Thoughts on Leadership: Do The Wright Thing

By Gino Blefari

This week my travels found me in Las Vegas for a meeting with Mark Stark, CEO/owner of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Arizona Properties, Nevada Properties and California Properties. Along with other affiliates on our Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices team, we met to discuss new business models for recruiting, retention and onboarding, new innovations and new technologies that would push our brokerages forward and make us a more efficient network for our agents and the buyers and sellers we serve.

The scheduling of this meeting couldn’t have been better timed; I’ve recently been reading “The Wright Brothers,” a biography of the world’s first aviators written by New York Times bestselling author, David McCullough. In “The Wright Brothers,” McCullough describes Orville and Wilbur Wright not as straight-forward heroes of American folklore who simply built a plane and then flew it in the sky, but as struggling inventors who fought with public perception as much as they did serious headwinds.

“We couldn’t help thinking they were just a pair of poor nuts,” said one resident of Kitty Hawk, N.C. where the Wright brothers worked on their aircraft.

But, as McCullough explains, the Wright brothers, even from an early age, were always fans of going against the norm. In their youth, Wilbur and Orville developed a penchant for bicycles, two-wheeled machines seen in the 1890s as vehicles that could cause impressionable, young boys and girls to ride far from their homes and their books, toward less acceptable or appropriate hobbies. Later, this curiosity for the science of motion led the Wright Brothers to look up into the sky.

At the time the Wright Brothers were working on what would then become the first modern airplane, aerial propulsion was thought of as a wild, imaginary concept better suited for the birds. I don’t think I’d be spoiling the book to say the Wright Brothers did eventually invent a working flying machine, defying the odds and those who simply said they never could.

So, what’s the message? Whether inventing something wholly new like the Wright Brothers or brainstorming new concepts like our team did in Las Vegas, dare to dream and don’t hold back. Because if you think something is possible, there’s no reason you can’t take that idea and make it fly.

GINO BLEFARI is CEO of HSF Affiliates LLC. You can follow Gino on Facebook and Twitter.