Leadership BS by Jeffrey Pfeffer

• Myths and inspiring stories can be comforting, but they are worse than useless for creating change.
• Much of the oft-repeated conventional wisdom about leadership is based more on hope than reality, on wishes rather than data, on beliefs instead of science.
• The way leadership gurus try to demonstrate their legitimacy is not through their scientific knowledge or accomplishments but rather by achieving public notoriety-be it the requisites TED talks, blog posts, Twitter followers, or books filled with leadership advice that might or might not be valid and useful.
• The leadership industry is large and prominent, but, notwithstanding its magnitude and reach, workplaces in the United States and around the world are, for the most part, filled with dissatisfied, disengaged employees who do not trust their leaders; leaders at all levels lose their jobs at an increasingly fast pace, in part because they are unprepared for the realities of organizationational life, and thus, the leadership industry has failed and continues to fail in its task of producing leaders who are effective and successful, and it has even failed to produce sufficient talent to fill leadership vacancies.
• One big problem is that much leadership training and development has become too much a form of lay preaching, telling people inspiring stories about heroic leaders and exceptional organizations and, in the process, making those who hear the stories feel good and temporarily uplifted while not changing much of what happens at many workplaces.
• Then I lay out the evidence for and logic of why sometimes doing the opposite of what has been prescribed makes sense, at least for leaders seeking to advance their own careers. And this fact is at the core of the argument--that the qualities we actually select for and reward in most workplaces are precisely the ones that are unlikely to produce leaders who are good for employees or, for that matter, for long-term organizational performance.
• If these recommendations were comfortable and easily implemented, they already would have been.
• One critical time for derailment is when, in their first jobs post graduation, people move from positions where they can succeed mostly on the basis of their individual performance and into more interdependent roles where political skill become more important. The next critical time comes around twenty years later, when, if successful, people have reached very senior hierarchical levels where everyone around them is smart and accomplished. At that point, the differentiating factor is the ability to navigate increasingly politically charged environments that are peopled by those who mostly do not fulfill the leadership industry’s prescriptions.
• The simple but important point: the oft-observed divergence in interests between individual leaders and the organizations they lead means that any prescription of what one should do has to begin by both acknowledging the trade-offs and soothing through that person’s real priorities and the multiple, often poorly correlated measure of a leader’s outcomes.
• Individuals maximize their own survival chances by acting selflessly to acquire, at all costs, the resources necessary for their survival. Group survival, however, often depends on individuals sacrificing their own well-being for that of the group.
• The leadership industry is so obsessively focused on the normative--what leaders should do and how things out to be--that it has largely ignored asking the fundamental question of what actually is true and going on and why.
• Unless and until leaders are measured for what they really do and for actual workplace conditions, and until these leaders are held accountable for improving both their own behavior and, as a consequence, workplace outcomes, nothing will change.
• And as near as I can tell, there is not much of a connection between actually knowing something about leadership and being successful as a leadership guru.
• Measure and hold people accountable for workplace outcomes.
• One of the core principles coming out of the quality movement is that what gets inspected gets affected. Measurement focuses attention and, if nothing else, makes problems salient.
• Measuring the wrong thing is often worse than measuring nothing, because you do get what you measure.
• Improvement comes from employing measurements that are appropriate, those that are connected to the areas in which we seek improvement. In the case of leadership, that appropriate measurement would include assessing the frequency of desirable leader behaviors; actual workplace conditions such as engagement, satisfaction, and trust in leadership; and leaders’ careers--measures that are notable by their absence not only in ue byt even from much of the discussion of leadership-development activity.
• Measuring results, measuring leader behaviors, and assessing whether or not prescriptions get implemented would go a long way to both highlighting and then altering the current sad state of affairs in most workplaces. WIthout baseline measurements of leader and workplace conditions, it is simply impossible to understand what to do to make improvements.
• Use more-scientific methods and worry about credentials.
• Sometimes--not always, but some of the time--doing precisely the opposite of what the leadership industry prescribes produces better outcomes. What’s more, doing the opposite of what the leadership industry advocates is sometimes a much better, more reliable path to individual success.
• If you are a leader seeking to actually change a workplace’s conditions so as to improve employee engagement, satisfaction, or productivity, or if you are an individual seeking to chart a course to a more successful career, inspiration is not what you need. What you need are facts, evidence, and ideas.
