How (47 page)

“Shortly after I became CEO of Pfizer,” Jeff Kindler told me, “I was being interviewed on internal video for our more than 100,000 employees. They were asking me about changes to the company, and I said something like, ‘There may be a need to make important changes in the company; we may need to take up a lot of actions to change,’ and blah blah blah blah. I was using a lot of buzzwords and corporate-speak. And then I realized what I was doing. I was on the border of spinning, and I interrupted myself and said, ‘Wait a minute, let me correct myself. Let me be clear about what I am talking about here. There will be cost cutting, and there will be layoffs, and people will lose their jobs.’ ” It was Kindler’s first major communication with his company, and it was his first opportunity to show what kind of a leader he was going to be. Though it meant being vulnerable in front of 100,000 people, Kindler’s ability to reflect in the moment allowed him to set a true course of change for his company. “It was harsh language,” he admitted, “but it was truthful, and I think people respected the fact that I was not giving them a load of baloney in corporate-speak. Since then, I have received comments that people at Pfizer appreciate that somebody is talking straight to them, that I am acknowledging that we have serious challenges and serious issues we need to face.”
¹⁶

Self-reflection lights the way on a journey of self-improvement, guiding you through both the good times on the Hill of A and the struggles in the Valley of C. Governing yourself means working on yourself and trying to do things better year over year and week over week. Like the monks, we will never achieve perfection, but if we reflect not only will we improve, but we will develop the sort of simultaneous consciousness that Jeff Kindler has, the ability to see the HOWs in everything we do, as we do them.

A lack of reflection leaves you superficial and determined. You may win a lot of arguments, motivate a lot of action, show the superficial characteristics of corporate-speak leadership, and even achieve some success, but you will work harder to do so, and eventually people will begin to see your limitations as a leader.

Go to the Point of No Return

Do you remember the first time you went to the edge of a very high diving board at a swimming pool? Goaded there by your friends who, despite all sense, yelled for you to jump, you inched your way to the edge, looked down, and immediately wished you were somewhere else. In that moment, you realized, perhaps for the first time in your life, that you had consciously taken yourself to the point of no return. If you crawled back and didn’t jump, you realized, your friends would call you a bunch of names you didn’t want to be called. If you jumped, however, you felt you might die. Butterflies in your stomach, trying hard not to giggle, there was nothing comfortable about that moment. Nothing was more terrifying.

Some of us jumped. Some of us crawled back, only to return another day and succeed. Some of us, to this day, have never taken the plunge. But to envision, by definition, means to explore the unknown, to go to new, risky, and potentially frightening places. You can’t land on the moon if you don’t go farther than the hill behind your house. If you are trying to bring about a better future, you must every day go someplace you have not been before, to the point of no return. What happens every time you go to the point of no return? You push past your limits and open up new terrains of possibility. Each challenge accepted leads to greater ability when you confront the next. Taking the first step off the Hill of B, leaving the easy and comfortable knowledge there to pursue mastery on the Hill of A is a point of no return. Forcing yourself to ask the question this week that you were too shy to ask last week is a point of no return. When you take that step, you know that tough times lie ahead in the Valley of C. Those who cannot bring themselves to take that step confine themselves to the path of least resistance. A leadership disposition guides you to take the path of most resistance and turn it into the path of least resistance.

Be Passionate and Optimistic

LRN is headquartered a few miles from the Pacific Ocean in Los Angeles, and since I started the company in 1994, I have worked hard to personally recruit the most talented people I could find. Inevitably, when I identify and pursue a potential recruit who lives in another city, we end up in a pros-and-cons-type debate about the relative merits of wherever they live and Los Angeles. Each time I have this discussion, it sounds eerily the same.
Their
city has great culture,
my
city has great culture;
their
city has great restaurants,
my
city has great restaurants; and back and forth we go in this ledger of pluses and minuses. But in the end, when all has been tallied, I play my trump card. “Both cities are great,” I say, “but all else being equal, my city gets an extra boost, because in Los Angeles we have the sun, and the sun is that one thing that shines through all the other qualities, making them that much better.” In business, that is what passion does. Passion is like the sun shining through everything; it makes it that much better.

Passion is the difference between a morning wake-me-up and a global corporation. Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz makes a good cup of coffee, but he is passionate about creating a workplace full of dignity and respect for his employees, customers, and suppliers. Schultz’s passion wafts through the company and its many shops like the scent of roasting coffee beans, inspiring everyone who catches a whiff. And that makes all the difference in the world.

“You either have a tremendous love for what you do, and passion for it, or you don’t,” Schultz told
BusinessWeek
. “So whether I’m talking to a barista, a customer, or an investor, I really communicate how I feel about our company, our mission, and our values. It’s our collective passion that provides a competitive advantage in the marketplace because we love what we do and we’re inspired to do it better. When you’re around people who share a collective passion around a common purpose, there’s no telling what you can do.”
¹⁷

You need passion to start a Wave. You’ve got to turn to the person to your right and have real conviction that if we make this Wave we can help our team win. If you’re not passionate about that, then it will never happen. Without passion, you grow complacent, and complacency leads nowhere. “Passion is everything,” Steve Wynn told me. “It springs from strange places in the human psyche, from a kind of introspective, deep, and penetrating consideration of what you do, and it unleashes a phenomenal amount of energy that leads to higher insights and a deeper understanding of your customers or your employees. And it strikes a happy, deep, self-satisfying chord. It resonates. And when it does, you’re off on a hunt. You don’t think that you’re tired or even working. You’re just consumed with the notion that if you can get this done, it’s significant; it’s wonderful, and off you go. That’s the thing we call passion.”

