In four distinct sections, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There discusses a bunch of habits that hinder successful people from maintaining their statuses or climbing the ladder further.
The first section talks about how a series of accomplishments can cause an exaggerated feeling of self-confidence, which is often the bane of a person’s success.
The second section is called, The Twenty Habits That Hold you Back from the Top. He talks about self-destructive habits that ensue as a result of victory. Addressed here are, the human desire to win even at time when it does not matter, and the obsession for reaching a goal, judging people by one’s own biased standards, making injurious remarks with the intention of being witty, implicitly displaying a superiority complex through repeated use of negative qualifiers, the tendency to be vocal when emotions are running high, withholding information with a desire to reach the goal first, misplacing credit and failing to acknowledge another person’s worth, being biased towards people for one’s own designs, inability to correct one’s jarring traits with the notion of being natural and unaffected, and the inclination to divert blame. In the next section, Goldsmith takes the reader through the seven infallible steps to redress these self-detrimental flaws.
The last section is essentially meant for those in the management sector, and Marshall deals with issues that pervade an organization rather than individual flaws and the right tactics for handling these bad habits when they surface in subordinates, as well as in superiors. He emphasizes how important it is to be absolutely explicit and specific about job responsibilities and how imperative it is to be candid for the benefit of a healthy and successful work environment.
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There was released in 2007, and it was the New York Times best-seller and also the winner of the Harold Longman Award as the Best Business Book of the Year. It was also the Wall Street Journal bestseller Business Book.
About The Authors
Marshall Goldsmith is an American author, thinker, and educator in the field of leadership and management strategy.
Goldsmith has co-edited or authored over 31 books, including, The Leader of the Future 2: Visions, Strategies and Practices for the New Era, Memo to the CEO: Succession, and Recession or Plenty Pocket-Size.
Marshall was born on March 20, 1949, in Kentucky. After graduating from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology with a BS, he went on to procure his MBA degree from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. In 1977, he received his PhD from UCLA, after which he co-founded Keilty, Goldsmith and Company. He is ranked among the top 10 executive educators, been called on to work with 120 major CEOs, acknowledged to be among the 50 great influential thinkers of the last 80 years, and won the 2011 Thinkers50 Leadership Award. Marshall’s son works with him in the family business. He also has a daughter and lives with his wife in California.
Mark Reiter is an author, literary agent, and editor who collaborated with Marshall Goldsmith, Phil Dusenberry, Mark McCormack, and Twyla Tharp on their books.
Reiter has collaborated or edited several books, including The Final Four of Everything and its other edition, The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything.