• To build a science of leadership, you need reliable data. To learn from others’ success, you need to know what those others did. The best learning, simply put, comes from accurate and comprehensive data, either qualitative or quantitative.
• Motivated cognition is one factor that explains the unreliability of the stories we read. Not surprisingly, people are motivated to think well of themselves. Therefor, not only do individuals perceive themselves to be above average for most positive attributes and believe that the qualities in which they excel are the most important--the so-called above-average effect--but individuals will also selectively remember their successes and forget their failures or shortcomings.
• In general, leaders want to remember their accomplishments and not remember some of their most negative behaviors, let alone disclose such things even if they did remember them--so they don’t.
• The problem is that the leadership stories are often exaggerated or fabricated out of whole cloth, and their listeners don’t bother to do any fact-checking.
• If you are a mythical, heroic, larger-than-life figure used to getting your way, rules and social conventions and corporate governance tenets don’t apply.
• Mythical, heroic leaders become vulnerable to losing their jobs because after a while, regardless of their business skills and leadership capabilities, they find it impossible to live up to the hype, as it would be for anyone. With great expectations and high hopes comes, naturally enough, great disappointments.
• A second problem that arises: In the desire to learn only from success, people miss the opportunity to learn from failure, which is often a more promising and interesting teacher.
• The admonition to “learn from failure” is common and well known but mostly ignored.
• Of course, precisely because inspiration does not work very well to produce tangible change, one can make a good living doing it again and again.
• Systematically and regularly reflecting on behavior, and even better, measuring such behavior, is much more likely to produce substantive change than mere storytelling and emotional uplift is.
• All this sanctimonious talk about great leadership creates one additional problem: people, overconfident in their leadership abilities, let talk about leadership substitute for action.
• Because talking often substitutes for reality, one ought to be quite skeptical about what actually goes on at places run by people who think they are leadership experts.
• ONe ought to be skeptical, for instance, about taking advice on leadership and human resources from someone from the senior leadership of a firm with a turnover rate hovering around 30 percent--a rate that characterizes some consulting firms offering leadership advice.
• Simple put, the motivation to believe in heroes and a just world circumvents people’s critical faculties. Do people join organizations and sign up with leaders only to be disappointed, or worse.
• Do some research before you believe, and, more important, act on your beliefs, about leaders and leadership. And in your research efforts, try to use multiple, independent sources. Confirm the information you receive, just as you would do if you were reference-checking a prospective employee. You are reference checking someone much more important--someone you are possibly going to work for--so do the task well.
• The prescription for leaders to be modest is also consistent with the principle that people do not like others who self-promoted and are self-aggrandizing. Research shows that people who self-promoted are perceived negatively by others, and those who are modest about their ability and performance are better liked than individuals who boast about their accomplishments.
• One reason people leave companies is because they do not feel acknowledged or recognized for their contributions, and one behavior that provokes irritation is when others take credit for another’s work.
• Modest leaders are less likely to claim credit for the accomplishments of others and also are more prone to acknowledge what others have done--so modesty should reduce voluntary turnover.
• The evidence suggests that modesty may not be such a good thing for getting to the top or staying there.
• Many, possibly most, leadership roles are ambiguous--there is uncertainty about what the leader should do, uncertainty about who would be best in that position, and frequently even a lack of clarity about how people are performing in their leadership roles.
• In order for you to be selected for a leadership role, either by peers or by bosses, it is necessary, albeit insufficient, that those doing the selecting notice you. No one who is unmemorable is going to be chosen for an important job, because one cannot select what one cannot remember.
• It helps to be known, to have a brand, to, simply put, stand out.
• Research consistently shows that self-promotion is positively correlated with interviewers’ evaluations of job candidates as well as with hiring recommendations. THis is not surprising. Self-promotion is one manifestation of self-confidence, and self-confidence frequently leads others to share the confidence that someone exudes.
• The extensive and eve-growing research evidence is overwhelmingly clear--narcissists are more likely to be selected for leadership roles and also to seek such psotiions in the first place.
• One reason women are less frequently chosen for leadership roles has to do with their unwillingness to display confidence.
• Leaders must be able to put on a show, to display energy and pay attention to others, regardless of how they ay feel at the time.
• In fact, being authentic is pretty much the opposite of what leaders must do. Leaders don't need to be true to themselves. Rather, leaders need to be true to what the situation and what those around them want and need from them. And often what others want and need is the reassurance that things will work out and the confidence that they are on the right track.
