Why listen to me is not just a rhetorical question. It’s also a rhetorical answer.
Follow your way to leadership!
While it’s true I have not overrun whole continents, delivered gifts to children all over the world in 24 hours, or trekked to one or more poles, the organizations you inhabit are probably more like mine than a Mongol horde, Santa’s workshop, or South Pole expedition.
An Amazon.com search of the phrase “The leadership secrets of…” returned over 5000 results including secrets of Santa Claus, Ernest Shackleton, Jack Welch, Jesus Christ, golf, Elizabeth I, Billy Graham, Saint Paul, and King David. My personal favorite promises the leadership secrets of a hundred top CEO’s. Conveniently all these secrets are a few simple rules which will put you on the fast track to becoming Gandhi or Attila the Hun or - the killer app of leadership – both.
Aside from the fact that rule following is an odd vein to mine given the current mania for innovation, rules are for people who confuse pills with health. Rules and pills only help when you use them correctly. Rules furnish options, rough guides, and short cuts if you apply the same principle to them as Humpty Dumpty’s advice to Alice about words, “the question is, who is to be master, you or the word”. So I liked First, Break All the Rules because it’s really about challenging assumptions.
But this is the Internet, so here are my four actionable rules you can act on immediately:
1. Nothing in a book is a secret.
2. Following rules is following.
3. Break all the rules is a rule.
4. Great leaders and managers don’t rely on rules.
In short, it’s good I’m not a hero. 1
My story line so far
I retired early from the Nova Scotia public service in 2007 having served in various legal and leadership positions. In my last seven years I was the deputy minister of justice and deputy attorney general. Deputy minister is the Canadian term for the non-political head of a government department. Fans of Yes Minister will be familiar with the office of permanent secretary occupied by Sir Humphrey Appleby - who I think I’ve come to resemble.
You be the judge
But, you say, what’s managing in government got to do with the real world? In Elon, Run Your Business Like a Government I argue that government done well is not business done badly and running a business today is a lot more like government than you’d like to think. My last sixteen years in the private sector has convinced me that, whether you meet a financial bottom line, or a democratic bottom line, management and leadership are the same.
Leaving government when I did, I not only experienced the transition from government to a small business, I also experienced the transition going on in both government and business from the information era to the Ideas Era – appropriately as “a tide in the affairs of men…”2
My first big project as a consultant was starting up the Fundy Ocean Research Centre for Energy (FORCE).
As deputy minister of justice, I oversaw an annual budget of $120 million and about 1300 employees, all carefully detailed on charts and in accounts, together with the full panoply of bureaucratic processes. FORCE has grown since 2007 but in its early years, when I was its first executive director, it was the loose sort of firm Peter Drucker called a confederation in his 2001 article Will the Corporation Survive? It functioned very effectively with no office and no employees. It had about 20 or so regular contractors – freelancers and firms of varying shapes and sizes, me included as I continued to do other consulting work. All were high performing professionals delivering services that would, in former times, have been performed by employees of a large corporation. I don’t think we were ever all in the same room together.
Each of the other contractors was an expert in something I knew nothing about from industrial construction, bathymetry, engineering, and marine operations to submarine cables and electrical substation design and operation.
I managed them. They led me.
My authority stemmed from my accountability to the Board for what they did individually, and what we did together - build a $40 million research facility at what has been called the Everest of tidal energy.
Today
I’m a private consultant with experience in leadership, negotiation, crisis response, and strategic navigation. I engage in projects ranging from facilitation and strategic planning for various organizations, to conducting reviews including toxic workplace complaint investigations.
I’ve co-chaired the Vancouver Hockey Riot Review and The Nova Scotia Fuel Shortage Review, and chaired the Commission on Effective Representation of Acadian and African Nova Scotians.
I maintained my interest in marine renewable energy even after leaving FORCE and contributed to policy and legislative development, promotion, and community relations. I chaired Marine Renewables Canada and currently chair FORCE’s board.
Ten years ago my wife and I moved to a rural part of Atlantic Canada and I became a volunteer firefighter, something I’ve always wanted to be.
I have been a big fish in a medium pond, a lead fish in a school of fish, and most of the time now, a pilot fish. In all my time as a professional I have worked hard to do a good job and, on my best days, I have done a great job. When I accidentally did a great job, I have always tried to figure out how it happened.
Five or six years ago I started gathering my accumulated notes and research for a book as a way to collect my thoughts on leadership and management and be busy during times when my consulting business wasn’t. I puttered along, reading more than writing for, as John McPhee says, “anything beats writing.” Then, in 2020, Covid provided me the extended downtime and intimation of mortality necessary to pick up the pace and get the book about three quarters done. Life’s more or less back to normal now and I’m unlikely to ever finish it. Hence this newsletter.
I confess that I’m not above puffing myself up when I need to impress a potential client or opponent. Then I’m Douglas J Keefe KC. KC stands for King’s Counsel. It’s a designation awarded to lawyers in the United Kingdom and some Commonwealth countries like Canada. Occasionally an American will ask me if it’s like a knighthood and I say yes. I’m not fibbing, I’m allowing a false impression to persist. Both are conferred by the Monarch (technically) and neither confers any power. But I didn’t kneel before Queen Elizabeth and in fact the only real benefit is that a few people think it’s like a knighthood.
Responsibility for the dated gendered language rests with Shakespeare. In his Julius Caesar, Brutus tells Cassius, “There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”
I'm wondering if you are the same "Doug Keefe" who used to play drums in a band (long before a career in law) and dabbled in indoor/outdoor soccer.
My name is John Gibson, I've resided on PEI since 1983 and have retired from the financial services industry (finally, in 2023), just have time of my hands, and found your name to be memorable.
I crossed paths with Brian Doherty about 6-8 years ago on PEI and recalled your soccer prowess.
It would be nice to hear from you when you get a chance, if I've got my facts straight that is, to john.gibson6400@gmail.com