FC NOW: The Fast Company Weblog
October 30, 2003
Being the Best
The October edition of Ideas!, an email newsletter by staff of the Sonoma Institute, offers 11 tactics and tips from going from good to great at the individual level. How can leaders become -- or remain -- the best?
- Define your standards
- Define your industry and focus
- Identify the standards for being the best that are common and consistent throughout your industry or community of focus
- Decide whose assessment matters
- Recognize that you can only be the best within a relatively narrow range of focus -- you are and become what you practice
- Being the best means having discipline and rigor
- Embrace change as a gateway to innovation
- Recognize that, at the end of the day, it is all about relationships
- Be willing to step outside your history and comfort zones to repeatedly declare yourself a beginner
- Manage commitments and energy, not time
- If you want to be the best, have a vision, walk your talk, be authentic, and have courage
What advice would you offer leaders looking to become the best? What have you done yourself?
Posted by Heath Row at October 30, 2003 11:09 AM | Category: career development |
5 Comments
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11.5 In order to go from good to great you must mentor and individual or group of individuals.
"One Who Teach's another learns twice."
Never be afraid of failure. It is from failure that you will learn life's true lessons.
-LOM
"It is not because of success that so many are successful but rather because of their failures"
Trevor Maasdorp
-Make decisions that DEFINE the future
-Encourage people to PURSUE the future
-Enable themselves and others to REALISE that future
-Create a culture of spirits and hearts not just heads and hands
-Replace an empty mind with an open one
Until that leader knows what it is they want to be best in, I wouldn't offer a single iota of advice, but I would offer a hefty kick up the backside if they couldn't tell me what they wanted to be best in, consulting fees or no consulting fees.
As for me I have a unique style where I have learned to interpret the world in such a different way that either the world starts seeing what I see, sense what I sense, think in the way I think or I remain one its quaint oddballs where we speak the same English in two different facing languages; yet what I am doing is to self-extract the best that I want out of myself rather than try to go for Gold and suffer the sins of "perfexioneeeeism". It's not about perfectionism, it is about excellence, but one person's excellence is another persons version of an incomprehensible lifestyle. My best comes from my originality, for someone else it might come in the safer waters of following a role model or by imitation of various successful behaviours. We talk so often about innovation, but it is imitation which is the dominant culture.
M.
zorromark@consultant.com
(Mark Twain wasn't Mark Twain, Mark Zorro isn't Mark Zorro)
http://www.markzorro.blogspot.com