Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge 

Bennis, Warren G.; Nanus, Burt

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• Leaders implement and create the atmosphere for the vision to thrive. In order to do this a leader must be crystal clear with clarity and also bring consistency and reliability. This will establish trust which is the glue that holds everything together. Leaders wear their visions like clothes and are able to enroll others in the belief that the vision is attainable and all the behaviors exemplify these ideals in action. Leaders live it every second. 
• Effective leadership takes risks—it innovates, challenges, and changes the basic metabolism of the organizational culture.
• Leaders emphasize their strengths. There was no trace of self-worship or cockiness in our leaders. But they know their worth. They trust themselves without letting their egos or images get in the way
• Developed their skills with extreme focus and discipline.
•  It’s the capacity to develop and improve their skills that distinguishes leaders from followers. They seemed to be responsible for their own evolution and even could appropriately be called “self-evolvers.”
• Perhaps the most impressive and memorable quality of the leaders we studied was the way they responded to failure. They simply don’t think about failure, don’t even use the word
• leaders seemed to retain many of the positive characteristics of the child: enthusiasm for people, spontaneity, imagination and an unlimited capacity to learn new behavior. Emotional wisdom, as we’ve come to understand it, reflects itself in the way people relate to others.
• For successful leadership to occur there has to be a fusion between positive self-regard and optimism about a desired outcome
• The essential thing in organizational leadership is that the leader’s style pulls rather than pushes people on. A pull style of influence works by attracting and energizing people to an exciting vision of the future. It motivates by identification, rather than through rewards and punishments. The leaders we have been talking about articulate and embody the ideals toward which the organization is striving. They enroll themselves (and others) in a vision of that ideal as attainable and worthy
• The important thing to keep in mind is that nothing serves an organization better—especially during times of agonizing doubts and uncertainties—than leadership that knows what it wants, communicates those intentions, positions itself correctly, and empowers its workforce
• All of the leaders to whom we spoke seemed to have been masters at selecting, synthesizing and articulating an appropriate vision of the future
• Above and beyond his envisioning capabilities, a leader must be a social architect who understands the organization and shapes the way it works. The social architecture of any organization is the silent variable that translates the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of organizational life into meaning. It determines who says what to whom, about what, and what kinds of actions then ensue. Social architecture is an intangible, but it governs the way people act, the values and norms that are subtly transmitted to groups and individuals, and the construct of binding and bonding within a company
• Trust is the emotional glue that binds followers and leaders together. The accumulation of trust is a measure of the legitimacy of leadership. It cannot be mandated or purchased; it must be earned. Trust is the basic ingredient of all organizations, the lubrication that maintains the organization, and, as we said earlier, it is as mysterious and elusive a concept as leadership—and as important. One thing we can say for sure about trust is that if trust is to be generated, there must be predictability, the capacity to predict another’s behavior
• When we asked our ninety leaders about the personal qualities they needed to run their organizations, they talked about persistence and self-knowledge; about willingness to take risks and accept losses; about commitment, consistency and challenge. But, above all, they talked about learning
• The challenge to leaders will be to act as compassionate coaches, dedicated to reducing stress by ensuring that the whole team has everything it needs—from human and financial resources to emotional support and encouragement—to work together effectively and at peak performance most of the time. Recognizing, developing and celebrating the distinctive skills of each individual will become critically important to organizational survival
• Our ninety leaders do resemble each other. They all have the ability to translate intention into reality and to sustain it. They all make a sharp distinction between leadership and management by concerning themselves with the organization’s basic purposes, why it exists, its general direction and value system. They are all able to induce clarity regarding their organization’s vision

Leadership Attributes 

Vision

• Our research had indicated that one of the most critical elements of successful leadership was a clearly articulated vision, or sense of direction, to focus the attention of everyone associated with the organization.
• Today it is generally recognized that all successful organizations need not just a clear mission or purpose, but also a widely shared vision and that few leaders can succeed without both.
• Trustworthiness is a vital characteristic of successful leadership and that absence of trust was a sure recipe for organizational disaster.
• We identified the leader as the person with the primary responsibility for articulating organizational values, interpreting reality, framing and mobilizing meaning, and creating the necessary symbols and role models to communicate a coherent image of the principles that should guide organizational behavior.

Foreword to the Second Edition

• Leadership is about character. Character is a continuously evolving thing. The process of becoming a leader is much the same as becoming an integrated human being.

7 Attributes of a leader: 

• Technical competence 
• People skills 
• Conceptual skills
• Track record 
• Taste 
• Judgment 
• Character. Of these, the last two are the most difficult to identify, measure or develop.

To keep organizations competitive, leaders must be instrumental in creating a social architecture capable of generating intellectual capital. What matters most about the structure, architecture or design of the organization is that it exemplify Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s 

4 F’s: 

• Focused
• Flexible
• Fast 
• Friendly. 
• We’d like to add a fifth F: fun. Almost any architecture will work if the people want it to work. We’re less concerned about structure than about what leaders do to motivate and create a culture of respect, caring and trust.

• We cannot exaggerate the significance of a strong determination to achieve a goal or realize a vision—a conviction, even a passion.
• The capacity to generate and sustain trust is the central ingredient in leadership. You can have the most glorious vision in the world and it won’t mean a thing if there’s low trust in the organization.
• True leaders have an uncanny way of enrolling people in their vision through their optimism—sometimes unwarranted optimism. For them, the glass is not half-full, it’s brimming. They believe—all of the exemplary leaders we have studied—that they can change the world or, at the very least, make a dent in the universe.
• Leaders have a bias toward action that results in success. It is the capacity to translate vision and purpose into reality. It’s not enough just to have vision, trust and optimism. The leader has to manifest concrete, active steps—execution—to bring about results. Leaders make things happen. 

Mistaking Charge

The new leader, which is what this book is about, is one who commits people to action, who converts followers into leaders, and who may convert leaders into agents of change. We refer to this as “transformative leadership” and will return to this concept throughout. 

Leading Others, Managing Yourself

• A business short on capital can borrow money, and one with a poor location can move. But a business short on leadership has little chance for survival.
• Leadership is what gives an organization its vision and its ability to translate that vision into reality. Without this translation, a transaction between leaders and followers, there is no organizational heartbeat.
• Managers are people who do things right and leaders are people who do the right thing. The difference may be summarized as activities of vision and judgment—effectiveness—versus activities of mastering routines—efficiency.
• Thus, the context of leadership that all those interviewed both shared and embodied was directly related to how they construed their roles. They viewed themselves as leaders, not managers. This is to say that they concerned themselves with their organizations’ basic purposes and general direction. Their perspective was “vision-oriented.” They did not spend their time on the “how tos,” the proverbial “nuts and bolts,” but rather with the paradigms of action, with “doing the right thing.” Furthermore, the study concentrated
• Otherwise, there seemed to be no obvious patterns for their success. They were right-brained and left-brained, tall and short, fat and thin, articulate and inarticulate, assertive and retiring, dressed for success and dressed for failure, participative and autocratic. There were more variations than themes. Even their managerial styles were restlessly different. (One confided that, by nature, he believed in “participative fascism.”) For those of us interested in pattern, in underlying themes, this group was frustratingly unruly. But they also gave testimony to the multifarious opportunities that are uniquely American.

