The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win

by Jeff Haden

If you’re the CEO of a company, or an entrepreneur stating a company, you cannot optimize for any one attribute. The minute you do that, you compromise your ability to perform at a high level in another area. . . . The job of running a complex organization or starting a business is all about four or five different things that have nothing in common. So being a good manager, and optimizing the performance of any aspect of your company, is often at odds. . . . Being a good manager means saying to your employees, “You do it. You take responsibility,” even though, by definition, they’re not as good at it as you are. My editor at the New Yorker magazine, David Remnick, is a better writer than 95 percent of the people who work for him. He’s constantly in this position of having to accept articles that are not as good as the ones he would write himself. If he were to be completely honest and say, “I can’t accept this,” he wouldn’t have a magazine.