When Andrew Carnegie died in 1919, he was worth the equivalent of $300 BILLION dollars in today’s money! Not bad for a Scottish immigrant who started work as a ‘bobbin boy’ in a cotton mill at age 13 on just $1.20 per week.
When a newspaper reporter asked him what the secret of his success was, he told them that …
If he lost everything and had to start all over again, he would have it all back again within a year …
PROVIDED HE HAD HIS KEY EMPLOYEES.
Andrew Carnegie was a true believer in the ‘you are only as good as your people philosophy’!
Peter Drucker summed up the importance of this ‘it’s not about me’ attitude and the importance of the ‘team’ when he said:
“Leaders who work most effectively never say ‘I.’ And that’s not because they have trained themselves not to say ‘I.’ They don’t think ‘I.’ They think ‘we’; they think ‘team.’ They understand that it’s their job to make the team function.”
[Leaders] UNDERSTAND that IT’S THEIR JOB to make the team function.
And Andrew Carnegie put it like this:
“Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.”
[Teamwork] is the fuel that allows COMMON people to attain UNCOMMON results.
So, it could be argued that …
It’s your job to actually make yourself dispensable as a CEO, by creating a team that is more indispensable than you.