For us, four major themes slowly developed, four areas of competency, four types of human handling skills, that all ninety of our leaders embodied: Strategy I: attention through vision 

Strategy II: meaning through communication 

Strategy III: trust through positioning 

Strategy IV: the deployment of self through (1) positive self-regard and (2) the Wallenda factor

Strategy I: Attention Through Vision 

• All men dream; but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds Awake to find that it was vanity; But the dreamers of day are dangerous men, That they may act their dreams with open eyes to make it possible. T. E. Lawrence
• Management of attention through vision is the creation of focus. All ninety people interviewed had an agenda, an unparalleled concern with outcome. Leaders are the most results-oriented individuals in the world, and results get attention. Their visions or intentions are compelling and pull people toward them. Intensity coupled with commitment is magnetic. And these intense personalities do not have to coerce people to pay attention; they are so intent on what they are doing that, like a child completely absorbed with creating a sand castle in a sandbox, they draw others in. 
• Vision grabs. Initially it grabs the leader, and management of attention enables others also to get on the bandwagon. “he doesn’t waste our time.” It became clear that Comissioná transmits an unbridled clarity about what he wants from the players. He knows precisely and emphatically what he wants to hear at any given time.- from “the maestro’s tapestry of intentions.”
• And attention is the first step to implementing or orchestrating a vision external to one’s own actions.
• An actress working on a set with one of our leaders, in this case a director, commented about him: “He reminds me of a child at play… very determined…. He says, like a child, ‘I want this or I want that.’ When he explains things, it is like a child who says, ‘I want a castle built for me,’ and he gets it.”
• The visions these various leaders conveyed seemed to bring about a confidence on the part of the employees, a confidence that instilled in them a belief that they were capable of performing the 
• Vision animates, inspirits, transforms purpose into action.
• “He has a power of concentration the likes of which I’ve never seen. He always knew what he wanted.”
• This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no “brief candle” to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
• But leadership is also a transaction, a transaction between leaders and followers. Neither could exist without the other. There has to be resonance, a connection between them. So what we discovered is that leaders also pay attention as well as catch. The interaction between the leader and the led is tacitly far more complicated than the simple command; they bring out the best in each other. The transaction creates unity. Conductor and orchestra as one. Coach and team. Leader and organization as one. And that unified focus is the management of attention through vision.

Strategy II: Meaning Through Communication 

“If you can dream it, you can do it.” Walt Disney

• Believing in one’s dreams is not enough. There are a lot of intoxicating visions and a lot of noble intentions. Many people have rich and deeply textured agendas, but without communication nothing will be realized. Success requires the capacity to relate a compelling image of a desired state of affairs—the kind of image that induces enthusiasm and commitment in others.
• Workers have to recognize and get behind something of established identity. The management of meaning, mastery of communication, is inseparable from effective leadership.
• A number of lessons can be drawn from the experiences of our ninety leaders. First, and perhaps most important, is that all organizations depend on the existence of shared meanings and interpretations of reality, which facilitate coordinated action. The actions and symbols of leadership frame and mobilize meaning. Leaders articulate and define what has previously remained implicit or unsaid; then they invent images, metaphors, and models that provide a focus for new attention. By so doing, they consolidate or challenge prevailing wisdom. In short, an essential factor in leadership is the capacity to influence and organize meaning for the members of the organization
• Despite the variations in style, however—whether verbal or nonverbal, whether through words or music—every successful leader is aware that an organization is based on a set of shared meanings that define roles and authority. He or she is also aware that a pivotal responsibility is to communicate the blueprint which shapes and interprets situations so that the actions of employees are guided by common interpretations of reality.
• Finally, what we mean by “meaning” goes far beyond what is usually meant by “communication.” For one thing, it has very little to do with “facts” or even “knowing.” Facts and knowing have to do with technique, with methodology, with “knowing how to do things.” That’s useful, even necessary, and undeniably occupies a useful place in today’s scheme of things. But thinking is emphatically closer to what we mean by “meaning” than knowing is. Thinking prepares one for what is to be done, what ought to be done. Thinking, though it may be unsettling and dangerous to the established order, is constructive: it challenges old conventions by suggesting new directions, new visions. To depend on facts, without thinking, may seem safe and secure, but in the long run it is dangerously unconstructive because it has nothing to say about directions. The distinctive role of leadership (in a volatile environment especially) is the quest for “know-why” ahead of “know-how.” And this distinction illustrates, once again, one of the key differences between leaders and managers.
• Creativity involves a “discovered problem,” one that needs to be worked out from beginning to end. The highest form of discovery always requires problem finding. This is very like the identification of a new direction or vision for an organization. This is the difference we noted earlier between leaders and managers; it is the difference between routine problem solvers and problem finders.
• The best answer we can give to that venerable question is that the acceptance of a vision—or any new idea, for that matter—requires that the employees (or any audience) be willing to pay attention to the would-be creative contribution. However, we must quickly add that the acceptance of a new idea is never determined solely by the quality of that idea. Even the “best” ideas are only as good as their ability to attract attention in the social environment. The conditions of that environment—organizations in this case—are inherently unpredictable: They can kill a good idea just as easily as a bad one.
• The main clue is that leadership creates a new audience for its ideas because it alters the shape of understanding by transmitting information in such a way that it “fixes” and secures tradition. Leadership, by communicating meaning, creates a commonwealth of learning, and that, in turn, is what effective organizations are.
• Communication creates meaning for people. Or should. It’s the only way any group, small or large, can become aligned behind the overarching goals of an organization. Getting the message across unequivocally at every level is an absolute key. Basically it is what the creative process is all about and what, once again, separates the managers from the leaders.

