Sublime

“There are lots of good peacetime CEOs and lots of good wartime CEOs, but almost no CEOs that can function in both peacetime and in wartime. You’re a peacetime/wartime CEO.”

And it’s clear that Jeff has often followed his gut instincts over the years. He respects leaders who are willing to do the same.

At any point, a leader is either above the line or below the line. If you are above it, you are leading consciously, and if you are below it, you are not. Above the line, one is open, curious, and committed to learning. Below the line, one is closed, defensive, and committed to being right.

Among Kelly Johnson’s strengths was a sure grasp of what mattered to his people and what didn’t. Most of them were engineers and tinkerers who hated paperwork, which he cut to an absolute minimum.

Anybody operating with a theory of leadership that assumes that experts know what is best, and that then the leadership problem is basically a sales problem in persuasion, is in our experience doomed at best to selling partial solutions at high cost.

An early lesson I learned in my career was that whenever a large organization attempts to do anything, it always comes down to a single person who can delay the entire project. An engineer might get stuck waiting for a decision or a manager may think she doesn’t have authority to make a critical purchase. These small, seemingly minor hesitations ca

Rather, my experience in running my own company and in helping other people run theirs is that the leader's job is to get the people to be responsible for their own performance. This revised leadership paradigm significantly alters the behavior of everyone in the organization.

Battle Metaphor for Management By the time the battle begins, the manager’s real work is already done.