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One of the best reasons to study biographies is to observe how people acted in difficult circumstances.  They were imperfect people (like you), living in the context of their times (like you), facing uncertainties and risks (like you).  What worked for them?  How did they choose to relate with people (and enemies)?  How did they analyze opportunities and frame problems?  Where did they make strategic and tactical mistakes, and then what did they do next? What did they learn to do differently over time? 

Some have characterized this approach as having a pantheon of great people to emulate.  When you’re faced with something similar, you can ask yourself, “What would this person do and say?”  You combine what you know from their history with your current context and your imagination to make better decisions.  You can also explicitly avoid bad decisions made in the past.  It’s been well-said that the most underutilized assets in the modern world are history books.

Here are some members of my pantheon, in no particular order:

Teddy Roosevelt

Perry Marshall

Charlie Munger

Margaret Thatcher

Indira Gandhi

Dwight Eisenhower

Robert E. Lee

Barnabas the Apostle

Clara Barton

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Jocko Willink

Frederick Douglas

Barbara McClintock

Helen Keller

Winston Churchill

Golda Meir

Richard Feynman

My dad

I’m not listing a few living individuals whom I’m close to, who have mentored me.  You’ll have your own list of those people. 

We too often fall into a trap thinking that value delivered is proportional to project effort.  That’s quite rare. Projects tend to follow the patterns represented by the green and red lines in this graphic:

If you have a “green” type of project, it’s worth asking when you’re hitting a point of diminishing returns.  In software development, for example, the last 10% of the functionality often requires half the total project effort.  A classic bit of “big organization” political theatre is for an image-conscious leader to bask in the early value delivery, and then jump to another project before they hit the “slog plateau.” 

“Red” project patterns require significant commitment from sponsors because the results aren’t usually visible or useful until much later.  These projects are often the unsexy, unflashy necessary foundation work for long-term success.  Consider shaping a portion of this project to fit the “green” pattern to garner more project buy-in from leaders and stakeholders.  Explore parallelization of workstreams to improve delivery time (though you’ll probably pay a premium in overall effort).

Adapt your leadership and execution to the nature of the project.  Be mindful of how you coach the energy-needed-over-time equation with your team.  Use even a qualitative diagram like the one above to help set expectations.

It’s worth considering which skills will be consistently valuable, even as technology capabilities and business models continue to evolve quickly.  

There are three meta-skill domains, which underlie all other skill progress:

1. Self-leadership
2. Ability to learn new information and skills
3. Mental models for analysis and decision-making

These meta-skill capabilities enable everything else.

The four most valuable skill areas, both now and going forward:

1. Communication – the ability to share ideas, gaining perspectives, educating and engaging others
2. Sales & Marketing – we’re always selling and persuading, reaching new customers/partners, persuading people to buy or use or change
3. Finance & Markets – financial models and appreciation of interconnected markets and sub-markets are powerful toolsets with many applications
4. Coding – the 4^th generation digitalization of everything means that skills in coding concepts and thinking in algorithms are critical, even if you’re not a software developer per se

Note these are true for commercial ventures, non-profits, academic, and government institutions. 

If your strengths and desires align with these four, terrific!  Go deep, and apply broadly.

If your strengths lie elsewhere, work to combine a subset of these skills with your specific strengths to maximize your ability to deliver value over a long time. 

The one thing you cannot do is to rest content, deluding yourself that continued skills sharpening and acquiring better skills is unnecessary. 

Diversity of ideas creates richer imagination about a better future state, and more ways to potentially get there. 

Diversity of ideas – which come from diversity of people’s experiences, knowledge, and perception — is only powerful in a two-part framework:

1. Aligned objectives, which require shared values. We need shared values to align on the problem statement, and right and wrong ways to create solutions. 
2. The shared value of inclusion, which means we accept people as people with something to offer.

Diversity of ideas is an input into a process of making a decision.  High-performing teams solicit many ideas before making a decision.  Once the decision is made, the team pivots their energy into executing a plan to reach an objective.  Too often, we start debating the decision 22 seconds after people left the meeting – this is wasted energy and a poor use of diversity. 

There is considerable power in simplifying.  Amazon makes it simple for customers to find products, buy easily, and get them delivered fast.  Equipment manufacturers work hard to simplify user experience and production/maintenance.  Organization leaders strive for simple messaging.  Organizations absorb immense amounts of complexity to create simplicity for customers and employees.  We even celebrate Occam’s Razor which says that when presented with competing hypotheses to solve a problem, one should select the solution with the fewest assumptions.

We long for simple, and respond to simple, because it’s harder to manage the complexity of the actual system-of-many-systems world we inhabit.

Simple can also be a trap, and is often used in deception.  We must guard against simplistic assumptions.  Let’s work through some examples:

“This is the only solution!”  History is filled with examples of alternatives which people were blind to, or refused to explore, or couldn’t imagine.

“We need a new [neighbor/boss/new CEO/new ruler/new government] and then everything will be ok!”  Possible but unlikely.  At best you’ll have different problems, and if you prefer those problems, that will be progress. Most of the European aristocracy power was gone after WW1 which created different political challenges, not necessarily better.  

“If people had listened to me it would have turned out better!”  It might have been different, but you can’t know it would be “better.” We can’t do split-test experiments.

“Everything was better in [time period].  It’s all screwed up now.”  My grandfather lamented this, saying everything was better in the 1950’s.  My black friend from Alabama and my colleagues from India and China would disagree. 

