Book Title: The enemies of excellence
Author: Greg Salciccioli
Blindness is widespread today as disgraced leaders sit in the
wreckage of their own actions, stunned at their own capacity for deviance. Leadership
Excellence is a journey and in the journey there will be hurdles. Some of the
failures are due to unforeseen conditions and few due to personal conditions. The world is beautiful when you are successful
and the world is more meaningful when there is a purpose attached to living. Everyone
is susceptible to self-sabotage—especially in the presence of success. This
book is on about being a morally strong a leader, has to overcome seven core risks which one
needs checked and worked on in order to excel.
By identifying and learning to recognize each risk, leaders can stop
creating misery for themselves and the people who rely on them emotionally and
financially. The Enemies of Excellence can affect anyone—from the corner office
to the conference room, and from the classroom to the living room.
Managing personal life is a struggle for every leader. We all
have flaws that blind us. If left unattended and unexamined, they will
eventually destroy us. One of my own tragic flaws was anger, which affected
everything in my life. The book narrates the seven core enemies classified into
common and disastrous for excellence. The first three Egotism, Life
Mismanagement, Bad Habits are
commonly found in most of the leaders. Timely feedback, due-diligence and awareness
on these can be controlled through willpower. Indulgence, Broken relationships, Isolation and Self-sabotage are the lethal for excellence. All these seven core
risks occurs when being successful or enjoying success is at top of the mind
resulting in mismanagement. Therefore it
is needed to be grounded and do a self-check to ensure that success is not
captured in mind and body.
The first three Enemies of Excellence. As egotism is allowed to
exist, it breeds arrogance, and arrogance in turn builds ignorance. People
become ignorant of the other Enemies that are active in their life and
leadership. The second Enemy ensures that the balance between work and life is
ignored and allowed to break down. As work-life balance breaks down, bad habits
accumulate. This third Enemy opens the door to the dark side of Indulgence.
Egotists make people feel expendable. Ego-driven leaders not
only harm themselves and others—they destabilize and potentially destroy
organizations. To avoid the enemy of an egocentric focus, we need to not only
determine to avoid egotism but to understand the benefits of altruism. Altruism has great advantages over egotism.
Life Mismanagement: a situation due to egotism is disorganized or
controlled badly. This may be in the personal life or corporate life, may be
due to habits or addicts. Due to external environment or internal pressure. Enemy
of Life Mismanagement can’t stand against a person who establishes their
priorities and drives towards them each day. Life mismanagement is basically
due to centrally decision making and controls. Decentralization
and Delegation of controls is advantages over Life Mismanagement.
Bad Habits: Patterned behaviour regarded as detrimental to one’s physical
or mental health, which is often linked to lack of self-control. Everyone has a
bad habit. Some are more obvious than others. The primary reason that we are
overrun by the Enemy of Bad Habits has to do with intentional versus
reactionary living. The first step in choosing intentional leadership lies in a
simple but powerful best practice.
Indulgence: Indulgence means yielding to your desires, resulting in excess
that undermines your success. Indulgence dismantles the conscience piece by
piece until the alarms of moderation or morality are silenced. With the alarm
system disabled, all kinds of destructive behaviour can be explored.
Isolation: An ideal mind is a devils workshop, Isolation will lead to
power for destruction. The enemy of Isolation will plan of attack is to divide
and conquer. He wants us to leave the presence of others and go it alone, to be
the maverick who ends up masterminding his own demise.
Self-Sabotage: Self-sabotage is any behaviour,
thought, emotion or action that holds you back from getting what you
consciously want. Moreover, it’s the conflict that exists
between conscious desires and unconscious wants that manifest in
self-sabotage patterns. Self-sabotage patterns because we are unable to manage our emotions effectively.
