Leadership Lessons from San Juan

Sarah and I had supper with our friends Tom & Leah on Monday night. Afterwards, Tom introduced us to a new game, San Juan. In this game, you have to build, produce, trade, etc using various supplies. Of course there are “speciality” cards – in this game, beautiful purple cards – that help with special bonus features for the game… but are also more costly to build and have limited immediate benefit, esp in terms of production, trade, replenishing of stock, etc. The end of the game comes when one person has built a dozen places. I was the player who “ended” the game as I was the first one to build twelve sites. However, in the end I had the fewest points of all four of us. You see, Tom, Leah & Sarah had all built fewer production sites and thus had not built as many places as my dozen, but they had built more speciality sites that at the end of the game gave them more victory points. So even though I was “productive” and got the most sites built the fastest, I was not even close to the winner. Yes, the leadership lessons are just so abundantly obvious... 1) Building Fast has its dangers. Often in the face of immediate pressures – meeting deadlines or quotas, financial targets to meet or else – leaders push themselves and other to build too much too fast. (I’ve suggested that the NHL lockout/strike of 2005 can be significantly attributed to the fact that the NHL did this in their expansion!). While its great to hit targets, have impressive looking “improvement” numbers, and show consistent signs of growth – that doesn’t necessarily mean that you are winning. In fact, it probably means you are putting up lots of glitz and glamour… and there may not be much left when the sizzle stops.
2) Build Strategically. My dear wife, Sarah, kept getting the purple/specialty cards at the beginning of the game. And while she wanted to use them, she had no means to “pay” for these sites because she could not get any production sites built. Yes, these purple/speciality cards served her well at the end of the game, but it took a while before she was able to get enough production to use these well. In fact, she had to wait too long – and it was her first time playing too! Tom (though I don’t believe he had played this specific game before) has played other games like this much more than the rest of us and knew the value of having some production sites early, but strategically building a “specialty” site, sometimes even waiting a turn and not building even when he had the resources, so that next time his “speciality” site would build some immediate gain and even more long-term (end of the game) benefits. Just as one cannot go 1000 miles per hour through life, a person in leadership cannot run their business/service perpetually at high speed – even in this high-speed, interconnected world. There has got to be some times of waiting, letting the current resources settle, even have some slower production time, in order for the long-term benefits to truly be reaped.