Strategy III: Trust Through Positioning 

“Nothing worthwhile can be accomplished without determination. In the early days of nuclear power, for example, getting approval to build the first nuclear submarine—the Nautilus—was almost as difficult as designing and building it. Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.” Admiral Hyman Rickover

• Trust is the lubrication that makes it possible for organizations to work. It’s hard to imagine an organization without some semblance of trust operating somehow, somewhere. An organization without trust is more than an anomaly, it’s a misnomer, a dim creature of Kafka’s imagination. Trust implies accountability, predictability, reliability. It’s what sells products and keeps organizations humming. Trust is the glue that maintains organizational integrity.
• Like leadership, trust is hard to describe, let alone define. We know when it’s present and we know when it’s not, and we cannot say much more about it except for its essentiality and that it is based on predictability. The truth is that we trust people who are predictable, whose positions are known and who keep at it; leaders who are trusted make themselves known, make their positions clear. Emphasis on position, on knowing what is right and necessary. Our leaders, in a variety of ways, echoed that same principle. Leaders are reliable and tirelessly persistent.
• Exceptional people have made continual sacrifices, sometimes even facing death for causes in which they believed, because they chose an angle and stuck reasonably to it. Ultimately, it is this relentless dedication that engages trust.
• Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with great talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence, determination alone are omnipotent.
• To sum up, what we’ve been getting at thus far is that positioning is the set of actions necessary to implement the vision of the leader. If vision is the idea, then positioning is the niche the leader establishes. For this niche to be achieved, the leader must be the epitome not only of clarity (which the previous section emphasized) but of constancy, of reliability. Through establishing the position—and, more important, staying the course—leadership establishes trust. Leaders acquire and wear their visions like clothes. Accordingly, they seem to enroll themselves (and then others) in the belief of their ideals as attainable, and their behavior exemplifies the ideals in action. Nelson Mandela is perhaps the most stellar model since Mahatma Gandhi of a leader who radically transformed his nation by serving as a role model for his followers and persistently living his ideals.

Old Chinese proverb: “If we don’t change our direction, we’re likely to end up where we’re headed.”

• In order for an organization to have integrity, it must have an identity—that is, a sense of who it is and what it is to do.

Effective leadership takes risks—it innovates, challenges, and changes the basic metabolism of the organizational culture. This form of leadership requires what Admiral Rickover alluded to in the statement quoted earlier as “courageous patience.” In practice, this means “keeping at it” and “at it” and, once again, “at it.” Innovation—any new idea—by definition will not be accepted at first, no matter how sensational the idea may be. If everyone embraced the innovation, it would be difficult to take it seriously—as an innovation. Innovation causes resistance to stiffen, defense to set in, opposition to form. And any new idea looks either foolish or impractical or unfeasible—at first. It takes repeated attempts, endless demonstrations, monotonous rehearsals before innovation can be accepted and internalized by any organization. This requires staying power and, yes, “courageous patience.”

Strategy IV: The Deployment of Self Through Positive Self-Regard 

When Yen Ho was about to take up his duties as tutor to the heir of Ling, Duke of Wei, he went to Ch’u Po Yu for advice. “I have to deal,” he said, “with a man of depraved and murderous disposition…. How is one to deal with a man of this sort?” “I am glad,” said Ch’u Po Yu, “that you asked this question…. The first thing you must do is not to improve him, but to improve yourself.” Taoist story of ancient China

• Our top executives spent roughly 90 percent of their time with others and virtually the same percentage of their time concerned with the messiness of people problems. Our study of effective leaders strongly suggested that a key factor was the creative deployment of self.
• This creative deployment of self makes leading, as we noted, a deeply personal business. It’s what we’re calling, more out of convenience than precision, positive self-regard. We learned the meaning of this phrase from responses to one of our three standard questions: “What are your major strengths and weaknesses?” For the most part, the leaders emphasized their strengths and tended to soft-pedal or minimize their weaknesses. Which is not to say that they weren’t aware of personal weaknesses but rather that they didn’t harp on them.
• It may be easier to say what positive self-regard isn’t than what it is. To begin with, it is not a crowing self-importance or egoistic self-centeredness that we have in mind. Nor is it what’s ordinarily meant by a “narcissistic character.” There was no trace of self-worship or cockiness in our leaders. But they know their worth. They trust themselves without letting their egos or images get in the way.
• Recognizing strengths and compensating for weaknesses represent the first step in achieving positive self-regard. The leaders in our study seemed to know what they were good at from an early age.
• The second element in positive self-regard is the nurturing of skills with discipline—that is, to keep working on and developing one’s talents. Many, though by no means all, of the leaders were athletes or athletic and were eager to get feedback and all manner of data about their performance. Like athletes, they regularly set higher goals and objectives for themselves, based on past performances.
• But it’s not the profit and loss or return on investment that we’re primarily referring to. It’s the capacity to develop and improve their skills that distinguished leaders from followers. They seemed to be responsible for their own evolution and even could appropriately be called “self-evolvers.”
• their perceived weakness or they do not take the job. Which leads to the third aspect of positive self-regard, the capacity to discern the fit between one’s perceived skills and what the job requires.
• Conventional wisdom often (and incorrectly) consigns to good timing what we attribute to this third element of positive self-regard, the fit between personal strengths and organizational requirements. What actually happens—and we learned this from reviewing in detail the career trajectories of the ninety leaders—is that they seemed to “know” when a particular job would fully exploit their strengths and when their unique qualities were no longer relevant (or could even be detrimental) for the organization. They seemed to know intuitively, to quote the country and western singer Kenny Rogers, “when to hold and when to fold.” Their so-called good timing was more dependent on their capacity to discern the fit of strengths to needs than anything else.
• We can sum up what we mean by positive self-regard. It consists of three major components: knowledge of one’s strengths, the capacity to nurture and develop those strengths and the ability to discern the fit between one’s strengths and weaknesses and the organization’s needs. Another way of thinking about positive self-regard as it specifically relates to work and jobs is this: Individuals who possess it are good at their jobs; they have the requisite skills. They enjoy their work; it satisfies their basic needs and motives. And, finally, they are proud of their work; it reflects their value system.
• What that illustrates is that the self-regard of leaders is contagious.
• His secret: always asking, “Can’t we do this a little better?” And the employees rose to the occasion. As one long-time Deere employee put it, “Hewitt made us learn how good we were.”
• Never criticizes his players until they’re convinced of his unconditional confidence in their abilities. After that’s achieved, he might say (if he does spot something
• Our individual potential is a direct derivative of our self-esteem. Which means we feel good about ourselves. If we come to regard ourselves more highly, then we come to expect more of ourselves…. This growth process results in more aggressive goals, greater expectations and hence more impressive achievements. If you believe what I’m saying, you cannot help but come to the conclusions that those you have followed passionately, gladly, zealously—have made you feel like somebody. It was not merely because they had the job, or the power… it somehow made you feel terrific to be around them.
• Positive self-regard seems to exert its force by creating in others a sense of confidence and high expectations. Positive self-regard is related to maturity, but we’d prefer the phrase “emotional wisdom” to “maturity.” Maturity sounds too much like the point where one outgrows childish behavior. But our leaders seemed to retain many of the positive characteristics of the child: enthusiasm for people, spontaneity, imagination and an unlimited capacity to learn new behavior. Emotional wisdom, as we’ve come to understand it, reflects itself in the way people relate to others. In the case of our ninety leaders, they used five key skills:

