dig deep

What counts, in the long run, is not what you read; it is what you sift through your own mind; it is the ideas and impressions that are aroused in you by your reading. It is the ideas stirred in your own mind, the ideas which are a reflection of your own thinking, which make you an interesting person.

Book education cannot accomplish this by itself. It needs the supplement and the stimulus of the exchange of ideas with other people. In particular, it means learning from other people. There is no human being from whom we cannot learn something if we are interested enough to dig deep...

I... began to meet a great variety of people. Knowing my own deficiencies, I made a game of trying to make people talk about whatever they were interested in and learning as much as I could about their particular subject. After a while I had acquired a certain technique for picking their brains. It was not only great fun but I began to get an insight into many subjects I could not possibly have learned about in any other way. And, best of all, I discovered vast fields of knowledge and experience that I had hardly guessed existed.

This, I think, is one of the most effective and rewarding forms of education. The interest is there, lurking somewhere in another person. You have only to seek for it. It will make every encounter a challenge and it will keep alive one of the most valuable qualities a person has - curiosity. 

Eleanor Roosevelt

You Learn by Living by Eleanor Roosevelt. Westminster Press. 1983. p.8. As found in 2022 Great Quotes From Great Leaders Boxed Calendar: 365 Inspirational Quotes From Leaders Who Shaped the World. 

ensuring cultural consistency

By the time I stepped down as CEO, we were hiring about 85 percent of our leaders from inside the company. A certain number of external hires will inject new thinking into the organization, but hiring internally the vast majority of the time is vital for ensuring cultural consistency.

David M. Cote

Winning Now, Winning Later: How Companies Can Succeed in the Short Term While Investing for the Long Term. HarperCollins Leadership. 2020. p. 111

strategy had no relevance

Given what I’ve revealed about short-termism at Honeywell, you might wonder if we had a formal strategic planning process in place. We certainly did. Each July our businesses made presentations to the CEO, with similar presentations taking place down through the ranks. These presentations were, in a word, bullshit. Leaders had no clue how they would run their businesses over the next five years, what big initiatives they would have to push to make their goals, or what changes in their industry they should anticipate, or better, lead. Rather than choosing goals thoughtfully, they picked ambitious targets they thought would please their bosses, without regard for whether the business could realistically achieve them. They might have factored in the benefit of downsizing, the introduction of new products or services, process improvement, or other cost-savings initiatives, but then didn’t include as an expense the funds to bankroll these initiatives because it would depress the outlook. To cover themselves, they threw around lofty language and piled on hundreds of pages of charts and tables, hoping to look smart. Without much critical analysis, leaders gave their blessings, leaving the businesses to go execute whatever they wanted without follow-up or accountability. “Strategy,” such as it was, had no relevance. Operational considerations and making the quarter became daily concerns, with strategy fading to the background.

David M. Cote

Winning Now, Winning Later: How Companies Can Succeed in the Short Term While Investing for the Long Term. HarperCollins Leadership. 2020. p. 38

couldn’t say in the meeting

A final way I tightened up meetings was to discourage people from coming to my office afterward to tell me what they “couldn’t say in the meeting” on account of who was in the room. What kind of leader would I be if I suddenly changed my opinion based on statements from the last person with whom I spoke? When people did come to me after meetings, I explained that because they lacked the guts to speak up, we had just wasted an hour of everyone’s time and would now have to reconvene so that everyone could hear this new input. I only had to do that a couple of times before this baloney stopped. 

David M. Cote

Winning Now, Winning Later: How Companies Can Succeed in the Short Term While Investing for the Long Term. HarperCollins Leadership. 2020. p. 27

right at the end of a meeting

It’s important to be right at the end of a meeting, not at the beginning. If you embrace that mind-set, you’ll do a lot less talking in meetings, and focus instead on getting others to report facts and air their opinions. I stumbled onto this approach when I first arrived at Honeywell. Realizing I couldn’t trust my board or staff, I became a lot more careful about expressing my opinions up front. Then I realized I was making better decisions because I was allowing for a richer discussion. I proceeded to permanently change how I ran meetings.

David M. Cote

Winning Now, Winning Later: How Companies Can Succeed in the Short Term While Investing for the Long Term. HarperCollins Leadership. 2020. p. 24