With Ichak Adizes, leading management and corporate performance expert
In order to develop businesses in my life I didn’t go to a business school. I read many books by world-renowned business people and tried to learn from their trainings and seminars.
One of the unchallenged business authorities in the world is definitely Ichak Adizes whose books I read and who has always been very inspiring to me. It’s purely amazing how at his age of 78 he still gets in front of people with so much energy to inspire them and change their mindsets when it comes to business methodology.
In December 2014 I was at the Tony Robbins event in Florida. When Tony was walking along the room I looked at the screen and I noticed that Ichak Adizes was in the audience. I didn’t really believe that it could be him. But half-an-hour later Tony invited a few people onto the stage to show how they can dance in a very attractive manner, so that the audience could see who the best dancer in the room was. And I was completely shocked when I saw that 78-year old man, one of the top trainers in the world, get up on stage and dance in front of 5000 people in the audience.
I made it my objective to find him but it’s not easy when you have a few thousand people in the audience. Later that day I was coming back from lunch and, as I was walking towards the hall, I saw Ichak sitting right there. I was a bit nervous to come up to him, because he is such a high level person and he had a few people standing around him trying to ask him questions. But I still managed to push myself to the front of this line of people to say hello to him in Hebrew because I knew that he lived in Israel for many years of his life. And he very quickly ignored everyone else and started having a conversation with me, asking me what I was doing there, at Tony’s event.
“For me a person of that high level, in his late 70s, trying to improve relationship with his wife, is truly inspiring”.
Of course I had to ask him the same question, what he was doing there. And what he said was really extraordinary: “I would like to improve relationship with my wife”. For me a person of that high level, in his late 70s, trying to improve relationship with his wife, is truly inspiring. And since then we’ve managed to stay in touch and when he came to Moscow 2 months later he reached out to me and we had a nice dinner together. We’ve also formed a very strong collaboration between his company and my company in order to support each other in events.
You will definitely enjoy Ichak Adizes’s provocative book called «The Ideal Executive: Why You Cannot Be One and What to Do About It» where the author claims that the ideal executive simply does not exist.
And make sure to watch this video where Ichak Adizes speaks about management and mismanagement styles: