(My) Leadership Life Lessons
Avoiding The “Local Peak” Syndrome
Given the list of leadership initiatives I have had the good fortune to work on these past 20+ years, I was recently asked how I decide which projects to say “yes” to and which to decline. My answer is somewhat simplistic, but it has come down to the quality of the team I get to work with and our collective ambition to do something meaningful that has the potential to scale and spread. I had the opportunity to start my B-school career under the guidance of a brilliant thought leader who cautioned against the limitations of what he called the “Local Peak Syndrome” — equipping yourself to tackle the easily reachable and often crowded local peak as opposed to navigating your own path to a higher summit where few if any, have gone before. Even if you don’t reach your goal, you will have learned invaluable lessons along the way and perhaps inspired others to also raise their line of sight on what is possible given the right collaborators and guiding purpose.
