Awesome leadership book

It’s not often I rave about leadership books, but I’m going to rave about this one. It’s by the then CEO of Avis (“we try harder”) who distilled his lessons on leading into a set of very short chapters on a set of topics. Some of the topics are listed below.

It’s really hard to summarize but to give you a flavor of the kind of advice, here’s a few:

• On advertising: Don’t hire a master to paint you a masterpiece and then assign as roomful of schoolboy-artists to look his shoulder and suggest improvements.
• All decisions should be made as low as possible in the org. The charge of the Light Brigage was ordered by an officer who wasn’t there looking at the territory.
• If (board of directors) can ask important questions that the CEO hasn’t already thought of, he ought to be replaced
• The world seems to be divided into those that produce the results and those who get the credit. Amen to that.
• When he joined Avis, he agreed with the senior partner at Lazard that he wouldn’t mention the stock price for two years. “Most investment bankers idea of a long term investment is 36 hours”. 🙂
• Install a vice-president in charge of anti-bureaucratization
• Most people in big companies are administered not led. They are treated as personnel, not people. Such employees lead only in the sense that the carved wooden figured leads the ship. 🙂
• An early sign of mistress is a sudden surge of creativity in an executive’s expense account
• Fire the whole personnel department
• If you have to have a policy manual, publish the 10 commandments
• Fire the whole purchasing department. They cost $10 in zeal for every $1 they save through purchasing acumen
• A sure sign of frustration is putting on weight. Watch for it on the people that work for you.
• On re-orgs: Should be undergone about as often as major surgery. “I was able to learn that we tend to meet any new situation by re-organizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization” – Petronius Arbiter (circa 60 AD).
• Organizations that have time to get into jurisdictional disputes are almost overstaffed.
• Man is a complicating animal. He only simplifies under pressure.
• …and more

Now the book is old (like 35 years old), but still super relevant. If you are leading any kind of organization, please do yourself a huge favor and stop reading this and go buy the book. I wish there were more books like this and not the usual fluff.