Traits and Habits of Great Leaders:
How the best leaders throughout history and across industries differ from the ordinary
Interview with Scott S. Smith
Scott Smith has had 1,800 articles and interviews published in 190 media, including Investor’s Business Daily, Entrepreneur, Success, Chief Executive, American Airlines’ American Way, United Airlines’ Hemispheres, and Los Angeles Magazine. His focus has been on the practices that distinguish great leaders from the rest and he has interviewed dozens of top CEOs, including Bill Gates, Meg Whitman, Mark Cuban, Larry Ellison, Howard Schultz, Lee Iacocca, Marilyn Carlson Nelson of the Carlson Companies, Whole Foods founder John Mackey, and Richard Branson. He has also talked with a wide variety of other high-achievers, including Stan Lee, Kathy Ireland, Bob Newhart, Dean Koontz, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, civil rights pioneer James Meredith, Kirk Douglas, Shark Tank’s Barbara Corcoran, 
former president of Mexico Vicente Fox, and leadership expert Frances Hesselbein. Based on his own experience as the manager of a dozen small companies and wide reading in history, he wrote Extraordinary People: Real Life Lessons on What It Takes to Achieve Success, which included in-depth analysis of the careers of people like Catherine the Great, Ray Charles Anne Rice, Jim Henson, and Simon Bolivar.
Watch or listen to the interview as Scott Smith shares stories of how the traits and habits of great leaders has made a difference throughout history.
Read the Interview
Hugh Ballou: Welcome to The Nonprofit Exchange. This is Hugh Ballou. As usual, we have a fascinating guest today. He is a friend from four or five years ago. We’ve had very little encounters, but every time we talk, I am greatly inspired. He is a writer. He is a nutritional specialist. He is a musician, a learned person who really enjoys discovery. The things that he has discovered about leaders is something we’re going to share today with you and with each other. Scott Smith is our guest today. Scott, one of the favorite quotes I have from the British composer/conductor Ralph Vaughan Williams is “Music did not reveal all of its secrets to just one person.” What I say to you is you can replace the word “music” with “leadership.” We can explore that. You have interviewed lots of people in your time. Scott, welcome. Tell us a little bit about your background and why you are interested in this topic of leadership.
Scott Smith: It’s great to be back, Hugh. One of the central things that you learn about leadership when you study leaders throughout history is they are all thirsty for knowledge. They are curious in the broadest way, not just in their particular specialty. It’s a process of continuous learning. Every time you think you get to the top of the mountain, there is another bigger mountain ahead. It makes it exciting. It keeps you humble.
My own background in this field that got me involved was I started out as the same time that I was one of the founders of Vegetarian World, which was the predecessor to Vegetarian Times. This was 1973 before veganism became fashionable. I was working with some famous nutritionists, and learning about taking care of yourself is important to having the energy to be successful. But at the same time as I was doing that nights and weekends, I had been by almost synchronistic accident thrown into a position of managing a couple of large natural food stores. This again was way ahead of it being fashionable. I had never worked in a store before. I fell into the job. It was a steep learning curve. I learned about the importance of training, of learning how to work with people who are very different, and what customer service is not just a slogan on the wall, but listening to people, trying to help them, putting them first, a lot of the basic principles. The more I was involved in running this newspaper and the retail end, I started reading business books, the more I realized there was a big disconnect between how most businesses are run and the knowledge that was out there from some of the great business authors and thinkers about how they should be run. You see this enormous turnover in the business world, tremendous unhappiness on the part of employees. Most companies get very low ratings on how they deal with their people. People leave, and you lose all that knowledge.
