind. If you didn’t, he’d just as soon replace you. ‘I don’t care if we do the trade or don’t do the trade,’ he told a reporter. ‘I care that we do it right…. If you work in a company where you can’t walk in the room and say what you think, you create an atmosphere where you don’t do the best you can and where people don’t disclose things.’” This environment of honest debate would often energize the team. “When you worked with [Jamie] it was almost impossible to view something as a stopping point. He was always thinking about what things could be.”
Boring Is Not Always Bad
“The International Monetary Fund estimates that stock market bubbles happen about every 13 years, and that housing bubbles occur every two decades.” Although Jamie doesn’t claim he had any corner on understanding the timing of things to come, he was always running the scenarios in his head. What’s the downside? What’s the upside? What is the worst that could happen? After a season of much market criticism for JPMorgan Chase’s consistent and relatively conservative approach to growth, Wall Street finally conceded. “At the start of 2008, Wall Street analysts had completely come around to JPMorgan Chase. Being boring was now a virtue.”
Don’t Use Re-Orgs and Change to Shift Blame
“Wall Street is a pressure cooker, and when the pressure started to get intense in 2007, the more insecure of its chief executives started firing everybody around them to make sure outsiders knew where they should place the blame. Such a strategy does enhance one’s short-term job security, but the problem with it is that when turnover gets too high, no one really knows what’s going on anymore. As proof of the point, before they themselves were dismissed, Bear’s Jimmy Cayne, Citigroup’s Chuck Prince, Merrill Lynch’s Stan O’Neal, and Lehman’s Dick Fuld had all participated in their own little orgies of firing. Dimon has resisted doing the same thing, and his firm is surely the better for it.”
It’s Okay to Be a Force of Nature
I’ll close with Duff McDonald’s assessment toward the end of the book. “It’s impossible to deny that most people who wander into [Jamie's] orbit come away feeling as if they’ve just encountered a force of nature. At a time when true Wall Street leaders seem in desperately short supply, Jamie Dimon has emerged as a moral and managerial compass for both his industry and the country itself.”
It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat. —Citation from a speech Theodore Roosevelt made in Paris in 1910
Dec
15
Lessons From Last Man Standing, Jamie Dimon: Part 1
Filed Under Inspiration, Leadership | Leave a Comment
“Buy straw hats in winter.” —Bernard Baruch
Following up my earlier post, here are some lessons I learned while reading Duff McDonald’s, Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase.
Self-Starters Have an Advantage
In college, during his final year at Browning, Dimon’s calculus teacher had a heart attack and the replacement didn’t know calculus. If Dimon and his handful of fellow classmates were going to learn, they’d have to teach themselves. “Three of the students decided to throw in the towel, but Dimon and the remaining two—one of whom was Jeremy Paul—spent a challenging year of self-instruction. ‘As far as working experiences go, that was pretty intense,’ recalls Paul. ‘Each day we’d go into the classroom and there was no teacher, just us. And we’d sit there, trying to work our way through the problems.’”
Mentoring Relationships Are Huge
In 1985, banking giant Sandy Weill left a top job at American Express. A year later, Weill took over a small company named Commercial Credit Corporation, that would eventually become Citigroup (after almost 20 years of mergers and acquisitions). Jamie Dimon was the guy Weill brought on from the beginning. “So began one of the greatest mentor-protégé relationships in the history of American business. Sandy Weill saw Jamie Dimon for what he was: an ambitious young man with an enormous capacity for hard work.” One of the more practical lessons that Weill would impart to Dimon was that “You can’t control income. It varies based on conditions outside of our control. But you can control expenses.” “And,” says Dimon, “he taught me one of the most important things in my career, which is not to rest on your laurels.”
Know What You’re Doing, Make Things Happen
One of the lessons McDonald distills from Dimon is to make sure you actually know what it is you’re doing. A novel concept in the banking industry! “Don’t go chasing the flavor of the month unless you actually know its ingredients. Just because other people are making money in something, don’t be tempted to follow suit unless you understand the complexities involved and how they profit from it.”