• The ability to not succumb to personal feelings or predilection seems like a crucial trait for high performers in many domains.
• The idea that one would and could be trained to become or at least appear authentic oozes with delicious irony.
• The idea of authentic leadership epitomizes almost everything that I believe characterizes the leadership industry generally, much of which does not help either science or practice: (1) a well-intentioned, values-laden (2) set of prescriptions--los of “shoulds” and “oughts”--(3) that are mostly not representative of most people in leadership roles, and (4) are recommendations that are almost certainly not implementable and may be fundamentally misguided.
• Leaders need to be and do what their followers and society require, not what the leader feels like being or doing at the moment.
• Learning and adapting to what we do never stops.
• People need to figure out how to be effective, regardless of their wants, needs, upbringing, and so forth. They need to learn how to be successful in the environments they confront, or they must learn how to find different and better environments.
• People need to grow, develop, and change, not get stuck in their temporarily authentic selves.
• People make and remake themselves all the time and adjust their behaviors to the situations they face.
• One of the most important leadership skills is the ability to put on a show, to act like a leader, to act in a way that inspires confidence and garners support--even if the person doing the performance does not actually feel confident or powerful.
• Acting is essential to effective leadership.
• Act powerful and you become powerful.
• Not only is authentic leadership often not very useful, it may be almost impossible to do. If we have learned anything from all of the social science research over the past several decades--and actually we have learned quite a bit--it is that people’s attitudes and behaviors are profoundly affected by the situations in which they are embedded. So to the extend that being true to oneself entails ignoring or resisting situational constraints, the prescriptions of authentic leadership are at variance with how people act.
• Research show that “people view duplicity as one of the gravest moral failings”.
• There’s only one problem with the admonitions in favor of truth-telling: lying is incredibly common in everyday life and rampant among leaders of all sorts of organizations, including some of the most venerated leaders and companies. It logically follows that if some specific behavior is pervasive, that behavior must confront few sanctions, or else it would be rarer.
• One of the reasons lying persists is that there are few adverse consequence for it; and as we will see, positive results very often come from not telling the truth.
• My conclusions: if we actually want to build more truthful organizations, we need to understand some of the empirical realities about lying, including its startling pervasiveness and efficacy.
• One of the reasons leaders lie is that they seldom face serious consequences for doing so.
• The lesson: sometimes survival demands that you do what prevails in the ecosystem in which you are competing.
• One reasons why lying is common is that the ability to lie or deceive others offers evolutionary benefits and, as a consequence, has increased over time. A second reason is that “manipulative ability is a foundation of social power and the ability to lie successfully is an important skill linked to personal and professional success.”
• Simply put, lying is useful for getting ahead. There is a reciprocal relationship between power and lying: the powerful deceive more often, and the ability to deceive effectively creates social power.
• Because lying produces few to no severe sanctions, lying increases in frequency. Because lying is then common, it becomes normative, in the sense that norms describe common behavioral patterns. Because lying becomes normative, it isn’t sanctioned, because it makes no sense to try to punish widespread, almost taken-for-granted behavior.
• Lies, told often enough and convincingly enough, can become the truth--sometimes with positive effects. That is because what people say, whether truthful or not, helps construct a social reality that then becomes real.
• Leaders also affect companies’ ability to survive difficult economic circumstances. If employees believe that a company is going to fail, they will leave--and the best ones, who have the greatest chance of finding other good jobs, will leave first. As talent drains out, the odds of turning the company around are reduced. Thus, on important task of leaders is to convince their employees that success is possible.
• In many instances, leaders convince customers to buy their products, investors to part with their money--a particularly important task for star-ups--talented employees to join, and stay, and suppliers to work with their company by presenting the organization as more successful than it really is. By so doing, leaders enlist the resources and support that will ultimately make the organization successful.
• If you don’t feel confident, or competent, thaen getting and keeping a good job entails misrepresenting your true feelings--being able to lie convincingly about your ability to do the job. But often, if people believe you can do the job, you can, because they will give you the advice and support to make you successful.
• But there is no question that sometimes lies become the truth for the very fact of their being told and believed--with, on occasion, positive consequences for companies and leaders.
• A lie typically involves two parties who are in interaction with each other--the person who tells the tlie and the person who signals that he or she wants to hear it.
