By: Harvard Busines Publishing/Bill Taylor

The Economist owes much of its popularity to its knack for challenging conventional wisdom. In a recent column, it applied its contrarian mindset to the question of what kinds of leaders make the best CEOs, making the case that what the world needs now are more “raging egomaniacs” and “tightly wound empire-builders” rather than the “faceless” and “anonymous” bosses running so many companies today — “bland and boring men and women who can hardly get themselves noticed at cocktail parties.”

The crux of The Economist’s argument relies on what’s known as the Great Man Theory of History. After trumpeting the virtues of business geniuses such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Lou Gerstner, and Jack Welch, it then generalizes from this handful of larger-than-life moguls: “The best ambassadors for business are the outsize figures who have changed the world and who feel no need to apologise for themselves or their calling.”

It’s an intriguing essay and a good read. It’s also a false choice — and a bad reading of history. For one thing, when it comes to larger-than-life CEOs, I can name as many scoundrels and failures as I can geniuses and world-changers. There’s a reason Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind titled their bestseller on the Enron disaster The Smartest Guys in the Room, and it goes beyond the criminality those deeply flawed executives displayed. That familiar phrase captures the mindset too many of us expect even our most honest leaders to display — the assumption that being “in charge” means having all the answers. In simpler times, fierce personal confidence, a sense of infallibility as a leader, might have been be a calling card of success. Today it is a warning sign of failure, whether from bad judgment, low morale among disillusioned colleagues, or sheer burnout from the pressures of always having to be right.

That’s not a case (and here’s the false choice) for aiming low or being dull. The best executives I’ve met understand that there is a vast difference between advancing big, exciting, important goals — aspiring to change the game in your field — and assuming that you know best how to achieve those goals. Sure, great leaders champion new ideas and disruptive points of view — they have vision. But that doesn’t mean they have to see the future on their own.

Just because you’re in charge doesn’t mean you have to have all the answers. Real business geniuses don’t pretend they know everything.

To be sure, it’s easier to divide leaders into either-or categories: risk-takers vs. bureaucrats, those with ambition vs. those with humility. Fortune just named Steve Jobs its CEO of the Decade — and while it’s hard to argue with the choice, it’s even harder to reproduce his talents. The problem with trumpeting the virtues of one-of-a-kind geniuses like Steve Jobs is that — duh — there is only one of them! Memo to The Economist: It’s not a good idea to urge CEOs to emulate leaders whose success is, almost by definition, impossible to copy.

Keith Sawyer, a creativity guru at Washington University in St. Louis, has literally written the book on where good ideas come from. In Group Genius, he explains how few leaders are prepared to recognize the messy and hard-to-manage truth about the real logic of business success. Many (perhaps most) executives subscribe to what Sawyer calls script-think — “the tendency to think that events are more predictable than they really are.” In fact, he says, “Innovation emerges from the bottom up, unpredictably and improvisationally, and it’s often only after the innovation has occurred that everyone realizes what’s happened. The paradox is that innovation can’t be planned, it can’t be predicted; it has to be allowed to emerge.”

Harriet Rubin, one of the great innovators in business-book publishing, and an accomplished author in her own right, uses different language to make a similar point about leadership and innovation. “Freedom is actually a bigger game than power,” she reminds executives who are eager to make their mark in the world. “Power is about what you can control. Freedom is about what you can unleash.”

The most effective leaders no longer want the job of solving their organization’s biggest problems or identifying its best opportunities on their own. Instead, they recognize that the most powerful ideas can come from the most unexpected places: the quiet genius buried deep inside the organization, the collective genius that surrounds the organization, the hidden genius of customers, suppliers, and other constituencies who would be eager to share what they know if only they were asked. For companies, and the CEOs at their helms, those are the smartest (and most sustainable) sources of greatness.

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By: Peter Bregman/ Harvard Business Publishing

Many years ago, when I first started my consulting firm, a friend of mine, Jane*, who worked for a large company, suggested I speak with her colleague, a man named Fred, who might be in a position to hire Bregman Partners.

So I called Fred, mentioned Jane and asked to meet with him. I’m very busy, Fred told me, let’s just talk on the phone.

But I knew the phone wouldn’t cut it. How about lunch?, I suggested. Or a drink after work? Or maybe just fifteen minutes in person somewhere?

Fred finally agreed to a short lunch. Then he canceled. We rescheduled. He canceled again. We rescheduled again. He canceled again. It was clear he didn’t want to meet with me. I almost gave up.

Here’s what I realized though: if I could avoid reacting to my feelings of frustration or hurt, then the cost to me of rescheduling the meeting was a two minute phone call with Fred’s secretary. And the upside was potentially enormous.

So I kept rescheduling until, one day, several months later, Fred didn’t cancel and we had lunch. Which was very quick, of course, but long enough for me to ask him to let me submit a proposal. A couple of weeks after I sent it to him, he left me a short message explaining that I had missed the mark but he’d keep me in mind. Right.

I felt affronted. All that work I put in and all I got in return was a voicemail? Again, I almost walked away.

But instead I called and asked for another lunch to understand what I misunderstood. He declined but suggested I speak with his colleague, Lily, who was in a different department and might have a need for my services.

