This week I read an article on LinkedIn by Jan Rutherford. In his article, he briefly reviews a book called Leadership BS by Jeffrey Pfeffer, who is a professor at Stanford University.
Apparently, in Leadership BS Jeff teaches that the leadership development industry, with all of its self-help books, executive coaching, and deep thinking, is not delivering an ROI.
Over the last year I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the ROI of this blog. If you’re calculating the ROI based on how much money I’ve gotten out of it, it’s a clear loser. But I’m not doing it for the money. As long as I keep it up, the blog and all of its content will be free.
The ROI of a blog like this is two-fold. First, the blog is a way for me to work on my ideas. It forces me to shape my thoughts into something resembling coherence at least once a week.
The second part of the ROI comes from people putting these ideas into practice. It exists in building what Jeff calls an “environment in which ordinary, albeit conscientious, people can reliably produce desirable results.”
That’s why it’s so important to think about why we’re in business. As Clayton Christensen said in How Will You Measure Your Life: “How do you make sure that you’re implementing the strategy you really want to implement? Watch where your resources flow . . . . Because if the decisions you make about where you invest your blood, sweat, and tears are not consistent with the person you aspire to be, you’ll never become that person.”
It’s just as true of business as it is of people.
