Hold your cynicism

If you want to be successful, grow up and find your mojo, says self-help evangelist Marshall Goldsmith. It's that simple, writes RICHARD GILLIS

TWO THINGS have remained with me since conducting this interview with the author and management self-help evangelist Marshall Goldsmith. The first came when I asked him to name his all-time favourite business books – he listed one of his own previous efforts – What Got You Here Won't Get You There– before going on to name a few others, all by people who he called "his good friends", such as Frances Hesselbein (whose effusive praise for Goldsmith's new book is splashed on its cover) and Warren Bennis (likewise).

The second moment came when we were talking, inevitably given his line of work, about what makes a leader. Goldsmith suggested, “Great leaders are those who exhibit high amounts of mojo”, before going on to support his argument with the sentence: “the great leaders I’ve worked with are off the charts with their mojo scores”. This last bit of gobbledegook retains the power, even now a couple of weeks later, to make me laugh out loud while on my own on a train.

To be fair to Goldsmith, he isn't a wannabe self-help hack. His books sell by the million, he teaches at some of the best business schools in the US and he was a recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Institute of Management Studies, one of only two people to have been honoured in that way in the last 25 years. His new book is called Mojo: How to Get It, How to Keep It, How to Get It Back if you Lose It.

The term, as defined by Goldsmith, is the “positive spirit toward what we are doing now that starts from the inside and radiates to the outside”. These people consistently communicate a sense of happiness and joy at being where they are and they communicate that what they are doing is meaningful for them. To be against mojo, is to be nojo, a cynical pit of despair, the inhabitants of which will be damned forever to be unhappy and lonely – of which more later.

Goldsmith’s books are his calling card in a sector that is increasingly congested with people selling the next big management idea. “I do three things and they are all quite different,” he says. “Firstly, I speak or teach. This is what I love to do the most, it’s fun and it makes me happy. It has what I would call a mid-level impact.

“I also do executive coaching, it’s much harder work it has a deeper impact but impacts a much smaller number of people, I can only coach around eight people at a time. The third thing I do is write. It has a very broad reach but is much shallower than the other two. Over 10 million people have read a blog or something I’ve written. I could never speak to that number of people or coach them.”

Writing, he says, is the hardest part of his working life, an inconvenience made easier by the fact that he doesn't do it. "I will share the secret of my two best books: find someone else who can write and get them to write the book," he says, tipping his hat to Mark Reiter, who wrote Mojo. It's a combination that seems to work. "To write a best-selling book today is like being struck by lightning, the chances are slim. Amazon has 27,000 business titles and my book was a top 10 bestseller for six weeks and that's not easy. Many of these others are good books but only a few of them will sell copies. Most books don't sell many copies at all."

There is little in Mojothat hasn't been dealt with before; we have been told many times that optimism is probably a healthier mental state than pessimism and that living in the moment is better for us than deferring to some point in the future. Mojo is another way of saying "be happy now", "live in the moment" or "rejoice in the power of now"; all laudable aims that come up again in Mojo. What's more, every management thinker from Abraham Maslow to Peter Drucker has cited the deep need we have to find meaning in our lives, and the problems that occur when its missing. Goldsmith is not pretending to have discovered anything new but his skill is presenting it with amiable chutzpah.

The timing of the book is also intriguing, with some of the case studies pondering the changing nature of work, using the credit crunch as a handy context. One of the myths of modern life, he says, is that technology and advanced management thinking will make things easier but this has turned out to be fundamentally wrong. “Unfortunately we will have to work more in the future,” says Goldsmith. “Globalisation and global competition will ensure that. You’re in Ireland so I don’t have to tell you this. I mean, are things easier in Ireland this week than they were last week? I don’t think so. Things have gotten much more challenging and will continue to be challenging as global competition increases.”

The basic assumption of Goldsmith’s books and of the self-help industry generally, is that you can learn this stuff and that it is not an inherent trait.

“I definitely believe that the only people who can’t change are those with incurable genetic defects, so by definition, if we’re not one of those people we can change,” says Goldsmith. “It’s important not to stereotype ourselves in negative ways. I see this all the time in my coaching. I’m not naive, I don’t believe I can become anything, I do have unchangeable deficiencies that will prohibit me from ever becoming, say, a professional basketball player or anything else that I cannot do, it’s not there in me, and it never will be.”

What if, I ask, you find it hard to play ball? What if you spend a great deal of time questioning things, or people, or feel generally that the happy clappy stuff goes out of the window when things get tough?

“Leaders should try not to be cynical,” he says. “Nobody ever said, ‘you’re a great leader because you’re so cynical’.”

He cites Drucker again: “Drucker would ask three basic questions. What is your mission, who is your customer and what does your customer consider value.” These questions, says Goldsmith, allows us to know when cynicism is appropriate.

“Most people who are cynical tend to be customers themselves and their mission is to try and show how smart or clever they are. Every decision is made by the person who has the power to make that decision, not the best person, not the smartest person, not the right person or the person who agrees with you. Once you make peace with that life is much better, you will be happier and make a more positive difference.

“Cynicism comes from an excessive search for logic and not being able to find it, and being upset because decision-makers are not perfect and that they don’t agree with you or that the decision-makers are unfair and irrational. My general response to people who act cynically is, grow up! It is usually a childish whining that represents the inability to accept ‘what is’ and the fact that ‘what is’ doesn’t fit their view or goal.”

That’s me told anyway.