The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership

Follow Them and People Will Follow You

John C. Maxwell

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781400236213
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Decision Making
• Index: Business

The Best-Selling Leadership Book of All Time Just Got Better!

The fully revised and updated 25th Anniversary Edition of Maxwell's New York Times bestseller provides clear guidance on how to become an effective leader in today's world.

You'll learn the key principles of successful leadership such as vision, influence, responsibility and commitment. It highlights ways to set goals for yourself and your team while maintaining emotional balance during difficult times. Each law is backed up by inspiring and practical examples from Maxwell's personal experience.

John Maxwell has gone through every word of this book and updated it for the next generation of leaders, adding new insights to these timeless laws and incorporating lessons learned since he originally wrote the book. He removed dated stories and replaced them with fresh ones that apply to today’s world of business.

What he didn't change are the powerful leadership truths that have been helping people become better leaders for the last quarter century. This is still the best book on leadership people can buy, whether they want to:

• Learn leadership on their own,
• Develop as leaders in a group, or
• Teach leadership to others as a mentor.

The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership is essential reading for anyone looking to better understand what it takes to be a great leader and achieve success in their chosen profession.

1

THE LAW OF THE LID

How Well You Lead Determines How Well You Succeed

Brothers Dick and Maurice came as close as they could to living the American Dream—without making it. Instead a guy named Ray did it with the company they had founded. It happened because they didn’t know the Law of the Lid.

I have often opened my leadership conferences by explaining the Law of the Lid because it helps people understand the value of leadership. If you can get a handle on this law, you will see the incredible impact of leadership on every aspect of life. So here it is: how well you lead determines how well you succeed. Leadership is the lid to your potential. The lower your leadership ability, the lower the lid on your potential. The higher your leadership ability, the higher the lid on your potential. To give you an example, if your leadership operates at an 8 (out of 10), then your effectiveness can never be greater than a 7. If your leadership is only a 4, then your effectiveness with others will be no higher than a 3. How well you are able to lead—for better or for worse—always determines your effectiveness with others and the potential of your team. How well you lead determines how well you succeed.

LOOKING FOR AN OPPORTUNITY

Let me tell you a story that illustrates the Law of the Lid. In 1930, two young brothers named Dick and Maurice moved from New Hampshire to California in search of the American Dream. They had just gotten out of high school, and they saw few opportunities back home. So they headed straight for Hollywood where they eventually found jobs on a movie studio set.

After a while, their entrepreneurial spirit and interest in the entertainment industry prompted them to open a theater in Glendale, a town about five miles northeast of Hollywood. But despite all their efforts, the brothers just couldn’t make the business profitable.

The brothers’ desire for success was strong, so they kept looking for better business opportunities. Drive-in restaurants were a new phenomenon springing up in the early thirties as people became more dependent on cars. Rather than eating in a dining room, customers placed orders with carhops and received their food on trays, right in their cars. Back then, food was served on dinner plates complete with glassware and metal utensils.

In 1937, Dick and Maurice opened a small drive-in restaurant in Pasadena, and it was a great success. In 1940, they decided to move the operation to San Bernardino, a working-class boomtown fifty miles east of Los Angeles, built a larger facility, and expanded their menu from hot dogs, fries, and shakes to include barbecued beef and pork sandwiches, hamburgers, and other items. Their business exploded. Annual sales reached $200,000, and the brothers found themselves splitting $50,000 in profits every year—a sum that put them in the town’s financial elite.

In 1948, their intuition told them that times were changing. They eliminated the carhops, started serving only walk-up customers, and streamlined everything to reduce their costs and lower their prices. They reduced their menu and put their focus on selling hamburgers. They eliminated plates, glassware, and metal utensils, switching to paper products instead.

They also created what they called the Speedy Service System. Their kitchen became like an assembly line, where each employee focused on service with speed. The brothers’ goal was to fill each customer’s order in thirty seconds or less. And they succeeded. By the mid-1950s, annual revenue hit $350,000, and by then, Dick and Maurice split net profits of about $100,000 each year.