1. The ability to accept people as they are, not as you would like them to be. In a way, this can be seen as the height of wisdom—to “enter the skin” of someone else, to understand what other people are like on their terms, rather than judging them.
2. The capacity to approach relationships and problems in terms of the present rather than the past. Certainly it is true that we can learn from past mistakes. But using the present as a takeoff point for trying to make fewer mistakes seemed to be more productive for our leaders—and certainly was more psychologically sound than rehashing things that are over.
3. The ability to treat those who are close to you with the same courteous attention that you extend to strangers and casual acquaintances. The need for this skill is often most obvious—and lacking—in our relationships with our own families. But it is equally important at work. We tend to take for granted those to whom we are closest. Often we get so accustomed to seeing them and hearing from them that we lose our ability to listen to what they are really saying or to appreciate the quality—good or bad—of what they are doing. Personal feelings of friendship or hostility or simple indifference interfere.There are two aspects to this problem of overfamiliarity. The first is that of not hearing what is being said: selective deafness leads to misunderstandings, misconceptions, mistakes. The second is the matter of feedback we fail to provide to indicate our attentiveness.
4. The ability to trust others, even if the risk seems great. A withholding of trust is often necessary for self-protection. But the price is too high if it means always being on guard, constantly suspicious of others. Even an overdose of trust that at times involves the risk of being deceived or disappointed is wiser, in the long run, than taking it for granted that most people are incompetent or insincere.
5. The ability to do without constant approval and recognition from others. Particularly in a work situation, the need for constant approval can be harmful and counterproductive. It should not really matter how many people like leaders. The important thing is the quality of work that results from collaborating with them. The emotionally wise leader realizes that this quality will suffer when undue emphasis is placed on being a “good guy.” More important, it is a large part of the leader’s job to take risks. And risks by their very nature cannot be pleasing to everyone.

The Deployment of Self Through the Wallenda Factor

“Being on the tightrope is living; everything else is waiting.” Karl Wallenda, 1968

• Perhaps the most impressive and memorable quality of the leaders we studied was the way they responded to failure. They simply don’t think about failure, don’t even use the word, relying on such synonyms as “mistake,” “glitch,” “bungle,” or countless others such as “false start,” “mess,” “hash,” “bollix,” “setback,” and “error.” Never failure. One of them said during the course of an interview that “a mistake is just another way of doing things.” Another said, “If I have an art form of leadership, it is to make as many mistakes as quickly as I can in order to learn.”
• “hardest decision he ever had to make,” he responded this way: I don’t know what a hard decision is. I may be a strange animal but I don’t worry. Whenever I make a decision, I start out recognizing there’s a strong likelihood I’m going to be wrong. All I can do is the best I can. To worry puts obstacles in the way of clear thinking.
• For the successful leader, failure is a beginning, the springboard to hope.
• Although leading is a “job” for which leaders are handsomely paid, where their rewards come from—and what they truly value—is a sense of adventure and play. In our interviews, they describe work in ways that scientists use: “exploring a new space,” “solving a problem,” “designing or discovering something new.” Like explorers, scientists, and artists, they seem to focus their attention on a limited field—their task—to forget personal problems, to lose their sense of time, to feel competent and in control. When these elements are present, leaders truly enjoy what they’re doing and stop worrying about whether the activity will be productive or not, whether their activities will be rewarded or not, whether what they are doing will work or not. They are walking the tightrope.
• For successful leadership to occur there has to be a fusion between positive self-regard and optimism about a desired outcome.
• We’ve concluded that great leaders are like the Zen archer who develops his skills to the point where the desire to hit the target becomes extinguished and man, arrow and target become indivisible components of the same process. That’s good for leaders. And when this style of influence works to attract and empower people to join them on the tightrope, that’s good for organizations and for society.

Empowerment: The Dependent Variable To lead, One must follow. Lao-tzu

• They empower others to translate intention into reality and sustain it.
• This does not mean that leaders must relinquish power, or that followers must continually challenge authority. It does mean that power must become a unit of exchange—an active, changing token in creative, productive and communicative transactions.
• The essential thing in organizational leadership is that the leader’s style pulls rather than pushes people on. A pull style of influence works by attracting and energizing people to an exciting vision of the future. It motivates by identification, rather than through rewards and punishments. The leaders we have been talking about articulate and embody the ideals toward which the organization is striving. They enroll themselves (and others) in a vision of that ideal as attainable and worthy.
• We discovered that the effective leader seemed able to create a vision that gave workers the feeling of being at the active centers of the social order.
• The second component of empowerment is competence, meaning development and learning on the job.
• This increasing sense of mastery and ever-new horizons enhanced performance and alignment behind the organization’s goals.
• Thirdly, workers experienced something akin to “family,” to community. They felt joined in some common purpose. We’re not talking necessarily about a matter of “liking” one another. Rather, it is a sense of reliance on one another toward a common cause that we have in mind.
• The fourth aspect of empowerment, enjoyment or just plain fun, comes through in almost all of the groups

Plan for Implementation

• The important thing to keep in mind is that nothing serves an organization better—especially during times of agonizing doubts and uncertainties—than leadership that knows what it wants, communicates those intentions, positions itself correctly, and empowers its workforce.

Strategy I: Attention Through Vision

“Both Mr. Durant and Mr. Ford had unusual vision, courage, daring, imagination, and foresight. Both gambled everything on the future of the automobile at a time when fewer were made in a year than are now made in a couple of days…. Both created great and lasting institutions.” Alfred P. Sloan,

• Over and over again, the leaders we spoke to told us that they did the same things when they took charge of their organizations—they paid attention to what was going on, they determined what part of the events at hand would be important for the future of the organization, they set a new direction, and they concentrated the attention of everyone in the organization on it. We soon found that this was a universal principle of leadership, as true for orchestra conductors, army generals, football coaches, and school superintendents as for corporate leaders.