“If we drastically cut CO2 emissions and get back to 300ppm all these bad weather events will stop.”  The last time CO2 levels were at that level was 1915-1935, and millions of people were killed or dislocated by floods, hurricanes, and droughts.  Weather is not perfectly correlated to CO2 levels in the atmosphere; there are many more factors.

“I just need to cut out X from my diet and I’ll lose weight and have better health.”  The amount of variation of experiences with diets is incredible.  A specific plan might generally help for any individual or group, but results vary.

“I’m being held back by [my parents/spouse/children/boss/”the man”/racism/sexism/neighborhood/lack of ___/government].”  Everyone has smaller and larger obstacles.  You still control your effort, beliefs, attitude, action, integrity, willingness to learn, thoughts, and generosity. Will you prefer the simplistic narrative of helpless victim or create a different narrative?   

“It’s so-and-so’s fault!” We operate in systems-within-systems, so it’s incredibly unlikely that one person is solely to blame.

“The whole world would be better off if we were exclusively [vegetarian/organic/fitness junkies/environmentalists/humble and charitable/renewable energy/rural/urban/digital currency/technophiles/screen-free/gun owners/gun-free/one political party/one religion/religion-free/appropriately indoctrinated/etc]!”  Are you qualified to make that judgment? 

You might read these and think, “People don’t speak about these topics so simplistically, Glenn.”  Many do not, and some do.  Some assumptions are more implied (by behavior) than explicitly spoken. 

I observe that people invest enormous emotional energy into these simplistic assumptions.  Smart leaders detach themselves from assumptions and revisit them carefully.  They step back, consider the situation, evaluate both facts and emotions, get other input if helpful, and then choose how to respond. 

The other key leadership capability is to think in terms of tradeoffs.  Simplistic assumptions fail because the underlying mindset glosses over related factors and tradeoffs in decision-making.  There are many interacting factors (you might not even know them all), and we cannot optimize for everything at once.  Everything you choose to optimize will come at some cost of money, attention, quality, time, and/or energy. 

The first thing I encourage you to do is check yourself.  Where might you be making simplistic assumptions that inhibit your ability to think clearly and make wise decisions?

We’d all like “instant change” but it’s rare. Our journey is “a long walk in the same direction,” as the old saying goes. And we must not underestimate the value of individual steps, however small, on the way.

I reflect on time when I was about 10 years old, helping my grandfather break up some big rocks we’d pulled out of a new section of field. We were pounding away with sledgehammers. I banged and banged and banged on one rock, and then it final broke into several smaller pieces. My grandfather asked me, “Which hit broke the rock?” “The last one!” I said. “Are you sure?” he asked and smiled. We went back to banging and breaking.

Keep banging. Every swing, every hit is making an impact.

You hear it and of course you nod in agreement: “People need mentoring.”  

(I’m writing now to experienced people who have the potential to mentor a less experienced person.  I’ll save “how to approach someone to mentor you” for another time.  Even the most experienced people still need mentors.)

So why doesn’t mentoring happen more?  I observe several reasons:

• People like the abstract idea of mentoring, but not actual conversations. We need more mature people who think highly of helping real individuals around them.  
• Fear: People think it’s a risk to their own job if they help someone else improve their skills.
• Misplaced humility: “Me, mentor?  I’m a mess, I’m still learning, I’ve made so many mistakes, I’m not qualified.”
• Misunderstanding the process: Thinking mentoring is all about telling, rather than mostly asking questions and conversations over time.
• Arrogance: “I can tell them what to do, and they’ll look up to me!”
• Waiting for someone to give you a program on exactly what to say and do.
• Confusing mentoring with teaching and coaching.  Teaching is about giving someone information or a skill they didn’t have before.  Coaching is helping some improve a skill they already have.  Mentoring is more life on life – it’s about exploring questions and concerns you can’t answer with a Google search.  We all need all three.
• Failing to create time and space for mentoring conversations to happen. 

Did you see yourself in there anywhere?  If so, what will you do about it?

Have you ever checked your calendar in the morning and thought – Ack! Need get that done!  Or scramble to get a meeting organized? 

You weren’t looking out far enough.  You’ve probably made that mistake a few times, but not often. 

The more senior your role, the more scope you’re responsible for, the further out you need to be looking, thinking, and planning. 

3 weeks is a minimum for consistently successful leaders, folks.  3 WEEKS.  (I’m humbly making that statement as a guy who has repeatedly failed to look out even 3 weeks.) 

3 weeks is for tactical preparedness for the stuff everyone can see coming, because it’s on the calendar already or a predictable upcoming process. 

What about the important-not-urgent, strategically valuable, no-one-is-asking-but-tremendously-valuable, and playing-the-long-game work?  This is the work that distinguishes better leaders from mediocre leaders, and the best managers from the average manager. 

I’ve written before about working in 6-weeks (1/2 a business quarter) blocks.  That’s long enough to deliver something valuable, but short enough you’ll find it harder to procrastinate.  Schedule personal work time and meetings with others so that you can deliver on your 6 week objectives.  

If you’re in a mid-level manager position, schedule regular thinking and pondering time to look at 6 months out and 12 months out.  Depending on the topic area or your domain of work, you probably also need to think about what could happen in 18 and 24 months.

Senior leaders need to think out even further.  Delegate daily and weekly work to others, so you can spend 80% of your time on work that only you can do.   Yes, you have to work day to day, but your thinking and planning must be done with a multi-year perspective. Lead yourself first, or deal with the reality that someone far less competent will be leading you day to day.