LEADERSHIP ASSIGNMENT

More Praise for The Secret Language of Leadership

“Out of the morass of strategies leaders are given to transform organizations, Denning plucks a powerful one—storytelling— and shows how and why it works.”

—Dorothy Leonard, William J. Abernathy Professor of Business, Emerita, Harvard Business School, and author, Deep Smarts: How to Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom

“The Secret Language of Leadership shows why narrative intelligence is central to transformational leadership and how to harness its power.”

—Carol Pearson, director, James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership, University of Maryland, and coauthor, The Hero and the Outlaw

“The Secret Language of Leadership is not only the best analysis I have seen of how and why leaders succeed or fail, it’s highly readable, as well as downright practical. It should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in engaging a company with big ideas who under- stands that leaders live and die by the quality of what they say.”

—Richard Stone, story analytics master, i.d.e.a.s

“A primary role of leaders is to create and maintain meaning for their organizations. Denning clearly demonstrates that meaning- making comes from stories well told.”

—Thomas Davenport, President’s Distinguished Professor of I.T. and Management, Babson College, and author, The Attention Economy

“Steve Denning is one of the leading thinkers on the power of narra- tive in business settings. His latest book is a smart, useful guide that can help leaders of every kind add value to their organizations and add meaning to their own journeys.”

—Daniel H. Pink, author, A Whole New Mind

Denning.ffirs 8/17/07 8:52 AM Page i

Denning.ffirs 8/17/07 8:52 AM Page ii

The

SECRET LANGUAGE

of

LEADERSHIP •

HOW LEADERS INSPIRE ACTION THROUGH NARRATIVE

STEPHEN DENNING

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Denning.ffirs 8/17/07 8:52 AM Page iii

Copyright © 2007 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by Jossey-Bass A Wiley Imprint 989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741 www.josseybass.com

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Denning, Stephen. The secret language of leadership : how leaders inspire action

through narrative / Stephen Denning.—1st ed. p. cm.

“A Wiley Imprint.” Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7879-8789-3 (cloth)

1. Leadership. 2. Communication in organizations. 3. Storytelling. I. Title.

HD57.7.D49 2007 658.4'5—dc22

2007028784

Printed in the United States of America first edition HB Printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Denning.ffirs 8/17/07 8:52 AM Page iv

v

Preface: My Leadership Journey vii

Part One: What Is Transformational Leadership? 1

Introduction: Ten Mistakes Transformational Leaders Make 3

1 The Secret Language of Leadership 21

Part Two: The Language of Leadership: Key Enablers 51

2 Articulating a Clear, Inspiring Goal 53

3 The Leader’s Own Story: Committing to the Goal 65

4 Mastering the Audience’s Story 80

5 Cultivating Narrative Intelligence 92

6 Telling Truthful Stories 116

7 Leadership Presence: The Body Language of Leadership 132

Part Three: The Language of Leadership: Key Steps 147

8 Getting People’s Attention 149

9 Stimulating Desire 166

10 Reinforcing with Reasons 187

11 Continuing the Conversation 199

12 Epilogue 211

Appendix 1: Presentation to the Change Management Committee of the World Bank: April 1996 221

Appendix 2: Templates and Exercises 229

Appendix 3: What’s Your Narrative Intelligence? 235

Notes 245

Acknowledgments 265

About the Author 267

Index 269

[ ]CONTENTS

Denning.ftoc 8/17/07 8:53 AM Page v

Contents

vi

S T E P S

Deploying body language

Getting attention

Stimulating desire

Reinforcing with

reason

Continuing the

conversation

Telling authentically truthful stories

Using narrative intelligence

Understanding the audience’s story

The leader’s own story: committing to the change idea

Articulating a clear, inspiring change idea

E N A B L E R S

The Secret Language of Leadership.

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vii

My own leadership journey began abruptly late on Monday afternoon,

February 5, 1996. That day, I’d asked for a meeting with one of the man-

aging directors of the World Bank—one of the three people who reported

to the president of the bank and were charged with running its opera-

tions. As the director of the Africa Region, I needed to see him because

that curious thing known as “my career” had just then taken a turn for the

worse.