Vision and Organizations 

• To choose a direction, a leader must first have developed a mental image of a possible and desirable future state of the organization. This image, which we call a vision, may be as vague as a dream or as precise as a goal or mission statement. The critical point is that a vision articulates a view of a realistic, credible, attractive future for the organization, a condition that is better in some important ways than what now exists.
• Note also that a vision always refers to a future state, a condition that does not presently exist and never existed before. With a vision, the leader provides the all-important bridge from the present to the future of the organization.
• When the organization has a clear sense of its purpose, direction, and desired future state and when this image is widely shared, individuals are able to find their own roles both in the organization and in the larger society of which they are a part. This empowers individuals and confers status upon them because they can see themselves as part of a worthwhile enterprise. They gain a sense of importance, as they are transformed from robots blindly following instructions to human beings engaged in a creative and purposeful venture. When individuals feel that they can make a difference and that they can improve the society in which they are living through their participation in an organization, then it is much more likely that they will bring vigor and enthusiasm to their tasks and that the results of their work will be mutually reinforcing. Under these conditions, the human energies of the organization are aligned toward a common end, and a major precondition for success has been satisfied. 
• A shared vision of the future also suggests measures of effectiveness for the organization and for all its parts. It helps individuals distinguish between what’s good and what’s bad for the organization, and what it’s worthwhile to want to achieve. And most important, it makes it possible to distribute decision making widely. People can make difficult decisions without having to appeal to higher levels in the organization each time because they know what end results are desired. Thus, in a very real sense, individual behavior can be shaped, directed, and coordinated by a shared and empowering vision of the future.
• It remains for the effective leader, however, to help people in the organization know pride and satisfaction in their work. Great leaders often inspire their followers to high levels of achievement by showing them how their work contributes to worthwhile ends. It is an emotional appeal to some of the most fundamental of human needs—the need to be important, to make a difference, to feel useful, to be a part of a successful and worthwhile enterprise. 

In all these cases, the leader may have been the one who chose the image from those available at the moment, articulated it, gave it form and legitimacy, and focused attention on it, but the leader only rarely was the one who conceived of the vision in the first place. Therefore, the leader must be a superb listener, particularly to those advocating new or different images of the emerging reality. Many leaders establish both formal and informal channels of communication to gain access to these ideas. Most leaders also spend a substantial portion of their time interacting with advisers, consultants, other leaders, scholars, planners, and a wide variety of other people both inside and outside their own organizations in this search. Successful leaders, we have found, are great askers, and they do pay attention.

Strategy I: Attention Through Vision

The Past One -obvious way to start is to reflect on your own experiences with other banks to identify analogies and precedents that might apply to the new situation. You will surely want to learn about history. As you do this, you’ll be building a mental model of what worked and what didn’t work for this and similar banks in the past. You will be identifying some long-term trends—

The Present -There is a lot to learn about the future from looking all around you at what is happening right now. The present provides a first approximation of the human, organizational and material resources out of which the future will be formed. There are early warning signals of impending change all around you. Your market researchers, for example, should be able to identify growing markets at an early stage of development. Finally, you can conduct small experiments.

The Future-Beyond structural clues, you could obtain forecasts of all kinds to study: economic projections, demographic analyses, industry forecasts and the like. You could explore some of the intellectual ideas that may shape the future: philosophical works; science fiction novels; political party platforms; and books by leading sociologists, political scientists and futurists. It is in the interpretation of this information that the real art of leadership lies. Just as the historian attempts to take piles of information about the past and construct an interpretation of the forces that may have been at work, so does the leader select, organize, structure and interpret information about the future in an attempt to construct a viable and credible vision. But the leader has one distinctive advantage over the historian in that much of the future can be invented or designed. By synthesizing an appropriate vision, the leader is influential in shaping the future itself.

Synthesizing Vision: The Leader’s Choice of Direction 

All of the leaders to whom we spoke seemed to have been masters at selecting, synthesizing and articulating an appropriate vision of the future. Later, we learned that this was a common quality of leaders down through the ages. Napoleon, Louis Madelin, described him: He would deal with three or four alternatives at the same time and endeavor to conjure up every possible eventuality—preferably the worst. This foresight, the fruit of meditation, generally enabled him to be ready for any setback; nothing ever took him by surprise…. His vision, as I have said, was capable of both breadth and depth. Perhaps the most astonishing characteristic of his intellect was the combination of idealism and realism which enabled him to face the most exalted visions at the same time as the most insignificant realities. And, indeed, he was in a sense a visionary, a dreamer of dreams. 

• The task of synthesizing an appropriate direction for the organization is complicated by the many dimensions of vision that may be required. Leaders require foresight, so that they can judge how the vision fits into the way the environment of the organization may evolve; hindsight, so that the vision does not violate the traditions and culture of the organization; a worldview, within which to interpret the impact of possible new developments and trends; depth perception, so that the whole picture can be seen in appropriate detail and perspective; peripheral vision, so that the possible responses of competitors and other stakeholders to the new direction can be comprehended; and a process of revision, so that all visions previously synthesized are constantly reviewed as the environment changes. Beyond this, decisions must be made about the appropriate time horizon to address, the simplicity or complexity of the image, the extent to which it will represent continuity with the past as opposed to a radical transformation, the degree of optimism or pessimism it will contain, its realism and credibility, and its potential impact on the organization.
• If there is a spark of genius in the leadership function at all, it must lie in this transcending ability, a kind of magic, to assemble—out of all the variety of images, signals, forecasts and alternatives—a clearly articulated vision of the future that is at once simple, easily understood, clearly desirable, and energizing.
• Involving others in the visioning process allows the participants to share their values and dreams, brings a broader range of viewpoints and expertise into the search for a new direction, and makes it easier to gain commitment to the vision at the end of the process.

Focusing Attention: The Leader’s Search for Commitment 

“The leader may generate new views of the future and may be a genius at synthesizing and articulating them, but this makes a difference only when the vision has been successfully communicated throughout the organization and effectively institutionalized as a guiding principle. Leaders are only as powerful as the ideas they can communicate. The leader’s basic philosophy must be: “We have seen what this organization can be, we understand the consequences of that vision, and now we must act to make it so.”

• We have found in our discussions with leaders that visions can often be communicated best by metaphors, or models— In any communication, some distortion takes place, but the great leader seems to be able to find just the right metaphor that clarifies the idea and minimizes distortion. In fact, the right metaphor often transcends verbal communication altogether;
• Another way the leader communicates a new vision is by consistently acting on it and personifying it.
• In the end, the leader may be the one who articulates the vision and gives it legitimacy, who expresses the vision in captivating rhetoric that fires the imagination and emotions of followers, who—through the vision—empowers others to make decisions that get things done. But if the organization is to be successful, the image must grow out of the needs of the entire organization and must be “claimed” or “owned” by all the important actors. In short, it must become part of a new social architecture in the organization, the subject to which we next turn our attention.

