800-CEO-READ Blog

Do it right the first time

If you didn't see John's first post of the day, check it out.

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One of the pertinent points that Bengals Coach Marvin Lewis made in an interview that looked at leadership but soon spread to other topics was this: it’s too hard to be successful in the NFL—or in any business—if you’re always putting good money after bad. To him, that’s what do-overs, screw ups, are about and plenty of sayings come to mind, like “my mistake,� for instance. Well, all that is, is people allowing mediocrity to happen, he said. In business the shelf life, the window of opportunity is too short and you have to focus your people on that. There’s not an opportunity to get many chances back. If you don’t do it right the first time, you don’t really have time to do it again.

And when asked what trait most annoyed him as a leader, his answer was swift: jealousy. Not lack of effort, not unpreparedness, not alibis - but jealousy. I would not have guessed that answer in a thousand years.