Here is an excerpt from an article by Beth Comstock for LinkedIn Pulse. To read the complete article and check out others, please click here. Her post is part of a series in which LinkedIn’s Influencers describe the books that changed them. Follow the channel to see the full list.
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“Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea,” says Howard Roark, the idealistic, driven hero of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. This book captured my attention in college and has kept it ever since. This is when I first fell in love with the romantic notion of the possessed, creative soul, the daring innovator who seeks to bring the ideal to life.
Rand writes: “Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it’s made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail.” In my working life, I’ve found that business breakthroughs are often driven by visionaries who are moved by their convictions to be better, do better and follow a path that is clear to no one but themselves.
But, as much as my 19-year-old self loved this work, experience has taught me that much of The Fountainhead doesn’t translate to the business world. Rand writes that “achievements only come through the individual artist.” In reality, it’s hard to be the soloist, especially in this connected economy where each achievement builds on another, where technologies are moving exponentially and our ability to innovate and create is measured in shorter period of time. No man stands alone and no idea is conceived in isolation. And even if we could solve our problems alone, why would we want to?
The Fountainhead appealed to my love of art and design. It was written at a time when the skylines of cities like Chicago and New York were testaments to man’s ability to shape the world. Rand brings this to life in The Fountainhead: “Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon….from this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we have comes from a single attribute of man – the function of his reasoning mind.”
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Here’s a direct link to the complete article.
Beth Comstock is CMO at GE.