Strategy II: Meaning Through Communication

Above and beyond his envisioning capabilities, a leader must be a social architect who understands the organization and shapes the way it works. The social architecture of any organization is the silent variable that translates the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of organizational life into meaning. It determines who says what to whom, about what, and what kinds of actions then ensue. Social architecture is an intangible, but it governs the way people act, the values and norms that are subtly transmitted to groups and individuals, and the construct of binding and bonding within a company.*

• Three Styles of Social Architecture The major elements that define an organization’s social architecture are its origins; its basic operating principle; the nature of its work; the management of information, decision making and power; influence; and status. These elements characterize three distinct organizational types—the collegial, personalistic and formalistic—which we will review below.
• People want to do a good job and be associated with success! People will do a good job if: 
  • They understand the need! 
  • They are provided: Facilities and equipment Procedures Material Know-how
  •  Management that leads 
  • Their efforts are recognized and appreciated 
  • We attach no blame to “failure” 
  • Everybody assumes responsibility for the product 
  • We leave workers alone and allow them flexibility

Collegial organizations are frequently found in the high-tech sector, in many partnership organizations, and where there is a high proportion of professional employees.

• Many a “young” entrepreneurial, high-growth organization—often the brainchild of an inventor-founder—turns out to be personalistic. Examples such as Gore-Tex, Thompson Vitamins, the Foothill Group, the Hotel Corporation of America, the Louisville Cardinals and The Limited come to mind. (As they “age,” however, many personalistic organizations have a tendency to move either toward a collegial or formalistic type of social architecture.)
• Social architecture, as we have continually emphasized, provides meaning. The key point is that if an organization is to be transformed, the social architecture must be revamped. The effective leader needs to articulate new values and norms, offer new visions, and use a variety of tools in order to transform, support, and institutionalize new meanings and directions.

Tools of the Social Architect

“The most successful leader of all is one who sees another picture not yet actualized. He sees the things which belong in his present picture but which are not yet there…. Above all, he should make his co-workers see that it is not his purpose which is to be achieved, but a common purpose, born of the desires and the activities of the group.” Mary Parker Follett

• For a successful transformation to be achieved, three things have to happen—and these principles apply equally to each and every one of the three styles just described: 
  • Create a new and compelling vision capable of bringing the workforce to a new place. Develop commitment for the new vision. Institutionalize the new vision.
  • Changing the Social Architecture The leader is an effective social architect to the extent that he can manage meaning.
  • But if there is one lesson that emerges from our analysis of the best practices in this complex area, it appears to stem from leaders doing a lot of fairly simple and obvious things well. This is said in no way to minimize or trivialize the difficulties in mastering social architecture, but in retrospect it does seem that our effective leaders all apply common sense.

Strategy III: Trust Through Positioning

Fail to honor people, They fail to honor you; But of a good leader, who talks little, When his work is done, his aim fulfilled, They will all say, “We did this ourselves.” Lao-tzu

• Trust is the emotional glue that binds followers and leaders together. The accumulation of trust is a measure of the legitimacy of leadership. It cannot be mandated or purchased; it must be earned. Trust is the basic ingredient of all organizations, the lubrication that maintains the organization, and, as we said earlier, it is as mysterious and elusive a concept as leadership—and as important. One thing we can say for sure about trust is that if trust is to be generated, there must be predictability, the capacity to predict another’s behavior.
• In organizational settings of the kind we have been discussing, trust between leaders and followers cannot exist without two conditions: The leader’s vision for the organization must be clear, attractive, and attainable. We tend to trust leaders who create these visions, since vision represents the context for shared beliefs in a common organizational purpose. The leader’s positions must be clear. We tend to trust leaders when we know where they stand in relation to the organization and how they position the organization relative to the environment.

Organizations and Their Environments

“Organizational positioning” refers to the process by which an organization designs, establishes and sustains a viable niche in its external environments. It encompasses everything the leader must do to align the internal and external environments of the organization over time and space.

• The first is that the environments of organizations are much more complex than natural environments because they contain both physical and man-made elements. In contrast to physical environments, man-made elements tend to be irregular, non-recurring, irrational, and unpredictable. In addition, an organization must interact not only with its primary environments—such as suppliers, consumers, and interfacing organizations—but also with many technological, legal, social, economic, and institutional structures that constrain the activities of the organization and over which it has very little direct control.
• The second difference between human organizations and other organisms is the central importance of the time dimension. In most natural systems, change occurs very slowly and is often measured in thousands of years. In human systems, change can occur very rapidly. As a result, nothing is more important to modern organizations than their effectiveness in coping with change. And this leads to the third difference. Whereas other organisms change as a result of natural selection, organizations change as a result of specific choices that they make themselves. In fact, the positioning decisions of an organization are very much concerned with the design of an appropriate niche.
• These three dimensions—complexity, the time horizon and choice—that differentiate human organizations from other organisms are the very factors with which leaders are primarily concerned in positioning their organizations.

4 Main Strategies Leaders Choose

There are four main strategies that leaders choose (sometimes unwittingly) in order to position their organization: 

1: Reactive. With this approach, the organization waits for change and reacts—after the fact. Some leaders who operate in this fashion act through default, as those in the steel industry have done. A reactive mode is the least expensive (and often the most shortsighted) strategy; it may occasionally work, but only in slowly changing environments that allow enough lead time to react.

2: Change the internal environment. Rather than waiting for change to happen to them, leaders can develop effective forecasting procedures to anticipate change and then “proact” rather than react.

3: Change the external environment. This approach requires that the organization anticipating change act upon the environment itself to make the change congenial to its needs, much as the opening movement of a symphony creates an environment that is receptive to the later movements.

4: Establish a new linkage between the external and internal environments.

• All leaders face the challenge of overcoming resistance to change. People will resist change if they don’t understand its purpose, if it causes too much uncertainty or disruption or if they feel it will affect them or the organization adversely. Some leaders try to overcome this by the simple exercise of power and control, but resistance often stiffens when people feel change is being imposed arbitrarily. Effective leaders, including most of those in our panel, learned early in their careers that it was far better to secure voluntary commitment to changes through open communication, participation and mutual trust.
• Leaders set the moral tone by choosing carefully the people with whom they surround themselves, by communicating a sense of purpose for the organization, by reinforcing appropriate behaviors and by articulating these moral positions to external and internal constituencies. In the end, trust, integrity and positioning are all different faces of a common property of leadership—the ability to integrate those who must act with that which must be done so that it all comes together as a single organism in harmony with itself and its niche in the environment.