Who were these brothers? You’ve probably already guessed their last name: McDonald. Dick and Maurice McDonald had hit the great American jackpot, and the rest, as they say, is history, right? Wrong. The McDonalds never went any farther because their leadership put a lid on their ability to succeed.

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY

It’s true that the McDonald brothers were financially secure. Theirs was one of the most profitable restaurant enterprises in the country, and they felt that they had a hard time spending all the money they made. Their genius was in customer service and kitchen organization. In fact, their talent was so widely known in food service circles that people started writing them and visiting their restaurant from all over the country to learn more about their methods. At one point, they received as many as three hundred calls and letters every month.

That led them to the idea of marketing the McDonald’s concept. The idea of franchising restaurants wasn’t new. It had been around for several decades. To the McDonald brothers, it looked like a way to make money without having to open another restaurant themselves. In 1952, they got started, but their effort was a dismal failure. The reason was simple. They lacked the leadership necessary to make a larger enterprise effective. Dick and Maurice were good single-restaurant owners. They understood how to run a business, make their systems efficient, cut costs, and increase profits. They were efficient managers, but they were not great leaders. Their thinking patterns clamped a lid down on what they could do and become. At the height of their success, Dick and Maurice found themselves smack-dab against the Law of the Lid.

THE BROTHERS PARTNER WITH A BETTER LEADER

Then in 1954, the brothers met Ray Kroc. He had been running a small company that sold machines for making milk shakes. Kroc knew the McDonald brothers because their restaurant was one of his best customers. After visiting their store, he had a vision for its potential: he could see the restaurant going nationwide in hundreds of markets. He soon struck a deal with Dick and Maurice, and in 1955, he formed McDonald’s Systems, Inc. (later called the McDonald’s Corporation).

In the years that Dick and Maurice McDonald had attempted to franchise their food service system, they managed to sell the concept to just fifteen buyers, only ten of whom actually opened restaurants. And even in that size enterprise, their limited leadership and vision were hindrances. For example, when their first franchisee, Neil Fox of Phoenix, told the brothers that he wanted to call his restaurant McDonald’s, Dick’s response was, “What . . . for? McDonald’s means nothing in Phoenix.”

Kroc thought—and led—differently. He immediately bought the rights to a franchise so that he could use it as a model and prototype so that he could sell franchises to others. Between 1955 and 1959, Kroc succeeded in opening one hundred restaurants. Four years after that, there were five hundred McDonald’s restaurants. During his first eight years with McDonald’s, he took no salary and borrowed money from the bank and against his life insurance to help cover the salaries of a few key leaders he wanted on the team. He had the vision and ability to make McDonald’s a nationwide entity. And in 1961 for the sum of $2.7 million, Kroc bought the exclusive rights to McDonald’s from the brothers, and he proceeded to turn it into an American institution and global entity.

Today McDonald’s has opened more than 38,000 restaurants in 120 countries.¹ In 2019, it recorded a net income of $6.1 billion, and its net worth is estimated at $170 billion. And it’s still growing. None of that would have occurred without Ray Kroc. The leadership of the McDonald brothers had been the lid on the business, whereas Kroc had blown the lid off.

SUCCESS WITHOUT LEADERSHIP

I believe that personal success is within the reach of just about everyone. But I also believe that the better you can lead, the greater you can succeed. The higher you want to climb and the greater success you want to achieve, the more you will need leadership. The greater the impact you want to make, the greater your influence needs to be. Whatever you will accomplish is restricted by your ability to lead others.

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The higher you want to climb, the more you need leadership. The greater the impact you want to make, the greater your influence needs to be.

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Let me give you a picture of what I mean. Hold your left hand out in front of you, palm down. That represents your leadership level. If your leadership is low, hold your hand down at waist level. If it’s average, hold it chest high. Now put out your right hand below it. That’s your success. Here’s the reality of leadership and success. Your success hand can never go higher than your leadership hand. It will always bump up against it.

