Everybody pick up a rock! Leadership and management in early times were about the same as now.

YOU JUST CAN'T BELIEVE IT--WHAT THEY BUILT IN Europe in the 1600s and even earlier. My wife and I recently took what we think of as a dream trip, spending a couple of weeks in Spain and Portugal. Lots of jokes are made about all the castles and palaces, but they are everywhere and they are incredible.

This country, the U.S., is just 200 years old. Portugal and Spain are 2,200 years old! We are just beginners. If you want to see something older than 200 years in this country you have to start looking at mountains or other geography.

In Portugal you leave an "Autopista" as good as any part of Interstate 25 here, and instantly take a 600-year trip back in time. The streets in the towns become one-car wide and are made of cobblestone, and just about every burg is complete with a castle built on top of the biggest hill and often surrounded by what is left of a protective city wall built by Moors or Romans. We saw the ruins of Roman aqueducts and houses built some 200 years B.C. At times I felt like James Bond driving through narrow streets between the old buildings with people needing to jump out of the way as I passed.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

While we were visiting a beautiful, huge castle, the exterior at least twice the size of the Pepsi Center, I wondered out loud how they could have done this without tools, cranes, trucks, bulldozers, etc. One of the caretakers told us it took 50,000 men some 30 years to build it. This is more people than work for United Airlines! How did they do it? How did they get anything done? Very few could read or write; there was no way to talk to 100 men at a time, much less 50,000.

The problems of leadership and management had to be massive.

First, you have to get everyone willing and ready to pick up a rock. Probably in those days slavery was a pretty good motivator. But the results were so beautiful and have lasted so long that I can't believe that a lot of it wasn't done with lots of care and pride. That would have required some real, people-oriented leadership.

After you have 50,000 men eager to get the work done, someone has to manage them. This must have taken incredible skills in planning and organizing, directing, getting feedback and then directing changes. Laborers, rock cutters, masons, carpenters, architects and on and on ... had to be inspired and organized.

The often blurred relationship between "leadership" and "management" becomes pretty clear in this case; it takes a leader to get thousands of men to want to haul building materials up the mountain and to do a good job of assembling the materials, and it takes a great manager to plan and organize the workers to get the job done.

Perhaps it can give us some clues as to how to run our own businesses.

We have to be a leader to get people to charge the problem. This can only be done if the people doing the charging see their work as somehow worthy, a way to achieve their own goals. It's up to the leader to relate the results of the effort to the goals and aspirations of the doers. Obviously, the leader has to find out what that connection might be.

The manager then has to have a plan that inspires success, the organizational skills to efficiently keep all the parts synchronized, and a feedback system that allows smooth control and communication.

If we measure ourselves by both sets of criteria perhaps we can become good enough to be considered both a leader and a manager.

[e-mail]

PAT WIESNER is the retired CEO of Wiesner Publishing, publisher of ColoradoBiz. He now spends much of his time leading sales and management training for the company.