This is an exercise to try in private. Try it on your CEO in public and you will certainly get noticed, mainly because you will find security escorting you off the building as fast as you can get your personal possessions into a black bin liner.
This is a three part test.
Part One
Make a list of all the Prime Ministers, or Presidents, of your country since the World War II. Now see what you can remember them for. For instance, in the UK
- Attlee: the welfare state
- Churchill: er, not much.
- Eden: the Suez invasion. Oops.
- Macmillan: “You never had it so good”
- Wilson: dodgy raincoats, pipes and unions.
- Heath: sailing and Europe
- Wilson again: more of the same.
- Callaghan: three day week, strikes and chaos.
- Thatcher: Thatcherism
- Major: son of Thatcher
- Blair: grandson of Thatcher; Iraq.
- Brown: oops.
That’s about as much as a Cambridge history graduate can figure out (ask me about 18th century India, I may do better. But I may have forgotten it all….)
Very few of the Prime Ministers are remembered as they would like. And most of them are only remembered for one or two things at most. The longer ago they were, the simpler the judgement on them becomes.
Part two.
Repeat the exercise from part one, but for the CEOs or other leaders of your company. Chances are that you won’t remember many of them, and even then you will not remember them for much. So much for their dazzling business careers in which they reached the apex of success as a captain of industry or colonel of commerce.
Part three
Repeat the exercise for yourself. How will you be remembered? If you are lucky, you will be remembered as much as for who you are as for what you did. If you are to make an impact as a leader at whatever level of business, you will not do so by counting the emails you sent or received. You need to have one big claim to fame.
If contemplating the possibility of irrrelevance is too depressing, turn the test around. How will you remember this year in five, 10, 20 years’ time? You will not remember it for beating budget by 5.2 per cent or getting a slightly bigger bonus than last year. Think back over the same five, 10 or 20 years and see what you can remember. You are likely to remember only one or two things. What are the one or two things which you want to remember from this year, in or out of work?
There are several years where I remember nothing clearly: all I achieved was to get one year closer to death.
We can easily get sucked into the details and not notice life is slipping us by. Make every year a year worth living and worth remembering.
