Leadership

When leaders exercise authority where they lack competency, they undermine the organization’s efficiency.

“The best new ideas always have unanticipated benefits. So it’s stupid to require people who want to do new things to enumerate the benefits beforehand. The best you can do is choose smart people and then trust their intuitions about what’s worth exploring.”

“A candle loses NOTHING

by lighting another candle.”

— James Keller

Smart people know an unsettling truth: loyalty must be given before it’s earned.

The best leaders I know extend trust and loyalty long before receiving it – they treat people as if they’ve already proven trustworthy. This seems naive until you realize it’s a forcing function: by acting as if people have already earned your trust, you create the... See more

“You hear in business meetings that if you can’t measure it, you cannot improve it. These kinds of statements are taken as truths. And over time, I realized [that] used in the wrong context, they tend to cause a lot of damage that we don’t even realize because we feel like we are being smart when we say, “This thing must be measured before we can... See more

“The three stages of career development are:

1. I want to be in the meeting

2. I want to run the meeting

3. I want to avoid meetings.”

When your primary goal is to be liked, you can’t take risks. You can’t disagree. You can’t push boundaries. You become a prisoner of other people’s expectations.

In many ways, there is only one question any manager need ask: How do I make my team members’ lives easier—physically, cognitively, and emotionally?