Jimmy Smith
Balancing Selfless And Self-Serving Ambition
Leading at Light Speed is a powerful leadership book for businesses, public agencies, and nonprofits revealing the 10 specific ways an organization must act and behave to build trust, spark innovation, and create a high-performing organization.
The Ambition Paradox is a concept in Leading at Light Speed described in Chapter 9 along with three other Leadership Paradoxes. The other three are available upon purchase of the book.
True leaders are ambitious – but their ambitions are in service to something greater than themselves. Martin Luther King, Jr., Jimmy Carter, Cesar Chavez, Barack Obama – each of these ambitious men knew how to contain their personal ambition for the good of the larger cause. Peter Drucker, the famed management consultant, describes it as a singular focus on defining what the organization needs. When Louis Gerstner took over at IBM, he saw the need for far greater customer focus. Jack Welch, when he took the reins at General Electric, saw that the company needed to narrow its focus to businesses that were at the very top of its marketplace. When Darwin Smith took over at Kimberly-Clark, he saw the need to sell the mills and focus on the paper products business. Let it not be said that these were not men of ambition. But the important thing is that each of the men felt they had truly identified what the organization needed from them. No one told Gerstner or Welch or Smith to do these things. Each had the ambition to get it done. Nevertheless, these were the essentials.
Leaders master the fine line between self-serving ambition and selfless ambition. In the end, it boils down to the fact that effective leaders are willing to do the things that are right for the organization – even though it will challenge the organization and cause some people pain. So when faced with the ambition paradox, ask yourself: “Am I willing to suffer some personal loss – even up to losing my comfortable way of life or my job – in order to do what’s right?” If the answer is yes, then you’ve found the path through the ambition paradox.
Take this free work survey to discover how well your company measures up to the 10 key practices of high-performing organizations.
Jimmy Smith – The Sermon (1964)
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