My interest in leadership and management really came out of my personal experience hands-on managing businesses. I went on after I sold the newspaper running some other small businesses. The same kinds of principles of success applied. Then, it was my privilege to move on, starting with an interview with Howard Schultz of Starbucks back in 1998 before anybody hardly knew who he was. He had just come out with his first book. He was my first major CEO interview. It’s been my privilege to interview hundreds of others and also go back into history and write about the great leaders of the past. Everybody from actors to generals. You find similar privileges no matter the time, place, or profession that helped people becoming leaders. I would say given the more limited resources, those who were in the nonprofit field have the biggest challenges. They can’t just throw money at a problem and hire the best CEO. A lot of this is pulling off by your bootstraps. The traits I can share about the people I have interviewed could be useful for people who are wondering why they are not achieving the success they’d like.
Hugh: I was just looking at my AdWords account as you were talking. I was remembering there are a lot of different definitions of leadership depending. Part of the lower functioning is there is the theory and the practice. My AdWords on Google, over the last few years, the term “what is leadership” has been searching 15,200 times. There is a lot of people out there trying to get their head around what leadership is. From your perspective studying leadership, and you have written for Investors Business Daily. And you have other places. You post on LinkedIn. You have two books, Extraordinary People: Real Life Lessons on What It Takes to Achieve Success, and a book on public speaking. That is how leaders show up as influencers. I would say that you know more about leadership than the average person on the street. If somebody said, “What is leadership anyway, Scott?”
Scott: One of our favorite leaders is Frances Hesselbein of the Frances Hesselbein Institute in New York. She says leadership has to do with character and the understanding of who you are, what your goals are, and how you get there with integrity. Management is tactics. It’s a lower level, more mundane thing. But you need both to be able to succeed. What I would say is that business books, especially biographies because that has been my specialty, and I have written for Entrepreneur and Success Magazine. Most of my 1,800 articles in 190 publications have been focused on what distinguishes the top performing companies and organizations from everybody else. Famously, Jim Collins wrote a couple of books, Good to Great, Built to Last. He showed what the gaps were between the #1 company in any industry.
Yes, that’s our friend, Frances. I have interviewed her twice. Last I checked, recently, she is 103, I think. I think she probably is the #1 centenarian in the world as a leader. There may not be a lot of competition in the field, but she is certainly looked up to by the army and everybody else. For those of you who don’t know, she was put in this position by Peter Drucker, who is considered the greatest mind and business manager. He invented modern business management study. He was asked who is the greatest leader you’ve ever known? He said Frances Hesselbein. That is the ultimate compliment. He plucked her from being the CEO of the Girl Scouts, which was funny because she only had a son, not a female child. He was so impressed with what she was able to do there in turning around the Girl Scouts that he brought her over to what was then called the Peter Drucker Leadership Institute. She has talked about this.
What I would say is that in order to be successful, you have to throw out the MBA. The problem with-
Hugh: That’s a good sound bite. I like that.
Scott: Over and over and over, whether I have been an employee or self-employed or interviewing major leaders, it’s absolutely astounding how many people who have academic credentials but not enough front-line experience think they know better than the people who are actually talking with the customer. This is almost like truism, where if you wonder why 99% of companies seem to get crummy ratings from their employees, none of them talk to the people who are on the front line. One of the companies that I have done a lot of work for recently is a good example of this. I collected a whole bunch of- There was a consensus in the places I worked with this company about what was wrong. It came down to the fact that people with MBAs who thought they were smarter than everybody else had bigger blinders to their faults and weaknesses and lack of knowledge than anybody else. You have to be humble and a continuous learner and have a desire to know the truth. It’s just much easier for executives to hand down these edicts that everybody lower down realizes are going to make things worse.
These are the problems that people run into are very common. You have to study the tactics of management. At the same time, keep your eye on the bigger picture. We can get into quite a bit of detail what those are. One of the things, aside from the tactics, which are very interesting, there is a lot of good resources, one of the things I have discovered that is common to true leaders that don’t necessarily go into a business handbook or a leadership handbook is first of all, all the great leaders that I’ve known or read about are big readers. They have a thirst for knowledge and continuous learning. One of my favorite guys, Steven Sample, the late head of USC, he wrote something called The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership. He said, “Quit reading trade magazines. Only read books that are at least 50 years old.” It’s like they have some wisdom that will last. If they are still available and popular, it means there is something- it’s like the great books, you might say.
