Confident or Arrogant?

I just ran across this Businessweek slide show which has tips for the company Newbie. Liz Ryan's entire article provides valuable tips that resonated for me.


Several years ago I joined a new company. In my first week, it was very apparent to me that my new company was awash in improvement opportunities, some of these the CEO planned to exploit with a new ERP system (that no one else wanted).


While we "won the battle" by installing the new system, we lost the war, in that our team was seen as arrogant.


I saw us as being confident.


While we did garner most of the benefits we anticipated, we didn't get them all. Had we taken the challenges a little more slowly, building relationships and garnering confidence with our business partners as we went, we might have garnered 100% of the expected results.