Better Under Pressure : Justin Menkes

Better Under Pressure : Justin Menkes was my 98 of 2020. The flap of the book say, Most business leaders can take only so much pressure before their performance slides. Yet some CEOs deliver their greatest successes when times get toughest—when customers’ preferences are shifting away from a company’s products, when new regulations are shrinking profit margins, when political unrest is destroying supply lines.

In Better Under Pressure, Justin Menkes reveals the common traits that make these leaders successful. Drawing on in-depth interviews with sixty CEOs from an array of industries and performance data from two hundred other leaders, Menkes shows that great executives strive relentlessly to maximize their own potential—as well as stoke their people’s innate thirst for their own triumphs. To do so, they draw on a set of three essential and rare attributes:

• Realistic optimism: They recognize the risks threatening their organization’s survival—and their own failings—while remaining confident in their ability to have an impact. (i.e. they are aware of the circumstances, and has a sense of agency - they change the rules)

• Subservience to purpose: They dedicate themselves to pursuing a noble cause and win their team’s commitment to that cause. (i.e. they equate progress toward goal with emotional satisfaction; affiliations are based on shared dedication and affect tolerance)

• Finding order in chaos: They find clarity amid the many variables affecting their business by culling data and forming the conclusions that matter most to the company. (Maintain clarity of thought, have the drive to solve the puzzle - Become masterful listener)

The good news: these three capabilities can be learned. Drawing on a broad range of examples from real companies—including Avon, Yum Brands, Southwest, Procter & Gamble, and Ryerson Steel, to name just a few—Menkes demonstrates how each psychological attribute manifests itself in real life and enables top performance under extreme duress. He also shows you how to develop and deploy those attributes—so you can transform yourself into a leader who only shines brighter as the pressure intensifies.

Deeply personal, brimming with compelling stories from real-life CEOs, and packed with powerful insights, tools, and practices, this book is a potent resource for aspiring, emerging, and seasoned business leaders alike.

Leaders and the lead are influenced by those around them in their quest for success. Most important lesson about what sets the best leaders apart under today's extreme conditions is the gratification that comes from rising to ever higher levels of achievement - fulfilling potential. Leaders ability to realize their maximum potential and the potential of their workforce is the most profound way that they can differentiate themselves. 

1) Leadership means realizing potential - in yourself and in the people you lead. 

2) Because the external environment around leadership has changed dramatically, how leaders realize their own and others potential has changed dramatically as well.

The three catalysts for realizing potential are: realistic optimism, subservience to purpose, finding order in Chaos. 

Chapter 1 explores deeply the core-driving principle of realizing potential. Chapter 2 through 7 details the components of the three catalysts we need to realize our potential in a fast paced world. In the concluding chapter 8 is an example in which one leader illustrates how all three drivers are leveraged toward realizing the potential of a workforce. 

From the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s, the list of the top 100 companies largely stayed the same. From 1992-2002, more than half of those companies no longer existed. Pressure, the result of more competitors emerging from more parts of the world, and every business becoming more an more global, means an inevitable increase in the number of variables that influence your business, and the sheer speed of change. The resulting psychological experience of these of leaders is universal – increased pressure.

The new world of ever increasing complexity and intensified pressure is indifferent to our opinion of it, whether or not it is a good thing, or whether we wish it would go back to the way it was. It just is. Those that have learned how to thrive in it are the ones that will win. - So we need to Be Prepared. 

Complacency is the enemy of making things happen. Chapter 1 say don't be complacent. 

Relentless leaders who fully realize their potential never stop pursuing new challenges and opportunities. And in so doing, they have learned to first recognize and then satisfy an urge that has been with them since birth. They never retire. They constantly improve and make meaningful contribution and motivates others to do so. The realize the importance of balance, of enjoying the family life. Greatness doesn't come from robots. Greatness comes from people who have figured out how to build around themselves a system that allows them to be almost an archetypal parental figure at work, the kind of person who helps others pursue their ultimate abilities in life. 

Key tool is making the real world palpable, bring to the forefront the threats and uncertainties from the external environment. This tool can only take hold if people believe that what they are doing matters. Have and make people aware of purpose and ownership.

Leader should tolerate uncomfortable affects in order to achieve a broader, more meaningful outcome. Affiliations should be based on a shared dedication to the group's goal. 

People do not act as isolated entities, but are reflections of an essential interaction between themselves and the context in which they are placed. 

Through these interactionist models, we can far more accurately understand the causes of professional success and, consequently, achieve that very success ourselves. 

(Justin Menkes is an acclaimed author and leading expert in executive assessment. A consultant for the influential executive search firm Spencer Stuart, he and his colleagues advise the boards of the world’s leading companies on their choice of CEO. He authored The Wall Street Journal bestseller Executive Intelligence: What All Great Leaders Have and has written articles for Chief Executive and Harvard Business Review.)