Shark And The Fish , livre ebook

Ecw Press - Charley Swayne

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163 pages

English

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Description

The boardroom table and the poker table: the only difference is a layer of felt. In high-stakes poker, the only things necessary are patience and aggression - qualities that translate to the world of business. In The Shark And The Fish, Charley Swayne applies winning poker strategies to decision-making and leadership. The aspiring business man will learn how to: avoid losing control, turn losses into lessons, perfect the art of negotiating a deal, understand the stakes and much more besides. Swayne ultimately teaches how to be a shark in the boardroom, not the fish.

Informations

Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	20 septembre 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781770902633
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

No man has ever had a more wonderful wife than Carol or better sons than Joe, Brian, and Chuck.

1

Introduction

My mission is to help you make better decisions than you would have made on your own . Every day for over a year I wrote that mission at the top of the page. Then I got to work. Great news: if there isn’t a precise roadmap, there is a lighthouse guiding you to a higher level of strategic thinking and decision making.
Answers have been found. Theory has been translated so you can use it. According to the Wall Street Journal , the most sought-after leadership skill is strategic thinking. This book will help you to go about making the wisest possible decision and pulling the trigger.
Building a company is really hard. Leading the company is all about creating an environment in which anyone in the organization would make the same decision and take the same action you would if you were there. And it’s about giving them the freedom to do so.
Why poker and business? I often use poker as a metaphor because I have found that world-class poker players think in an entirely different way than good players — they really do think strategically. Great leaders also think in a different way than good managers. It was no coincidence that Gates launched Microsoft, Nixon funded his first campaign, and Eisenhower paid for his military uniforms — all from their poker winnings. The skill is not the cards or business; it’s a higher dimension of creating an extraordinary environment, and you are about to find out what it is and how to do it.
We will start by discovering your compass. We will look into the future, create a mission, set objectives, determine strategies, take action, and then evaluate, experiment, and adapt.
As a bonus, if you lead a business or organization, you’ll see how to instill in your people the sense that “we did it” (the workers) as opposed to “they did it” (the managers). And, when that happens, you will discover ever-increasing possibilities.
Let’s roll.

The Leader Makes It Happen
Leader as savior. Leader as messiah. Leader as hero. Atlantis fulfilled. It’s all a crock. The leader is not the wizard behind the curtain pulling all the right levers. The leader is not some seductive siren song. This image is nothing more than a self-serving myth.
If you think you’re in charge, you’re not even close. Your authority is limited. There is no cosmic chess board. As Philip Gelatt, president of Northern Engraving, said after 40 years in business, “It doesn’t matter what I do. I can’t control anything.”
At dinner one day, one of our children asked me what we were going to do on the weekend. I carefully explained to them, “There is one vote per person in this family. I have one, and your mom has the rest.”

Shift the power to the folks bringing in the beans. — Colin Powell
Despite what your span of control looks like on your organizational chart, control does not really exist. The longer the span, the shorter the control. The greater the tooth-to-tail ratio, the lesser the command. It’s not the person at the top, it’s the people within. The organization is bottom up, inside out. Organizations manage themselves. None of us has ever done it on our own. That doesn’t mean we don’t need top management; it’s just that top management needs to embrace that it’s not only top down but also bottom up. The day is saved or lost by those on the ground.
Okay, now that you have the bad news, there is good news. Leadership is less about command and control and more about creation. You are the base that influences the pH of your company’s soil. You have the power to create character-based leadership.
True leadership is when you create an atmosphere in which your people are so engaged that, when faced with unforeseen circumstances and forces, they act as you would and in some cases better than you would. Freeing the energies of the hive. A multiplier effect. More later.
Police officer Rick Hanna was working out on a stair climber at the Gainesville Health and Fitness Center. He fell off. Patrick, the supervisor, went over, and Rick said, “I just need to rest for a moment.” But then he passed out. No heartbeat. A sudden-death cardiac event. Immediately, Patrick started CPR ; Kristen, the saleswoman, gave him mouth to mouth; and David from maintenance went for the AED (automatic external defibrillator) and literally broke his hand ripping it off the wall. Still no pulse, but they kept working on Rick. Within 10 minutes, the paramedics arrived. The officer was dead. The paramedics continued to work on him for another 20 minutes, and finally they got a heartbeat. At the hospital, when he woke up, Rick was fine. Amazingly, no brain damage. In the words of Marlene Hanna, his wife, “The cardiologists and pulmonary doctors all say the same thing, had it not happened in your gym, he would not be alive today, and because your staff were so well trained and you had the AED equipment right there. Most importantly, no one gave up. They continued CPR well after the paramedics arrived.”
Joe Cirulli owns the Gainesville Health and Fitness Center. You might have seen him on the cover of Inc. magazine. Joe wasn’t present, but his leadership was. I have seen Joe when faced with an emergency, and that’s exactly what he would have done if he was there. His staff reacted exactly the way he would have.

