I recently asked a trio of entrepreneurs what they wished they had known before they set out on the path to leadership.<\/p>\n
Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post, who now heads Thrive Global, which aims to end the \u201cstress and burnout epidemic\u201d, told me: \u201cI wish I knew what I discovered the hard way in 2007 when I collapsed from exhaustion\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009That [it is a] delusion that in order to succeed we have to be always on.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI wish somebody would have told me how hard it is,\u201d said Anna Skaya, chief executive of Basepaws, which is building a database of feline DNA.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are obstacles all the time. All the time,\u201d added designer Diane von Furstenberg, who heads the eponymous fashion group. \u201cListen, I have a lot of energy\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009That doesn\u2019t mean that I don\u2019t wake up thinking like I\u2019m a total loser, [even] now.\u201d<\/p>\n
It probably takes a successful entrepreneur-founder to admit such truths. Even in a world where there is increasing acknowledgment of the dangers of workplace stress, this kind of leadership lesson is only rarely taught in business schools, still less by leadership manuals of the \u201cfive ways to be awesome\u201d variety.<\/p>\n
Yet this understanding of the many hurdles facing any leader is embedded in the 3,000-year-old Judeo-Christian culture of teaching about how to lead, according to Steven Croft, the Anglican Bishop of Oxford….<\/p>\n