But doesn't that overlook differences in talent and effort among the people you're leading?

The A is easy to misunderstand. People say, "Oh, you mean it's just pretending that everybody is the same." It's not that at all. Nor is it about pretending that people can do things they can't do. The A helps you get at what is unique in people -- and at the unique challenges that they face. Grades tell me only how one person stacks up against other people. The letters that students write to me about what they will do to deserve their A give me much richer information about how the students stack up against their dreams. They write, "Suddenly I'm not shy anymore, and I enjoy playing," or "I'm no longer depressed by criticism." That's the kind of information that I need to help them perform at their best.

There's lots at stake in art -- and in business. Don't people have good reason to put pressure on themselves?

Too much of the business world uses a narrow definition of success. I used it myself for a long time. I could not focus on what I had in front of me. I could think only about what else I ought to be doing, and whether that was enough.

Then, one day, I had an epiphany. I realized that this is all a game we're playing. It's called "the Success Game" -- or, I suppose, "the Success-Failure Game," because failure follows success everywhere. The Success Game runs in an endless win-lose cycle -- which means that the people in it live with a sense of anxiety and fear.

So I invented a new game, called "I Am a Contribution," or "the Contribution Game." It's easy: You wake up in the morning, convince yourself for a few minutes that you are a contribution, and you go out and contribute. Then you go to bed and do it again the next day. What I've discovered since I started the Contribution Game is that people have an endless amount of energy for it. Sure, goals can be energizing -- when you win. But a vision is more powerful than a goal. A vision is enlivening, it's spirit-giving, it's the guiding force behind all great human endeavors. Vision is about shared energy, a sense of awe, a sense of possibility. That's what fuels the Contribution Game -- and that's what's behind all great performances.

How do you know when you've performed well as a leader?

One way to check whether I'm doing an adequate job is to look in my musicians' eyes. The eyes never lie. If the eyes are shining, then I know that my leadership is working. Human beings in the presence of possibility react physically as well as emotionally. If the eyes aren't shining, I ask myself, "What am I doing that's keeping my musicians' eyes from shining?" That question also works for the transformation of the dominating father -- "What kind of a parent am I being that my children's eyes aren't shining?" -- or the dominating teacher, or the dominating manager.

Orchestras play Beethoven's Fifth quite a lot. I know it, you know it, everyone knows it -- and the result is all the bored faces you see on both sides of the footlights in a concert hall. When I did that piece for the first time, I looked at the score and said, "Oh my God, this is not what Beethoven wrote at all." He wrote those notes, but he wrote allegro con brio, which means "very fast." The general attitude among conductors is that Beethoven couldn't possibly have meant that; it's much too fast. But Beethoven meant what he wrote. Beethoven intended the Fifth Symphony as an attack -- on complacency, on the status quo, on the way people see things. He was shaking his fist at humanity. I want to wake people up to that spirit. My job as a conductor is to remind people what the music was originally about. That doesn't mean a couple of times a year at a retreat. It means at every rehearsal, at every meeting.

Once, after a rehearsal at Carnegie Hall, a musician came up to me looking very angry. I thought I'd done something terrible. Before I could get too alarmed, she said, "Thank you for reminding me why I went into music. I'd forgotten for the last 25 years." Her anger was not against me. It was against the lost decades of her life. As leaders, we must never forget that one of our main jobs is to remind people why they went into music, or into art, or into business.

What's Fast

According to Rosamund Stone Zander, who works as a family therapist and who is Ben Zander's long-time intellectual partner, the job of a leader isn't to make decisions. It's to make "distinctions." "The discipline of making distinctions," she says, "is based on two questions: What assumptions am I making that I don't know I'm making, and what can I create that will give me something new? Making distinctions is about performing small, inventive acts -- acts that are totally different from normal strategizing or scheming. Leaders of the future will create categories that give people information on how to do their jobs and on how to live their lives." In an interview with Fast Company, Roz Zander explained some of the distinctions behind Ben Zander's statements about leadership.