Let me tell you a story about one of my super bosses, that highlights some of their personality attributes in general. And it also shows how super bosses are are different than the average or even the good leader or bos. A nondescript white truck chugged through the streets of downtown Philadelphia, passing the Boz Art Rodin Museum Building and the Community College of Philadelphia. Before arriving at the iconic structure located at 400 North Broad Street. The front of this building, known locally as the quote Tower of Truth end quote bore the insignia of the town's leading newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 18 stories tall. It housed editorial offices and at one time giant newspaper presses whose operations sent vibrations coursing through the entire building. On this day, way back in 1978, the van skirted the front entrance and continued around the building to the back. Normally, trucks came here to load newspapers hot off the presses, but not this van, it was there to unload. The driver and other workers walked around to open the vans rear door out, came a long spine lee leg, then another. In the end there were four legs as well as a hump, a sizable torso and a serenely smiling face a camel rented from a local circus. More legs followed shorter ones, a goat thrown in by the circus and inquire employee remembers when I talked to him at no additional charge. The animals handlers and inquirer staff who had come to meet the creatures, led them through a door to a freight elevator That unfortunately went no higher than the 4th floor. When the doors opened, the animals were led through the building through the cafeteria, in fact, which has got to break all kinds of OSHA rules onto a passenger elevator and up to another floor. Employees in the cafeteria stared in astonishment, needless to say. Some got up to follow the animals eager to see what was going on. These were reporters after all. A gaggle of spectators darted up the stairs, arriving in time to see the camel exit the passenger elevator and crossed the newsroom. At the time editor in chief Gene Roberts, a super boss was meeting with architects and interior decorators, discussing plans for the newsroom of the future to be built for the inquirer. Roberts didn't jump or shriek or laugh as the animals entered without batting an eye. He turned to these experts that he was talking to and said, yes, we'll need the newsroom to be near the freight elevator. Longtime staffers told this story 30 years later gathering together in 2008 to celebrate their time working for Roberts. The camel was meant to celebrate the recent Pulitzer awarded to inquire journalist Richard Ben Cramer for his Middle East reporting. As well as Robert's ability to parlay that success and to increase corporate funding from the Inquirer's owners for foreign correspondents. Any number of other colorful stories also revealed how the inquirer lead by Robert's pulsed with energy and creativity. When I spoke with Robert's proteges, the people that worked for him over the years, I discovered that they didn't merely respect and admired him as a leader. They revered him. Every person I contacted immediately got back in touch and said they love to share stories about the Robert's era. Working for Gene Roberts clearly wasn't just another job for them, it was the job of a lifetime. And Roberts wasn't just another boss. He was one of a kind a force of nature, as an investigative reporter. Don Bartlett told me if you were a reporter and you didn't love him, there was something wrong with you. They may also have been something wrong with you if upon leaving Roberts nest, you didn't claim a place for yourself at the apex of American journalism. At the Reunion attended by more than 300 people, there were 16 Pulitzer Prize Winners, a National Book Award winner. And the best selling authors of the books, Friday Night Lights and Black Hawk down. Other former staffers of Roberts have gone on to head the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, the Akron Beacon Journal and the Poynter Institute, which is the leading in service school for journalists. Not to mention others who became investigative reporters for top papers and magazines across the country. This is a super boss in action, isn't it? And a story that highlights several of the key attributes of super bosses, they're creative, which is a theme I will return to several times in this course. They're energetic, they instill a tremendous sense of loyalty among people who work for them and they are risk takers. One more thing. Our super boss is any different than the run of the mill good boss. Gene roberts sounds really out there, right, but is he better than and other super boss, are they better than good bosses? Well, let me make a couple of points about that comparison. Super bosses embrace certain practices well, the good bosses don't, and they do even more of the productive things that good bosses do. For instance, good bosses will give employees opportunities to move up, using even career ladders to define opportunities. Super bosses also create opportunities for employees to move up, but they personalize those opportunities rather than organizing them in a standard or lockstep way. Good bosses measure engagement formally using standard metrics. Super bosses don't need to rely on all those standard metrics because they're living the workplace experience with their employees. Likewise, good bosses are very big on best practices. They want to know what works, they want to know what to do that works, maybe that doesn't work. Super boss have very little interest and best practices for them such practices amount to kind of codifying the past that implicitly reduces openness to new ways of doing things. What hedge fund titan Julian Robertson have funded so many apparently inexperienced investors which he called and others called the tiger cubs. If he followed a textbook approach to selecting fund managers, it's hard to believe, and this is true for super boss after super boss. If they did what the textbook told you to do, I don't think we'd see the same type of success. Much of the difference between good bosses and super bosses, it comes down to mentality. How do you think to mindset many of the best bosses today tend to think of themselves as professional managers? They do the basics well, strive to get better as most professionals do. What these bosses sometimes lose, frankly, is the intuition, the innate curiosity, the rough and tumble entrepreneurial energy that characterize super bosse. It's not that professional managers don't exist among the ranks of super bosses. Of course they do, they're all very, very professional and I'm going to feature a whole bunch of these examples throughout this course. But super bosses don't limit their sense of themselves to that of the professional manager, no matter how professional, in fact they might be. They embrace they think about the world in such a creative entrepreneurial, breaking the rules kind of way that I think opens the door to some pretty powerful leadership. And we'll see it in situation after situation and in story after story. So super boss are good bosses, but more so than good bosses and super bosses do stuff that good boss actually don't even do. And I think that's important to keep in mind and all of this that I'm talking about with you now in this video, I have tons of examples for you. And importantly, I'm going to give you a chance to kind of apply some of these lessons for yourself.