Most of the great leaders love reading historical bios because history gives you perspective. I recently read James Madison’s book. General Madison was head of the US Defense Department. He said, “I told my Marine leaders that if they had not already read hundreds of books, they were functionally illiterate and a danger to their soldiers.” I share that. Somebody some years ago said, “Americans are alliterate. They could read if they wanted to.” As a freelance journalist, back in the day, 20 years ago, I would get a 5,000-word assignment in Los Angeles Magazine. Now I’m lucky if I get 1,300 words at half the rate. People have short attention spans. They think they can learn everything on Twitter. I think anybody who with some perspective realizes this is dangerous for business, society, nonprofits, politics. If you don’t read widely and know who the best opinion writers are in a particular field, then you’re lost in your own experience because your experience is extraordinarily limited.
The second trait I would say about some of the major leaders is they love travel. They are curious about other cultures. They don’t go to New Delhi just to solve a computer problem or interview somebody they want to hire. They want to get out and see the world. Americans are dangerously isolated from the rest of the world.
They take care of their health. You cannot have the energy to be a great leader unless you take care of yourself. Somebody doesn’t go to the gym and get some exercise. If they don’t eat vegetables, it will catch up with you. Guys are slow to understand that until it’s almost too late.
A couple of other things. They are self-aware, or they try to become self-aware. The Greeks on the Temple of Delphi famously had a little carved slogan that said, “Know thyself.” Too many leaders are perfectionists, workaholics. They have tempers. They’re anxious, depressed. These are all solvable problems. But you can’t solve them if you think you know everything and if you’re not self-aware.
Harville Hendrix, who wrote Getting the Love You Want among other things, he’s Oprah’s favorite relationship teacher. He showed in the early part of life we get brainwashed, we get subconsciously programmed, and we don’t understand why we’re getting in our own way all the time. One of my favorite leaders Chip Connelly, who had a boutique hotel chain in San Francisco for many years, wrote a book called How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow, who is a great psychologist. You have to understand yourself and why you’re getting in your own way and how you can get out of your way. If you have a larger philosophy about what life is about and how you can help others and you’re motivated by more than making money, that helps.
Aside from the tactical aspects of management, within the high-level leadership definition, there are a lot of elements that I find all the really successful true leaders are. Those are some of their traits. We can get into the tactics whenever you want.
Hugh: They read. Most of them are avid readers. They are well-traveled. They are self-aware. Leaders get out of the way.
Scott: Well-traveled. Get out of your own way. Self-aware. Avid readers. Take care of your health. All those things.
Hugh: Health-conscious. I would add to your list if I may. As a musician, I think good leaders are active listeners.
Scott: Good point. Also, music has another function. That is lead a balanced life. Don’t just be a workaholic at the office all the time and neglect your family. Get out. Have some fun. Be inspired. That is a good point.
Hugh: I have seven. We will add to the list. Those are important. What I flashed on the screen while you were talking was the second-year, first edition of The Nonprofit Performance 360 Magazine. You had introduced us to Frances Hesselbein. You also had an article. Frances saw me twice in New York in her private, exclusive office suite created by this big insurance company for her. She has never paid a penny for it. She has pictures of her receiving five Presidential Medals. Ronald Reagan asked Frances to be on his Cabinet. She said, “No, thank you. I am busy running the Girl Scouts.” She is feisty. I was up there for her 100th birthday. She had just had all the top brass from all the military come and salute her at her desk. That was amazing. One of those big streets, they stopped traffic so they could come and thank her for what she meant to them.
Leaders are primarily in my world people who influence others. They impact others’ lives. Over the course of time, let’s unpack a couple of these. We will get to what we can today. There is so much to talk about with leadership, and there are so many parts of leadership that people don’t realize are parts of leadership, like leaders are very active in building relationships. Without relationships, you don’t have leadership or communication. You don’t attract the funding you need. This relationship piece is the key component underneath all of those.
