Yesterday I spent three hours reading during “working hours”. Brought up in Scotland with the pervasive calvinist work ethic, part of me thought “I’m not working, I should be working”. I then shook myself down (metaphorically) and recognised that a core part of my work is ensuring I am well and widely read so as to add value to my clients.
By consistently committing to reading, listening, learning, lessons come forward, often crystallising and distilling into concise models and ideas (note, several of these are captured in a list of articles in the footer of my site).
I think back to a post I wrote over three years ago, in December 2017, called: “Stop the “Busyness”” in which I noted (please also note my bold highlights):
…many of the most commercially successful people (and yes, let’s skip the paradigm today that success equals money!) are known to read five hours per DAY (Warren Buffett), work less than 40 hours per week (every single employee at the radically successful in many ways) software house 37 Signals), sleep at least 8 hours per day (Arianna Huffington) etc etc.
Put simply, for leaders, less is more. Simple, yes? But how many of you just skipped over this and then skipped to thinking: “I get that, but I have so much to do, I’m so BUSY !” I’m passionate about new models for leadership and am developing one theme I call #OpenLeadership. Though my writing on this has stalled of late, the work around this has not, I continue to read, reflect, experiment (as the five-hour rule article talks about), taking time to read, to reflect, and also to experiment through lots of interesting conversations with leaders in wildly varying spaces.
In all of this, similar themes come through, and one of them is that being busy is not a virtue, and in fact, can be radically destructive to all of us, and in particular to our capability to lead ourselves and so lead others.
I don’t read for five hours every day, but I do spend at least one or two hours every day reading, thinking, as well as meeting (virtually, these days) and listening to other people (including my weekly show #WhatComesNextLive)
So, three years after I wrote those first thoughts on the topic of #OpenLeadership, yesterday I wrote a “long read” on the topic which distills much of what I have learned from all of that reading and listening over the last three-plus years. I hope you take value from it as you ask yourself the question: “Are you ready for #OpenLeadership?“, it came forth in a few hours of writing this week, yet was distilled from years of “reading during “work time””.