• In many ways, people are complicit in their own deception. That is certainly true in the case of the leadership industry as well. People, wanting to believe the best about others and the world, not only fail to do due diligence but signal that they want to hear the myths and tales that have become so much a part and parcel of leadership lore. So that’s what they get.
• Ignoring the frequency of lying, the fact that it is positively associated with both having and acquiring power, and the possibility that lying is a behavior that is often quite effective won’t change any of these oft-documented facts.
• Trust is more efficient and cost-effective in coordinating and ensuring collaborative behavior than the financial incentives or contracts that, as Oliver Williamson, a Nobel prize winning economists, first pointed out decades ago, are difficult to write in ways that cover every possible future contingency.
• Trust is the glue of many social relationships, and organizations are essentially all about social relationships.
• People expect trustworthy, honest behavior and react when they don’t see or recieve it.
• But I no longer believe that trust is essential to organizational functioning or even to effective leadership. Why? Because the data suggest that trust is notable mostly by its absence. Nevertheless, organizations continue to roll along, as do their leaders who seemingly suffer few consequences for being untrustworthy.
• First because trust is essential for human survival, it is hardwired into us so that in many cases we are predisposed to trust too much and the wrong people. Second, we are likely to trust those who are similar to us, something that the Edelman surveys also confirm. Third, and most important, our ability to accurately discern who is taking advantage of us is remarkably poor.
• We are predisposed to trust and have an evolutionary need to do so. Therefore, people are motivated to overlook a violation of trust as a one time thing that won’t occur again, or at least won’t happen to them--because they are, after all, above average in their ability to detect people who shouldn’t be trusted.
• Trust-breakers for the most part retain their networks and social relationships because others in their orbit haven’t been harmed by their actions, so they don’t feel compelled to redress the harm. Trust-breakers frequently maintain their financial resources.
• Instead, carefully, systematically investigate what the people you are going to entrust with important dimensions of your future well-being have actually done.
• People will frequently act in their own interests, and if those interests involve breaching commitments made to you, then you should probably kiss those commitments goodbye. And often there won’t be sanctions for violating trust, the experimental research notwithstanding.
• It’s pretty clear how to build or destroy trust. Trust implies that others know that someone or some company will honor their commitments and promises. Therefore, trust requires consistency and predictability. Because building trust entails, most fundamentally, keeping one’s word and honoring promises, including the promises--either explicit or implicit--that are made to employees and customers, building and maintaining trust necessitats honoring commitments and obligations.
• Leaders, who first and foremost are responsible for ensuring their organization’s well-being, sometimes have to take tough actions.
• The simple fact is that maintaining trust requires honoring commitments, but commitments constrain.
• Power is positively correlated with hierarchical rank, and senior people mostly use their power to protect both their jobs and their salaries and perquisites.
• CEO pay is well known as being untethered from what happens to regular employees, a fact that explains why the multiple between CEO pay and that of the average worker continues to widen to nosebleed levels.
• For the most part, leaders just take care of themselves, regardless of what they should do either to adhere to moral strictures or to make their organizations perform better.
• Research shows that people are more likely to help those who are similar to them, even in trivial, unimportant, and random ways--a finding that suggests identifying and helping similar others is an almost automatic, mindless behavior.
• Leaders share little or nothing in common with those they lead.
• Research shows that leaders take credit for good company performance and attribute poor performance to environmental factors over which they have no control, to predecessors, to macroeconomic issues, or sometimes to other organizational interests, particularly frontline employees.
• So when senior leaders complain about the competitiveness problems stemming from high labor costs and excessive staffing, they are mostly referring to the costs of frontline salaries and the number of people actually doing the work.
• Leaders who have come up through the ranks and have done many if not most of the organization’s jobs are much more likely to look out for the interests of those they lead because they have been there themselves.
• Outside succession, and particularly succession by industry outsiders with limited frontline experience, exacerbates the tendency for leaders to not give the interests and well-being of others much priority.
• Expecting reciprocity, generosity, and selflessness is a wonderful sentiment but will almost certainly produce disappointment in many if not most organizational situations. That does not mean, however, that there is nothing that might be done to induce leaders to be more concerned with the well-being of those they lead.
• Agency theory is a formal, analytical exploration of a pervasive, important, and profound problem: Owners delegate operational control to managers and managers delegate responsibility in turn to lower-level managers. But owners and leaders at all levels often have difficulty monitoring and therefore controlling or even evaluating what the people to whom they have delegated power are doing. Consequently, the problem that agency theory addresses is how to align incentives and develop contracting arrangements, including optimal compensation schemes, so that in the course of pursuing their own narrow interests, agents, the people to who power has been delegated, will also wind up serving the interests of the principles who have delegated that decision-making authority to them.
