Good leaders delay making decisions. Good leaders think indecisively. Good leaders do not keep up with popular trends. That’s according to Steve B. Sample. He wants us to question conventional wisdom about leadership. Sample, an electrical engineer, musician, and inventor, is also president of the University of Southern California and author of The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2002). His book has been widely praised by leaders in politics, business, and now the church.
A committed Christian, Sample was interviewed about his provocative leadership principles by Bill Hybels at Willow Creek’s recent Leadership Summit. Hybels told the audience when he read the first few pages of the book, Sample’s concepts “knocked me out of my airplane seat.” The pastor made The Contrarian’s Guide mandatory reading for leaders at Willow Creek Community Church and the subject of a two-day staff retreat. “That’s how strongly I feel about these principles,” he said.
Hybels: You start the book by saying we have to learn how to “think gray.” I’m like, wait a minute. Every leader has to think decisive thoughts. People look to us to be clear and to take all the gray out of it. But you say, no, leaders should think gray. What do you mean by that?
Sample: Human beings have this tremendous tendency built in to make up our minds right away. Good or bad. True or false. Up or down. That works for most people most of the time. It may work very well for managers, but it’s a terrible way to act if you’re a leader. The idea of thinking gray is this: don’t make judgments until you have to.
You also talk about “thinking free.” What does that mean?
This is probably one of the most controversial parts of the book, one of the parts that’s the hardest for people to understand. Thinking free goes several steps beyond thinking out of the box. It means forcing yourself to consider possibilities, situations, answers, resolutions that are absolutely outrageous, absolutely untenable from the beginning. That’s hard to do.
When was a time you practiced that?
In one particular case in 1967, I had a client who built dishwashers, and I was hired to come up with a new way to control a dishwasher, replacing the troublesome clock-motor timer.
I was making very little progress until finally I lay down on the family room floor and for ten minutes forced myself to think of ladybugs controlling a dishwasher. Then French horns controlling a dishwasher. The planet Jupiter controlling a dishwasher. Newspapers controlling a dishwasher. All of these things that have no way to be held in the average person’s mind. It was difficult for me.
But after the second session, I suddenly saw an almost complete circuit diagram for a totally different way to control a dishwasher or any home appliance. And some four or five hundred million appliances worldwide have been built using this invention.
This forced contemplation of the outrageous is the most effective way to get us out of our ruts. And, believe me, all of us are in very deep ruts all the time.
One part of this book made me laugh out loud, because these are some of the strangest views I’ve ever heard—about what leaders should be reading. Tell us your theory.
My theory is that, to a greater extent than most of us realize, we are what we read. I think it was Thoreau who made the observation that reading one book necessarily precludes your reading hundreds of others. You have to make hard choices with respect to reading.
If you’re in a leadership position, the least important things for you to read are newspapers and trade magazines and the like. Thomas Jefferson once said “The man who reads nothing at all is better informed than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”
You actually went on a fast from reading newspapers—for how long?
I didn’t read a newspaper, a newsmagazine, didn’t watch television news for six months. I found it had no deleterious effect on my job whatsoever. It was really tough to give up all newspapers and newsmagazines during the first two or three weeks. Kathryn and I would be walking along the street, and I’d lean into a newsstand kiosk. She’d say, “Are you reading the headlines?”
“No, no, no. Just admiring the construction of that little box.”
So it was awfully hard. But after two or three weeks—the same thing with quitting smoking—I felt a new sense of freedom. After six months I went back to a half-hour a day. I allow myself 10 minutes to scan the Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal and that’s enough. But the other 20 minutes has to go toward reading substantive material.
I’ve been telling leaders this for a long time: read everything you can read about leadership. You took my counsel one step further. You said, “Don’t read just anything about leadership; read the ‘supertexts’ about leadership.” What are you talking about?
Of the hundreds of thousands of things that men and women have written 400 years ago or before, only about 25 to 50 are widely read today. So there’s something very special about these 25 to 50 texts. They influence everything that is written and spoken in our society to an unprecedented degree.
You can usefully spend your time reading any of the supertexts, even over and over again, because they probably tell us more about human nature than anything else we have at our disposal. But for books that are not the supertexts, I think a person has to be very, very selective.
You talk a lot about decision making in your book, and your two key rules for decision making. Both of these surprised me.
The first rule is never make a decision yourself that can reasonably be delegated to a subordinate. And second, never make a decision today that can reasonably be put off till tomorrow. Even with the word reasonably included, those two rules are so counterintuitive, they’re repugnant to most leaders on the first reading. But there’s a contrarian bit of wisdom there.
If you have a very small organization—two or three people—sure, the boss can make all the decisions. But if you’re in a large organization, and you want it to be so healthy and vital that it can survive even if the original leader doesn’t survive, then you need delegation, delegation, delegation. You’ve got to let the team members learn by doing, learn by making mistakes, and you have to be willing to take the heat for a decision that you didn’t even make. That’s almost impossible for most people, but what a powerful tool for building an organization.
And your second rule: postpone as much as possible?
Never make a decision today that you can reasonably put off till tomorrow. That runs counter to the clean-plate and tidy-desk mentality that we were all brought up with. For managers, being more decisive, making decisions right away is probably important. But for leaders, exactly the opposite is important.
Harry Truman is my idol in this area. When a subordinate would come to him and say, “Mr. President, we need a decision on this matter right away,” the first thing Truman would say is, “How much time do I have? Do I have ten seconds? Do I have a day? A week? A month? A year? How much time do I have?” Truman understood that the timing of a decision is often as important as the decision itself.
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