Understand that the people who have the keenest insight into your organization hold the lower level jobs. You can talk to your chief of staff or vice president for an hour to find out what s going on, or you can spend five minutes with the receptionist to really find out what s going on. Be an optimist. Things do go bad once in awhile. But it s been amazing to me to learn that a governor not me, any governor has a tremendous ability to project optimism, to make people feel that any problem can be solved, that we can face any challenge and succeed.
Optimism is infectious, and ultimately can be self-fulfilling.
Beats doom and gloom any day. Don t worry about not getting credit for good ideas. If the idea really is good and it works, the credit will take care of itself. Politicians and even CEO s sometimes spend too much time promoting themselves and trying to earn credit they only sometimes deserve. We always have to remind ourselves that we re here to do a job for the public, for shareholders, for customers, whoever.