Issue No. 158 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features a feast of one-liners and leadership insights from an unusual new book from George Barna. I had a long plane ride this week—hence a long eNews. Enjoy. And this reminder, check out my Management Buckets website with dozens of resources and downloadable worksheets for your staff meetings.
Amplified 10 Times
I’m calling this book review, “Barna’s Brilliant Brainstorm: The Big Name Speaker’s Backroom Buzz.” Every leader will wish he or she had thought of writing this book. It’s brilliant—on so many levels. George Barna’s goal: “Create the ultimate leadership event and report what happened behind the scenes where the leaders mixed it up a bit.”
The robust gathering included: Warren Bennis, Ken Blanchard, Colleen Barrett, Henry Cloud, Newt Gingrich, Laurie Beth Jones, Mike Huckabee, Rich Stearns, Patrick Lencioni, Seth Godin, John Townsend. Oh…and Tony Dungy and Lou Holtz. And 18 more, including a former Mafia boss.
The unique setting: the “green room” where speakers hang out in between speaking assignments. The conference: a fictitious “Master Leaders” two-day leadership event attended by thousands. (While fictitious, Barna actually did interview all 30 leaders and, obviously, got their sign-offs on their “quoted” conversations.)
It’s the perfect leadership book if you’ve got attention deficit disorder or you don’t or won’t take the time to read the thousands of pages written by these 30 leadership doers and thinkers. Hang onto your Kindle, the book moves fast. Dialogue is spirited. Insights are short and snappy—without any of the patronizing dribble so common in “I’m the guru” books.
Barna, who plays himself in this leadership axioms marathon, is hilarious at appropriate times. Laugh-out-loud funny. His segues between conversations are masterful. George is no leadership novice himself, but his self-effacing tone models a savvy humility. (Can you put those two words together?)
So…if you pay attention, you’ll enjoy 200 pages crammed with executive level street smarts and about a thousand years of leadership experience. It’s a leadership and management feast. So taste these morsels (or as Barna labels the book, “an educational blitzkrieg):
RICH STEARNS: “The most effective leaders are good at constantly pushing away the things that consume them but that are not adding value at the end of the day, and they try to spend more and more time on those things that do add value.”
DON SODERQUIST: “I discovered you can’t change everybody.”
GEORGE BARNA: “Note to self: leaders teach through stories, even if the tale is told at their expense.”
JOHN ASHCROFT: “First leadership is the identification of noble goals and objectives, and second, it is the pursuit of those noble goals and objectives with such intensity that others are drawn into the process.”
NEWT GINGRICH: “You get what you measure.”
JON GORDON (on vision and values): “Repetition is the number one thing. I have one story that I love to tell and I have probably told it over four thousand times.”
PATRICK LENCIONI (on vision and values): “We talk about being humble, hungry, smart.”
SODERQUIST: “Egos get bigger and people become more arrogant, the higher their position.”
BARNA: “Ken [Blanchard] was doing something that great leaders do: take the complex and make it simple.”
GORDON: “Culture drives behavior, and behavior drives habits in an organization.”
MILES McPHERSON: “One way to get a healthy culture is to hire healthy people.”
GINGRICH: “Wisdom beats being the smartest. That’s the great problem Bill Clinton had. Clinton is tremendously smart; he just has the least wisdom of a senior leader I’ve ever seen.”
BOB DEES: “I was in Germany in a training environment and we didn’t have any training aids, like PowerPoint or projectors. But I always thought it was a sin to bore the troops when you were training them, so I asked my platoon sergeant for some chalk and an armored personnel carrier. He got them, and we used the side of the carrier as a blackboard.”
SAM CHAND: “Is this person a can’t or won’t? Can’t is about abilities…but won’t is about attitude.”
BARNA: “Vision is the air that leaders breathe.”
HENRY CLOUD: “Leadership development, in some form or fashion, is always about leaders being coaches.”
JIMMY BLANCHARD: “One thing we learned is that developing leaders is probably the most appreciated benefit in the company.”
CLOUD: “When trust is high, speed is high, so we can get things done faster and the costs are lower.”
GINGRICH: “You have to surround yourself with people who can fire you.”
KEN BLANCHARD (on listening): “I love the whole concept of leading with your ears.”
DEES: “There is an expression in the military: threat clears a man’s head—when that happens, you’re very teachable.”
CLOUD: “The good [leaders] don’t see a problem as a problem. They see it as part of leading.”
LOU HOLTZ: “We don’t like where we are, but the only thing that’s going to change it from where we are today, to where we’ll be five years from now is the books we read, the people we meet, and the dreams we dream.”
J. BLANCHARD: “Everybody who works for us has a right to work for a good boss.”
STEARNS: “Leaders have to be very aware of the power they wield. When you’re at the bottom of the hierarchical ladder, sometimes you have to shout to be heard, because you don’t have any title or you don’t have authority. But when you are the CEO or a top leader, you can speak softly and it sounds like a shout to someone. So when you criticize someone, you have to be very careful abut being too blunt or cutting, because whatever you say will be amplified ten times just because you’re the president. You have to adapt your style to realize that it’s not just you, the person, speaking; it’s the position that you hold that’s speaking.”
There are a zillion more insights like these. The chapter on hiring and firing is brilliant, as is the rarely addressed topic (an entire chapter) on confrontation and conflict. Like I said, this book is a feast. Kudos to George Barna and Bill Dallas!
To order this book from Amazon, click on this title: Master Leaders: Revealing Conversations With 30 Leadership Greats, by George Barna with Bill Dallas.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1) How do you coach a “can’t” person? How do you help a “won’t” team member?
2) Rich Stearns says that effective leaders “try to spend more and more time on those things that do add value.” What should you STOP doing today that doesn’t add value here?”
Get Real. You’re Insane! - Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Nonprofit
One of the big ideas in the Strategy Bucket, Chapter 3, in Mastering the Management Buckets, is to be strategic about strategic planning. It was Albert Einstein who said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” If your company or organization has gone three or more years without a written strategic planning process and you think that this year you’ll finally get around to it, Einstein has one word for you: insanity!
One solution: recruit or retain a volunteer or consultant to help you keep your feet to the strategic planning fire. A team-crafted, staff-driven strategic plan is not more busy work. Instead it can be transformational for your team as you focus on your mission and eliminate activity-driven money-wasters in favor of results-driven big ideas.
On the Buckets website, check out the strategic planning resources, including Worksheet #3.1: "Summarize Your Plan With a G.N.O.M.E. Chart."
MANAGEMENT BUCKETS WORKSHOP:
• October 20-21, 2009 – Mastering the Management Buckets Workshop Experience (Dana Point, California) - Click here for more information.
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Posted by: Music_master | September 24, 2010 at 12:18 PM