Do You Have the Will to Lead?

Why does being a leader feel so hard today?

Because reckoning with freedom is always hard -- and the powerful paradoxes of the new economy make it even harder. We're living in a peculiar time: It's marked by a soaring stock market, the creation of tremendous wealth, an explosion in innovation, and the acute alienation that occurs when the global economy hits the average individual. What I call the "new-economy pathology" is driven by impossible demands -- better quality, lower prices, faster innovation -- that generate an unprecedented form of stress. People feel pressure to meet ever-higher objectives in all realms of work, wealth, and lifestyle -- and to thrive on that pressure in the process.

This condition is exacerbated by the pornographic treatment of business in media and culture. The message is, You're living in the best country in the world at the best time in history; you have an amazing degree of freedom to do what you want, along with an unprecedented opportunity to build immense wealth and success -- and to do it more quickly than ever before. Of course, the average individual has as much of a chance of launching a skyrocketing IPO as he or she has of becoming a movie star.

What's even more disturbing is that the ascendancy of shareholder value as the dominant driving force in business has resulted in a terrible insensitivity to basic human values. That's the real "stuck point" for leaders: How do we cope with a brutal business reality and still preserve human values? How do we handle competition without becoming either the kind of fool who allows it to crush us or the kind of fool who forgets people?

Resolving that paradox requires something like an evolutionary transformation of who we are, how we behave, how we think, and what we value. We've reached such an incredible level of freedom that, for the first time in history, we have to manage our own mutation. It's up to us to decide what it means to be a successful human being. That's the philosophical task of the age.

In some sense, of course, that has been the task of every age. There's nothing in today's economic disruptions that equals the horror of World War II. According to some estimates, nearly 100,000 people were killed during every week of that war. In 1935, when I was a seven-year-old boy, I once stood in the Alexanderplatz, a square in Berlin, and watched Hitler parade by in his Mercedes, just a few feet away. I'll never forget the mothers with babies in their arms, the children holding up swastikas. That leaves a mark on you that can't be erased -- and it leaves you with questions that you have to confront: Who am I to have witnessed such acts? How am I to live meaningfully in a world such as this?

The new economy just happens to be the form that our existential challenge takes today. As always, the real obstacle is existence itself.

That's a heavy burden to place on leaders. They must not only guide organizations but also wrestle with basic philosophical questions.

There's a terrible defect at the core of how we think about people and organizations today. There is little or no tolerance for the kinds of character-building conversations that pave the way for meaningful change. The average person is stuck, lost, riveted by the objective domain. That's where our metrics are; that's where we look for solutions. It's the come-on of the consulting industry and the domain of all the books, magazines, and training programs out there. And that's why books and magazines that have numbers in their titles sell so well. We'll do anything to avoid facing the basic, underlying questions: How do we make truly difficult choices? How do we act when the risks seem overwhelming? How can we muster the guts to burn our bridges and to create a condition of no return?

There's nothing wrong with all of those technical solutions. They're excellent; they're creative; they're even necessary. But they shield us from the real issues: What kind of life do I want to lead? What is my destiny? How much evil am I willing to tolerate?

Reflection doesn't take anything away from decisiveness, from being a person of action. In fact, it generates the inner toughness that you need to be an effective person of action -- to be a leader. Think of leadership as the sum of two vectors: competence (your specialty, your skills, your know-how) and authenticity (your identity, your character, your attitude). When companies and people get stuck, they tend to apply more steam -- more competence -- to what got them into trouble in the first place: "If I try harder, I'll be successful," or "If we exert more control, we'll get the results we need."

The problem is, when you're stuck, you're not likely to make progress by using competence as your tool. Instead, progress requires commitment to two things. First, you need to dedicate yourself to understanding yourself better -- in the philosophical sense of understanding what it means to exist as a human being in the world. Second, you need to change your habits of thought: how you think, what you value, how you work, how you connect with people, how you learn, what you expect from life, and how you manage frustration. Changing those habits means changing your way of being intelligent. It means moving from a nonleadership mind to a leadership mind.