Let My People Go Surfing

SEAL team soldiers have a leader but are really self-managed as they have all bought into the mission, know what their individual job is, and know the others’ jobs as well. If the leader is disabled, any of the others can take over.

When you look to hire management, it’s important to know the difference between a manager and a true leader.

Leaders take risks, have long-term vision, create the strategic plans, and instigate change.

The best leadership is by example.

I’ve found that whenever we have had a top manager or CEO leave the company, there is no chaos. In fact, the work continues as if they were still there. It’s not that they were doing nothing but that the system is pretty much self-regulating.

Maybe a few people take advantage of our flextime policy, but none of our best employees would want to work in a company that didn’t have that trust.

groups sized between four and seven were most successful at problem solving,

it’s hard to find one person who can do everything well. For example, the “shoot from the hip turnaround artist” you hire to downsize your company may not be the CEO you need to run things after the company has been stabilized. And the person in charge of creating a new retail store usually has a different set of skills from the manager of a store that’s been open and operating. The first needs to be expedient and creative, the second more nurturing.

The longevity of a CEO’s career is directly proportional to his or her problem-solving skills and ability to adapt and grow with the job.

Only by confronting the problems and trying to solve them yourself will you prevent them from happening again in another form.

The key to confronting and truly solving any problem is to continue to ask enough questions to get past all the symptoms and reach the actual cause,

When there is no crisis, the wise leader or CEO will invent one. Not by crying wolf but by challenging the employees with change. You might think that

a wise leader knows that you also move when everything is going too well; everyone is laid-back, lazy, and happy. If you don’t move now, then you may not be able to move when the real crisis happens.

the cure for depression is action

Evil always wins if we do nothing.

In fact, the government’s indicator for the health of the economy is the GDP (gross domestic product), which measures the economic health of a nation by the value of the quantity of goods produced, not by the cleanliness and availability of air and water, the health of soil, the biodiversity of ecosystems, or the temperature of oceans—the elements that support and sustain the natural resources necessary to build products these corporations sell. Rather, it has become a race to squeeze the last drop of oil out of the earth at all costs including the potential and too often realized risks of hazardous spills, contamination of nearby aquifers, and toxic air pollution.

I don’t really believe that humans are evil; it is just that we are not very intelligent animals.

We are certainly not smart enough to foretell the long-term results of our everyday actions.

We need to recognize that most of the damage we cause to the planet is the result of our own ignorance and that we cannot afford to go about blindly doing unnecessary damage simply because we lack curiosity.

We wanted to do the right thing, we didn’t want to cause unnecessary harm, but in the beginning we hardly even knew what questions to ask.