11 Ideas You Should Know From: The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership by Steven Sample

The 11 Big Ideas:

• The truth is almost always in between the extremes

• Be patient getting to a decision until you’ve heard everything

• Stop thinking in binary terms, there’s always an in-between

• Encourage new ideas without blindly accepting or rejecting them

• Try to think with two perspectives – your own and those you interact with

• Treat people’s concerns with absolute sincerity, but don’t judge until you have the facts

• Communication should be wide open to share the best ideas. Decisions can still be made in traditional channels

• Take control of what you read and consume; don’t let the media decide

• Always give your team the power to decide

• Worry about what’s best for your objective, not if it makes people like you

• Never insult or humiliate someone because it will come back at you in a dangerous way

My highlights From the Book:

The truth is almost always in between the extremes:

True effective leaders needs to see shades of grey in a situation in order to make wise decisions.

Be patient getting to a decision until you’ve heard everything:

Don’t form an opinion until you’ve heard all the relevant facts and arguments until circumstances force you to form an opinion.

Stop thinking in binary terms, there’s always an in-between:

Three dangers with binary thinking:

• Forms opinion before necessary

• Flip-flopping based on the latest data

• Believing what everyone else believes

Encourage new ideas without blindly accepting or rejecting them:

Ability to complement a new idea without deciding whether it is useful or bad – need to think grey but give enthusiastic response.

Try to think with two perspectives – your own and those you interact with:

Maintain intellectual independence – ability to see things through the eyes of his followers while at the same time seeing things from his own perspective – seeing double

Treat people’s concerns with absolute sincerity, but don’t judge until you have the facts:

Acknowledge concern by offering a temporizing response but don’t say anything concrete until you know exactly what happened.

Communication should be wide open to share the best ideas. Decisions can still be made in traditional channels:

Failing to make conscious choices about what to read is one of the worst things a leader can do. Its better to make own mistakes than to follow a best seller list. Don’t let people choose your books.

Always give your team the power to decide:

Never make a decision yourself that you can reasonably be delegated to a lieutenant.

Worry about what’s best for your objective, not if it makes people like you:

The failure of a leader to enforce the rules out of desire to incur the affection of his followers can bring that leader to ruin in a hurry.

Never insult or humiliate someone because it will come back at you in a dangerous way:

Don’t humiliate a person unless you can completely eliminate them, otherwise they will be an enemy for life.