Bootstrap Leadership Blog

This just in – leadership matters. It’s true in all walks of life, but especially true in the business world. You can’t browse the internet or pick up a paper or business magazine without reading about the power of positive leadership. And everyone wants more if it. Executive search firms have never been busier trying to fill the demand for leadership talent. Every year, the top consulting firms and Fortune 500 companies line up to grab MBA talent from the best business schools. Great leaders demand a premium on the open market, as they seek to find the right environment to apply their skills. 

If you are a business executive, you face a number of critical challenges to building a successful organization. However, of all the variables that impact your company, one stands out as the single best indicator of your success – the quality of your leaders.   By now, it’s accepted that a company’s human capital is its best single asset. If this is true, then leadership is certainly the key ingredient that powers this asset; you simply can’t become a great company without great leaders. And in today’s competitive environment, you need leaders at all levels of your organization to spark innovation, drive productivity, and motivate and empower employees. Having the right leaders also makes a substantial impact on key customers and business partners. In fact, great leaders have been proven to be significantly more effective than average leaders in every way – from producing revenue and profits to driving customer satisfaction and employee commitment (Zenger & Folkman, 2002).

As a business executive, leadership needs to be one of your top priorities. You need to insist upon and support the right processes. You need to make sure you’re being rigorous, fair, and well-grounded in your assessment of leadership talent. Finally, you need to demonstrate a passion for growing leaders, and make it known that you consider it every manager’s job to help develop the next generation of leaders.  

In the weeks and months to come, we'll explore the characteristics that great leaders share, examine specific examples where leaders are making a difference, and offer suggestions for how you can take your leadership game to a new level.  Leadership most definitely matters, and you owe it to yourself (and your team) to continuously improve as a leader.  Make a commitment to your own development by book-marking and visiting this post on a regular basis.  Its up to you to create your own leadership style and improve your impact as a leader.    

Here’s some recent data on the concept of women leaving (and returning to) the workforce.  In the June edition of the Harvard Business Review, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Laura Sherbin and Diana Forster conducted a survey in 2009 using the same questionnaire they used in 2004 to examine the choices women make about their career paths.  Interestingly, the results of the two surveys were quite similar, despite one of the worst recessions in recent memory.

In 2004, in a robust economy, 37% of highly qualified (top performing) women said they were “offramping” – voluntarily leaving their jobs for extended time periods.  In 2009, the researchers found that, for the most part, off-ramps and on-ramps are here to stay; 31% said they had taken an off-ramp, and for those who did, they’re staying out of work longer – up to six months longer. 

In the 2009 survey, the researchers found that, of the 31% of women who had off-ramped, 40% re-entered the workforce in full-time jobs, 23% came back for part-time roles, and 7% became self-employed.  Perhaps most interesting, 30% had not returned at all to the workforce. 

The authors hypothesize that the nonlinear path is not a luxury for boom times, but the way many women want to structure their careers, regardless of the economy.  All of which left me wondering what these results might look like in another 5 years… of the choices, I’d bet on the self-employed number going higher and higher.  What do you think?

30 million people worldwide have read it.  Your father or grandfather probably had a copy of it on their shelf.  It was published in 1936, and yet, when released as an iPhone app in February, it immediately became the top-selling paid business app in the iTunes store.  A new edition (only the second since the original publication) will hit stores next year.  What is it?  How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie.  Carnegie’s brainstorm of business advice has been translated into 47 languages, and is the most successful business book in history (by far).  In 2009 alone, it sold 300,000 copies – this for a book that is 74 years old! 

So who was this guy, and how did he tap into the mother lode of business counseling?  Born in 1888, Carnegie had virtually no business background when he wrote the book.  He was raised on a pig farm in Missouri, and moved east to become an actor in his early twenties.  He didn’t make it as an actor, so he tried selling trucks and writing western novels (neither of those ventures worked, either).  What did seem to stick was a class in effective business speaking that he began to teach at a Harlem YMCA in 1912 – a class that would form the basis for the book.

Carnegie knew a thing or two about marketing, for sure – in 1919 he changed the spelling of his name from Carnagey to Carnegie… probably to match the spelling of another pretty famous entrepreneur at the time.  Carnegie just intuitively “got” the relationship between public speaking and business success (these days, we’d call that connection “executive presence”).  Lots of prominent business people seem to have benefited from the connection.  Warren Buffett, for one, says that the course “changed my life.” 

The core elements of How to Win Friends and Influence People are Carnegie’s 30 principles of success, which are as applicable in one’s private life as they are in the business world.   Essentially, it’s a book about self-confidence, and how self-assuredness and poise makes us effective as people.  The 30 principles are all pretty basic themes: “let the other person do most of the talking” or “the only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.”   But actually, that’s what makes the book so charming (and yes, so effective). 

Sometimes the best advice really is the basic stuff.  Carnegie himself used to tell audiences – “I’ve never claimed to have a new idea.  I present the obvious – because the obvious is what people need to be told.”  Sounds like good coaching to me (clearly, Carnegie would be an executive coach today – or maybe Dr. Phil). 

Everyone who has ever written a business advice book owes a debt of gratitude to Dale Carnegie.  Now, if they could only out-sell him!  This tells you something about the power of his simple ideas… sound, basic advice never goes out of style – something we might all remember as we look for ways to influence in our own lives.