Leaders In London

Sir Terence Conran, a past speaker at Leader in London, was once asked to describe himself in ten words. He replied ‘Ambitious, mean, kind, greedy, frustrated, emotional, tiresome, intolerant, shy, fat.’

Dan Pink, who is running a masterclass for us at Leaders in London 2008, says we can go even shorter in describing ourselves. He points to the book ‘Not Quite What I was Planning’, six word memoirs by a collection of people, both famous and obscure.

Now, this sounds trivial, but we live in a world of digest, where your leadership ‘brand’ has to be conveyed fast and deep. Remember past Leaders in London speaker Tom Peters’ powerful idea ‘Brand You’; that you have to brand yourself through your behaviour as a leader to stand out as unique, because the market tells us difference wins, sameness doesn’t?

So, here’s a useful exercise: what six words sum you up as a leader? Come up with six word then try them out on your colleagues to see if they agree. It’ll help you sharpen your leadership brand - aligning how others perceive you with how you perceive yourself as a leader.

Dan tried it at a business conference he was attending and these are a few of the replies. They aren’t specifically about leadership, but you get how it works by reading them:

* Did what I was supposed to.

* Happy, sad, angry, confident, really happy.

* Unsure, but you would never know. I like that last one in particular - describes a lot of people in leadership positions.

Dan Pink . Here’s a link to his blog where he talks about the power of six word stories

You can use the comment link, below, if you want to share your six words.

Posted on behalf of
Leaders in London
by
Phil Dourado of
The Leadership Hub

One of the first things Jack Welch did as a 24-year-old manager of a GE plant was blow up the part of the plant he was responsible for.

The head of the plant called him to his office to explain.

Welch, assuming this was the end of his managerial career, duly explained that he was experimenting with a different mixture from the standard one and it had caused an explosion. The plant boss probed further, asking him why and what he had hoped to achieve.

Satisfied that Welch had

a) learnt a lesson from the experiment and

b) had practised sound thinking, just needed to adjust his risk analysis, the plant head protected Welch and he kept his job.

Welch says that act of leadership had a profound effect on him for the rest of his life. As head of GE, Welch championed experimentation, learning from mistakes and not blaming people if an attempt at something new went wrong…unless they repeated the same mistake more than once, that is.

Source for this story: My notes from a conversation between Jack Welch and the journalist Kirsty Wark. She had spotted the story in his book Jack, Straight From The Gut and so asked him about it. A secondary learning point: he tells that story to make it clear that leaders are not infallible and need to admit to their own mistakes - admit their own fallibility - if they are to create a culture in which others are honest and admit to mistakes, too. Otherwise you get the myth that the leader can’t be wrong and everyone covers up evidence to the contrary, and also never admit that they themselves are wrong.

You can learn, live by satellite, from Jack Welch, ‘the world’s greatest living CEO’ at Leaders in London 2008.

Posted on behalf of
Leaders in London
by
Phil Dourado of
The Leadership Hub

This is the first of six book recommendations from Luke Johnson, who multiplied PizzaExpress’s share price by twenty-fold before selling that company, who started his first company at the age of 18 and has been growing and selling them ever since, and who is coming to Leaders in London 2008 to tell us how to lead for business growth.

“There are huge numbers of business books published, but most are unreadable and written by non-entities. That does not apply to my magic half-dozen.

“The first choice is a sort of cheat, in that it is an anthology of essays and articles by legendary figures in commerce and industry. It is called The Book of Business Wisdom, edited by Peter Krass. It includes incisive and revealing pieces by pioneers such as Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron, and Thomas Alva Edison, the inventor and entrepreneur, as well as Sam Walton’s rules for success and Thomas J Watson, who built IBM, on selling with sincerity. There is David Ogilvy on leadership, Intel’s Andrew Grove on time management and Benjamin Franklin on the ‘way to wealth’.

Here, for example, is Franklin on laziness and industry: ‘Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears, while the used key is always bright. Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of’.

Or Sam Walton 250 years later recommending his 10 rules for building a business but also pointing out: ‘They are some rules that worked for me. But I always prided myself on breaking everybody else’s rules, and I always favoured the mavericks who challenged my rules. In the end I listened to them a lot more closely than I did the pack who always agreed with everything I said’.

All in all, The Book of Business Wisdom is a classic collection of brilliant business minds…”

The Book of Business Wisdom
Classic Writings by
The Legends of Commerce and Industry
Edited by Peter Krass

Recommended by: Luke Johnson, Chairman of Channel 4 and Capital Risk Partners, who will be presenting at Leaders in London 2008 .

More like this? Luke Johnson’s recommended reads is a regular item in the Leaders in London monthly tips and insights email, called Taking The Lead, which you can sign up to for free. There’s a link over on the right, near the top of this page, where you can sign up for the free email newsletter if you want.

Posted on behalf of
Leaders in London
by
Phil Dourado of
The Leadership Hub

An interesting little story on Reuter’s ‘Oddly Enough’ news site: Though Vladimir Putin is no longer officially President of Russia, he kept his chair at the first Kremlin meeting in which his protoge, Medvedev, replaced him as President. Putin went to sit in the presidential chair, paused, and said to Medvedev, “This is your place, now”. Medvedev refused to sit in it, sitting as usual on Putin’s right hand side and saying “Oh, what’s the difference.” Interesting…

Reminds me of a story about Mikhail Gorbachev and Stalin’s chair that Gorbachev told the Sunday Times when he came to talk at Leaders in London a few years ago. When Gorbachev took over the Kremlin, he was faced with the prospect of sitting in Stalin’s chair. He replaced it with another one. “I preferred to have a different perspective,” he said.

A final thought on chairs and leadership and the importance of where you sit (this is a mix of the metaphorical and the literal). I heard the Managing Director of National Express Coaches explain once how he was leading a workshop on change. All the managers in the workshop had spent the morning focussing on how the biggest enemy of change is habit, and how we need to become conscious of our habits if we are to be able to break the ones we need to break, to make space to bring in new ones.

The MD noticed, during the coffee break, that the participants had done what people usually do at conferences and workshops - hang their jackets and bags on the back of their chair, surround it with their paperwork and bottled water and so on, to mark out their territory. When they came back after the coffee break, as an experiment, he suggested they change seats to get a different perspective. No-one took him up on the suggestion. They had, in just an hour, already created a comfort zone, defensible territory, and they didn’t want to change to somewhere unfamiliar.

He then had to point out the irony of it to them, that they had just displayed resistance to change in a workshop meant to help them identify and remove (where necessary) resistance to change in themselves and others.

Posted on behalf of
Leaders in London
by
Phil Dourado of
The Leadership Hub