“Dimon was widely regarded as the man who made things happen when they needed to happen. If there were costs that had to be cut, Dimon was the man for the job. The company needed higher credit ratings? Dimon figured out how to get them. What he brought to the table was the basic ability to understand the underlying drivers of any business—the two or three things that really mattered—far more quickly than his peers.”
Ethical Leadership Must Be A Value
One day during a class in American history–history is one of Dimon’s favorite subjects–the only African-American student in his class was dismissed after the teacher decided she had had enough of the student’s acting out. “Once the door closed behind him, the teacher turned toward the class and muttered, ‘Six hundred thousand died to free the slaves, and this is the gratitude we get.’ Dimon stood up, grabbed his things, and walked out the door. ‘He blasted me for not going with him,’ recalls Paul. ‘And he was right.’” Decades later, in 2008, Dimon’s job was effectively “to clean up the entire financial system. And in so doing, he proved a point he’s been focused on his entire life: that you can still win while doing the right thing.
Saying ‘No’ Allows You to Say ‘Yes’ Later
“It’s a well-known maxim that one of the hardest things about running a business is to maintain the ability to say no and thereby save limited resources for the best opportunities. Over time, most companies simply lose their discipline.” This discipline to save resources for prime opportunities was what ultimately made Dimon the last man standing on Wall Street during the collapse of 2008. “Don’t do anything stupid. And don’t waste any money. Let everybody else waste money and do stupid things; then we’ll buy them.”
“Know when to be capital rich. Both the economy and Wall Street have cycles, and he who is capital rich when the competition stumbles will see opportunities abound.
“Buy businesses with significant cash flow, preferably at a discount, prune their expenses without sacrificing revenues, and then use that additional cash flow from those cuts to buy more companies until you end up owning Citigroup.”
“We think [the business] should be prepared for adverse times,” Dimon told analysts in a conference call. “In fact, we think if you’re strong in adverse times that that puts you in the position where you actually can do more interesting things, either hire people or buy other companies that are having a tough time.”
I’ll post my final thoughts tomorrow.
Dec
14
Last Man Standing by Duff McDonald
Filed Under Inspiration, Leadership | Leave a Comment
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been fascinated with the mainstream business world. I’ve been a longtime subscriber to Fortune, Fast Company and BusinessWeek. I thought by now I would have completed my MBA, having applied to a program two years ago. To be perfectly honest, I struggle with understanding exactly where I fit in this world as it relates to a career. Up to now, my life has been primarily invested in nonprofit religious sectors. While business principles apply across industries, there is something very intriguing about working in the mainstream business world (banking, tech, media, etc.). Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—I have this little strength called “belief,” which is always beckoning me to make sure I’m working on things I believe in. Bottom line profit is not something I get really passionate about. Profit, in my opinion, is just one of the ways to keep score.
I digress.
I just finished reading Duff McDonald’s book, Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase. Not only did this book provide a riveting front row seat–albeit with a rear view mirror–to the U.S. financial collapse (and micro successes) over the past several years, it provided what appears to be rare access into the life and mind of Jamie Dimon. Today, Jamie is the top dog at JPMorgan Chase and worked his way there after taking an unlikely path out of Harvard Business School. It’s an incredible story of “clarity, consistency, integrity, and courage.” Says McDonald, “Dimon was quite literally the only chief of a major bank to have properly prepared for the hundred-year storm that had hit Wall Street with such vengeance.” By sticking to his values, “Dimon has unquestionably become the dominant banking executive of his era.”
My plan is to unpack some of the lessons I learned over the next few days on this blog. More to come.
Jun
17
How the Mighty Fall
Filed Under Inspiration, Leadership | Leave a Comment
“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” — Dick Clark, former CEO at Merck
Jim Collins initially thought that How the Mighty Fall was a simple magazine article. An opportunity to rest his mind from six years of research working on his next book following Good to Great. I’m glad he didn’t try to fit this interim book into an article! However, if you’re looking for an article excerpt, Business Week did a decent job.
I love the way Jim Collins organizes information. His well-researched principles are so palatable and practical, mostly because he lets the story stay at the steering wheel. How the Mighty Fall is a darker book of sorts, spending the majority of its pages studying the five stages of decline, outlined here.
