The Hero Factor summary

What do you, as a leader, value more: profit or people? This deceptively simple question is usually the author’s first question to business leaders he meets. And in fact, the most heroic answer is neither one nor the other. The hero’s answer is both. Both people and profits are of equal importance to a company, and there is no need to compromise the health of one to maximize the well-being of the other.

Now that we’ve cleared up this common misunderstanding, let’s take a closer look at what sort of values you’ll need to implement in order to make significant profits while improving relations with employees.

It’s important for leaders to have values, but it’s even more important that they live them too. After all, what good is it telling others, and yourself, that you value something, if you’re not actually putting that value into practice in your everyday work life?

The author witnessed this disconnect between espousing values and living them in his own company. When one of his digital media employees said in a meeting that she had achieved a 60 percent open rate on a batch of email newsletters she’d sent to the company’s clients, the author was shocked. After all, these clients were paying to receive these emails and thus should have been considering them interesting enough to open and read.

As a heroic leader, it’s important to build a heroic culture in your workplace – but exactly what does this sort of culture look like in practice?

You might assume that an excellent working culture looks like lots of enthusiastic employees, all working long, productive hours while having a great time in each other’s company. However, signs of a heroic culture might be a lot more subtle than that.

January 15th, 2009. Flight 1549 had only been in the air for two minutes when flames started shooting out from one of its engines. What happened next shocked and amazed the world. Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger landed the burning plane in the Hudson river in New York.

After the crash landing, one of the passengers Dave Sanderson quickly found himself waist-deep in cold water. After a terrifying few minutes, he managed to get out of the plane and swim to a boat. He was taken to the hospital, treated for hypothermia and kept in overnight.

Heroic leaders exist in all walks of life, but the impact some of them can have is remarkable.

When Rob Ryan founded Ascend Communications in 1989, he couldn’t have predicted that in just ten short years, he would sell his company to the tune of $20 billion. But when he did, Ryan’s life went on just as before. He ate lunch in the same place, and he drove the same car. In fact, the only big difference was to the lives of the people around him. How? He made them all millionaires.