Chapter 17.
Get the Picture

People cannot be managed.... Inventories can be managed, but people must be led.

—H. Ross Perot

Here’s a question often asked: Isn’t leadership something people are born with? Aren’t some people referred to as born leaders?

Yes, but it’s a myth. Leadership is a skill, like gardening or chess or playing a computer game. It can be taught and it can be learned at any age if the commitment to learn is present. Companies can turn their managers into leaders.

But if companies could transform all their managers into leaders, why wouldn’t every company just do that?

They don’t know what a leader is. So how can they train for it? They don’t read books on leadership, they don’t have leadership training seminars, and they don’t hold meetings in which leadership is discussed and brainstormed. Therefore, they can’t define it. So they say people are born leaders.

The remedy for this is to always revise your picture of what a good leader is. People are not motivated by people who can’t even picture good leadership.

In his powerful, innovative book on business management, The Laughing Warriors (Lumina Media, 2003), Dale Dauten offers a picture of a leader with a code to work by: “THINK LIKE A HERO (Who can I help today?), WORK LIKE AN ARTIST (What else can we try?), REFUSE TO BE ORDINARY (Pursue excellence, then kill it.), and CELEBRATE (But take no credit.).”

Continuously picturing that code in and of itself would create leadership.