When Demosthenes was asked what the three most important qualities of an orator were, he replied: “Action, action, action.”
In another sense, this can be applied to a business manager who is asked to point out the three fundamental attributes of their performance as a manager and producer of results.
Evidently, it is not expected that a CEO’s actions are reckless gestures, devoid of strategic sense or tactical orientation. Nor would it be understood if their energy were a pure and simple waste of unreflected gestures, without a line of intimate and utterable coherence.
Yet genius has already been described as “an extraordinary capacity for hard work,” therefore no one can claim to be an excellent leader of a business project without an above-average index of physical and mental activity, because only thus will they know how to maintain the advantages of information, wisdom, and intervention over others, leading them by example.
It is said in the highlands of the North that “among men there is no ox’s strength,” meaning that differences in capacity between individuals of the same nature are matters of degree and are surmountable. This conviction of the equivalence of basic capacities relegates differentials of strength to character, and within character, especially to willpower.
Having an iron will is a requirement of any chief. It is upon it that one builds the power of endurance, independence, ambition, and concentration on the objective that delimit permanent advancement facing the mob.
None of this leads to the conclusion that a CEO can only do their job well and obtain results if they are an obtuse D. Casmurro, blind to life. Confusing the plane of reason with the plane of the heart is a worn-out trick. And a poorly spent one. Regarding the heart, we stand with D. Francisco Manuel de Melo when he asks: “who could live with a man of immutable heart? What strength would suffice to tame him? What reason to persuade him?”
Yet regarding reason, it is fitting that it remain coherent with the presuppositions of action and the objectives laid out. Because reason will be the stay of the will in moments of greatest uncertainty. And whoever wishes to shoulder responsibility will quickly discover that their will is the simplest principle and the shortest justification for all successful action.
Paulo Fidalgo
CEO of Marketividade
