We believe that one of the most important aspects of leading this company is to grow a factory of forward thinkers and leaders. Good leaders make new leaders. This idea can be summed up in a famous quote by Stephen Covey and one of our favorites:

“Leadership is communicating to people their worth and potential so clearly that they come to see it in themselves.”

Unfortunately, leadership is one of the biggest voids in just about any organization and it seems to be even more evident in very technical organizations.

We believe that it is a myth when people say “Leaders are just born, they are not made.”, but there is a caveat. While we think leaders can be made, leadership cannot be lectured in a class or taught through forced teaching. It has to be self-learned and the individual has to want to become a leader and crave responsibility. It is a very internally driven improvement trait.

Leadership is hard. It is dealing with people and there is no magic formula. It is a never-ending learning process and changes over time, just as you change over time. But just as any journey starts somewhere, we hope that you would try to seek out opportunities, no matter how small to improve your leadership skills. One way we would like to help kick start your life long leadership learning course is to read a few books that can help ignite some thoughts or feelings that you may have on this subject.

We will keep a slew of books that focus on leadership, management, inspiration, or other aspects of self-improvement in the bookshelf in the Daniel Island Office. It is the shelf that is second from the top. You are free to grab any one of them that interests you, but please return the book to the shelf when done so others can read it later. All we ask is that after you read it, you write a FULL 1-page paper (no more than one page, but not three sentences, either – we want to see some deep thought) that references the following:

1. The single biggest point of the book that resonated with you. We like to refer to them a ‘gem’ and each of these books has at least one that hits home.
2. How you are going to implement that in your life. It can be personal, professional or both.

If you complete a book and send it to Glenn and Brian, we will give you a crisp $50 bill. Obviously, in a perfect world, we know everyone would have the exponential amount of initiative and drive to just want to do it on your own, but we also know that dangling a carrot may just be what some need to make that little extra effort to actually open a book. We hope that is the spark needed to build some momentum within yourself to improve in an area that just isn’t taught in a class.

We are also certainly aware of the number of resources on the internet that can summarize a book, but we are just going to trust that you have enough honesty to actually read the whole book and complete the paper on your own accord.

– Glenn and Brian