You have interviewed a lot of people and written a lot of articles. You have this vast knowledge base. Do you ever plan to do books on these articles? Would you have to work with one of your publishers to do that? Is there something on the horizon that you’d like to share some of these insights with the world at large?
Scott: When I originally published Extraordinary People, that project went awry because the publisher wasn’t the right one. What I was putting into the book were basically the stories about fascinating people. Half of them alive at the time, and half of them from history. Where for one reason or another, I couldn’t get an assignment for my column in Investors Business Daily. A third of my 1,800 articles have appeared there for some years before they went weekly, despite the name in June 2016. I was in there twice a week. I was cranking these studies out. Investors Business Daily is underappreciated. It has 385,000 readers. They have a strong interest not just in financial things, but in management and leaders and who the great role models are. If you go on Investors.com and plug my name into Search, you will see a couple hundred articles that are accessible to non-subscribers. They especially have given me an outlet for quite a bit of influence. The irony is I got a lot of assignments out of that book because after my editors read some of the things they weren’t originally interested in, they realized people like Jim Henson and Ray Charles, even though they weren’t conventional business leaders, there were a lot of lessons that could be applied. I still write for them.
At the same time, I have also been able to interview companies that are household names like the Hilton CEO, Chris Nassetta. Last year, believe it or not, up against Facebook and all these major and sexy tech companies, the Hilton was ranked the #1 place to work for in America. I asked him what made them so successful. Why did they get so much support from their employees? He said that the top management, including the CEO, have to spend at least one week every year on the front line, hauling bags, front desk, working in the kitchen, as a reminder of what the work really is because when you’re isolated, like most CEOs are, it’s real easy to forget and hand down edicts. He also empowers the employees, much like the Four Seasons does, to solve problems. When he came on, they had 3,000 rules, and he cut them down to 300. Make things simple, workable. You can prioritize 300. You can’t prioritize 3,000. It’s been my privilege to have all these great outlets. I really had all the influence one can imagine with these 190 different outlets. I’m semi-retired in the sense that I don’t have to crank out two columns a week now. I write maybe one a month for them now. I have some pretty interesting ones coming up. If you search on Investors.com, you will see my latest. A lot of these are companies that people don’t know, but they all have incredible lessons to teach any leader. Extraordinary People does have a lot of those articles, too.
Hugh: This book is almost a textbook for life. Years ago, somebody wrote about me on Forbes and what a conductor knows about leadership. You and I resonate on these topics. A conductor is a leader. We build high-performance teams and have tangible outcomes. We got to do it within time parameters. We have to do it in real time. Instantly, it’s obvious if you’re a good leader or bad leader because things can fall apart just like that. I was impressed that people were impressed that I was in Forbes, but I was also impressed by the insights that Cheryl Snapp Conner had gleaned from a short interview. Do people ever come back to you and thank you for what you have observed about them?
Scott: A lot of editors and writers have the wrong idea about the attitude of PR people. They think that if you show them a first draft, they will censor it. That’s not the case at all. It’s a big misconception. Journalists have never worked in business. They don’t have a real job, so they don’t understand how management works. PR people are sophisticated. I spent 14 years in financial PR frustrated by the likes of Forbes because quite often, they would go to press with some article that had important factual inaccuracies. Then of course, they would print the correction on page 45 in a corner. You couldn’t use the article online to share in your marketing because of the flaws. I made a point early in my career of letting the PR people fact-check them. They found mistakes. No matter how much you think you’ve studied a company. Cheryl is very sophisticated and accurate. I’ve had lots of people come back and say how much they appreciated it.
