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April 4, 2017updated 10 Apr 2017 9:03am

Captain Sully: Leave your ego at the door, says hero pilot at SAS Global Forum

The first day of the SAS Global Forum saw the hero pilot take to the stage to talk leadership and innovation.

By Hannah Williams

The SAS Global Forum officially kicked off in Orlando yesterday, with one rousing keynote delivered by Captain Sully, the hero pilot known for the ‘Miracle on the Hudson’ aviation incident.

Named TIME’s “Top 100 Most Influential Heroes and Icons of 2009”, Captain ‘Sully’ Sullenberger took to the SAS Global Forum to discuss leadership, advocating those at the Forum to lead by example.

“You have to be willing and able to check your ego at the door and do things not for your own needs, or your own self-aggrandizement or your own self-enrichment, but for the common good,” said Sullenberger.

captain sully

Chesley Burnett “Sully” Sullenberger III

“And then once in a while, we need to share success, we need to show people who work with us or for us that all the hard work they have done has mattered and has contributed to the success of the organisation as a whole.”

The famed Captain urged that ego be left behind, encouraging those assembled to lead by personal example. Doing so creates togetherness, which enables your team to make the organisation’s core values real everyday.

“Most of us cannot get through an entire working professional lifetime with only a single skill set, instead we must keep on learning, growing, stretching ourselves, sometimes reinventing ourselves as I’ve certainly had to, and we have to know how to innovate,” said Captain Sully.

Innovation, as we all know, is also important in business, with Sullenberger imparting his data wisdom on those at the Forum.

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“You can’t use data if you don’t understand it, and we have to understand that the purpose of science is to provide humankind with a more complete and accurate understanding of reality,” said the hero Captain.

Sullenberger has been dedicated to the pursuit of safety nearly all his career, with the Captain seeing his fair share of innovation and change. His advice to the SAS attendees was concise and to the point:

“Change before you’re forced to, by competition, by regulation,or by circumstance, and the more and quicker that you’re able to change the more it can become a competitive advantage.”

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