The 80/20 Manager: Ten ways to become a great leader by Richard Koch

Author:Richard Koch [Koch, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2013-05-01T14:00:00+00:00

Way Six: The Manager Seeking Meaning

To fulfil a dream … to be given a chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy.

Bette Davis

I like what is in work – the chance to find yourself.

Joseph Conrad1

When I turned forty, I suffered from great good fortune. After fourteen years as a management consultant, I decided to hang up my calculator. I sold my shares in LEK, the firm I had co-founded six years earlier, and that gave me more than enough to live off for the rest of my life. I had freedom. But to do what?

I had no idea. I decided to stop working so hard and set up a small investment company. But it had little meaning for me. I tried a spell of not working at all. But that just left me feeling guilty and useless. It was a long time before I realized that I could best achieve a satisfying purpose in life by writing books that, good or bad, nobody else could have written. I am lucky enough to enjoy a relaxed and pleasant lifestyle, with plenty of time for cycling, tennis, walking in beautiful countryside and meeting friends. But I am only really happy if I write something that has meaning for me every day.

Nothing is more important than achieving meaning in your life. Viktor Frankl, the Austrian doctor and philosopher, wrote one of the most important books of the last century, Man’s Search for Meaning, after he was liberated from Dachau concentration camp. Meaning, he said, derives from achievement – from creating something or performing a deed that derives from your unique imagination and talents. When we crave meaning but cannot find it, we use money, sex, entertainment or even violence as substitutes. We think these will make us happy, but they don’t. Indeed, the very search for happiness is misguided because it comes only when we are not looking for it – at that moment when we find meaning by losing ourselves in productive self-expression. Happiness is a by-product of leading a life with meaning. ‘Only the unfulfilment of potential is meaningless,’ said Frankl, ‘not life itself.’2 Bertrand Russell put it slightly differently: ‘Anything you’re good at contributes to happiness.’3

One of modern philosophy’s greatest revelations has been that greatness lies within. Saint Paul talked about the variety of gifts that the early Christians possessed, but as the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has brilliantly shown, it was only in the late eighteenth century that the idea of human originality and uniqueness came to the fore. The poet Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), for example, wrote, ‘each human being has his own measure, as it were an accord peculiar to him of all his feelings to each other’. The differences between individuals are important, he said, and each of us should tread a unique path and live up to our originality.4 Nowadays, we take it for granted that we all have a vital inner self, almost in the same way that we have arms and legs, but that notion did not always exist.

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