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1-Page Summary of The One Thing You Need to Know
Dialogue: Just This One Thing
In the movie City Slickers, two characters played by Billy Crystal and Jack Palance debate about life as they ride horses on a dude ranch. The older character played by Jack Palance tells the young character played by Billy Crystal that there’s only one thing in life worth doing.
“What’s the one thing that you want to do?” Crystal asks. “That is what you should focus on,” Palance answers.
Corporate leaders have a desire to understand leadership. They know that they need to be good leaders, but they don’t know what makes a great leader. To find out more about leadership, it’s helpful to first learn about management.
The One Thing Great Managers Know
Managers are critical to the success of any company. Great managers focus on helping their employees be successful, and they do that by increasing employee productivity. They help people grow as individuals and understand that they’re there for them. Good managers say that they’re motivated by watching others succeed, but great managers actually make it happen. Therefore, what is the one talent of great leaders?
What Is Leadership?
Leadership is often confused with heroic success. To illustrate this, remember what happened on July 24, 2002 at a Pennsylvania coal mine named Quecreek. A giant machine was digging through a coal seam when it struck an underground lake that caused tons of water to shoot up the shaft and toss around mining equipment like toys. The men inside the mine escaped by diving out of the way and regrouping to determine their next step—to go to higher ground since one man would have died if they hadn’t escaped quickly enough.
The workers could see Moe on the other side of the tunnel. He was safe, but he couldn’t get to them because there was a huge water spout in his way. They realized that if the water continued rising, he would be trapped and killed. The crew boss decided to save him by driving a front-end loader close enough for Moe to jump into it before retreating back to safety.
The plan was to use the loader as a bucket and scoop out water from the bottom of an open coal mine. However, if the water caught up with it first, it could tip over and tumble down into the mine shaft along with Moe. The loader was moved forward until its bucket reached as far as possible. Then Fogle asked if that was good enough for Moe to jump in safely. It wasn’t, so Fogle had to move closer toward the torrential flow of water before he could successfully save his crew member’s life.
Moe was very frightened. He took a leap of faith and jumped into the water, which he described as hard steel. He slid into the back of a bucket that Randy Fogle had lowered to him. The men were saved by other rescuers on site who used their own resources to save them.
The miners were out of the shaft before they agreed to hire a lawyer and sue the mining company. Fogle refused because he didn’t think that it was predictable, as a state safety team had recently certified the mine as okay.
Did Fogle demonstrate the one thing you need to know about leadership? Most organizations would answer, yes. The answer, surprisingly, is no. Fogle was brave, innovative, original and selfless. He showed four characteristics most organizations define as leadership: initiative, creativity; courage of convictions and integrity. These are leadership traits but every fine person should have these traits not just leaders. So what do leaders get done that ordinary people with these qualities don’t?
The definition of leadership is to rally people to a better future. This means that even though the rescuers and Fogle were leaders, they weren’t great ones since their actions didn’t reflect this idea. The most important thing about being a leader is having an image in your mind of how things could be different in the future. Great leaders see what’s possible and are able to convince other people that it can happen as well.