• The point of agency theory is that with the right measurements and incentives, many of the problems entailed in aligning otherwise conflicting interests can be solved.
• If leaders are expected to take care of and develop their people, then it is essential to measure whether or not they do, and then hold them accountable for those measurements.
• Measurement and incentives won’t solve everything, but they might solve quite a bit. When leaders’ own jobs and salaries depend on how well they look after others, they will do so. Until then, relying on leader’s generosity of spirit or the exhortations of the leadership literature is an ineffective and risky way to ensure that leaders take care of anyone other than themselves.
• If we really want leaders to look out for others, companies and maybe even the larger society need to give them some pretty concrete reasons to do so.
• You may think your employer owes you something for your past contributions and good work--but most employers don’t agree.
• Nice speeches and noble sentiments notwithstanding, leaders mostly take care of themselves first--and maybe second and third, also--regardless of what they are supposed to do. The obvious conclusion: you should do the same.
• Data show that companies violate implicit contracts with their employees all the time.
• The logical conclusion form systematic data and countless cases in multiple environments, ranging from college and professional athletics to corporations to universities: relying on the good behavior and positive sentiments of work organizations for your career well-being is singularly foolish.
• For the typical work organization, or for the typical individual in a social relationship, the question posed by the counterparty is typically not “What have you done for me in the past that deserves repayment?” but rather, “What can you do for me in the future that warrants spending any time or resources on keeping you happy or keeping you at all?”
• No one can count on stability in companies these days, so you need to be prepared.
• Workplaces are primarily instrumental, calculative settings largely free of moral sentiments and even normative constraints.
• In a nutshell, companies will treat you well as long as you seem as though you are going to be useful in the future, and companies will probably be less inclined to treat you well or to repay past contributions the minute you are perceived as being less useful in future endeavors.
• Autonomy seems great until you have it, and then many people want the reassurance and even guidance that comes from belonging to a larger entity like a workplace that will provide at least some minimal sense of security.
• People are social creatures, which is why one of the first things done to break prisoners of war--or for that matter, prisoners in general--is to isolate them from social contact. We are afraid of being ostracized, of being excluded from the group--something that accounts for a lot of teenage behavior, including teen bullying. We can seemingly avoid ostracism by joining a group with a strong leader that includes and incorporates us.
• Put simply, attack the problems by fixing the system, not scapegoating the necessarily fallible human beings working in and operating that system--whether or not they deserve it.
• Try doing precisely what companies have told you to do for decades, and what the fundamental principle of economics has advocated since the time of Adam Smith. Take care of yourself and assiduously look out for your own interests in your life inside work organizations.
• The practical advice that emerges from the copious amounts of research on self-interested behavior is the same: presume that others are acting on the basis of their self-interest, and you will be better equipped to forecast and understand their actions.
• Competitive markets require only that there may be many participants in the market and that each participant vigorously pursued its own interests. In such a system, the best possible outcomes occur, as much economic analysis demonstrates.
• The bottom line: If you have a beneficent environment and a leader who actually cares about you, enjoy and treasure the moment, but don’t expect it to be replicated elsewhere or to even persist indefinitely where you are.
• The world is often not a just or fair place, our hopes and desires notwithstanding. Get over it. Take care of yourself and watch out for your interests.
• To the extent you develop self-reliance and cease relying on leadership myths and stories, you will be much better off, and substantially less likely to confront disappointment and the career consequences that develove from relying on the unreliable.
• Averting our eyes from the facts may provide solace, but it does so at the price of progress. There is no theory or evidence that suggests that improvement comes from ignoring bad news, paying inordinate attention to rare, exceptional cases, or from failing to measure base rates for how often something occurs.
• By leaving people feeling good while somewhat uninformed about reality, the leadership enterprise helps produce people happily oblivious to many important truths about organizational life in the real world. In this zoned-out, semiconscious, blissful state, people are insufficiently prepared for what they will encounter at work and, most important, insufficiently energized to accurately diagnose and change that world of work.
• To get from one place to another, you need to know as best as you can where you are, where you want to go, and, most important, the obstacles and barriers you will likely encounter en route.