So I set up a meeting with Lily. Who canceled. As I prepared to reschedule I noticed something unexpected: I started to enjoy the process of trying to get in, the challenge of making the sale. It became a game to me and my goal was to keep playing until, at some point, I’d say the right thing to the right person and get my foot in the door. I was, surprisingly, having fun.

And I was starting to be good at it. Scheduling. Rescheduling. Finding a way to keep the conversation going. You’d think it wouldn’t be something hard or useful to become good at but you’d be wrong on both counts.

Most of our jobs hinge on repetition. That’s how we become good at anything. The problem is we give up too soon because anything we do repetitively becomes boring.

That is, unless we have a peculiar taste for the task; if it captures our interest. For some reason, maybe we don’t even understand — and we don’t have to — we enjoy it.

That’s how I learned how to do a handstand. It always seemed completely out of reach for me. But then someone told me they learned as an adult. So I figured I could learn too. It took six months but now I can, somewhat reliably, stand on my hands.

Which has led me to believe that anyone can do anything. As long as three conditions exist:

1. You want to achieve it
2. You believe you can achieve it
3. You enjoy trying to achieve it

We often think we only need the first two but it’s the third condition that’s most important. The trying is the day-to-day reality. And trying to achieve something is very different than achieving it. It’s the opposite actually. It’s not achieving it.

If you want to be a great marketer, you need to spend years being a clumsy one. Want to be a great manager? Then you’d better enjoy being a poor one long enough to become a good one. Because that practice is what it’s going to take to eventually become a great one.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell discusses research done at the Berlin Academy of Music. Researchers divided violin students into three categories: the stars, the good performers, and the ones who would become teachers but not performers. It turns out that the number one predictor of which category a violinist fell in was the number of hours of practice.

The future teachers had practiced 4,000 hours in their lifetime. The good performers, 8,000 hours. And those who were categorized as stars? Every single one of them had practiced at least 10,000 hours.

And here’s the compelling part: There wasn’t a single violinist who had practiced 10,000 hours who wasn’t a star. In other words, 10,000 hours of practice guaranteed you’d be a star violinist. According to Gladwell, 10,000 hours of practice is the magic number to become the best at anything.

Which is why you’d better enjoy trying to achieve your goals. Because you’ll never spend 10,000 hours doing anything you don’t enjoy. And if you don’t enjoy the trying part you’ll never do it long enough to reach your goal.

Eventually, after five or six cancelled meetings, Lily and I met for lunch. Which, as it turned out, was perfect timing. When we finally met, she had a real need, which hadn’t existed when we first started scheduling a meeting.

By this time, I was familiar to her and the company even though I had never done any work for them. I had been around for months and they trusted me because I followed through on every commitment I made to them.

That year I signed a large contract with Lily’s company. Twelve years later, they’re still a big client of Bregman Partners. And they still cancel lots of meetings with me.

*Some information has been changed to protect people’s privacy.

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By: Anthony Tjan/ Harvard Business Publishing

I’ve been involved in many negotiations in my career. They’ve all been different in some ways, and alike in others. But through them all, I’ve identified four “golden rules” to be the most helpful towards productive negotiation outcomes. The rules parallel different stages of a negotiation:

1. The background homework: Before any negotiation begins, understand the interests and positions of the other side relative to your own interests and positions. Put these points down and spend time in advance seeing things from the other side.

2. During the process: Don’t negotiate against yourself. This is especially true if you don’t fully know the position of the other side. Much is learned about what the other side really wants during the actual negotiation process. Stay firm on your initial set of positions and explain your rationale but don’t give in too early on the points. Wait to better understand which points are more important to the other side.

3. The stalemate: There will often come a point in a negotiation where it feels like there is zero room for either side to budge. Two sides are stuck on their positions and may have lost sight of the overall goals of the negotiation. Emotion may have overtaken logic at this point. If you recognize that you’ve reached this point, see if you can give in to the other side on their issue in exchange for an unrelated point that is relatively more important to you. An example helps clarify: during a friend’s recent car purchase he negotiated the price to a level that the dealer did not want to move any more. My friend was going to leave when he asked if they would do the deal if he took the car price the dealer wanted, but give him a substantial discount on a brake job he needed on his second car. They said yes – likely since the discount on the brake job was an easier give (less profit on a job, but on a job they would not have gotten). Yet there was higher relative value of that discount for my friend who would have had to pay higher on the brake repair elsewhere. Bottom line – there is usually negotiation currency outside of the last area you are focused on negotiating. Use different “currencies” and you might get there.

4. To close or not to close: My partner John Hamel always reminds me that the uber golden rule of negotiation is to always let someone else walk away. Whether you drive too hard a bargain, cannot reconcile on key terms, or feel that the deal is just too rich for your blood, make the offer you want and let the other side walk if they don’t want it. This is not to say to be offensive or to low ball, but rather to be honest, straightforward on what you are willing to do and explain that you understand if it does not work for them and that it is the best you can do. A great example to end on is how John Hamel recently purchased his new home. He had found a unit in a townhouse complex that he liked and was ready to close on it at price x per square foot. That said, he thought he’d take a shot on a larger and more recently renovated unit by advising that owner (who he knew was interested in selling) that he was going to be accepting a price on the other unit in 24 hours, but would take their unit at an even more aggressive price per square foot if they were interested with an immediate close. Remarkable thing, he ended up with the larger unit and one of the best units in the complex.

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