Dan Rosensweig in “The Corner Office”

Dan Rosensweig

Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Dan Rosensweig, president and chief executive of Chegg.  To read the complete interview, please click here.

Bryant: Tell me about some important leadership lessons.

Rosensweig: One of the blessings I’ve had, really for my entire career, is working with founders of companies, whether it was Bill Ziff at Ziff Davis or with Jerry Yang and David Filo at Yahoo [click here http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/yahoo_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org]. What I love about that culture is the energy, enthusiasm and the unbridled passion for what’s possible, as opposed to spending a whole lot of time trying to figure out the obstacles.

In Silicon Valley, if you spend a lot of time thinking about the obstacles, you’ll talk yourself out of everything, because the more you look at it, the less logical something sounds, since no one has done it yet. Founders simply ask what needs to be done and what’s the best way to do it. And that’s fun. It’s had a significant impact on the way I think, the way I lead, the way I manage, and the opportunities I seek out.

I like being surrounded by people who have very little fear and very little respect for the past — not in a negative way, but in a positive way. They appreciate everything that’s been done, but they constantly look for how to do it better. When you lead with what’s possible, and how you create value for people, it’s energizing. Being around that kind of energy and inspiration has allowed me to think bigger than I probably ever would have thought.

Bryant: You just started at Chegg this year. What was your first-day speech to the staff?

Rosensweig: I articulated why I came. What’s the opportunity we see? How do we want to define success? What’s the bigger dream? Many people work really hard every day, but they’re incrementalists. When you are in a growth company, you have to really open people’s eyes to the bigger possibilities, so they think differently. Once they understand how to define success and what their role is in success, they make better decisions and you can push decision-making down.

Stylistically, I try very hard to be descriptive about how we want to define success and not necessarily prescriptive on telling them exactly how we want to do it — because, frankly, many of them are a lot smarter than me at what they do.

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To read several of Bryant’s more recent interviews of other executives, please click here.

Saul Alinsky + The Starfish and The Spider – Wisdom for a New Generation, on both sides of the Aisle

The basics transcend all differences.

I generally shy away from anything political on this blog.  But this morning, there is an article on Politico that is worth a little attention on a blog focused on business books.  The article is entitled The new tea party bible, and it describes how the Tea Party Movement has used two books as “Bibles” for their purposes.  The first is the most unlikely choice, the “liberal’s” guidebook for organizing, Rules for Radicals:  A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals by Saul Alinsky.  Politico had earlier written specifically about the Tea Party’s use of this book in the article The Right loves to hate – and imitate – Saul Alinsky. The second is the more recent The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom.

First, a few excerpts from Alinsky (I presented a synopsis of Alinsky’s book at the Urban Engagement Book Club in Dallas for Central Dallas Ministries, a couple of years ago):

As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be…  it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be.

A reformation means that masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values.  They don’t know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless.  They won’t act for change but won’t strongly oppose those who do.  The time is then ripe for revolution.

The building of many mass power organizations to merge into a national popular power force cannot come without many organizers.  Since organizations are created, in large part, by the organizer, we must find out what creates the organizer.

I know that I have communicated with the other party when his eyes light up and he responds, “I know exactly what you mean…” — communication occurs concretely.

And a little about The Starfish and the Spider (from the Amazon page):

The title metaphor conveys the core concept: though a starfish and a spider have similar shapes, their internal structure is dramatically different—a decapitated spider inevitably dies, while a starfish can regenerate itself from a single amputated leg. In the same way, decentralized organizations, like the Internet, the Apache Indian tribe and Alcoholics Anonymous, are made up of many smaller units capable of operating, growing and multiplying independently of each other, making it very difficult for a rival force to control or defeat them.

Here are some lessons:

Lesson # 1:  Learn from anywhere and everywhere to accomplish your goals.  You will find books, companions, colleagues, alliances in many unlikely places.  Embrace wisdom from wherever you can find it.

Lesson #2:  We really are living in a bottom-up world. The top-down leadership structure of yesterday is so yesterday.  The Tea Party on the Right, and community organizers on the Left, have this in common:  no one leader at the “top” is dictating much of anything anymore.  Leadership comes from within, from underneath, from everywhere.  Modern social networking tools have simply accelerated the pace of this remarkable development.

Lesson #3:  As I have often hinted, and stated openly, the more you know, the more you know. Keep reading widely.  Keep learning.  And  remember that you can learn from people who come from very different places than you come from.  The disciplined, ongoing pursuit of learning is the only path to a more effective tomorrow.

Peter Bregman suggests, “Don’t regret working too hard”

Peter Bregman

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Peter Bregman for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

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I was lying in bed, safely reading a magazine, when the fear arose. It started somewhere between my stomach and my chest, and it radiated outward. Like adrenaline coursing through my body after a sudden fright, it was a physical sensation, but it felt slower, deeper, wider, as it radiated to the tops of my arms and legs. It felt hot. I started to sweat. My body felt weak.

I put down the magazine and thought about death.

My mother-in-law, who was in her late sixties, died not long ago after a long battle with cancer; she was first diagnosed in her forties. A few weeks ago I received a call from a friend in her forties, who one morning found a lump in her breast and a few days later had a mastectomy. At lunch last week, a friend told me his business partner came home from vacation feeling a little under the weather; within a week he was dead from an aggressive cancer he never knew he had. That was right after he told me that his father-in-law was recently killed crossing the street.

And now I was reading an article by Atul Gawande [click here] about rethinking end of life treatment. Gawande is not just insightful as he explores what doctors should do when they can’t save your life; he’s also vivid. The first line of his article reads: “Sara Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her doctors learned that she was going to die.”

I am, as far as I know, thank God, healthy. But somewhere in the middle of that article it suddenly hit me — not just intellectually, but physically and emotionally: I am going to die.

Each year, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics conducts an American Time Use Survey [click here] asking thousands of Americans to document how they spend every minute of every day. (The New York Times created a fascinating interactive graphic using the survey as raw material. [Click here] by Bronnie Ware, who spent many years nursing people who had gone home to die. Their most common regret? “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” Their second most common regret? “I wish I didn’t work so hard.”

There are two ways to address these regrets. One, work less hard and spend your time living a life true to yourself, whatever that means. Or two, work just as hard — harder even — on things you consider to be important and meaningful.

If you put those two regrets together, you realize that what people really regret isn’t simply working so hard, it’s working so hard on things that don’t matter to them. If our work matters to us, if it represents a life true to us, than we will die without the main regrets that haunt the dying. We will have lived more fully.

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To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

Peter Bregman speaks, writes, and consults on leadership. He is the CEO of Bregman Partners, Inc., a global management consulting firm, and the author of Point B: A Short Guide To Leading a Big Change. Click here to sign up to receive an email when he posts.