Stage 1: Hubris born of success
- Success entitlement, arrogance
- Neglect of a primary flywheel
- “What” replaces “why”
- Decline in learning orientation
- Discounting the role of luck
Stage 2: Undisciplined pursuit of more
- Unsustainable quest for growth, confusing big with great
- Undisciplined continuous leaps
- Declining proportion of right people in key seats
- Easy cash erodes cost discipline
- Bureaucracy subverts discipline
- Problematic succession of power
- PErsonal interests placed above organizational interests
Stage 3: Denial of risk and peril
- Amplify the positive, discount the negative
- Big bets and bold goals without empirical validation
- Incurring huge downside risk based on ambiguous data
- Erosion of healthy team dynamics
- Externalizing blame
- Obsessive reorganizations
Stage 4: Grasping for salvation
- A series of silver bullets
- Grasping for a leader-as-savior
- Panic and haste
- Radical change and “revolution” with fanfare
- Hype preceded results
- Initial upswing followed by disappointments
Stage 5: Capitulation to irrelevance or death
Whenever I read Collins’ stuff, I am always drawn to his repeated admonishment to stay true to your core values and principles.
“Discontinuous leaps into arenas for which you have no burning passion is undisciplined. Taking action inconsistent with your core values is undisciplined. Launching headlong into activities that do not fit with your economic or resource engine is undisciplined. To neglect your core business while you leap after exciting new adventures is undisciplined.”
“If you’re struggling with the tension between continuing your commitment to what made you successful and living in fear about what comes next,” says Collins, “ask yourself two questions:”
1. Does your primary flywheel face inevitable demise within the next five to ten years due to forces outside your control—will it become impossible for it to remain best in the world with a robust economic engine?
2. Have you lost passion for your primary flywheel?
“The #1 ingredient for a culture of discipline,” says Collins, “depends first and foremost upon having self-managed and self-motivated people.”
“The best leaders we’ve studied had a peculiar genius for seeing themselves as not all that important, recognizing the need to build an executive team and to craft a culture based on core values that do not depend upon a single heroic leader.”
“Reorganizations and restructurings can create a false sense that you’re actually doing something productive.”
At the conclusion of How the Mighty Fall, Collins channels the spirit of Winston Churchill and his famous “never give in” commencement speech from 1941. “We all need beacons of light as we struggle with the inevitable setbacks of life and work,” says Collins. “For me, that light has often come from studying [Churchill].”
Never give in. Be willing to change tactics, but never give up your core purpose. Be willing to kill failed business ideas, even to shutter big operations you’ve been in for a long time, but never give up on the idea of building a great company. Be willing to evolve into an entirely different portfolio of activities, even to the point of zero overlap with what you do today, but never give up on the principles that define your culture. Be willing to embrace the inevitability of creative destruction, but never give up on the discipline to create your own future. Be willing to embrace loss, to endure pain, to temporarily lose freedoms, but never give up faith in the ability to prevail. Be willing to form alliances with former adversaries, to accept necessary compromise, but never—ever—give up your core values.
Jun
11
Henri Nouwen on Leadership
Filed Under God, Faith & Spirituality, Leadership | 1 Comment
After nearly 20 years of teaching, including stints at Notre Dame, Yale and Harvard, Henri Nouwen moved to Toronto, Canada to live the rest of his life with mentally handicapped people at the L’Arche community. He moved “from the best and the brightest, wanting to rule the world, to men and women who had few or no words and were considered, at best, marginal to the needs [of] society.”
Upon moving to the L’Arche community, Nouwen would later say that “their liking or disliking me had absolutely nothing to do with any of the many useful things I had done until then.” “I was suddenly faced with my naked self, open for affirmations and rejections, hugs and punches, smiles and tears, all dependent simply on how I was perceived at the moment.”
In one of his most widely read books, In the Name of Jesus, Nouwen shares his thoughts on Christian leadership from a talk he gave in Washington, D.C. during the fifteenth anniversary of the Center for Human Development.
Nouwen begins this short book with three assumptions he had about leadership. A desire to be relevant, a desire for popularity and a desire for power was his prescription for leadership.
