How - Dov Seidman [147]
Self-governing people step up, seize the moment, and find ways to get things done. Though this may seem at first a recipe for doubling your workload, in fact the opposite is often true. This basic eagerness to plan and implement their visions or the visions of others serves as a powerful example to those around them. When others see these sorts of HOWs in action, they feel similarly inspired and join in. More gets done with less effort because the whole team pulls together. In football, when a running back is crashing the line with extra effort, his tackles block extra hard, his quarterback makes better handoffs, and everyone on the team steps up with the extra effort needed to help him score a touchdown.
Build Succession and Continuity
I collect mechanical wristwatches. It’s a hobby. I find them very beautiful, a profound expression of our desire to order the world around us, and objects that embody the deep tradition of man striving for perfection, to make many small and intricate parts operate as a constant whole. If you ask me the time, however, I usually reach into my pocket and pull out my cell phone. It is in continual contact with an atomic timeserver and is the most accurate information I can put my hands on. I’m the CEO of my company, the ultimate leader there, if you will. If I show up late to a meeting, can the people waiting for me there find out the time? Of course they can.
Metaphorically, leaders don’t show up and tell you perfect time; as James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras told us so brilliantly in Built to Last, leaders build clocks that keep telling the time whether they are there or not.5 If landing on the moon depended on JFK, what would have happened when he was tragically assassinated? Leaders are not superheroes; they build succession and continuity into everything that they do. They don’t build anything that depends on a single person to show up and tell perfect time.
This idea is one of the most central and powerful ideas in the Leadership Framework, and the one most often underestimated. I think it is because saying the world doesn’t need heroes contradicts most of our experience. Business often calls on us to be heroic, to go the extra mile, burn the midnight oil, or pull the extra shift in order to meet our goals. And I agree. The world certainly needs heroes. You can’t get the train out of the station without some hard pushing, without heroism sometimes. The paradox is that though we need heroism from time to time, to truly thrive we must build self-sustaining approaches at the same time. Understanding the need for systems that generate energy as they achieve, rather than depleting resources to do so, leads you to a disposition that does not depend on heroics. You cannot build a great, enduring, significant company on the backs of superheroes. No matter how strong they are, eventually they will collapse under the weight. To build a skyscraper of an idea, hundreds of floors stacked on one another, you need a foundation of continuity that can grow as you do.
In 1964, Disney began to buy unproductive orange groves near Orlando, Florida, for what was called the “Florida Project.” It was one of Walt’s grandest notions. But, as the project developed, he developed lung cancer and soon died. His brother Roy and a team of Disney’s hand-selected and trained designers picked up the ball and saw it through to completion; Walt Disney World opened in 1971,