Alan Webber’s Rules of Thumb
I loved Bob Sutton’s distillation of Alan Webber’s new book, The Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing Yourself. Sutton’s favorite rules:
#1. When the going gets tough, the tough relax.
#10. A good question beats a good answer (This, by the way, is the reason the Nobel Prize winners often give for the success of their work — they framed the question better than their peers.)
#13. Learn to take no as a question (Alan provides great step-by-step advice here).
#16. Facts are facts. Stories are how we learn (A similar point to Made to Stick).
#17. Entrepreneurs choose serendipity over efficiency.
#23. Keep two lists: What gets you up in the morning? What keeps you up at night?
#30. The likeliest sources of ideas are in the most unlikely places (He makes a great argument for looking for inspiration in all the wrong places).
#44. When to comes to business, it helps if you actually know something about something (Google is a good example of this principle, so are Men’s Wearhouse and Amazon).
#46. Tough leaders wear their hearts on their sleeves.
#51. Take your work seriously. Yourself, not so much. (See this Vanity Fair article by Michael Lewis for a cautionary tale: AIG CEOJoe Cassano suffered from a horrible case of taking himself too seriously).
By the way, Sutton’s blog is a daily must-read. If you are an RSS addict, you can nab his feed here.