Nouwen came to understand that these three things were actually temptations. Instead, our approach to leadership should be a direct response to the question Jesus asks all of us: “Do you love me?”
Jesus sends us out to be shepherds, and Jesus promises a life in which we increasingly have to stretch out our hands and be led to places where we would rather not go. He asks us to move from a concern for relevance to a life of prayer, from worries about popularity to communal and mutual ministry, and from leadership built on power to a leadership in which we critically discern where God is leading us and our people.
The “Christian leader of the next century,” says Nouwen, “is not the way of upward mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the way of downward mobility ending on the cross.”
“Power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love. It seems easier to be God than to love God.”
“Living in a community with very wounded people, I came to see that I had lived most of my life as a tightrope artist trying to walk on a high, thin cable from one tower to the other, always waiting for the applause when I had not fallen off and broken my leg.”
“When [Christian leaders] live their ministry mostly in their heads and relate to the Gospel as a set of valuable ideas to be announced, the body quickly takes revenge by screaming loudly for affection and intimacy.”
Nouwen begins and ends the book with a very moving story about Bill Van Buren, one of the mentally handicapped people he lived with at L’Arche. Bill and Henri traveled together on this trip to D.C., which is the backdrop for the whole speech/book. The experience they shared together is powerful. I’ll let you discover it for yourself.
Apr
21
A Sense of Urgency
Filed Under Leadership, Reading Room | 2 Comments
We are much too complacent. And we don’t even know it.
—John P. Kotter
Although familiar with John P. Kotter and his best-selling books Leading Change and Our Iceberg Is Melting, I am finally getting around to immersing myself in some of his genius. Kotter’s latest book, A Sense of Urgency, is both accessible and actionable, even if I can’t relate to all of his big biz stories and examples. After all, he is a professor of leadership at that place.
If you don’t have time to read A Sense of Urgency, it’s definitely worth skimming. Everything, says Kotter, must start with a true sense of urgency. Like most wisdom, the big idea here is not breathtaking. It’s the implementation of such wisdom that separates the wise from the weary.
The Strategy
Create action that is exceptionally alert, externally oriented, relentlessly aimed at winning, making some progress each and every day, and constantly purging low value-added activities—all by always focusing on the heart and not just the mind.
Kotter suggests four tactics to increase a true sense of urgency:
1. Bring the Outside in
Reconnect internal reality with external opportunities and hazards. Bring in emotionally compelling data, people, video, sites, and sounds.
2. Behave with Urgency Every Day
Never act content, anxious, or angry. Demonstrate your own sense of urgency always in meetings, one-on-one interactions, memos, and email and do so as visible as possible to as many people as possible.
3. Find Opportunity in Crises
Always be alert to see if crises can be a friends, not just a dreadful enemy, in order to destroy complacency. Proceed with caution, and never be naïve, since crises can be deadly.
4. Deal with the NoNos
Remove or neutralize all the relentless urgency-killers, people who are not skeptics but are determined to keep a group complacent or, if needed, to create destructive urgency.
Mar
30
Stories abound these days of leaders attempting to do more with less. From shrinking teams to dwindling budgets, we can either run from the challenge or to the challenge. Ernie Schenck is no stranger to adversity. He wrote The Houdini Solution and challenges us to think inside the box, not outside the box, when it comes to doing more with less. “The legendary magician did his best work shackled, handcuffed, and chained inside the smallest of boxes—and yet he managed to find his way out every time.”
For the past couple weeks, I’ve been retelling a story from Apollo 13 about doing more with less. There’s a scene in the movie when the crew on the ground in Houston has to build an air filter that will allow the crew stuck in space to increase their oxygen supply. With limited resources (only what was onboard the spaceship), the crew on the ground had to figure out how to fit a square peg in a round hole.
I’m inspired by moments like these because I feel like many leaders are in a similar spot these days. We’ve got to lead our teams from here to there with only what we have in front of us. It’s not time to complain about what we don’t have or dream about better scenarios. It’s time to get the team on the same page with the same urgency for the same mission. Anything less could be catastrophic.