Some of these things, I have been able to do in person. My wife and I spent a couple hours with Lee Iacocca. He was a fascinating guy. We were interviewing him one after the other for a couple of different publications. We had a chance to hear him on the phone with the General Motors CEO at the time. It was a trippy experience. You would ask him a question, and then he would spend 15 minutes and explore it from every aspect starting at the beginning of the universe. As I was leaving, he said, “Scott, can you just make me sound intelligent?” A lot of these guys are much more personable, down to earth, caring, human, and appreciative that you are going to- They understand that it’s important to be a role model when you’re in public. They need to look at their own career and say, “Okay, I am going to have 10 minutes on Oprah. What can I say that will make a difference?” This goes back to wanting influence for a positive thing. The great leaders all understand that.
Cathy Ireland, who most people think of as a swimsuit model. She has a record of having been on covers. She started out when her modeling career was fading with a couple unique socks. Then she built it up into this massive specialty retail empire. I was able to go on her Fox Business Channel program. She was a personable, great ,caring person. She said, “If you’re going to have some good influence, you have to live your beliefs and your boundaries. You have to think ahead of time about where you might be compromised and where you will draw the line and never compromise your character. If somebody turns you down in your effort to succeed, just don’t let it go at that. Ask why, and learn something from it.” I have been able to have these fascinating conversations with people who might seem to be up on a pedestal, but they are still learning, grappling. They are excited about success and people. They take an interest in people. They usually have a really good sense of humor. The study of great leaders is just endlessly fascinating.
You can take it back, way back to the leader that Peter Drucker said was the greatest ever, and that was Cyrus the Great. There was this great book out called Xenophon’s Cyrus the Great: The Arts of Leadership, which is a translation and commentary by somebody named Larry Hedrick. You go back, way back into history, and you find out 2,500 years ago they had the same challenges we did. How do you criticize employees or co-workers? How do you train people to get the results you want? How do you stay informed? Improve communication? Cyrus the Great set up the original Pony Express. They didn’t have good roads, so he created them and a messenger system. Human beings have not changed in a long time. He was a really great example. He’s best known for letting the Jews return from what was Babylon and became Persia back to their home. He was religiously tolerant. He was also famous for forgiving his enemies and bringing them in. You don’t have permanent enemies. Some of the people you’re at odds with, and this certainly would apply to politics, you may need them at another point. You need to treat people as if they were temporarily opposing you on a certain issue, but never treat them in a way where you can’t work things out in the future when you have common interests. Enough of my rant.
Hugh: Absolutely. This is good stuff. You talked about ditching the MBA. I find a lot of people with MBAs don’t have a functional knowledge of how business works. I work with some corporate clients. I see people with MBAs come in as a sideways move into management without having worked their way up or having any knowledge. It’s wrecking the culture. I think of the Gallup surveys. 70% of employees are either disengaged or highly disengaged, which amounts to $500 billion in lost profits. We are wasting the money with people who don’t know who he thinks he is.
A good example of that is I have a good friend who is a senior mechanic for an airline. He got a new boss. He said, “Open the manual. This is how we’re going to do things now.” The guy put his hand up. He said, “What?” “I wrote that manual.” He didn’t even have the basic knowledge of what knowledge people had. There is this textbook knowledge. Yes, we have to read. There is a real world benefit. Having worked with leaders and studied leaders, over multiple years, I brought in the best conductors in the world I knew to my church in St. Pete, Florida. Having a place in Florida to bring people in winter is an asset. But also, having a good place to make music was also an asset. Every one of them had this trait of humbleness. They were really good at what they did, but they were so good they knew what they didn’t know.
Talk about this mentality of lack of self-awareness. We come from an academic environment. How do we deal with that as a top leader, where you want to have people with some credentials, but how do you acclaim people with what leadership is who want to be a leader?
Scott: First of all, I think if you come up to speed on the great thinkers in the leadership field and the management field, and require your management to read some of these books. Let’s say Jack Canfield’s Success Principles, John Maxwell’s How Successful People Think, Jim Collins, Brian Tracy’s 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success, Steven Sample’s Contrarian Guide to Business. If you get people to read these things, they will start filling in the gaps in their knowledge.
