Leadership Quality Of Ambition
Leading at Light Speed is a powerful leadership book for businesses, public agencies, and nonprofits revealing the 10 specific ways an organization must act and behave to build trust, spark innovation, and create a high-performing organization.
The Ambition Paradox is a concept in Leading at Light Speed described in Chapter 9 along with three other Leadership Paradoxes. You must purchase the book in order to read all four.
True leaders are ambitious – but their ambitions are in service to something greater than themselves. Martin Luther King, Jr., Jimmy Carter, Cesar Chavez, Barack Obama – these were ambitious men who knew what to sacrifice for the good of the cause. Renowned management consultant Peter Drucker describes it as a dedication to the fundamental needs of the organization. When Louis Gerstner took over at IBM, he saw the need for far greater customer focus. Jack Welch, when he took the reins at General Electric, saw that the company needed to narrow its focus to businesses that were at the very top of its marketplace. When Darwin Smith took over at Kimberly-Clark, he saw the need to sell the mills and focus on the paper products business. It can not be denied that these were ambitious men. But the important thing is that each of the men felt they had truly identified what the organization needed from them. No one told Gerstner or Welch or Smith to do these things. Each was motivated to find the means to the end. At the same time, these were the things that needed to be done.
Leaders master the fine line between self-serving ambition and selfless ambition. The simple fact is that successful leadership comes when effective business decisions are made despite ensuing challenges and some personal upset. So when faced with the ambition paradox, ask yourself: “Am I willing to suffer some personal loss – even up to losing my comfortable way of life or my job – in order to do what’s right?” If the answer is yes, then you’ve found the path through the ambition paradox.
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