If you rise high enough in an organization, eventually you’ll get a staff, and the staff will send reports. But you, the executive, need to decide which report to act on and which to set aside, remembering that, like self-serving courtiers, thoughts and emotions don’t always speak the truth and that they come and go. Which is why we need to treat these reports as mere position papers, subject to our evaluation, rather than as representations of solid reality leading to action points. Thoughts and emotions contain information, not directions. Some of the information we act on, some we mark as
...more
