Carol Bartz of Yahoo is the exception. I don't read autobiographies of the "great business leaders," Jack Welch, Lou Gerstner or anyone else. The most basic reason is the halo effect: the way our minds tend to create and maintain a coherent and consistent picture of ourselves in order to reduce cognitive dissonance. That suggests that I'm also careful about how I think about myself, and quite able to laugh at myself. My kids and wife will also have a good laugh and challenge my self-characterization.
However, the interview of Carol Bartz in the Times was surprisingly believable, not because of her well-known business history, but because of the coherent and consistent challenges to conventional wisdom. She made a terrific amount of sense about a number of relevant subjects in a brief column.
One of the important leadership lessons she learned is to never really let things get to you. She follows up that lesson with a story:
My favorite story is when we were on a farm in Wisconsin; I would have probably been 13. There was a snake up in the rafter of the machine shed. And we ran and said, "Grandma, there's snake." And she came out and she knocked it down with a shovel, chopped its head off and said, "You could have done that." And, you know, that's the tone she set. Just get it done. Just do it. Pick yourself up. Move on. Laugh.
I talk about the same issue, but with my own language. I believe life should be lived with a bit of sanctified nonchalance. A bit of devil-may-care. That way, nothing really gets to me. Of course, to live life that way requires a bit of personal personal thinking and personal philosophizing.
Bartz addresses that issue also when asked what business schools should teach more of. I think there ought to be some classes for people to get more philosophical about who they are and what motivates them, and therefore why they act like they act.