Leadership is: "The capacity to elicit the willingness collaboration of others towards a worthwhile goal over an extended period of time." In season 5 episode 3 we are joined by Peter Browning. He spent 25 years at Continental Can, then went on to be the Chairman and CEO of National Gypsum as well as President and CEO of Sonoco Products. Later in his career he became the Dean of the McColl School of Business at Queens. He has served on 12 publicly traded corporate boards for companies such as Wachovia and Lowe's as well as well as multiple other private companies. He co-wrote the book "The Directors Manual, a framework for board governance" in 2015 and now runs Peter Browning Partners a Board Advisory Services company.
I honestly could have talked to Peter all day as he poured out so many stories from his 50+ year professional career. Here are just a few of my topics we discussed in our conversation.
- Peter’s famous definition of leadership
- The powerful practice of the leadership question box
- Why great leaders are open and transparent
- What a board’s most important job is without question
- Why you’re never as good as you think or never as bad as you think
- Why ambition alone isn’t going to make things happen
- Why the CEO’s job is 24/7 x 2.
- Why exercise and health are so important in leadership
- Why education is so important in life
- The power of curiosity in the trajectory of careers
- Why taking risk is so important even in big companies
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