If you read almost anything in the mainstream media about management or leadership, you’ll see lots of advice about making your employees happy.Listen to their problems and concerns. Create a positive atmosphere. Give them the resources they need and leave them alone. Inspire them. Cheer for them. Be their best friend.

Listen to their problems and concerns. Create a positive atmosphere. Give them the resources they need and leave them alone. Inspire them. Cheer for them. Be their best friend.

I like it when people who work for me like me, but I try as hard as I can NOT to encourage it.

It seems to me that the whole point of running a business is to focus your energies and attention on some worthy, profitable goal and get those who you pay to do the same. If you diffuse that objective by expending time and energy being likeable, things are likely to go wrong.

A good thing to do in business that will make you almost immediately unpopular is to set high standards.

Most people don’t like high standards because they create a lot of work – especially the kind of work that nobody likes: the do-it-over-again kind.

Let’s say you are the publisher of a sports magazine. You have to put together 70 pages of editorial every month by a very definite date. To get that accomplished, you create a schedule of a dozen deadlines – giving every writer of every essay ample time to submit his drafts, have them edited, revise them, then make final submissions.

What do you do if – 24 hours before the deadline – half of the articles are good but not great? Do you accept what you have as “good enough for now” and send out a memo suggesting ways to make things go better next time? Or do you call everybody in at 4:30 p.m. and tell them that if they want to keep their jobs they have to work until midnight to make the copy sing?

And if you are tough enough to take that “unreasonable” stance, what do you say to your top editor who tells you he has an anniversary date with his wife and children?

Setting high standards will make you a disliked boss/leader. Enforcing high standards will make you positively despised.

Don’t tell me that good management means planning and communicating and creating a system in which crisis intervention is unnecessary. If you believe that kind of thing, you are either a teacher, a consultant, or unemployed.

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In the real world, getting from good to great requires extraordinary efforts and high standards. It demands more time than you want, more energy than you have, and more cooperation than any normal person can be expected to contribute.

In the real world, getting from good to great requires extraordinary effort.

That’s if you want high standards. If you are willing to settle for “good,” things can be much easier – and you can be much nicer.

Sometimes, when I’m charged with getting something very difficult done, I say to my viceroys, “We can do this in either of two ways. We can do a half-assed job and have a good time … or we can do a really good job and you probably won’t like me when we’re done.”

People usually opt for the really good job – until, that is, they find out I wasn’t kidding.

It’s no fun to redline a manuscript that has been edited six times before. It’s not easy to insist that the wall be repainted yet again. What I feel like doing when I see that someone I like has worked long and hard to produce something that’s just OK is to say to him, “Good work, Joe. You did a really good job.”

And you can do that if you like.

But if you ever hope to achieve anything great – if you ever want to create a wonderful product or provide excellent customer service or have a great movie or magazine produced – you are going to have to establish and maintain high standards for your employees. And when you do, you are going to have to live with the fact that some of them won’t like you.

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They say that Thomas Edison redid his experiment something like 6,000 times before he could get the electric light to glow. I can only imagine how unpopular he must have been with the men who worked for him. If paying attention to them and their needs had been a top priority for him, I think it’s fair to say that someone else – sometime later – would have given the world electrical illumination.