Writer
Ideas, books and blogs
Finding your leadership voice
If you are underthinking, read.
If you are overthinking, write.
“The best way to gauge the quality of someone’s ideas isn’t to listen to them talking. It’s to read their writing.
Compelling speakers can mask weak logic with strong charisma. Putting key points on a page exposes flawed reasoning.
Compelling writing requires clear thinking.”
Adam Grant
Writer
Ideas, books and blogs
Stay Connected
Please subscribe to our “In the Arena” email.
From time to time to time we will email you with some leadership insights, as well as links to cool stuff that we’ve come across.
We will treat your information with respect and not take this privilege for granted.
It is not about doing more.
It is about doing different.
CEOs receive meaningless emails every day that most of us ignore. There is one email I never ignore and that’s the regular blog from Cameron Schwab.
His writings are generous, inspired and grounding.
I have not really considered that the world of elite sport would be a space that I could learn from, but how wrong I was I!
Cameron is a wise leader who generously shares wisdom gleaned from his successes and failures.
Damian Ferrie
CEO | Better Health Network
CEO’s receive meaningless emails every day that most of us ignore. There is one email I never ignore and that’s the regular blog from Cameron Schwab.
His writings are generous, inspired and grounding.
I have not really considered that the world of elite sport would be a space that I could learn from, but how wrong I was I!
Cameron is a wise leader who generously shares wisdom gleaned from his successes and failures.
Damian Ferrie
CEO | Better Health Network
Why I write
To make meaning, to make sense, to make progress, to find my voice.
‘Borrow freely, apply uniquely’ is the mantra of my writing practice. I have taken the ideas and thoughts of many wise people, some of whom I got to know at the level that can only happen when you try and do something very difficult together, whilst others I will never get to meet. I am forever grateful to the former, and I share many of these learnings.
The latter are those people who have generously and courageously shared their thinking, ‘shipped their work’ as Seth Godin describes it, understanding and encouraging others to find meaning in their words, even when it is different from their intent.
Those people have ‘borrowed’ their work, but it is in the unique ‘application’ where the meaning is made, and if leaders are nothing else, they are makers of meaning.
As a CEO, it was the requirement to make meaning, as well as make sense, from those times when the challenge of the role was beyond my capacity to deal with it.
The role was giving me feedback, which I could ignore at my own and the club’s peril, which I wasn’t prepared to do. I needed to build a system that was equal to the challenge.
At the heart of this was the need to find my leadership voice, a voice I could trust when it seemed that no one else could.
Unless you find this voice, you cannot lead.
To be an open and curious learner, not a knower, understanding and committing to a process where it is more important to get it right than to be right.
In my experience, this requires leaders to embed a practice of reflection, best described as focused introspection. You must be prepared to ‘do the reps’, the compounding interest of thinking and growth.
And remember, ‘thinking’ only starts when pen is hitting paper, or fingers are on a keyboard, and now ‘growth’ is given a chance.
More to the game
What leaders can learn from football?
Organisations often turn to the professional sporting codes, particularly football, when seeking to understand the key concepts of team, particularly the role of leadership in terms of establishing a winning culture and executing a game plan.
In my book, I seek to find some of the answers, the transferable principles and their applications.
The alignment of purpose and performance, the mechanics and dynamics of high-performance environments, and they can be taught.
The game does not give up its rewards easily.
What stands in the way, becomes the way
Forty lessons in forty years
I wasn’t ready, but one of the most important lessons I would learn, a repeating pattern over the next forty years – you are never ready.
It was forty years from my first day of work.
I was 18, straight from school. Skipped uni. The 11th of January is a date that has stayed with me forever. Four decades since I arrived way too early for my first day of work at 26 Jolimont Terrace, Jolimont, the terrace house offices of the Melbourne Football Club, in the shadows of MCG, sitting on the steps waiting for the first person to arrive.
I was now officially the Assistant to the Football Manager of the Melbourne Football Club.
My Job Description in those early days was typical of any office junior, but it might as well have read:
“Do anything Ron Barassi asks you to do.”
It might just be the best job description I’ve ever had.
The photo is me in the background, ball in hand, watching the Great Barassi kick the ball, pinching myself.
If it is to be, it is up to me
I now realise that each time I sit down to write, I try to make sense of what the last forty years have taught me. These lessons are my ‘so far’ story, but they are also the platform for the ‘not yet’ story still to be told, and by sharing them, they just might help someone trying to make sense of the ambiguity, overwhelm and privilege of leadership.
The learnings from wise people like Ron, books I have read, studying in and with great education institutions and sporting clubs, learning experiences from mistakes I made, as well as the joy that can only come from attempting to do something hard, and watching as it all comes together.
As Hall of Fame coach David Parkin says, “In football, you get ten kicks in the bum for every lick of the ice cream”.
I am now formalising this process, the challenge being to write down 40 lessons from 40 years. I will share these lessons in this forum and others and see where it takes me.
Featured writing
The lesson that honours Ron Barassi
LESSON #01 (Reprise)
If it is to be, it is up to me.
Cameron Schwab
_________________________________________
I went straight from school to work, deferring a so-so offer to go to university after Year 12, with no real plan and indeed little idea, but somehow knowing it was the start of the rest of my life.
I’d completed school a month or so earlier. With a newly minted driver’s licence I’d got on my 18th birthday and a 1970 Mazda 808 bought from a local car yard owned by one of Dad’s football buddies, I went away to Anglesea with a few mates and my girlfriend, knowing that the countdown was on, to a place of transition, stepping into adulthood, each on their own path.
Most of the group had a couple of months of sun and sand ahead of them as they were heading off to various universities, whereas I didn’t know whether I was skipping or avoiding what was becoming an expectation beyond high school.
“You need something to fall back on. Gotta get a trade or an education,” was the prevailing wisdom of the time, and it seemed that I was not equipped nor motivated by either.
I had gotten myself a job, not by design but by circumstance, which represented neither trade nor education but, in time, would be both.
Stay Connected
Please subscribe to our “In the Arena” email.
From time to time to time we will email you with some leadership insights, as well as links to cool stuff that we’ve come across.
We will treat your information with respect and not take this privilege for granted.
It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts
In the Arena
Notes from my leadership journal
An idea, quote and recommendation
The concepts for "In the arena" are taken from years of daily journaling and in the moment note-taking in my Moleskine journal, and the lived experience as a leader for most of my working life.
