Do you want a company or do you just want to get something done?

By David McElroy · September 1, 2020

I’m never going to be a leader, at least not the kind the “leadership books” teach you to be. And I’m finally OK with that.

When I was still in my “empire-builder” stage of my 20s, I read every business book I could find. I studied the ideas of popular writers such as Peter Drucker, Tom Peters and W. Edwards Deming. There were many more. The books often seemed profound as I read them, but I slowly realized something.

The concepts and management tips in the books turned out to be useless in the small companies I managed. No matter how brilliant the concepts seemed — and no matter how well they worked for the people in the small companies described — my employees looked at me blankly when I tried the ideas.

This left me confused about myself. Was I just a terrible leader? Was I doing something wrong? If so, why did people in organizations naturally turn to me when work needed to be done?

I’m thinking about this old topic because of something I randomly remembered this week which happened when I was in college.

I was mostly studying journalism and political science at the University of Alabama, but I took a class in television production one semester. I had no interest in doing any work in film or television at the time, but I thought it might be fun. Maybe even useful one day.

The instructor was a man who had worked in both film production and television production. We were learning studio production, so what we were doing was more like live television than making a film. Every student was assigned a particular role for a production and this rotated. I might be running a studio camera for one production, then operating the sound board next, then maybe manning the switcher. Everybody got at least one turn at each role — and every student had to write and direct his or her own production.

Most of the student productions were predictably awful. Even the people who had decent ideas had trouble converting those ideas into anything that looked decent on screen. They had trouble giving orders — via headset — to the students who were operating the other dozen or so technical positions.

Most people simply couldn’t keep their minds clear enough about all that had to happen — and which orders to give to which operators at different times — so there tended to be horrible gaps or switching errors. The instructor tried to hide his frustration, but it was obvious as the weeks went on.

It was finally my turn to direct the piece I’d written. It was a satire about someone being fired as a television news anchor. I held a pre-production meeting with my cast and crew, then we started the live-on-tape performance. I firmly gave orders from the control room to the camera operators, actors, technical director and the people in the other technical roles.

The production wasn’t flawless, but it was very acceptable for something that hadn’t been rehearsed and which used students who barely knew what they were doing. As I went through my preparation and production, the instructor didn’t say a word. He just stood to the back of the room and left us alone.

After we were finished and I had called “clear,” everybody started moving to pack up equipment and then collect personal items and leave the studio. I was gathering my things, too, when the instructor called me over to the side of the room while everybody else was talking and getting ready to leave. He had a serious look on his face, so I wondered if I had done something wrong.

“You’re a natural director,” he said quietly, as though he didn’t want other students to hear what he was saying. “You understood exactly what that needed to look like and sound like, and you knew how to bring it all together. You knew how to give the commands to everybody else to do what you saw in your mind. They followed your commands quickly and easily. That’s a gift. I can teach people to operate any equipment, but I can’t teach what you intuitively knew how to do. Don’t forget that.”

My ego swelled, of course. I felt sky high. I felt special. But since I had no interest in film or television at the time, I didn’t think that much about it. Even now, though, I can still see the earnest look on his face as he praised something he saw in me as a rank amateur.

I hadn’t thought of this story for a long time. When it crossed my mind this week, I started thinking about times like this — times when people have followed me simply because I knew how to give the orders.

It was this way when I took informal control of a high school project that I told you about last year. It happened at a small daily newspaper where I was the youngest employee in the newsroom and was a terrible manager but an excellent editor. It’s happened other times.

But I was unsuccessful in building a company. What’s more, I now understand that I’ll never be any good at building companies. And I’ve found myself thinking — maybe for the first time consciously — that these are two entirely different skills.

I’m really good at getting things done. I might bruise some feelings. I might not be popular with everybody afterward. But the job will be done and it will be something we’ll be proud of.

I’m really bad at building organizations and setting long-term incentives and growing employees into their roles. I know all that is necessary. I just don’t want to do it. I have no interest in administration. I have no interest in doing all the necessary hard work that takes place between the high-pressure events on which I thrive.

This is why the newspapers where I worked as a general manager and as a publisher won awards for flashy things we did. It’s why we did beautiful big projects and impressed everybody every now and then, but nobody in upper management of my company cared.

I understand now that the company for which I was a publisher was a terrible fit for me. The upper management didn’t really care whether we did anything impressive. They didn’t care whether we won awards. They didn’t care that our readers loved us. All they cared about was administering the company on a daily basis and turning in reports to the regional accounting center.

They hired someone with a skillset that didn’t come close to matching what they thought was important. And I was slow to realize that. I just thought they were idiots.

I’ve known for a long time now that I will never be part of building a company unless I have the right partner — someone who likes and enjoys the parts that I hate. I used to see that as a weakness in myself. I used to think I was flawed in those ways.

Now it seems perfectly fine.

When I was young, I was trying to force myself to be something I wasn’t, because that’s what I thought a real business leader would be. I know now that’s not who I am. I understand it’s not what I’ll ever be.

I’m really good at some things. I’m really terrible at other things. Understanding the difference — and finding a way to stick with what I’m good at — is the key to me being happy and successful, instead of angry and miserable.

I admire the people who build organizations. I just don’t want to be one of them.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts