Rules for Leaders (Continued)

46. Great leaders are great pols. Time for a reality check. Leadership is not for the lily-livered. Taking the responsibility to lead others into battle -- whether it's at war or at work -- isn't for the faint of heart. It's not just the casualties that you need to be able to stomach. It's the real world of organizational politics and inside deal making: doing what it takes to get things done. Dwight Eisenhower didn't become president because of his skills as a general, he became a general because of his skills as a politician. I'm not endorsing playing dirty. I'm just telling you that you can't pretend that the game won't get rough and that you can stay above the fray and still be an effective leader. Period.

47. Leaders make meaning. John Seely Brown, the former head of ceaselessly innovative Xerox PARC, nailed it, especially for these totally insane times: A leader's job isn't just to make decisions and to make products or services. A leader's job is also to make meaning. Why? Because in times like these, people depend on their leaders to absorb all of the chaos, all of the information, all of the change, and to find some meaningful pattern and compelling purpose in the midst of all of the splatter.

48. Leaders learn. The single worst thing that can happen to you as a leader? You exhaust your intellectual capital. Before you became a leader, you accumulated that capital by going to conferences and taking notes. You networked like a lunatic. You kept your eyes and ears open, and you came up with the totally original synthesis that propelled you into the front ranks of leadership. And then you got bogged down in the perpetual politics of implementation and started to dissipate all of that accumulated wisdom. And because you were so damn busy doing, you stopped learning. You became a broken record for yesterday's paradigm. (Hey, it boosted you into orbit.) You listened to yesterday's (closed) circle of "brilliant" advisors. You started to quote yourself! (As I said in In Search of Excellence in 1982 . . .) This is only natural -- if you let it happen. Leaders work double overtime to keep it from happening. Learn fast, or get left behind fast.

49. Leaders. . .? I left this one open: You tell me. What is the one key idea for leadership in whacked-out times that you would propose? You can go to TomPeters.com (http://www.tompeters.com/no49.htm) and contribute your idea there, or you can send your thoughts to me via email (tom@tompeters.com). What's the one-liner that captures the essence of leadership for you? What do you think leaders need to do to win in the next five years?

50. Leaders know when to leave. Much good work gets undone by those who stay beyond their expiration dates. And it's not just baseball players who do this. It's also CEOs of megacorps. How will you know? When you know an idea won't work before you even try it. When you see the same problem coming around on the merry-go-round, and you've solved it so many times that it's no longer interesting. When you became the leader by challenging conventional wisdom, and now you represent the status quo. When you stop doing numbers one through 49 on this list. At that point, go back to number one. Start over.

Tom Peters, author, speaker, learner, and listener, says that leadership is the scarcest commodity. What do you think? Contact him by email (tom@tompeters.com).