Leadership Wisdom from the Monk Who Sold His Ferrari: The 8 Rituals of the Best Leaders. Робин Шарма
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my aging father a small check at the end of every month, a portion of the salary I received from the part-time job that I held. This was a simple token of thanks for all he had done. When it came time to enter the work force, I had already been offered a lucrative management position in the high-tech field, the field of my choice. The company was called Digitech Software Strategies and it was the place where everyone wanted to work.
Astonishingly successful, the pundits predicted its meteoric growth would only continue and I felt truly honored that the firm had actively recruited me to become a member of its high-flying team. Quickly accepting the post, I began working eighty-hour weeks to prove that I was worth every penny of the lofty salary I received. Little did I know that, seven years later, the very same company would humiliate me as I had never been humiliated before.
The first few years at Digitech were good ones. They really were. I made some fine friends, learned a great deal and quickly rose through the executive ranks. I became the acknowledged superstar, a young man who had a razor-sharp mind, who knew how to work hard and who showed true commitment to the company. Though I’d never really been taught how to manage and lead people, they just kept on promoting me to ever-higher positions of responsibility.
But, without a doubt, the best thing that happened to me at Digitech Software Strategies was meeting Samantha, the woman who would eventually become my wife. A bright young manager herself, she was strikingly pretty, with a formidable intellect to match. After meeting at the Christmas party, we quickly hit it off and were soon spending what little free time we had together. From day one, Samantha was my greatest fan, a true believer in my potential and talent. “Peter, you’ll be the CEO,” she would regularly tell me, giving me a soft smile. “I know you’ve got what it takes.” Unfortunately, not everyone felt the same way. Or perhaps they did.
The CEO of Digitech Software ruled the company like a dictator. A self-made man with a vicious streak, he had an ego that matched his grossly inflated paycheck. When I first started working with him, he was polite though reserved. But when word started to spread about my abilities and my ambitions, he grew cold, often communicating with me through terse memos when the situation called for something less formal. Samantha called him an “insecure little clod of a man,” but the fact remained that he had power. Real power. Maybe he felt that as I rose to higher management positions, I would make him look bad. Or maybe he saw too much of himself in me—and didn’t like what he saw.
I have to admit, however, that I carried my own weaknesses. Foremost was a hair-trigger temper. If something went wrong at the wrong time, a rage brewed within me that I simply could not control. I have no idea where it came from, but it was there. And it was not a business asset. I’ll also admit that though I think I’m a fundamentally decent person, I could be a little rough around the edges when it came to the art of managing people. Like I said, I had never received any leadership training and operated on what little instinct I had been granted. I often felt that not everyone on my team shared my work ethic and commitment to excellence, which led me to frustration. Yes, I would yell at people. Yes, I took on far more responsibility than I was capable of handling. Yes, I should have spent more time building relationships and cultivating loyalty. But there were always too many fires to put out and I never seemed to have enough time to attend to the things that needed improving. I guess I was like the mariner who spent all his time bailing water out of his boat rather than taking the time to fix the hole in it. Shortsighted at best.
And so the day came when I was fired. The months that followed were truly the darkest of my life. Thank God I had Samantha and the kids around me. They did their best to lift my spirits and encourage me to pick up the pieces of my once fast-tracked career. But those months of idleness showed me that our self-esteem is linked to our jobs. At a cocktail party, the first question we are inevitably asked is, “So what do you do for a living?” As we began our weekly round of golf, my partners would always ask, “Any news on work, Peter?” The doorman at our luxury high rise, always a master of small talk, would regularly inquire whether things were going well at the office. With no job to go to, I no longer had any answers.
I went from getting up in the morning and rushing off to the subway station, my mind full of ideas, to awakening around noon in a darkened room, littered with empty Heineken bottles, Marlboro packages and sticky Häagen-Dazs containers. I stopped reading the Wall Street Journal and retreated into cheesy spy novels, old western paperbacks and trashy tabloids that revealed Oprah was an alien and that Elvis was still alive, managing a McDonald’s on the West Coast. I could not face reality. I just didn’t want to think too hard or do too much. A numbing pain pervaded my body and resting under the covers of our four-poster bed seemed like the best place to be.
Then one day, I received a phone call. It was an old college friend who had carved out an excellent reputation as one of the best minds in the software industry. He told me that he had just quit his job as chief programmer for a large company and was getting ready to start his own firm. I still recall him telling me he had what he called “a brilliant concept” for a new line of software and needed a partner he could trust. I was his first choice. “It’s a chance to build something great, Peter,” he said with his usual sense of enthusiasm. “C’mon. It’ll be fun.”
Part of me lacked the confidence to say yes. Starting a new business is never easy, especially in the high-tech field. What if we failed? As it was, our financial situation was a mess. As senior vice-president at Digitech Software, I was paid well and lived the kind of life that my father could only have dreamed of. I drove a brand-new BMW while Samantha had her own Mercedes. The kids went to private school and spent summers at a prestigious sailing camp. My golf club’s membership fees alone totalled the annual income of many of my friends. Now, with no job, the unpaid bills were piling up and many promises were being broken. It was not the ideal time to dream of my own business.
On the other hand, my wise father always told me that “nothing can defeat you unless you defeat yourself.” I needed this opportunity to lift me from the darkness that had enveloped my life. I needed a reason to wake up in the morning. I needed to reconnect to that sense of passion and purpose I had felt in college when I believed that I was unstoppable and the world was truly a place of unlimited possibilities. I had enough intuition to know that life sends us gifts from time to time. Success comes to those who recognize and accept them. So I said yes.
We grandly named the company GlobalView Software Solutions and set up shop in a tiny office in a run-down industrial complex. I was CEO and my partner was the self-appointed chairman. We had no employees, no furniture and no money. But we did have a great idea. And so we started pitching our software concept to the marketplace. Fortunately, the marketplace enthusiastically responded. Soon Samantha came to work with us and we hired other employees. Our innovative software products began to sell at a phenomenal pace and our profits quickly soared. That first year of operation, Business Success magazine listed us as one of the country’s fastest-growing companies. My father was so proud. Though he was eighty-six at the time, I still remember him carrying a huge basket of fruit into the office to celebrate our achievement. Tears streamed down his face when he looked at me and said, “Son, your mother would have been very happy today.”
That was more than eleven years ago and we have continued our blistering pace of growth. GlobalView Software Solutions is now a two-billion-dollar company with 2,500 employees at eight locations around the world. Just last year we moved into our new international headquarters, a world-class complex complete with a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility, three Olympic-sized swimming pools and an amphitheater for meetings and other corporate events. My partner is no longer involved in the day-to-day operations of the company and spends most of his time on his private island in the Caribbean or mountain-climbing in Nepal. Samantha left the leadership of the company a few years ago to pursue her passion for writing and to become more involved in community service. As for me, I’m still the CEO, but now I have crushing responsibilities that consume the majority of my time. Twenty-five hundred people look to me for their livelihoods and many thousands more depend on our organization to provide products and services that help them in their daily lives.
Sadly, my father died two years after the company was formed, and though he always sensed I would be enormously successful, I don’t think that even he could have imagined that we would be where