Tuesday, February 10, 2009
To Be a Leader
We had Cole Orndorff come speak to our class last week. He is the CIO at Mortenson Construction, an excellent speaker, an interesting fellow, and for whatever reason reminded me of Chris Farley's little brother. His entire presentation was very enlightening, as it was cool to hear about his transformation from an IT dude to a full-fledged major player for Mortenson. I took the weekend to think about what he said and form my own opinions (see: procrastinated). I remember him making one comment in particular about the CEO (I think) for Cisco Systems. He mentioned that while he was an excellent businessman (he may or may not have used the word 'genius') he was also an 'arrogant SOB.' I immediately knew the type: a pompous prick who didn't have time for the little people and thought every idea he had was the correct one. But after thinking about it, isn't this the type of person who needs to be a leader of a company? Granted, all I know of this man is what was described to the class, but it kind of makes sense. An arrogant SOB would believe in himself wholeheartedly, and wouldn't get discouraged when others told him he was wrong, or that his ideas wouldn't work. Maybe he is an asshole, but if that's the case, it wouldn't be an issue for him to make the tough decisions when it came to personnel, etc. If he truly had a strand of genius in him as well (which could very well be the case, considering his position), it would be possible to overlook his crap personality to see the good that he is doing for the company. None of us wants to work for an arrogant SOB, but in the end that might be the type of person we need to be running our businesses.
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