The failure doesn't always become personal as it did with McKeown, but that actually makes it more nefarious, harder to spot, and address. And this led him to another breakthrough realization, that "the pursuit of success can be a catalyst for failure." And, luckily for us, it led to him writing this new book, because it was while doing his consulting work that he realized that most of his clients were also letting other people and outside forces set priorities for them.
It led to his work with Liz Wiseman on the brilliant 2010 leadership book Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, and it led to him starting his own strategy and leadership company. It's a lesson that led him out of the organization he was working in and back to school for graduate work at Stanford. This experience led him to the discovery of an important, life-changing lesson:Īnd that lesson is the base of this book. What was I doing there? I had said "yes" simply to please, and in doing so I had hurt my family, my integrity, and even the client relationship.Īs it turned out, exactly nothing came of the client meeting. Afterward, my colleague said "The client will respect you for making the decision to be here." But the look on the clients' faces did not evince respect. To my shame, while my wife lay in the hospital with our hours-old baby, I went to a meeting. So when asked whether I planned to attend the meeting, I said with all the conviction I could muster.
It was clearly time to be there for my wife and newborn child. My colleague had written "Friday between 1-2 would be a bad time to have a baby because I need you to come be at his meeting with X." It was now Friday and Instinctively, I knew what to do. Even as my beautiful new baby lay in my wife's tired arms, I was on the phone and on e-mail with work, and I was feeling pressure to go to a client meeting. hat should have been one of the happiest, most serene days of my life was actually filled with tension. Fortunately, the little lady was okay, "healthy and happy at 7 pounds, 3 ounces." But not everything was well with Daddy. Greg McKeown has a stomach-sinking story to tell near the beginning of his new book, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, about the day after his daughter was born.
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