I’ll explain it another way. Let’s say that when it comes to success, you’re an 8 (on a scale from 1 to 10). That’s pretty good. I think it would be safe to say that the McDonald brothers were in that range. But let’s also say that leadership isn’t even on your radar. You don’t care about it, and you make no effort to develop as a leader. You’re functioning as a 1. Your level of effectiveness would look like this:

To increase your level of effectiveness, you have a couple of choices. You could work very hard to increase your dedication to success and excellence—to work toward becoming a 10. It’s possible that you could make it to that level, though the Law of Diminishing Returns says that the effort it would take to increase those last two points might take more energy than it did to achieve the first eight. If you really killed yourself, you might increase your success by that 25 percent.

But you have another option. You can work hard to increase your level of leadership. Let’s say that your natural leadership ability is a 4—slightly below average. Just by using whatever natural talent you have, you already increase your effectiveness fourfold. But let’s say you become a real student of leadership and you maximize your potential. You take it all the way up to a 7. Visually, the results would look like this:

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Leadership has a multiplying effect.

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By raising your leadership ability—without increasing your success dedication at all—you can increase your original effectiveness by 600 percent. Leadership has a multiplying effect. I’ve seen its impact again and again in all kinds of businesses and nonprofit organizations. And that’s why I’ve taught leadership for more than fifty years.

TO CHANGE THE DIRECTION OF THE ORGANIZATION, CHANGE THE LEADER

Leadership ability is always the lid on personal and organizational success. If a person’s leadership is strong, the team’s or organization’s lid is high. But if it’s not, then it’s limited. That’s why in times of trouble, organizations naturally look for new leadership. When the country is experiencing hard times, it elects a new president. When a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword to the 10th Anniversary Edition by Stephen R. Covey
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: THE LAW OF THE LID: How Well You Lead Determines How Well You Succeed
• 2: THE LAW OF INFLUENCE: The True Measure of Leadership Is Influence—Nothing More, Nothing Less
• 3: THE LAW OF PROCESS: Leadership Develops Daily, Not in a Day
• 4: THE LAW OF NAVIGATION: Anyone Can Steer the Ship, but It Takes a Leader to Chart the Course
• 5: THE LAW OF ADDITION: Leaders Add Value by Serving Others
• 6: THE LAW OF SOLID GROUND: Trust Is the Foundation of Leadership
• 7: THE LAW OF RESPECT: People Naturally Follow Better Leaders Than Themselves
• 8: THE LAW OF INTUITION: Leaders Evaluate Everything with a Leadership Bias
• 9: THE LAW OF MAGNETISM: Who You Are Is Who You Attract
• 10: THE LAW OF CONNECTION: Leaders Touch a Heart Before They Ask for a Hand
• 11: THE LAW OF THE INNER CIRCLE: Those Closest to You Determine the Level of Your Success
• 12: THE LAW OF EMPOWERMENT: Only Secure Leaders Give Power to Others
• 13: THE LAW OF THE PICTURE: People Do What People See
• 14: THE LAW OF BUY-IN: People Buy into the Leader, Then the Vision
• 15: THE LAW OF VICTORY: Leaders Find Ways for the Team to Win
• 16: THE LAW OF THE BIG MO: Momentum Is a Leader’s Best Friend
• 17: THE LAW OF PRIORITIES: Leaders Understand That Activity Is Not Necessarily Accomplishment
• 18: THE LAW OF SACRIFICE: A Leader Must Give Up to Go Up
• 19: THE LAW OF TIMING: When to Lead Is As Important As What to Do and Where to Go
• 20: THE LAW OF EXPLOSIVE GROWTH: To Add Growth, Lead Followers—To Multiply, Lead Leaders
• 21: THE LAW OF LEGACY: A Leader’s Lasting Value Is Measured by Succession
• Conclusion
• 21 Laws Leadership Evaluation
• Notes