"What Got You Here Won't Get You There" by Marshall Goldsmith

Business owners and CEO’s seldom do a post success analysis as to how they got from one point of success to the next level. But according to Marshall Goldsmith’s book “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There” they would probably find out that it had a lot to do with not doing some things. The author notes that getting to the next level requires, that you “Know What to Stop” as well as what to do. Seldom do you attend a seminar or speech within an organization that is titled “Stupid Things Our Top People Do That We Need to Stop Doing Now”!

He further explains his point by using the Time Warner/AOL merger debacle. Gerald Levin was a much admired chairman of Time Warner in the 1990’s. He was hailed as a visionary who foresaw the future of cable TV. In 2000 he merged Time Warner with AOL a new online service. He was convinced the two companies together would dominate for decades. However, it was a mitigated disaster. The stock lost 80 percent of its value. Thousands of employees lost the majority of their retirement savings; and Levin lost his reputation and his job.

Now what do you suppose would have happened if Levin had said no to the merger. We would have probably never have heard about it. It would have been just one more bad decision avoided. But if he had said no; his reputation and net worth would have probably stayed intact. Goldsmith comments that we reward ourselves all the time for avoiding bad decisions outside of the work place but within the company walls it gets very little attention. He recommends before you make another To Do list, make a To Stop List.

In addition, Goldsmith lays out 20 workplace habits that you need to break in order to reach that next level of success. They are:

• Habit #1: Winning too much – the need to win at all cost
• Habit #2: Adding too much value – the overwhelming desire to add our two cents to every discussion
• Habit #3: Passing judgment – The need to rate others and impose our will on them
• Habit #4: Making destructive comments – The needless sarcasms and cutting remarks that we think make us sound sharp and witty
• Habit #5: Starting with “No,” “But,” or “However”: The overuse of these negative qualifiers which secretly say to everyone, I’m right. You’re wrong.”
• Habit #6: Telling the world how smart we are: The need to show people we’re smarter than they think we are
• Habit #7: Speaking when angry: Using emotional volatility as a management tool.
• Habit #8: Negativity or “Let me explain why that won’t work”: The need to share our negative thoughts even when we weren’t asked
• Habit #9: Withholding Information: The refusal to share information in order to maintain an advantage over others.
• Habit #10: Failing to give proper recognition: The inability to praise and reward.
• Habit #11: Claiming credit that we don’t deserve: The most annoying way to overestimate our contribution to any success.
• Habit #12: Making excuses: The need to reposition our annoying behavior as a permanent fixture so people excuse us for it.
• Habit #13: Clinging to the past: The need to deflect blame away from ourselves and onto events and people from our past; a subset of blaming everyone else.
• Habit #14: Playing favorites: Failing to see that we re treating someone unfairly
• Habit #15: Refusing to express regret: The inability to take responsibility for our actions, admit we’re wrong, or recognize how our actions affect others.
• Habit #16: Not listening: The most passive-aggressive form of disrespect for colleagues
• Habit #17: Failing to express gratitude: The most basic form of bad manners
• Habit #18: Punishing the messenger: The misguided need to attach the innocent who are usually only trying to help us.
• Habit #19: Passing the buck: The need to blame everyone but ourselves
• Habit #20: An excessive need to be “me”: Exalting our faults as virtues simply because they’re who we are.

Goldsmith actually has one more habit – Goal Obsession. He has given this habit its own special place because he feels that by itself it is not a flaw. However, it becomes a problem when we put achieving it above all else. It is non transactional; it is not something you do to another person.

This habit is one that is necessary to success but can actually be the cause of our failure when we confuse the achievement of the goal with the actual accomplishment of the mission. The author goes on to explain this by telling us that “It comes from misunderstanding what we want in our lives. We think we’d be truly happy (or at least happier) if only we made more money, or lost thirty pounds, or got the corner office. So, we pursue those goals relentlessly. What we don’t appreciate until much later is that in obsessing about making money, we might be neglecting the loved ones – i.e., our family – for whom we are presumable securing that money; in obsessing about our weight with extreme diets we might actually end up doing more harm than good to our bodies; in pursuing the corner office we might trample upon the colleagues at work whose support and loyalty we will need later on to stay in that corner office or move even higher. We start out with a road map heading in one direction but end up in the wrong town.”

I found this book so compelling that I had the 21 habits put into poster form and have posted them in my office. Goldsmith’s “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There” provides a lot of insight to how to get to that next level of success and I highly recommend it as a great read.