Good Morning,
My current read is “Sarah Palin: A New Kind of Leader” by Joe Hilley (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0310318920/?tag=mh0b-20&hvadid=63984712&ref=pd_sl_43gqh1o1z3_p). It was an interesting read, and was different from most leadership books that I have read in the past. Part of the book was selling Sarah Palin as a leader, another part was comparing her successful decisions to those which were not successful or were considered wrong, and finally the book covered 10 aspects of leadership which Sarah Palin exhibits. Please note, this is not a political post on my behalf, but sharing some ideas from this book.
One concept that really interested me in this book was a new combination of superficiality in knowledge that is becoming the mainstay in leadership these days. That is, leaders are becoming less and less experts in their areas, and more a jack of all trades.
This is a key change in the mindset of leadership and climbing the rungs of the ladder to success. Those folks who look to enter a field and work their way up the ladder, rung by rung, by learning their field inside and out, becoming a subject matter expert, may be vexed to see their new leaders not having done the same thing.
The concept is that leaders today are more versatile than experts. They have the ability to absorb a reasonable amount of information in their field and then use their decision making skills to be successful. This means that they can move to almost any field and be a leader. Sure there is a learning curve, but it is a much shorter curve when you only have to learn a few levels of knowledge rather than put in 20 years to get the minimum knowledge necessary.
In my days at the Dot.Com, the talk was about how the company took hold of a niche in the steel/internet market and went a mile deep with that niche. Sounded good back then. They had a small area where they operated in the entire industry, but within that small area they spent a lot of time digging deep into understanding how to rule and capitalize on that area. The result? They canned the entire program after three years. Was it because in an information age, they tried to become a subject matter expert over taking a small niche which can be used in many different industries which was not that deep? I am not sure, but that is what they have done and they are still alive today.
So, what does that mean for us who want to be leaders? I think it means to learn and master the skills of leadership itself as they can be applied across many industries. That is, be a jack of all trades in the industries you work in, but do not get bogged down. Focus on learning enough in your field to be able to make decisions, and spend your learning time on learning to making the right decisions more often. Since everything changes in the world at warp speed, trying to keep up to date on everything is becoming even harder.
In today’s world it is okay to be a jack of all trades more so than it was in the past, but don’t stop learning how to lead better.
I liked this book on Sarah Palin, she reminds me of President Theodore Roosevelt in character and drive.
Enjoy!
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