You can express your passion in any way you want. You can write an e-mail with passion, you can speak with passion, or you can create a spreadsheet with passion. Passion is the spice that enhances all other ingredients with greatness. Some people express their passion by just showing up, every day, on time, steady as a rock. Passion fuels enlistment and alignment and communication. Have you ever been truly persuaded by an argument that wasn’t put forward passionately? Passion is the sun, and leaders are passionate. “You take two runners,” Massimo Ferragamo told me, “one with an incredible physique and the other who runs with passion, and the second one you know will win even if it kills him. Working with passion is an engine that is unbelievable. A person with drive and passion does three times the job of another person. But it is not so much the quantity of the job; that is not the point. The point is that they draw crowds; they have followers; they push, and lead, and so achieve much more.”
¹⁸

Optimism lives hand in hand with passion. Would the United States have spent 10 years trying to land on the moon if we believed there was a chance we would take off and miss? “I am an optimist,” Sir Winston Churchill once said. “It does not seem too much use being anything else.”
¹⁹
Self-governing people don’t allow themselves to entertain the notion of not landing on the moon. They don’t keep the vote in their mind to say, “I choose success versus failure.” They only envision how they are going to land on the moon. They’ve got that positive, passionate energy.

That last thought may seem—well—optimistic. But there is an important power lurking in optimism, the power of unlimited belief. Pessimists hold limited beliefs. The doubt and fear of failure that are natural to everyone trying to achieve something great creeps into their brains and ossifies there, creating friction and dissonance and bottling up the amazing power that brains can unleash when filled with belief. The only way to get to the next level, to reach the point of no return and to push past it, is to spend zero time contemplating the alternative. “Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier,” said former U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell.
²⁰
Helen Keller, who had vision greater than eyesight and was no stranger to the point of no return, said, “No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.”
²¹

Pursue Significance

When Bill Gates was in high school, he and his friends would sit around marveling at what they thought was the undeniable future. “We couldn’t believe that everyone else didn’t see what we saw,” he said in a recent television interview, “that personal computers were going to change the world.” This was long before the fateful meeting with IBM when Gates and Paul Allen realized that if they just had an operating system, they could change the world (so they went out and bought one, which they resold to IBM, and Microsoft was born).

It’s virtually impossible to be inspired and generate passion unless you have an important mission. The journey to self-governance is inspired by the pursuit of significance. Leaders believe that landing on the moon will benefit mankind, not just profit the company. Leaders believe in ideas. I founded LRN on the idea that the world would be a better place if more people did the right thing. Leaders think of themselves as cathedral builders, not bricklayers. Mission, whether personal or organizational, needs to be important, something worthy of your inspiration or your passion. It could be number two on your list or it could be number three, but it’s got to be on your list of important things. You will never find enduring, self-perpetuating power by pursuing the mundane. Passion and optimism compel those who assume a leadership disposition to engage in enterprises of transcendental importance.

Significance means different things at different stages of your life. The young, for instance, often have less time and resources to devote to giving back to their community than those who are older and more established in life. The most successful among us might feel that our achievements alone add up to a life of significance. But the pursuit of significance I am talking about is a disposition toward serving others, toward devoting some measure of every stage of your life to improving lives. Even the most successful need to always measure their efforts against the higher standard of service to others. To make that shift, to envision your efforts in service of a better world, creates a disposition that leads you beyond the immediate and mundane toward the extraordinary and exceptional. If you can pursue significance in this way, then, and only then, can you achieve true success.

Circles in Circles, Part Two

And so we have circumnavigated the lens of HOW and returned to where we began, envisioning a better future through the pursuit of significance. And so we go around again.

Like a ship’s sextant aimed at the stars, this lens—the Leadership Framework—can help you navigate your way through a world of HOW. By developing a leadership disposition and focusing your efforts and perspectives on the areas we have discussed, you will begin to fill the synapses around you with trust, alignment, transparency, inspiration, and passion. You will begin to make Waves, perhaps little ones at first, but their effects will be immediate and long lasting. More than just a way of seeing, the Leadership Framework has all the qualities I have tried to put in this book: It is a system whose many parts are mutually reinforcing; it is a framework of ideas on which you can build structures of understanding; it is a constitution, informed and driven by a values-based approach to the world; and it is steeped deeply in the notion of self-governance, the thought that ultimate success will never come from without, but rather from within.

As the Leadership Framework circles back on itself, so too now does this book. We began our journey together with the story of Krazy George Henderson and the first Wave, and if you flip back now to that first story and reread George’s description of that fateful day, you will see that without consciously knowing it, George was as alive to the ideas of the world of HOW and the Leadership Framework as you now are. He knew that there was a way of pursuing his goals—a set of HOWs—that was more powerful, more effective, more self-sustaining, and more significant than other ways. I would reprint that story for you here, but it is probably easier for you to just flip back to the Prologue and read it again.

Besides, everything has to end somewhere.

THE LEADERSHIP FRAMEWORK