Page 70 - Roy W. Rice - CEO Material How to Be a Leader in Any Organization-McGraw-Hill (2009)

You Know You Don’t Know Enough • 51

Business Traveler, Biotech Business, Gaming Business, Tennessee Cattle
Business, and the Journal of Applied Christian Leadership, plus 4,860
other trade and business publications and another 6,000 nonbusiness
publications in the United States alone.

I subscribe to customer industry magazines, IT Journal, CFO Mag-
azine, and Human Resources Professional. Half of it’s boring to me,
but I do get a different perspective too.

It is better to read too much than to talk too much. One CEO told
me that he had read 40 books about cattle drives to hone his “herding”
leadership.
Jump at the chance to go to conferences, workshops, and seminars
sponsored by your company, industry association, vendors, chamber of
commerce, or local college in your expertise or not. Don’t wait to be
offered, sent, or required. Study anything you missed in your previous
schooling or anything you simply want to know something more about.
Hang with good, smart people, but not just people you know and who
are just like you (i.e., accountants with accountants and engineers with
engineers). Go out of your way to be around, listen to, and talk with people
in the most unrelated function to you and in the most distant industry.

I bought a college student’s books in classes I missed—paid him twice
what he would have gotten otherwise. Heck, he’d even underlined all
the important stuff.
ƒ

The subject you studied in school doesn’t mean anything. What is
significant is the training of your brain.

A good target in continuous learning is to simply fill in the gaps of
what you’ve haven’t had exposure to. If you studied English, like Michael
Eisner of Walt Disney, or premed, like Michael Dell of Dell Computer,
or history, like Terry Jones of Travelocity, or law, like John Chamber of
Cisco, you could self-study business, engineering, computer science,
mathematics, economics, physics, chemistry, finance, accounting, market-
ing, manufacturing, sales, operations, public speaking, languages, etc. You’ll
learn something that previously was difficult so that difficult doesn’t