Charley Swayne - The shark and the fish: applying poker strategies to business leadership

My mission is to help you make better decisions than you would have made on your own . Every day for over a year I wrote that mission at the top of the page. Then I got to work. Great news: if there isnt a precise roadmap, there is a lighthouse guiding you to a higher level of strategic thinking and decision making.

Answers have been found. Theory has been translated so you can use it. According to the Wall Street Journal , the most sought-after leadership skill is strategic thinking. This book will help you to go about making the wisest possible decision and pulling the trigger.

Building a company is really hard. Leading the company is all about creating an environment in which anyone in the organization would make the same decision and take the same action you would if you were there. And its about giving them the freedom to do so.

Why poker and business? I often use poker as a metaphor because I have found that world-class poker players think in an entirely different way than good players they really do think strategically. Great leaders also think in a different way than good managers. It was no coincidence that Gates launched Microsoft, Nixon funded his first campaign, and Eisenhower paid for his military uniforms all from their poker winnings. The skill is not the cards or business; its a higher dimension of creating an extraordinary environment, and you are about to find out what it is and how to do it.

We will start by discovering your compass. We will look into the future, create a mission, set objectives, determine strategies, take action, and then evaluate, experiment, and adapt.

As a bonus, if you lead a business or organization, youll see how to instill in your people the sense that we did it (the workers) as opposed to they did it (the managers). And, when that happens, you will discover ever-increasing possibilities.

Lets roll.

The Leader Makes It Happen

Leader as savior. Leader as messiah. Leader as hero. Atlantis fulfilled. Its all a crock. The leader is not the wizard behind the curtain pulling all the right levers. The leader is not some seductive siren song. This image is nothing more than a self-serving myth.

If you think youre in charge, youre not even close. Your authority is limited. There is no cosmic chess board. As Philip Gelatt, president of Northern Engraving, said after 40 years in business, It doesnt matter what I do. I cant control anything.

At dinner one day, one of our children asked me what we were going to do on the weekend. I carefully explained to them, There is one vote per person in this family. I have one, and your mom has the rest.

Shift the power to the folks bringing in the beans. Colin Powell

Despite what your span of control looks like on your organizational chart, control does not really exist. The longer the span, the shorter the control. The greater the tooth-to-tail ratio, the lesser the command. Its not the person at the top, its the people within. The organization is bottom up, inside out. Organizations manage themselves. None of us has ever done it on our own. That doesnt mean we dont need top management; its just that top management needs to embrace that its not only top down but also bottom up. The day is saved or lost by those on the ground.

Okay, now that you have the bad news, there is good news. Leadership is less about command and control and more about creation. You are the base that influences the pH of your companys soil. You have the power to create character-based leadership.

True leadership is when you create an atmosphere in which your people are so engaged that, when faced with unforeseen circumstances and forces, they act as you would and in some cases better than you would. Freeing the energies of the hive. A multiplier effect. More later.

Police officer Rick Hanna was working out on a stair climber at the Gainesville Health and Fitness Center. He fell off. Patrick, the supervisor, went over, and Rick said, I just need to rest for a moment. But then he passed out. No heartbeat. A sudden-death cardiac event. Immediately, Patrick started CPR ; Kristen, the saleswoman, gave him mouth to mouth; and David from maintenance went for the AED (automatic external defibrillator) and literally broke his hand ripping it off the wall. Still no pulse, but they kept working on Rick. Within 10 minutes, the paramedics arrived. The officer was dead. The paramedics continued to work on him for another 20 minutes, and finally they got a heartbeat. At the hospital, when he woke up, Rick was fine. Amazingly, no brain damage. In the words of Marlene Hanna, his wife, The cardiologists and pulmonary doctors all say the same thing, had it not happened in your gym, he would not be alive today, and because your staff were so well trained and you had the AED equipment right there. Most importantly, no one gave up. They continued CPR well after the paramedics arrived.

Joe Cirulli owns the Gainesville Health and Fitness Center. You might have seen him on the cover of Inc. magazine. Joe wasnt present, but his leadership was. I have seen Joe when faced with an emergency, and thats exactly what he would have done if he was there. His staff reacted exactly the way he would have.

Business School

More good news and bad news. First the bad news.

How many times have you heard of a board hiring a professor to run their company? If you took away the textbook from a business professor, what would he do in the classroom? Nothing. He would have no idea what to do. He cant leap beyond what he knows. He has never been a business manager. He has never had to make a profit. He has no experience, no anchor. Academics cant go beyond what they know. For the most part, they dont know anything except what is in the textbook. It is the difference between being in the stands and playing on the field.

When doing research for this book, I refused to interview any academic whose only life had been at a university. Although many are nice, intelligent people, they live in a world of their own, a silo, without authentic experience. They have no clue about what they have no clue. They will always hire the green PhD as opposed to the experienced businessman, worrying more about accreditation than quality. They write incestuous, dust-gathering, refereed research papers for other theorists to say attaboy; and, once they are tenured, they forget about hard work. On a Friday afternoon, if we still had phone booths, you could put all the professors who are actually on campus into one.

What would happen if the White House hired no one but academics to run the country? I guess we know the answer to that one.

We give students a brick of information, followed by another brick, followed by another brick, followed by another brick, until they graduate, at which point we assume they have a house. What they have is a pile of bricks, and they dont have it for long (Krohn).

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education. Albert Einstein

Business school is nothing but a ticket to the dance. The rules you learn are a betrayed promise. Warren Buffett has it right: Beware of geeks bearing formulas. No company ever faces a generic problem; it faces a specific problem. Its not that the bricks of the business rules, the maxims, the models dont matter; they do. They just dont matter as much as we think they do. They all sound good, but they dont have much value in the real world. Powell: Management techniques are not magic mantras but simply tools to be reached for at the right times. Business school starts with cherished management theories and shoves the facts into those theories. Practice always deviates from theory.