Netflix, Reed Hastings, I interviewed him. Their approach is that they hire people for character and values because particular aspects of an industry can be taught and trained. You need people who are committed to the values of the organization, have the big picture. To give you a contrarian example of how this whole thing doesn’t work in the conventional business world, one of the top recruiters told me that most of the time, when they recruit from outside and bring in somebody who has great credentials, they can’t go checking references until the last minute. By that time, they’ve already fallen in love with these three candidates. They will call the references who are supplied by the candidate; of course, they give glowing reviews. Six months later, they fall out of love with each other because having the credentials doesn’t really tell you much about the person. Is the person easy to get along with? It’s a little bit like a marriage. You could on the resume, on the dating app, it can say you’re Christian, Republican, and you love movies. Okay. Does that mean you love romantic movies or horror movies? Are you a Fundamentalist Christian or a heretic? What appears on the surface. I used to say about my ex when it came to the nutritional field. I said, I think I’m strict. I think you’re fanatical. She thought I was a little too loose as a goose. If you are a workaholic and expect people to constantly be checking their email and be available 24/7, if that’s your idea of somebody who will be of service, and this doesn’t all get cleared up in the interview because you’re still looking at that shiny object, the MBA, or the person was the COO at another organization, the bottom line is conventional recruiting doesn’t work. They don’t learn from it.
The MBA thing is symbolic because they have these neat case studies. They get out of school. It’s the same problem with journalists. The reason I have been assigned so many articles is because the editors know I have run companies and interviewed the top people, and I have a sense of the difference between how the good companies operate and how the lousy ones do. I have interviewed some lousy CEOs, too, so I have that perspective. Making an effort to learn for yourself and your top managers what enlightened leadership is, look at those lists of the companies that are the favorite of employees. What do they do differently from everybody else in that field? The crazy thing is it doesn’t cost much of anything. It’s a matter of doing the common sense thing. If you are going to make a big change in the organization, have you gone to the people who are going to get the phone calls from the customers?
I interviewed recently Avishai Abrahami who runs a company nobody has ever heard of called Wix. They have 200 million customers around the world who want to build a website. He really has a way of finding out the truth about what customers think because he goes into the call center, which no CEO ever does, and he doesn’t have them write down stuff. He interviews them on video because he said too much gets lost when you reduce it to a memo. He has a video-taped discussion with them about what the customers are really saying. What do they need to do differently? He tries to make their product much easier to use than something like GoDaddy. They try to keep it simple. They listen to the customers in actuality, and they make changes in actuality. It’s been fantastically successful. You wonder why doesn’t GoDaddy or other competitors copy them? It’s because 1% of the companies are run in an enlightened way. The outcomes is better for everybody: the customers, employees, vendors. It’s just amazing how stupid business leaders remain.
Jim Collins in Built to Last, to boil it down, said the #2 company in the field knows what the #1 company does, but they can’t get there. They say they are interested in the customer and employee, but in actuality, their behavior, their policies and priorities show they are interested in their departmental budget relative to everybody else. They are really interested in career advancement, and all these other things. Human nature gets in the way. They know what the #1 company does, but they don’t know how to copy it. If you’re in a particular field, look at the best-regarded company by customers and employees. Learn from them, and use them as a role model.
Hugh: That’s good advice. That’s really good advice. I find over and over leaders think they have to have all the right answers when leaders should have the good questions and listen carefully to the answers. We don’t hire good people and tell them what to do; we hire good people, train them, and they tell us what to do. I think the demise of companies is leadership. I don’t know the exact number. It’s somewhere around 53 of the original Fortune 500 companies are still in existence. 500 of the best-run companies. When I had five Kodak distinctive dealerships when I had a retail camera store, Kodak owned imaging in the world. They went into bankruptcy years later because they did not pay attention to how the market was shifting. IBM thought there was no market for personal computers, but only big computers. Swiss thought cords technology was a joke. The future of your enterprise depends on the self-awareness thing you talked about, and continuing to learn. I serve as a leadership coach for leaders in various fields. I have a leadership coach who keeps me on my toes. Staying ahead of the curve, I make a practice of doing what I advise other people to do, which is always have a coach. Any of those points you want to go down another?
