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The fellow who is chairman of my company, Turbine, is a sensational professor at Brown University named Andy van Dam. I won't go into Andy's long list of accomplishments except to say that you will do well to heed one of his secrets: "Do your homework."
Let's say Andy is going to a meeting at SIGGRAPH. A bunch of professors get together to talk about how things are going and what to do in the next year. Andy will come prepared with an agenda and say "OK, what about you? Where are your agendas?" Everyone else will say, "Um, I dunno, I just thought we were going to talk."
Being prepared in this way lets you set the agenda. It also impresses the hell out of people. The funny thing is that the stuff that you'd think up before the meeting probably isn't awe-inspiring stuff. It's stuff that anyone would have thought up if they'd put an hour into it. But that person was you, and that's leadership.
You're probably tired of me yakking about principles, so here are some concrete examples of people not doing the stuff that's important to their company:
- Managers who are "too busy" to read resumes in a timely manner and help with hiring. Meanwhile, unfilled positions in the company drain morale and efficiency.
- Top management who can't be bothered to communicate to the employees what's going on.
- Top management who's "too busy" to read the half-dozen most important industry magazines. If you're not keeping up on your own industry, how the hell are you running your company? What do you do when your in a negotiation and somebody asks you if you've heard of the AOL-Netscape merger and you say "Wha?"
Sorry, I got a little excited there. You can see that these things I'm talking about can have a real effect on your company.
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