Strategy IV: The Deployment of Self

“We are all afraid—for our confidence, for the future, for the world. This is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do. The personal commitment of a man to his skill, the intellectual commitment and the emotional commitment working together as one, has made the Ascent of Man.” Jacob Bronowski The Ascent of Man, 1973

• When we asked our ninety leaders about the personal qualities they needed to run their organizations, they talked about persistence and self-knowledge; about willingness to take risks and accept losses; about commitment, consistency and challenge. But, above all, they talked about learning. Leaders are perpetual learners. Some are voracious readers. Nearly all leaders are highly proficient in learning from experience. Most were able to identify a small number of mentors and key experiences that powerfully shaped their philosophies, personalities, aspirations and operating styles. And all of them regard themselves as “stretching,” “growing” and “breaking new ground.”
• Learning is the essential fuel for the leader, the source of high-octane energy that keeps up the momentum by continually sparking new understanding, new ideas and new challenges. It is absolutely indispensable under today’s conditions of rapid change and complexity. Very simply, those who do not learn do not long survive as leaders.
• Leaders have discovered not just how to learn but how to learn in an organizational context. They are able to concentrate on what matters most to the organization and to use the organization as a learning environment. The most successful leaders have done this by developing a set of skills that Donald Michael calls “the new competence,” which he identifies as follows: 
  • Acknowledging and sharing uncertainty 
  • Embracing error 
  • Responding to the future 
  • Becoming interpersonally competent (e.g., listening, nurturing, coping with value conflicts, etc.) 
  • Gaining self-knowledge

The Learning Organization

• Organizational learning is the process by which an organization obtains and uses new knowledge, tools, behaviors, and values. It happens at all levels in the organization—among individuals and groups as well as system wide. Individuals learn as part of their daily activities, particularly as they interact with each other and the outside world. Groups learn as their members cooperate to accomplish common goals. The entire system learns as it obtains feedback from the environment and anticipates further changes. At all levels, newly learned knowledge is translated into new goals, procedures, expectations, role structures, and measures of success.

Innovative Learning

1: Reinterpretation of history. Every organization has its experiences and traditions, sometimes embodied in anecdotes or legends of past successes and failures. When we examine these experiences in the light of new and evolving environments, it is often possible to draw lessons about what works under different sets of circumstances.

2: Experimentation. An organization can test hypotheses about the direction of change in its environment by conducting controlled experiments and studying the effects.

3: Analogous organizations. Organizations learn by observing the experiences of other similar organizations. Corporate leaders read trade publications, attend association meetings and discuss common industry problems with other leaders.

4: Analytical processes. Many organizations learn by a conscious process of analyzing trends in the external environment, identifying emerging issues, and designing new ways to cope with those issues. As Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., the legendary leader of General Motors, said, “The final act of business judgment is, of course, intuitive…. But the big work behind business judgment is in finding and acknowledging the facts and circumstances concerning technology, the market, and the like in their continually changing forms.” 4 This theme kept recurring in our discussions with the ninety CEOs; intuitive judgment by the leader is essential, but it is effective only if it has been preceded by thorough analysis. A common type of model is the blueprint, depicting a proposed design of a facility, product, or piece of equipment. By studying the blueprint, individuals and groups in the organization develop a shared view of the proposed design and are able to explore its strengths, weaknesses and suitability. On a more conceptual level, “think pieces” describing proposed marketing plans or financial strategies serve as models of change in the same way. Analysis can include large linear programming models, econometric models and financial spread-sheet models that permit people to ask “what if?” questions. The only reason for building a complex systems model is to use it as an instrument for individual and organizational learning about the system it represents.

5: Training and education. Many organizations place a considerable emphasis on formal training processes. In fact, training and development is itself a major industry in the United States, rivaling in size the total spent by all colleges and universities on more traditional higher education.

6: Unlearning. Often overlooked is the “unlearning” or discarding of old knowledge when actions by the organization clash with changed reality in the external environment. Problems such as the loss of a key customer often lead an organization to question its basic assumptions and to recombine or reorder them. A learning organization places a high value on these experiences because they supply a reality test and permit adjustments without which larger mistakes might be made in the future.

• These six modes of innovative learning illustrate some of the ways organizations learn how to reconfigure themselves, replace old rules, improve their information flows, and revitalize their creative abilities. With effective organizational learning, judgment improves over time, conventional assumptions are continually being challenged and deeper levels of understanding of both the environment and the organization’s role in it are constantly being achieved. But just as some kids are slow learners while others speed ahead, so too are some organizations more effective than others at innovative learning. The difference is leadership, without which organizational learning is unfocused—lacking in energy, force, cohesion and purpose.

Leading the Learning Organization 

• If the leader is seen as an effective learner from the environment, others will emulate that model, much as a child emulates a parent or a student emulates a teacher. The leader and the organization nurture each other, guiding the process of creative self-discovery by which each learns how to be most effective in a complex and changing environment.
• Leaders can energize learning behavior by rewarding it when it happens. The leader can use the full range of rewards and punishments for this purpose, including compensation, recognition, control over allocation of resources, promotion to increased responsibilities, coveted assignments, expense accounts, freedom from routine and more.
• What are some of the behaviors to be rewarded? 
  • First, the leader must reinforce long-range thinking, innovation and creativity. 
  • Speculation and anticipation of future developments should be legitimized and respected as an organizational activity. 
  • Change and experimentation must be embraced, as well as competition of ideas and the creation of new options. 
  • A general drive toward excellence and a shared commitment to the organization’s missions must likewise be rewarded. 
  • New values and organizational arrangements should be encouraged to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and the identification of lower-level purposes with overall organizational missions.

Organizing for Innovative Learning

• The good news is that leaders can redesign organizations to become more receptive to learning. They can do this by designing open organizations that are both participative and anticipative.
• An open organization is one that is designed to have constant, intense interactions with its external environments and to respond quickly and flexibly to new information. In an open organization, people share a set of norms, values, and priorities that contribute to learning—alertness to change, a search for new challenges and options, and respect for innovation and risk taking. An open organization is also future-oriented, in the sense that much of its behavior is governed by anticipations of future threats and opportunities and a concern for the future consequences of current strategies. Much attention is paid to information and communication systems, the channels through which learning is shared by all parts of the organization. Units of manageable size are created, small enough to let employees feel genuine responsibility for the unit and to measure their progress in accommodating environmental change.
• Participation is the second element in the design of a learning organization. “people have a stake in an idea if they participated in its creation; then they’ll work much harder, in a much more dedicated way, to bring it to success.” In groups, individuals learn from each other what is happening in the outside world, what is worthy of attention, what achievements are possible and desirable, and how responsibilities should be apportioned. Through cooperative processes, they share their understanding and stimulate each other to invest time and energy for the organization’s benefit.
• Finally, anticipation must be designed into the learning organization. This usually occurs by establishing an effective planning process and rewarding people who use it as a mechanism for managing change. In its most general sense, planning is nothing more than a process of making informed judgments about the future and acting on them.

