education

GENERATE SMALL WINS While we were just beginning our work on this edition, we got a call from Don Bennett, one of the pioneering people we interviewed for the first edition of The Leadership Challenge. With great excite- ment in his voice, he told us that he’d just returned from Argentina, where he had presented […]

Experiment and Take Risks C H A P T E R 7 186 T H E L E A D E R S H IP C H A L L E N G E The first thing was to reinvent and promote their primary vision—to prevent crime, with the lofty goal of ending crime. He

Search for Opportunities Leaders who are dedicated to making extraordinary things hap- pen are open to receiving ideas from anyone and anywhere. They are adept at using their outsight to constantly survey the landscape of technology, politics, economics, demograph- ics, art, religion, and society in search of new ideas. They are prepared to search for

Treat Every Job as an Adventure Leaders personally seize the initiative, encourage others to do the same, and actively look everywhere for great ideas, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t make extraordinary things happen if they’re leading a project that’s been assigned to them. They don’t have to wait to start their own business

Look Out for Good Ideas On a visit to Northern California, we stumbled across some extremely important advice for leaders. Exploring the Mendocino coast, we picked up a pamphlet describing a particular stretch of shoreline. Printed boldly across the top of the first page was this warning: “Never turn your back on the ocean.” And

Promote External and Internal Communication You can expect demand for change to come from both inside and outside the organization. Too often, however, managers cut them- selves off from critical information sources over time because they’re so busy trying to build an organization that will be operationally efficient and self-sustaining. And when the pressures for

EXERCISE OUTSIGHT You need only to scan the headlines to know how dramatic the changes are that influence people’s lives at home and at work. The old norms are being replaced by still uncertain ground rules. Recent research on the sources of innovation clearly indicates that the most disruptive and destructive innovations can wreak havoc

Challenge with Purpose Leaders don’t challenge for challenge’s sake. It’s not about shaking things up just to keep people on their toes. Individuals who criticize new thoughts and ideas or point out problems with the ideas of others without offering any kind of alternate options are not chal- lenging the process. They are simply complaining.

  Encourage Initiative in Others Change requires leadership, and every person, down to the most junior member of a team, can drive innovation and improvements in a team’s processes. This was precisely what John Wang, senior software engineer at Visa, remembers about the environment at his job after graduating from college. His manager fostered an

Make Something Happen Some standard practices, policies, and procedures are critical to productivity and quality assurance. However, many are simply matters of tradition, which is what Pat Oldenburg observed when he joined McAfee, the maker of computer security software for busi- ness and home. Pat decided that some changes were needed; and rather than wait