Quote of the Week
From Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs:
You have to, in your own life, get people to want to work with you and want to help you. The organizational chart, in my opinion, means very little. I need my bosses’ goodwill, but I need the goodwill of my subordinates even more. Because they can make it easy for me to get information. They’ll come to me and say: “Look at this. Do this.” Or they can give it to me begrudgingly, if they’re hostile.
Now why would they be hostile? Why would they be negative? Why would they be slow to give me information? Because they thought I wasn’t good for them. They thought I’d be bad for them.
Life is always about contracts that you make with people. Very few of them are written. Most of them are implicit, and most of them evolve out of a course of dealing and understanding. And if you are good for your people, they’ll be good to you, and help you and help propel you up in your career.
By the way, being good to them doesn’t mean you pay them more or you’re more liberal, or you let them get away with things. Most people, what they want is to be better. They want to work for a great organization. They want to feel good about themselves. They want to not so much get promoted, as be promotable. They want to evolve. And if you’re the kind of person that they think will help them do that, they’ll give you a loyalty that’s the most sincere kind of loyalty.
from NYTimes interview: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/business/13corner.html?sq=lessons%20learned%20at%20goldman&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=print
related posts
-
Quote of the Week: Living Within Your Means
From an article in the NYT by Ron Lieber, good financial advice from unusual sources – religious: Those who structure their standard of living to allow a little surplus control their circumstances. Those who spend a little more than they earn are controlled by their circumstances. They are in bondage. By N. Eldon Tanner, Church [...]
-
Quote of the Week: True Failure is Not Doing
"If you stand up and be counted, from time to time you may get yourself knocked down. But remember this: A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good." — Thomas J. Watson, Jr.
-
Quote of the Week: Creating New Choices
Roger Martin, Dean at the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto, gave an interesting presentation at the Opening Plenary at the Skoll World Forum today: Whether or not Barack Obama is your President or, as is the case for me, another country’s leader, most of you, I suspect, watched the President’s inauguration speech [...]
-
Quote of the Week: Madiba’s Eight Lessons
Richard Stengel summarized Nelson Mandela’s eight leadership lessons – Madiba’s Rules (Mandela’s clan name) in TIME Magazine: All of them are calibrated to cause the best kind of trouble: the trouble that forces us to ask how we can make the world a better place. No. 1: Courage is not the absence of fear — [...]
-
Quote of the Week: Let America Be
A few weeks back I attended a play hosted by Stanford Law School, a one-man-show by Lawrence Fishburne about Thurgood Marshall. At the end, retiring Justice Marshall quotes a poem from his classmate Langston Hughes: Oh, let America be America again The land that never has been yet — And yet must be — the [...]
post a new comment