Blog about Leadership

Does it make you feel old or young to know that the Walkman is 30 years old?

At any rate, the story of Sony’s Walkman is a valuable business lesson and I like the way Peter Drucker put it:
“Every organization must be prepared to abandon everything it does to survive in the future.”

Wharton’s Knowledge Today has a good post about this: When the Walkman Roamed.

Change is a constant!

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Many failures are merely mistakes and everyone makes mistakes. Those who achieve success are those who persevere after mistakes.

A Peter Drucker quote:
“The one person to distrust is the one who never makes a mistake. Either he is a phony, or he stays with the safe, the tried, and the trivial.”

I want to share a paragraph out of John C. Maxwell’s book, Failing Forward:

“Every successful person is someone who failed, yet never regarded himself as a failure. For example, Wolfgang Mozart, one of the geniuses of musical composition, was told by Emperor Ferdinand that his opera The Marriage of Figaro was ‘far too noisy’ and contained ‘far too many notes.’ Artist Vincent van Gogh, whose paintings now set records for the sums they bring at auction, sold only one painting in his lifetime. Thomas Edison, the most prolific inventor in history, was considered unteachable as a youngster. And Albert Einstein, the greatest thinker of our time, was told by a Munich schoolmaster that he would “never amount to much.

“I think it’s safe to say that all great achievers are given multiple reasons to believe they are failures. But in spite of that, they persevere. In the face of adversity, rejection, and failings, they continue believing in themselves and refuse to consider themselves failures.”

Many failures are merely mistakes and everyone makes mistakes. Those who achieve success are those who persevere after mistakes. As a leader, it is particularly important to understand this. You don’t cover up mistakes, you acknowledge, learn from, and move past mistakes.

The same is true for your team. Your team members may make mistakes. Don’t make them an example, but lead them to acknowledge what the mistake was, what can be learned from the mistake, and how to move past it.

As the quote from Peter Drucker reminds us, the person you should be weary of is not the one who makes mistakes, but the person who does not make mistakes. Are they trying their best, are they growing as a professional, are they expanding their knowledge and skills, or are they merely stagnant with the tried and true.

Especially, in our demanding economic times, change is constant. You cannot stop change, but you can get out in front and make the most of it. In the process of working with change, you and your team may make mistakes – that’s an indication that you are trying. Now you merely have to respond positively to mistakes – persevere – and don’t allow failures to consume and paralyze you and your team.

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Great Book

I’ve added another book to my collection that I am quite excited about. Anyone who knows me personally knows that I have great love for books. I picked up The Daily Drucker which is a compilation of the best of Peter F. Drucker that was put together with Joseph A. Maciariello.

The Daily Drucker is “366 DAYS of INSIGHT and MOTIVATION for GETTING the RIGHT THINGS DONE” (leap year included). I intend to go through this book as the writer intended – one day for one passage of the legendary Drucker. What prompted me to buy it was a paragraph in the preface written by Drucker, “But the most important part of this book is the blank spaces at the bottom of its pages. They are what the readers will contribute, their actions, decisions, and the results of these decisions. For this is an action book.

Action

Action is the key. All thoughts, plans, concepts, and ideas are empty without action. You can spend all your time reading and discussing the finer details of leadership, but it will be all for nothing without action. Leadership requires you to go and do. You can only be and become a leader through doing leadership.

There is a famous quote that is a bit controversial because it may be misappropriated to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (read about it here). Nonetheless I like this quote, so I am going to share it with you.

Quote about action from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:
 “What you can do or think you can do, begin it—boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”

Failure

Don’t let the fear of failure hold you back. Even if things don’t work out quite as you expect, you can still gain a great deal from experience and always remember the 3 Steps for How to Respond to Failure.

Be bold, be a leader, and take action.

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