Independent Thinking Blog

Wal-Mart Vice-Chair on the Crux of Leadership

Great interview with Wal-Mart Vice Chair Eduardo Castro-Wright about leadership and what they don’t teach you in business school. The crux of leadership: trust. Leadership is “about being able to get people to go to places they never thought they could go,” he said in an interview with the New York Times.

Other highlights:

1. “You can accomplish almost anything in life if you do not care who takes credit for it. So I’ve tried to do more of that. And I’ve tried to do less of the things that make business more complex. I really like simplicity.”

2. “I think that business schools could do more to prepare kids to deal with the often more difficult side of business management and leadership. The balance of courses is probably weighted to the numeric side of business as opposed to the people side of business.”

3. “I honestly believe … that cultural differences, which are so often touted as the rationale for making decisions in business, are grossly overrated, and that human behavior really doesn’t have a language. It’s pretty much the same everywhere.”

And my personal favorite, in response to how people make business more complicated than it is: “I think that all of us read far too many business books…We have a very clear view of what we do for consumers around the world. And we can describe our complete strategy in 10 words.”

Read the entire interview here.

Photo by Return the Sun (Flickr).

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