Monday, November 13, 2006

On the Topic of Leadership

I'm not sure where I first heard it, or when, but somewhere, a long time ago, it sunk in. And it went like this:

A good leader is someone who accepts all of the blame for whatever goes wrong and gives away all of the credit for the successes.

Don't we all know someone in a leadership position who lives by that motto, and possibly someone else who does exactly the opposite?

The other good aphorism that came up recently, somewhat related to Leadership, was:

Any reasonable decision is better than no decision at all.

I find that particular one to be very easy to live by, personally. If there's one thing I don't suffer from, it's indecision. I can usually make a call on a problem within seconds of hearing about it, without worrying about whether or not I've made the best call. All I ever aim for is a reasonable decision, and they're usually a Hell of a lot easier to come by than the best one. And one of the Agile books I read recently made the very valid point that, by making a decision and then having it fail, you learn something that can aid in future decisions; by doing nothing, you learn nothing (except how to be a better procrastinator).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Another one:

More has been lost with indecision than with wrong decision.