An excrypt from my recent reading: Tribes by Seth Goldin
I’d strongly recommend this book to anyone out there who needs a bit of inspiration in leadership, it certainly gave me a whole new perspective and outlook on work. The changes start now!
The Difference between things that happen to you and things you do
“In the old model, things happened to you at work. Factories opened, people were hired.
Bosses gave instructions. You got transferred. There were layoffs. You got promoted. Factories closed.
Leaders, on the other hand, don’t have things happened to them. They do things.
In the middle of the mortgage crisis, I spent some time with a few thousand Realtors at their annual convention. Some of the Realtors saw what the media, Bear Stearns, the banks and the public were doing to them and to their hard-won careers. They were angry (even bitter) about the end of a long run of increasing housing prices, and they were scared about their futures. These Realtors didn’t know how they were going to cope with what had happened. They wanted to manage their careers, but change was making it impossible.
The other Realtors were palpably excited. They were eager to get to work. They saw the change in the outside world as an opportunity, a chance for them to dramatically increase their business. They knew the current problems wouldn’t last forever, and they understood that the problems would wipe out the opportunity seekers, leaving the professionals standing. Some 10 or 20 percent of t he Realtors were going to quit, and the leaders, the ones who were going to stay, realized that this change was a very good thing. The same way soldiers realize that it’s war that makes generals, these brokers were ready
and motivated to use change as a chance to really wreak some havoc on the status quo.”