Scott: I used to write for Super Lawyers and interview some of the best attorneys. They always say an attorney should never represent himself. You cannot be objective about yourself. Yes, you should have- What was it the court jester, part of his function was to keep the king humble. Tell him the truth that nobody else would because everybody else would suck up to the leader. When you get smart people as your business counsel or coaches, they come from different backgrounds. It’s like brainstorming. If you just brainstorm by yourself, you won’t get 1/10 of the ideas you get while working with others. You have to create a welcoming culture. That means you don’t criticize people in front of everybody else and humiliate them like so many managers do. The astonishing thing is that the secrets to success are well-known, both on a personal level and an organizational level. They are numerous. You can never really implement them fully. You want to have people in your organization who are idealistic for what your organization is doing. That means they have before anything else a desire to achieve the loftiest goals of the organization. They want to learn all the different tactics that will help get them there and quit focusing on their own careers. Recognition may or may not come with doing the right thing, but if you come up with a lot of ideas, some of them are going to be implemented. You have to sometimes in an organization, if you’re not the top person, find somebody who shares your ideas social-wise with people. Show an interest in people’s personal lives and their outside of work lives so that you find common ground. Maybe both of you love history or travel or certain kinds of movies. Go out to dinner or lunch with people. Show a genuine interest in others. That will help you build alliances and get feedback, learn from other people.
People who are not big readers. Richard Branson is dyslexic and has had ADD. But he learned to be a great listener. While he didn’t read a lot, he’s written some great books, some of the best biographies like the Virgin Way. He made himself very informally accessible. He would walk around offices. He’d avoid too many formal meetings. There are a lot of ways that he learned to intake knowledge. I know that recently, I didn’t do an interview with Jack Dorsey, who was the CEO of Square and Twitter, but he has a unique rule, where if you have a meeting with more than one other person, you have to write a memo up about it. What did you discuss? What did you conclude? Share it with everybody. There is lots of ways to learn from others, get feedback from others. It doesn’t necessarily mean you will agree, but you want to hear from others so that you can find out what your blind spots might be. Everybody has blind spots.
Hugh: Oh yes. Isn’t that remarkable that we have blind spots, and we don’t see them? This is fascinating stuff, Scott. We’re talking to clergy and nonprofit leaders of community cause-based charities, community foundations, membership organizations. We’re talking about business leaders. My position is that it’s generic. Leadership is agnostic. It doesn’t look different in a local nonprofit to a corporation. What is your opinion about how leadership is applied? There are some nuances in religious life and nonprofit life. But the generic persona and the skillset you are talking about of a leader, is it different for nonprofits?
Scott: I would say the pluses and minuses are, as we mentioned, that you don’t really have the resources generally of a business. It’s more like a small business the way it functions with a limited budget. On the other hand, if you haven’t been brainwashed by the trade magazines and corporate consensus and other things that end up having the industries become extinct with unhappy employees, it doesn’t cost anything to learn whether it’s through reading real books. Kindle doesn’t stick in the brain as well as a paperback or a hardcover does. I’m doing a lot of commuting right now. I have loved to get stuck in traffic, which here in Los Angeles is pretty common. I pop in a CD from the library or something I got on a biography or leadership or anything else I want to learn about. Have that thirst for knowledge. Therefore, the principles of leading any organization, whether it’s six people or a million employees, are going to be the same. You can never be too good of a leader and know too much. It’s such an endlessly deep well of insights and ideas and techniques that what you should maybe do is talk to people either in your field or people who run other similar kinds of organizations, even if they are not direct competitors, and business leaders in your community on what they think are the most important lessons they’ve learned bout being successful.
