The Mansfield file
Mansfield on leading change: To change anything — to change a habit or change culture or change anything that’s indelibly embedded as culture — you have to start with making the compelling case for why. Why change? If we’re successful, if we’re delivering on our mission, if we’re happy, then why change?
Changing a culture is like breaking a horse — you’re going to get bumped off, but you have to be willing to get back on and keep getting back on until you get the change from the culture that you need to be successful.
Mansfield on your career choices: Work for an organization whose espoused and practice mission matches well to your own value system and life priorities. I feel very fortunate to have had almost a four-decade career, and I have never been in an organization where I felt like I had to compromise my value system in order to be effective in the role that I had. I think that’s very important as you’re contemplating where you’re going to spend your career, to make sure you’re working with a company whose goals and value systems and mission and vision statements you can embrace and support from a personal standpoint.
Mansfield on setting personal goals: I’m still amazed by the number of people who don’t do it, but it’s so important for human beings to have the discipline to periodically create and update your own personal goals. Not just your goals related to work, but your goals related to community and faith and health and all of those variables that make us multidimensional creations. Human beings have the capacity to accomplish so much more than we do.
One of the delimiting factors is we don’t create a road map that’s trying to take us to a better place as individuals. If you don’t really care where you’re going — it doesn’t matter — one road’s just as good as the other, but if you’re intentional about what you want to accomplish with your life across its many dimensions, I think that there’s strength and power in that acknowledgment. The Bible says that as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. What does that mean? I think that means we can accomplish a whole lot if we establish an expectation of ourselves to do so.
