The Legend Continues: Why The Bad Advice Persists

In our last post, The Legend Begins: How Business Biographies Can Offer Bad Advice, we described the distorted picture that can appear when successful business leaders look at their career path in the rearview mirror.

But why does this mistaken view persist, unchallenged and uncorrected?

The mindless insanity called “maximizing shareholder value” and its quarterly “scorecard” put a premium on the accurate predicting of results above all other competencies, and so in order to be considered successful, the senior manager has to be really, really good at doing that, regardless of whatever else he or she was able to do. And in any good business yarn about doing things right, it seems almost mandatory to include a huge slug about meticulous planning and execution, owing to their unique skills and for which they should be richly (sometimes ridiculously) compensated.

Success is largely a matter of a lot of the right things happening at the right time — some of which were deliberately or even forcibly made to happen by someone, and others that happened pretty randomly — but which were followed by opportunistic moves by leaders paying close attention in order to capitalize on them.

But top execs know they’re not going to be paid the big bucks for standing at the helm of a ship that’s mostly on auto pilot, and then yanking the wheel this way or that once in awhile at the precise moment it was needed, though that’s a wonderful and greatly underrated skill, and it’s often responsible for how good things actually happen.

Most people give themselves too much credit for planning and executing according to the plan, and too little credit for being quick learners, nimble, agile, resourceful and responsive to new information and situations as they emerge.

Successful people also often overestimate the amount of control they can and should have over a situation, and underestimate the influence they naturally have on it. Managers waste valuable time and energy trying in vain to get control of something and getting angry about the loss or lack of control, when that time would be better spent being aware of the influence they are having on others, minute-by-minute, and managing their own attitudes and behaviors to help move things along organically.

Strangely, successful people often tend to underestimate the role played by their own resilience and ability to bounce back from failures and set-backs as part of their successes.

There’s a new kind of business literature going around now where the author gleefully and joyously describes failures in very positive terms. Make no mistake, any failure has consequences, loss of momentum, loss of morale, wasting of time and money, and should not be taken lightly. But there is something to the fact that failure is not all bad if it comes with valuable lessons that can be put to use right away productively.

Whether the spinner of any particular business story actually calls himself out on a failure or treats it as all part of the plan, the goal of the story is to paint himself in the best possible managerial light.  It’s important to remember the brutal fact that there are very few people who have been purely 100% bad or good managers. Whether we realize or admit it or not, most of us have been good managers, great managers and poor managers all at various times in our careers. Hell, sometimes at various points in a single day!

It’s understandable that people will rewrite the history of their own success — that they think they have different skills from the ones they really had that helped them, or that they honestly believe they were 100% great managers all of the time.

It becomes a problem when they put this stuff out there for consumption by the rest of us, misleading us and depriving us of what might have been a genuine opportunity to learn the real story from the trials and errors of a manager who made it big.