In a study by James Brian Quinn of nine large corporations, the most important contributions of formal planning processes were found to be the following: 

• They created a network of information that would not otherwise have been available. 
• They periodically forced operating managers to extend their time horizons and see their work in a larger framework. 
• They required vigorous communications about goals, strategic issues and resource allocations. 
• They systematically taught managers about the future so they could better intuitively calibrate their short-term or interim decisions. 
• They often created an attitude about and a comfort factor concerning the future; that is, managers felt less uncertain about the future and consequently were more willing to make commitments that extended beyond short time horizons. 
• They often stimulated longer-term special studies that could have high impact at key junctures for specific strategic decisions. 

• In all of this, the role of the leader is much like that of the conductor of an orchestra. The real work of the organization is done by the people in it, just as the music is produced only by the members of the orchestra. The leader, however, serves the crucial role of seeing that the right work gets done at the right time, that it flows together harmoniously, and that the overall performance has the proper pacing, coordination and desired impact on the outside world. The great leader, like the great orchestra conductor, calls forth the best that is in the organization. Each performance is a learning experience which enables the next undertaking to be that much more effective—more “right” for the time, place and instruments at hand. And if in the long run the organization succeeds, it doesn’t at all detract from the quality of everyone else’s work to suggest that it was the leader who made it possible for the organization to learn how to perfect its contribution.

Their best, these leaders—a fairly disparate group in many superficial ways—commit themselves to a common enterprise and are resilient enough to absorb the conflicts; brave enough, now and then, to be transformed by its accompanying energies; and capable of sustaining a vision that encompasses the whole organization. The organization finds its greatest expression in the consciousness of a common social responsibility, and that is to translate that vision into a living reality.

Myth 1: Leadership is a rare skill. Nothing can be further from the truth. While great leaders may be as rare as great runners, great actors or great painters, everyone has leadership potential, just as everyone has some ability at running, acting and painting.

Myth 2: Leaders are born, not made. The truth is that major capacities and competencies of leadership can be learned, and we are all educable, at least if the basic desire to learn is there and we do not suffer from serious learning disorders. Furthermore, whatever natural endowments we bring to the role of leadership, they can be enhanced; nurture is far more important than nature in determining who becomes a successful leader.

Myth 3: Leaders are charismatic. Some are, most aren’t. Our leaders were all “too human”; they were short and tall, articulate and inarticulate, dressed for success and dressed for failure, and there was virtually nothing in terms of physical appearance, personality or style that set them apart from their followers. Our guess is that it operates in the other direction; that is, charisma is the result of effective leadership, not the other way around, and that those who are good at it are granted a certain amount of respect and even awe by their followers, which increases the bond of attraction between them.

Myth 4: Leadership exists only at the top of an organization. We may have played into this myth unintentionally by focusing exclusively on top leadership. But it’s obviously false. In fact, the larger the organization, the more leadership roles it is likely to have.

Myth 5: The leader controls, directs, prods, manipulates. This is perhaps the most damaging myth of all. As we have stressed with monotonous regularity, leadership is not so much the exercise of power itself as the empowerment of others. Leaders are able to translate intentions into reality by aligning the energies of the organization behind an attractive goal. These leaders lead by pulling rather than by pushing; by inspiring rather than by ordering; by creating achievable, though challenging, expectations and rewarding progress toward them rather than by manipulating; by enabling people to use their own initiative and experiences rather than by denying or constraining their experiences and actions.

Myth 6: The leader’s sole job is to increase shareholder value. At the very least, the statement needs to be revised to read, “an important part of the leader’s job is to increase long-term shareholder value,” but even that falls somewhat short. Leaders see themselves as having a different responsibility. Their primary concern is in building the organization to ensure its long-term viability and success. The leader is the major instrument an organization has for articulating its dreams, pointing the way toward their achievement and helping people work together effectively to create brighter futures. For real leaders, then, making a profit is a requirement, not a vision or goal; nor does it animate or empower the workforce. The excessive and exclusive obsession with the enshrined “bottom line” will only lead to destructive “short-termism” along with a tremendous cost to the long-term viability of the organization. Thus a broader and, in our view, far more satisfactory statement of the leader’s main role would be as follows: “The leader’s primary responsibility is to serve as trustee and architect of the organization’s future, building the foundations for its continued success.”

Will Rogers said, “It isn’t enough to be on the right track. If you aren’t moving, you can still get hit by a train.”

Therefore, the challenge to leaders will be to act as compassionate coaches, dedicated to reducing stress by ensuring that the whole team has everything it needs—from human and financial resources to emotional support and encouragement—to work together effectively and at peak performance most of the time. Recognizing, developing and celebrating the distinctive skills of each individual will become critically important to organizational survival.

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In the end, the leaders who succeed best will be those who are best able to (1) set direction during turbulent times; (2) manage change while still providing exceptional customer service and quality; (3) attract resources and forge new alliances to accommodate new constituencies; (4) harness diversity on a global scale; (5) inspire a sense of optimism, enthusiasm and commitment among their followers; and (6) be a leader of leaders, especially regarding knowledge workers. Leadership in the twenty-first century is not a job for wimps; but then, it never was.

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To… Few leaders, mainly at the top; many managers Leaders at every level; fewer managers Leading by goal-setting; e.g., near-term profits, ROI Leading by vision—creating new directions for long-term business growth Downsizing, benchmarking for low cost, high quality Also creating domains of uniqueness, distinctive competencies Reactive/ adaptive to change Anticipative/ futures-creative Designer of hierarchical organizations Designer of flatter, distributed, more collegial organizations; leader as social architect Directing and supervising individuals Empowering and inspiring individuals, but also facilitating teamwork Information held by few decision makers Information shared with many, both internally and with outside partners Leader as boss, controlling processes and behaviors Leader as coach, creating learning organizations Leader as stabilizer, balancing conflicting demands and maintaining the culture Leader as change agent, creating agenda for change, balancing risks and evolving the culture and the technology base Leader responsible for developing good managers Leader also responsible for developing future leaders; serving as leader of leaders

Our ninety leaders do resemble each other. They all have the ability to translate intention into reality and to sustain it. They all make a sharp distinction between leadership and management by concerning themselves with the organization’s basic purposes, why it exists, its general direction and value system. They are all able to induce clarity regarding their organization’s vision.

“The thing about Joe [his CEO] is that even when his advice to us turns out to be wrong, it’s always clear.”) They are all able to arouse a sense of excitement about the significance of the organization’s contribution to society.