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1. They don’t read blogs entitled ‘5 things very successful leaders have in common’.
2. They don’t care about lists of platitudes of the type: be yourself, know where you are going, give feed back, be proactive, listen to people and don’t leave things for tomorrow.
3. They don’t think they have anything in common with other successful leaders other than success.
4. Actually, very successful leaders have in common a pair of legs, a pair of eyes, one heart, they were all babies before, and they will all die.
5. Courage, determination, resilience, honesty and fantastic communication skills. These 5 attributes of very successful leaders, are equally found in very unsuccessful leaders .

I beg you:

Stop thinking like a printout. Stop spamming with a list of platitudes. Say something that is better than silence. Stop writing as if you have found the Meaning of the Universe. Starting the phrase with “research shows that’ does not necessarily give you credibility to your argument.

By all means, share ideas, personal and subjective. That is not the problem. On the contrary, that may be the solution to Robotic Psychological Pollution. I love biased and subjective ideas associated to a name. Then I know I am talking to a human being. I may agree or not, but I will know where people stand.

Disclosure. There are not 5 things that very successful leaders have in common. Or 10 things. Or Harvard research with the solution. These attributional lists have the solidity of a cream cake. Father Christmas is your dad. Management thinking is exhausted. We can’t milk more Google lists anymore.

Richard III update: A human and critical thinking conversation, my kingdom for a human and critical thinking conversation.

It’s the battle for Ideas, not Lists.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

For more thoughts on leadership…

 

I’ve met many top leaders in my life whose greatest merit seemed to be avoiding mistakes, by letting others make them for them. They climbed to the top on grounds of stainless purity and immaculate protection of themselves. They survived reorganizations one after another, with Darwinian perfection until the point at which the severance package was not to be refused anymore.They called this point ‘time to move on’.But having been motionless all their life, they could only end up being advisers or armchair investors or Board non execs. At this point they are incredibly skilful at pronouncing platitudes and they continue their working life with the same total lack of ‘skin in the game’ that has been their key feature until then.

 

Extract taken from my new book: The Flipping Point – Deprogramming Management. Available Now!

A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. Management needs deprogramming. This book of 200, tweet-sized, vignettes, looks at the other side of things – flipping the coin. It asks us to use more rigour and critical thinking in how we use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago.

 

Our real and present danger is not a future of robots and AI, but of current established BS. In this book, you are invited to the Mother of All Call Outs!

 

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