Business School
More good news and bad news. First the bad news.
How many times have you heard of a board hiring a professor to run their company? If you took away the textbook from a business professor, what would he do in the classroom? Nothing. He would have no idea what to do. He can’t leap beyond what he knows. He has never been a business manager. He has never had to make a profit. He has no experience, no anchor. Academics can’t go beyond what they know. For the most part, they don’t know anything except what is in the textbook. It is the difference between being in the stands and playing on the field.
When doing research for this book, I refused to interview any academic whose only life had been at a university. Although many are nice, intelligent people, they live in a world of their own, a silo, without authentic experience. They have no clue about what they have no clue. They will always hire the green PhD as opposed to the experienced businessman, worrying more about accreditation than quality. They write incestuous, dust-gathering, refereed research papers for other theorists to say “attaboy”; and, once they are tenured, they forget about hard work. On a Friday afternoon, if we still had phone booths, you could put all the professors who are actually on campus into one.
What would happen if the White House hired no one but academics to run the country? I guess we know the answer to that one.
We give students a brick of information, followed by another brick, followed by another brick, followed by another brick, until they graduate, at which point we assume they have a house. What they have is a pile of bricks, and they don’t have it for long (Krohn).

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education. — Albert Einstein
Business school is nothing but a ticket to the dance. The rules you learn are a betrayed promise. Warren Buffett has it right: “Beware of geeks bearing formulas.” No company ever faces a generic problem; it faces a specific problem. It’s not that the bricks of the business rules, the maxims, the models don’t matter; they do. They just don’t matter as much as we think they do. They all sound good, but they don’t have much value in the real world. Powell: “Management techniques are not magic mantras but simply tools to be reached for at the right times.” Business school starts with cherished management theories and shoves the facts into those theories. Practice always deviates from theory.
Although I have tried to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant concepts, and give only the most important bricks, there is no prescriptive formula. We do not live in a world with simple linear cause and effect. We cannot control or fully understand the vagaries of the marketplace. Equilibrium taught in the texts seldom occurs; disequilibrium is the norm. There is nothing that reduces our businesses or personal lives to science.
Now the good news. If you understand the house, you can understand the bricks. If all you can do is understand the bricks, then you’ll never understand the house. We will look at the house, not just at the bricks, and add some mortar. By the time we are finished, you will have a better understanding of which is which.

When a subject becomes totally obsolete, we make it a required course. — Peter Drucker

Model versus Reality
I use models a lot (not the runway kind — I’ve been married for almost 50 years), both visual and verbal. Models are perfect; reality isn’t.
You’ll see some new ones here. The three most important are the Strategic-Thinking, Knowledge, and Decision-Making models. For the most part, the elements of these models aren’t original, but you might find the systematic progression of the elements new.
Most of the models are two dimensional; a few are three dimensional. Matrices oversimplify. They are useful for understanding a point but do not come anywhere close to capturing reality. Reality is multi-dimensional, with imprecise definitions, unknown knowledge, and unseen interactions.
Some exceptional strategic thinkers have done all of this naturally, without effort, their entire lives. They are the exceptions. Their brains are prewired with patterns of thought linking strategy, tactics, and moral reasoning (Gilkey, Caceda, and Kilts). The Strategic-Thinking, Knowledge, and Decision-Making models are for the rest of us; they are helpful checklists to make sure we have covered everything