The biggest weakness is more tactical. Nonprofits do have that idealism and commitment to a great idea that is often missing in business. When Merck was founded, George W. Merck, who was the third CEO, he created the modern Merck company that still follows many of his principles with the idea that they are committed to changing the world. Most nonprofit leaders have that idealism. That’s a big advantage that keeps them on the right track. Where they are lacking is often the tactical management stuff. Some of the books that I mentioned can help teach real-world examples of things like being an innovator. Brian Tracy might have mentioned that you shouldn’t be happy with the first 20 good ideas that come out of brainstorming. Keep pushing, and you’ll find the next 10 are the best ideas of all. Your brain goes into overdrive, especially when you are working with other people.
You can get a lot of the personal things, like Benjamin Franklin for a few weeks, he would focus on one thing he wanted to work on, be it procrastination or being late to meetings. If you can pursue, be honest with yourself and discuss it with your coach and say, “Where do I need help? What am I not seeing here? What can I work on?” Maybe for example, I am so overwhelmed and so busy I don’t get to the gym, or I don’t eat right, or maybe I drink too much. Get people who will tell you the truth. The truth as they see it. You don’t have to agree with them. If you need a therapist, I went through eight years of psychotherapy. It was dream analysis. That made a big difference in my self-awareness, my ability to cope. Get some help from a minister or somebody you respect who has some level of wisdom, and help them fill in the blanks of your leadership and management skills.
There are pluses and minuses. Probably most nonprofit leaders, and I have been involved in that area myself, probably feel like their only problem is resources. If you’re really creative, marketing skills are the least mastered of all small business and all nonprofit organizations. Regular business doesn’t even do it well. There are books out on guerilla marketing and ways to spend an hour a day on social media or going out to your local chamber of commerce and telling the story about your organization and why the community should care. You can do that with any business. Be committed to educating people on what you believe in. They may reciprocate. Leadership management challenges are similar. You can learn from the big guys. You can also see the mistakes that most businesses make, and you don’t have to make because you already have that idealism and know what your philosophy is.
Hugh: I have found great joy in reading about great leaders. I have gone backwards, president by president, and found out a lot of disappointing things about everyone. We want to point fingers and blame them. I would challenge anybody to find anyone who is innocent. That is politics. Someday, I’d like to explore Napoleon Hill’s works with you. Like Scott Smith, he interviewed 500 people.
Scott: I would say don’t expect to learn from people who are perfect. I would get right in and say, “This person was horrible. Here’s things he did.” My response is, “If you’re only going to learn from perfect people, you’re out of luck because you’re not perfect.” Neither is anybody else. You can look at the glass half full. I recently did a story on Jeff Bezos. He has a million critics. He also is the world’s greatest master of how to fail successfully. He has lost hundreds of millions of dollars on projects that he thought were really great, and he learned when to get out. I tell people to accept the fact that all leaders, all human beings are imperfect. The question is. It can be helpful to learn a negative lesson, too.
Hugh: I also think if you interview the guy sitting under the bridge who is homeless and ask him, “What did you do wrong?” Scott Smith, this has been very enlightening.
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Scott, what do you want to leave people with today?
Scott: I would recommend that nothing beats reading real-world examples of leadership. Human beings are not as smart as we think. We think it’s all left brain MBA stuff. No. We do better when we have examples. If you read a biography or even if you have a superficial understanding of some of the great leaders, it gives you some common ground with other great leaders that you can share.
One easy way to do that is I have at least a couple hundred articles that are accessible to non-subscribers at Investors.com. Search my name, Scott Smith. You can’t access the whole thing. Pick the ones you like. You’ll see in my presidential profiles that I go way back to the start of this country. My number one source for articles has been Alvin Felzenberg’s The Leaders We Deserved. He does an objective ranking of the presidents. Here we are right at President’s Day. He showed you exactly what they did right and wrong. There is a tremendous amount you can learn about the country, about yourself, and about great leaders by looking at his book.
Hugh: That’s good advice. Thank you for being here for this episode.
