The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership Read Online Free PDF

put John F. Kennedy on the same pedestal and perhaps justify the choice by referencing his famous ‘Ask not what your country can do for you’ speech.
    Don’t get me wrong, both these men were iconic leaders and the importance of having the ability to express one’s thoughts in an articulate and compelling manner is a tremendous asset – and certainly in our video clip/sound-bite driven world, a lot more newsworthy than being a great listener; news footage that features ‘and here we see the president listening intently as only he can’ is hardly going to move the opinion polls! Oratorical excellence, however, is just one of a compendium of leadership skills and not the be-all and end-all that some would believe it to be. Apart from anything else, the majority of world leaders and captains of industry don’t actually write their own speeches – Churchill being one highly notable exception to this rule – so it is dangerous to judge them by words that are not their own but rather the work of highly paid speech writers. Winston Churchill was, however, renowned for his ability to sit down and listen to anyone and everyone, and his view on the importance of listening is evidenced by another quote often attributed to him,‘ Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen .’
    Could it be that his skills as a listener might have been one of the things that made him such a great writer and speaker? I would venture to submit that it is no small coincidence.
    LISTENING IS NOT HEARING
    If there were ever a dead giveaway that somebody is not listening to a word of what you’re saying, it’s when they repeatedly use the annoying phrase, ‘I hear you, I hear you.’ Unfortunately, hearing is not listening. On a recent long-haul flight I could most assuredly hear the infant a few seats behind me that cried incessantly for the whole night, but I didn’t care to listen to it. I can hear the wind in the trees but I don’t take as much time as I should to listen to that either. And I don’t believe it’s entirely a matter of semantics. When someone says, ‘I heard every word he said’, in a strictly literal sense they may be telling the truth, but fifty per cent of the time they could probably just as truthfully add, ‘although I didn’t absorb one iota of it.’ Paradoxically, while I have always prided myself on being a good listener, I may have had an unfair advantage on most people. Having grown up with dyslexia I learned very early in life that if I wanted to take anything in then I had to force myself to listen intently. Not only that, but in order to have any chance of remembering what I was listening to, I also had to make the effort to take copious handwritten notes: a habit that I still diligently practise to this day.
    As an adult in business I have used this lesson to great advantage. I’ve also discovered that, as an adjunct to listening to what people have to say, my now infamous and utterly low-tech notebook is one of the most powerful tools I have in my bag of business tricks. Apart from helping me remember little things I want to bring up with one of our airlines, like ‘Add cold – not hot towel service’ as I am travelling, more importantly I can’t begin to count the number of times when referring to my notebooks has given me a clearly unexpected advantage on much bigger issues. A typical situation would be when someone says, ‘Well, Richard, as I recall when we last spoke in early March, we agreed to get a draft proposal to you by the end of April’, and they are totally discombobulated by a response of, ‘Well, no, at least not according to my notes of our last conversation. At 3.15 p.m. on 7 February you promised you were going to have the complete business plan to us by 31 March at the latest.’ Nailed! I even had someone once suggest that I had been illegally recording my phone conversations with him – like some kind of a Nixon White