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LAST WORD
Are you 'Hardwired for Success?'
Authors look at 12 'executive skills' that business leaders should examine
By Michael McCord
Published: February 2007
Forget your "12 Angry Men," "Ocean's 12," "Cheaper by the Dozen" or your numerous 12-step self-help programs. It's time to pay homage to the 12 "executive skills" when it comes to being a smarter, effective, stronger and more communicative business leader.
That's the rub of a just-released book by Madbury business research guru Chuck Martin. "Smarts: Are We Hardwired for Success?" is not your run-of-the-mill business book.
Martin and his local co-authors from the Seacoast Mental Health Center -- psychologist Peg Dawson and neuropsychologist Richard Guare -- don't dance around the question they ask in the title.
Yes, indeed, we are hardwired for success and failure by the time adulthood arrives, if not sooner. It's a variation on the advice of philosophers and poets from Socrates to Alexander Pope to Ralph Waldo Emerson -- in other words, know thyself or pay the price.
Now it's one thing to say something so, well, obvious but Martin, the energetic and inventive president and founder of NFI Research, takes a leap to prove it by combining reams of data from his own surveys of more than 2,000 international business executives with neuropsychological research into how we learn, act and grow.
Martin is the author of previous bestselling business books including "Digital Estate," "Net Future," "Tough Management" and "Coffee at Luna's," which has become quite popular in South Korea. He and his collaborators want to change the paradigm of popular -- and perhaps too influential -- personality tests.
"It's a business book but it's more scientific," Martin told me during a recent interview. "What we do is explain the intelligence center in the brain and 12 executive skills that we have. We help identify those skills, (and write) about how we have two to three that are the strongest and two to three that are the weakest."
One of the interesting kickers, especially for those eager beaver, ambitious types determined to tackle their weaknesses, is, well, don't waste too much time.
"What we've discovered is that there's not much you can do to change these skills," Martin said.
Or, as that noted actor-philosopher Clint Eastwood said in one of his "Dirty Harry" films, "a man has got to know his limitations."
The 12 executive skills are a slight misnomer because they have little to do with actual business leadership attributes but rather, they are personal traits that are far ingrained before an aspiring Jack Welch or Bill Gates gets their first corporate position. It has to do with brain chemistry, nature, nurture and other metaphysical mysteries.
Moreover, the skills are no great mystery and range from focus to planning, to defining goals to flexibility, to emotion control and so on.
But Martin makes a strong case that to ignore the obvious and let our ego run amok is to court personal and professional disaster -- even with the best intentions in play -- if you aren't aware of your own strengths and weaknesses and how to focus on them.
For those brave souls who want to embark into unchartered territory, there's a self-examination model in the book to determine those top strengths and weaknesses.
What matters for leadership purposes, Martin explained to me as I nervously pondered my own strengths and weaknesses (ill-defined on the former; considerable on the latter), is that budding corporate stars and managers learn what they are good at and what they aren't -- and then have some empathy toward those with different personality traits.
It's not unlike the tireless athletic coach, say Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots, who has a maniacal mantra of putting their players in the best position to succeed. After all, why would a leader do otherwise?
Martin, a former journalist whose firm releases a bi-weekly research pulse of the international business community, knows that leaders make mistakes like these because they fail to see the blind spot in themselves -- or mismatch their subordinates to tasks almost guaranteed to fail.
Martin's advice is go full steam ahead on your strengths and minimize the weaknesses.
Of course, I couldn't resist asking Martin to fess up about his executive skills.
"My strength is defining and achieving goals. I'm good at keeping my eye on the ball," he said. "My weakness is time management."
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