Tips from Tom Peters for Leading in Freaked-out Times

“Rule #3: Leadership Is Confusing As Hell” By Tom Peters provides a list ways of being a leader in freaked-out times. These are some of the leadership tips that caught my eye…

• Leaders love the mess. “… There’s no mess — and no creativity, no energy, no inspired leadership.”
• The leader is rarely — possibly never? — the best performer. “… Leaders get their kicks from orchestrating the work of others — not from doing it themselves.”
• Leaders deliver. “If you’re aiming to be a real leader during the next five years, then you need to mimic the pizza man: You’d better deliver! For the past five years, ideas and cool have counted (which was important). What counts now? Performance. Results.”
• Leaders create their own (peculiar?) destinies. “… During the next five years, there won’t be room for paper pushers. Only people who make personal determinations to be leaders will survive — and that holds true at all levels of all organizations (including entry level)… ”
• Leaders win through logistics. “Vision, sure. Strategy, yes. But when you go to war, you need to have both toilet paper and bullets at the right place at the right time. In other words, you must win through superior logistics…”
• Leaders groove on ambiguity. “…The next five years are going to be an economic roller-coaster ride. That means that business leaders are going to be challenged repeatedly not just to make fact-based decisions, but also to make some sense out of all of the conflicting and hard-to-detect signals that come through the fog and the noise. Leaders are the ones who can handle gobs and gobs of ambiguity.”
• Leadership is an improvisational art. “The game — hey, the basic rule book — keeps changing. Competition keeps changing. So leaders need to change, to keep reinventing themselves. Leaders have to be ready to adapt, to move, to forget yesterday, to forgive, and to structure new roles and new relationships for themselves, their teams, and their ever-shifting portfolio of partners.”
• Leaders trust their guts. "Intuition" is one of those good words that has gotten a bad rap. For some reason, intuition has become a "soft" notion. Garbage! Intuition is the new physics. It’s an Einsteinian, seven-sense, practical way to make tough decisions. Bottom line, circa 2001 to 2010: The crazier the times are, the more important it is for leaders to develop and to trust their intuition.
• Leaders trust trust. “In a world gone nuts, we cry out for something or someone to rely on. To trust. The fearless leader may (make that, had better) change his or her mind with the times. But as a subordinate, I trust a leader who shows up, makes the tough calls, takes the heat, sleeps well amidst the furor, and then aggressively chomps into the next task in the morning with visible vitality.”
• Leaders are good at forgetting. “Companies need to be forgetting organizations… Got an idea? Don’t dally. Go for it while it’s an original! Doesn’t work? Try something else. If that doesn’t work, fuhgeddaboutit!”
• Leaders bring in different dudes. “…Winning leaders know that their organizations need to refresh the gene pool. That happens when leaders forget old practices and open up their minds to new ones. That also happens — and more effectively — when leaders bring in new people and new partners with new ideas. As a leader, do with your people what Cisco has done so effectively with technology: Acquire a new line of thinking by acquiring a new group of thinkers.”
• Leaders make mistakes — and make no bones about it. “Nobody — repeat, nobody — gets it right the first time. Most of us don’t get it right the second, third, or fourth time either. Winston Churchill said it best: "Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm." Churchill blew one assignment after another — until he came up against the big one and saved the world. As times get crazier, you’re going to see more — and dumber — mistakes. When you make mistakes, you need to recognize them quickly, deal with them quickly, move on quickly — and make cooler mistakes tomorrow.”
• Leaders love to work with other leaders. “… Leaders are known by the company they keep. If you work with people who are cool, pioneering leaders who have customers who are cool, pioneering leaders who source from suppliers who are cool, pioneering leaders — then you’ll stay on the leading edge for the next five years. Laggards work with laggards. Leaders work with leaders. It really is that simple.”
• Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders. “Too many old-fashioned leaders measure their influence by the number of followers that they can claim. But the greatest leaders are those who don’t look for followers. Think of Martin Luther King Jr., Mohandas Gandhi, or Nelson Mandela. They were looking for more leaders in order to empower others to find and create their own destinies.”
• Leaders honor the assassins in their own organizations. “There’s only one reason why any human being ever makes it into the history books: because he or she remorselessly overthrew the conventional wisdom. Those are leaders. But truly great leaders, the ones who aim to leave a legacy, go to the next level. They consistently seek out and honor the people in their own organizations who want to overthrow their conventional wisdom. Great leaders honor the people who want to depose them, the assassins in their midst. Real leaders, repeat after me: All hail Brutus!”
• Leaders wear their passion on their sleeve. “There’s absolutely no question in my mind: Leaders dream in Technicolor. They see the world in brighter colors, sharper images, and higher resolution. Leadership, in the end, is all about having energy, creating energy, showing energy, and spreading energy. Leaders emote, they erupt, they flame, and they have boundless (nutty) enthusiasm. And why shouldn’t they? The cold logic of it is unassailable: If you do not love what you’re doing, if you do not go totally bonkers for your project, your team, your customers, and your company, then why in the world are you doing what you’re doing? And why in the world would you expect anybody to follow you?”
• Leaders know: Energy begets energy. “Every successful company, every successful team, and every successful project runs on one thing: energy. It’s the leader’s job to be the energy source that others feed from… Benjamin Zander said it best: The job of the leader is to be a ‘dispenser of enthusiasm.’”
• Leaders give respect. “… Care. Respect. Leaders care about connecting — because it moves mountains.”
• Leadership is a performance. “According to HP big cheese Carly Fiorina, ‘Leadership is a performance. You have to be conscious about your behavior, because everyone else is.’ Leaders spend time leading — which means that they spend time and exert ceaseless effort making sure that they come across with the right message in the way that they walk, talk, dress, and stand. Leadership is not only about action. It’s also about acting.”

 

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