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Excerpt from Confessions of an Accidental Businessman: It Takes a Lifetime to Find Wisdom The Main Things I Know About Leadership If from my continuingly successful career, there are observations to offer about leadership, these are the main ones: All growth and most good things come from paying attention. Leadership is largely a matter of paying attention. So is life for that matter. This means paying attention, and attending, to the relationships in our lives, whether with a spouse or child or friend or colleague or vendor or customer. Next, use every experience. Every experience is connected to every other experience, from childhood throughout our lives. Everything counts. Everything--every event, every episode, every interaction--means something. Look for that meaning and remember the most important things are not obvious to the eye. Never think of employees as "labor," as a commodity. Once we begin to think of workers as a commodity, we rob work of its meaning and we rob our people of their opportunities for meaning. Avoid the tyranny of technocracy. Burnett used to say this, and I thought he meant the data-driven computer freaks and the government people or some combination, with the Pentagon thrown in. I did not realize, and perhaps he didn't, he was talking about the ninety percent of managers who ignore relationships and become technocrats, putting their energies into managing all the stuff that is easy to measure. The concept of technocracy has less to do with technology than it does with a " technical," versus a human, attitude about our jobs. The tyranny comes in its suppression of the human spirit at work. Abandon career planning and income plans. The most frustrated people I have ever known are those who got out of school with a complete plan about their career progress. The frustrated ones fall into two categories: those who did not get what they planned and those who did get what they planned. Avoid "building" a resume by taking jobs just because they will look good on the CV. There is far less future in doing things just to have done them than in doing things just for the doing of them. Nothing matters like having good work to do and reveling in the work itself. Expect the unexpected and be ready to embrace change. Everybody talks about this subject until we're all sick of hearing about it. I believe the only way to be ready is not to be ready, is not to burden ourselves with a mass of contingency plans and quick moves but simply to pay attention, expect the unexpected, and go with it until we find our opportunities in the chaos that change brings. So many businesses, large and small, make the same mistake: They do the right thing for the wrong reason, then they don't realize they've done the right thing because they evaluate it through the wrong prism, through the prism of their conditioning or their expectations. The same thing happens when they do the wrong thing for the right reason. In the midst of change and chaos, we must evaluate everything with a fresh eye, abandoning expectations and presumptions. Take the work seriously but don't take ourselves so seriously. One of the greatest barriers to personal growth is our desire to live up to our own image, our own hype. Corporate executives are just terrible about thinking they have to live up to some manufactured image of themselves. They end up leading the unexamined life because so many of them fear what they might discover. Do not use short-term solutions for long-term problems. The most obvious quick hit solution is often the one that comes back to haunt us. Never run away from anything. Always run to something. I gave this advice countless times to people who were unhappy in their work for some reason or another--difficult boss, incompatible co-worker, limited future. Of course there are reasons to leave a job, but often the solution to a better situation is in confronting the problem honestly and head-on rather than just leaving it behind, along with all the good things of the job. In so many cases have I seen the problems melt away when identified and addressed in the light of rational discussion. So much for theory and technique. I've said it all before, and most of you have heard it all before. I reiterate it only because, as I said above, my message is simple and does not change. I have no choice but to repeat myself and try to do it in ways and with stories that make the same point in different settings.
- James A. Autry, Confessions of an Accidental Business
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