• The list of leaders who, on the one hand, earned vast sums and retained power for decades while, on the other hand, being in almost every way contradictory to the customary bromides about modesty, serving others, and being truthful is almost endless, and it’s a list that grows longer all the time.
• First, in the real world, almost no one lives a perfect life, perfectly happy with everything going perfecting all the time. Second, and more importantly, although one can debate how truly successful these leaders were, there is no denying one fact: that each of them and the multitude of others who do not fit the leadership models so often proffered reached great heights and positions of power in the first place. So instead of attempting to reconstruct perceptions to make reality fit your view of a just and fair world, it might be more helpful to understand why and how people who don’t fit the visions of what leadership should entail reached such powerful positions. Such understanding is the fundamental prerequisite for altering the dynamics that produced these people, whether you like them or not.
• Wanting to believe in fairy tales, people avert their gaze and often actively avoid evidence that challenges their worldview.
• If we want to change the world of work and leadership conduct in many workplaces, we need to act on what we know rather than what we wish and hope fore.
• Simply put, in a world where people can’t handle the truth, they don’t get the truth--and they suffer in numerous ways as a result.
• Pay attention to what is really going on and to people’s real behavior and performance. Become a skilled and unbiased observer, and, to the extent you can, eliminate hopes and expectations from your observations.
• You would be well served to pay attention to what you see and not to what people are saying and the the lovely values and sentiments they are expressing.
• Rhetoric and reality are often decoupled in social life, and in leadership it is almost the norm.
• Simply put, there are occasions when you have to do bad things to achieve good results.
• The point is that sometimes to do good, you have to have the courage and wisdom to perform harmful, painful, actions.
• Making change, improving situations, getting things done, winning in very competitive environments, often requires being willing and able to engage in behaviors and exhibit qualities that some people might find repugnant. Maybe that’s why there is such a leadership shortage and why the leadership industry, with its failure to acknowledge this fundamental truth, continues to fail.
• Everyone wants advice, which is why the “how-to” industry, covering topics for losing weight to getting your finances under control to being a better leader, is so large. The advice business is also largely impervious as to whether or not the advice actually gets implemented, since the profit comes from selling the advice.
• People do deserve second, and maybe third, fourth, and fifth, chances. But not to recognize that the past often predicts the future, and therefore, not to remember people’s histories in their leadership roles and not to use that history in making decisions, and instead somehow presuming better behavior in the future than was exhibited in the past, is just asking for trouble.
• The most fundamental principle of learning theory is that behavior is a function of its consequences. When behavior is rewarded, that behavior gets repeated with even greater frequency. When behavior is ignored or punished, the frequency of the behavior diminishes.
• In the world of leadership, what seems striking is how few consequences there are for all varieties of bad behavior, ranging from underperforming in one’s job role to serious ethical lapses to treating employees badly. Consequently, even as leaders aren’t trusted and workplaces remain toxic, not much changes, because often leaders are able to get away with doing a great deal of harm.
• The problem with leadership is at its core a story of disconnections:
• The disconnect between what leaders say and what they do
• The disconnect between the leadership industry’s prescriptions and the reality of many leaders’ behaviors and traits
• The disconnect between the multidimensional nature of leadership performance and the simple, noncontingent  answers so many people seek
• The disconnect between how the leadership industry is evaluating and the actual consequences of leader failures
• The disconnect between leader performance and behavior and the consequences those leaders face
• The disconnect between what most people seem to want and what they need
• The disconnect between what would make workplaces better and organizations more effective, and the base rate with which such prescriptions get implemented
• The remedy for the many leadership failures seems simple, and it is: to restore the broken connections, the linkages between behavior and its consequences, words and actions, prescriptions and reality.
• Leaders love the disconnect that leaves them unaccountable for the workplaces they mess up and their poor performance and bad behavior. And worst of all, lots of people are complicit in the disconnect between the reality that exists and what they would prefer to believe and the stories they want to and often pay to hear.
• One of the important but troubling phenomenon that occur in organizations of all types so that the higher you rise, the more that people will tell you how smart and right you are, and the less connection you will have to the realities of organizational life. So good leaders seek to keep themselves grounded in the realities of what they are doing and, more important, why they are doing it.
• In the end, people can handle the truth, and the sooner they confront those truths, the batter off everyone will be. And until then, everyone, not just leaders, but everyone, will have to keep working away, until we get it.