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The Glory of Lists

Most kids know that Santa Claus is big into them. David Letterman has certainly done well with his. A random walk through twenty offices would probably turn up at least forty if not four hundred. We could only be talking about lists.

I like lists. In fact, I’m convinced that we all like lists. A chance reading of a charming little book by the late Stephen Jay Gould called Questioning the Millennium reminds me why. In it, he says the following:

We inhabit a world of infinite and wondrous variety, a source or potential joy, especially if we can recapture childhood’s fresh delight for “splendor in the grass” and “glory in the flower.” Robert Louis Stevenson caught the essence of such naïve pleasure in a single couplet—this “Happy Thought” from A Child’s Garden of Verses:

The world is so full of a number of things,
I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.

But sheer variety can also be overwhelming and frightening, especially when, as responsible adults, we must face the slings and arrows of (sometimes) outrageous fortune. In taking arms against this sea of troubles, no tool can be more powerful, or more distinctly human that the brain’s imposition of meaning upon the world’s confusion. (Pg. 28)

He goes on to say:

Among the devices we use to impose order upon a complicated (but by no means unstructured) world, classification—or the division of items into categories based on perceived similarities—must rank as the most general and most pervasive of all. (Pg. 29)

For those who don’t know, Stephen Jay Gould is a roundly recognized author and expert who sports a first class pedigree. He’s the Alexander Agassiz Professor of zoology and professor of geology at Harvard for goodness sake, and a diehard baseball fan, so he must be right.

So I guess we’re genetic list makers. Who knew?

I raise this point in part as a scholarly set up for a terrific list a colleague of mine sent me the other day. He and I have a past affiliation with a certain company and he had made this list mostly for his own purposes. Call it part of a personal catharsis, one of the first and best uses of list making (when in doubt, make a list). He shared it with me during a multi-week email conversation (where unedited prose becomes its own form of a list) that meandered through a variety of topics starting with, “so, what are you up to these days?”

Part of the meaning for me lies in the fact that I know the company he’s talking about—the one that caused the introspection that yielded the list. But when I stood back and just read it as a piece of business wisdom, I thought it was at least as good as the screeds I read in business publications and guru web sites. Truthfully, I was jealous I hadn’t written it.

Being the honorable guy that I am, I thought I would share it without personal attribution to protect the innocent. Here it is, in slightly edited form, “The Top Ten Things I Learned 1998-2002.”

1. Being an ethical company cannot stand in the way of being an aggressive company. A successful company needs to be both. Strong ethics cannot be used as an excuse not to pursue aggressive business strategies.

2. Raise as much money as possible when valuations rise and momentum is in your favor. This is the worst time to worry about dilution. Never, ever, operate without a Chief Financial Officer with experience. As expensive as they are, the costs of not having one are immeasurable. If a candidate cannot be found, find an interim solution from outside of the company.

3. Let new employees know how important they are, and continue the attention. Upon joining company x, my wife was sent a basket with a welcome note, some wine and other goodies. She told that story to hundreds of people over four years. The company showed its class and I was very energized about the team I was a part of. 

4. A company, like an individual, must take chances and be entrepreneurial. Make big moves, buy things, merge, raise a lot of money…create a lot of energy and do it when people feel great about the company. Too many missed windows can create a downdraft of momentum that is difficult to turn around.   

5. Employees normally will not challenge or inform the executive of a company. As an executive, if you think that this is a good thing, you are wrong. It is very difficult for an executive to understand the true state of affairs and extraordinary measures need to be taken to get beyond stock answers designed to please a superior. In this environment, the most successful teams are those not reinforced with similar opinions, rather those with respect to challenge each other without every dispute being seen as a leadership crisis.

6. If you cannot create an outward sense of confidence and leadership, any internal sense of confidence and leadership will dissipate.

7. There is nothing more disheartening than an attempt to lead with words rather than leading through listening and actions.

8. “Shut up and sell” is not a strategy. You cannot hire sales personnel, train them and await the happy ending.  Mentoring, communicating, and listening are all part of the process to making one successful salesperson. A leader must balance the needs in each of his or her team members before motivational efforts can be effective. When broad numbers of your team continue to underachieve, but there is something else happening…figure it out.

9. A Salesperson needs to take ultimate ownership of his or her territory and treat it like it is his or her own business. Management should be open and (brutally) honest in hiring with respect to the resources available to support the salesperson in an effort that each understands the amount of work in addition to the selling process necessary to be successful.

10. When it is hard to get out of bed in the morning, it is time to do something different.

Nothing to disagree with. Nothing more to be said. If there were, it would belong on another list.

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Last modified: 05/03/06