I’m pretty certain - disappointedly so - that the story below is apocryphal. But it serves.

This is a classified ad that ran in a London newspaper in 1900:

Men Wanted for Hazardous Journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success - Ernest Shackleton

They were inundated with inquiries.

As managers, we have an opportunity to be cynical, or reach for greatness. We can complain about what’s going on - and there will always be plenty to complain about - or we can make a case for greatness, and then lead the way.

Leo Burnett said it eloquently: “When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won’t end up with a handful of mud, either.”

Your best people secretly desire this from you. What better reason?

I spoke with a friend of mine recently who chastised me for not listening to more podcasts.  (It wasn’t Mike - he’s the kind one of the two of us, and just smiles at me and helps me get better without chastising me).  In the course of the conversation, he casually mentioned that the OTHER thing he disagreed with me about was, “reading - I don’t see the point.  I’m done with school.”

 Yes, we’re still friends.

And, I was quite stunned.  Reading, we believe, is a core skill that managers must engage in regularly as part of industry and competitive research and personal development, to say nothing of citizenship (local, national, or world). 

If you don’t want to hear it from us, here’s something from Melinda Gates: “Bill and I read a lot.”  They’re pretty smart… and they’re reading more than you and I.  (Dang!)

You don’t stop learning when you get old, you get old when you stop learning. And, for now, the best way to learn is to read. 

One of my significant failures last year was sporadic, insufficient, over-promised and under-delivered blog posting.  I spent a good deal of time thinking about this in the past month, and have determined that a big part of that was my desire to be a (very) good writer.  I would see something from which I could easily project a post idea, but then kill the idea with “perfect writing” concerns.

ONE solution to that problem is simply to write more, with less concerns about the tightness and elegance of my writing.  Thus, this is a “soup post” - I’ve just thrown everything in, and tried to avoid making a perfect little bisque.

 I read an article recently in a magazine while traveling; I think it was on the final page, a golf magazine.  It was an interview with Seth  Waugh, who is the Deutsche Bank Americas CEO.  The FIRST thing that caught my eye about the interview was that the interviewer was Tom Friedman, who wrote The World is Flat, one of our all-time favorite books here at Manager Tools.  (I cannot tell you how hard it is to include that tidbit, insofar as it doesn’t illuminate my larger point.  See?  Soup.)

What I really liked about the interview was the point he made about Tiger Woods, and how it relates to us as managers.  Mr. Waugh said that Tiger has “the most bizarre life, where everyone is constantly screaming and yelling his name.”

 That hit me as QUITE like most managers I know, believe it or not.  No, nobody’s “screaming your name”, but you do have hundreds of things (email, anyone?) jostling for your attention.

Mr. Waugh shared that when he talks with Tiger, despite all the noise, Tiger focuses like a lighthouse on him.  He shuts out the noise, and really pays attention.  Rather than being “thin and wide”, Tiger is, “a mile deep and an inch wide.”

I’m going to come back to this topic plenty of times in the years ahead, but for now, here’s my point.  Managers who aspire to greatness better learn to narrow their focus and deepen their knowledge.  It is not enough - worse, it is inefficient and ineffective and therefore wrong - to try to do everything.  And this is nothing new: Peter Drucker said this 30-40 years ago.

PS: I realize now that this post’s theme and title might more precisely be “potpourri”, but I couldn’t bring myself to do so.  “Soup post” sounds better… and besides, that’s the point: last year, I wouldn’t have written it.  I even thought about making it about New Year’s Resolutions, tying the whole “narrowing” concept to weight loss.  But I didn’t.

It’s all because of Tom Friedman.