The World Bank is an international lending organization located in

Washington, D.C., and aimed at relieving global poverty. For several

decades, I had held a number of positions and functions, including pro-

gramming and budgeting, the West Africa riverblindness program,

population, health and nutrition programs, and the quality control of

operations. In the early 1990s, I had been director of the Southern

Africa Department, where I had overseen the work of several hundred

people working in ten countries. Now, as director of the Africa Region, I

was responsible for the operations of more than a thousand staff work-

ing in forty-three countries. After that much experience as an executive,

I believed that I understood management, although I was about to dis-

cover that I had much to learn about leadership.

Large organizations may look stable, but appearances are deceptive.

In the past year, the president had unexpectedly died. Last month, my

boss had decided to retire. Now someone else had just been named to

my post.

MY LEADERSHIP

JOURNEY

[ ]PREFACE

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viii

The office of managing director is just two grade levels above direc-

tor. To an outsider, those two grade levels might not seem like much, but

from the inside, the difference was an abyss.

Like most organizations, the World Bank has a hierarchical manage-

ment style. It’s the same “look-up-and-yell-down” style as in the private

sector.

At the beginning of the interview, I told the managing director that

I’d heard the announcement that someone else was to fill my position.

Did they have anything in mind for me?

“Not really,” he replied with a smile.

I wasn’t surprised. There had been inklings of trouble afoot. Just one

month before, I’d been asked in the street if it was true that I was being

pushed aside. My boss had confirmed that the scene was turbulent: his

own decision to retire exposed me to the vagaries of the clan warfare that

pervades large organizations.

The managing director quickly explained to me the diminishing

range of my career options. The organization had no plans for me. There

were no specific positions available. There weren’t even any lists of possi-

ble positions on which I might figure.

He spoke to me dismissively, as though I had had no prior reputa-

tion, no credit for anything I had done over several decades, and no

prospects. His world was a personnel chessboard and I was no longer a

player. I had become a nobody.

When I pressed him, he said finally, “Why don’t you look into

information?”

Information? In February 1996, information in the World Bank had

all the prestige of the garage or the cafeteria—a wasteland from which no

traveler had ever returned. The message was unmistakable: I was being

sent to Siberia.

Although the interview was bad news, the imperial style of delivery

was something else. The managing director gazed on me as though he’d

just swatted a fly.

At the time, I had no way of knowing that his own vast power was a

facade. He had been chosen precisely because he was a loyal staff officer. I

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Preface: My Leadership Journey

ix

had no idea then that he, like all the new bank president’s close associates,

would be cast aside within a few years, when, in the inevitable custom of

authoritarian contexts, the executioner becomes the victim.

The loss of my job hit me as a grave personal setback. Yet in retro-

spect, it’s clear that there was nothing personal in it at all. The president,

as it emerged in due course, planned to ditch everyone at my level,

including the managing directors. He seemed to believe that if he

appointed people himself, they would be more loyal and dedicated to his

objectives. When this turned out not to be the case, he canned them with

the same indifference that he dispatched the senior managers on hand at

the time of his arrival.

For those slated for elimination, the president’s technique was sim-

ple. He refrained from dismissing them outright. Instead he appointed

them to posts with lesser responsibilities or status, or left them with no

position at all. The idea was that they would resign to avoid the public

humiliation of being treated so demeaningly.

In most cases, his judgment proved correct: they left without a

protest, slipping quietly into the night. My case was different: I wasn’t

quite ready to leave.

I remained optimistic. Surely, I thought, there must have been a mis-

take. Surely my record counted for something. Surely, when lines of com-

munication opened, my career would be back on track.

I set about looking into information, since I was interested in the

topic, having been an early computer enthusiast. I saw that if I combined

my knowledge of World Bank operations with my interest in computers, I

could make a unique contribution.

The issues were immediately obvious—systems that weren’t compat-

ible with each other so that every question had multiple answers, a huge

and growing duplication of effort, utter unresponsiveness to operations

on the ground, antiquated, paper-bound relations with clients, and inex-

cusable delays in doing even the simplest thing.

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x

I began putting together a plan for what I would do if I were to be

offered a position in information. It became steadily more apparent that

cleaning up information was a necessary but largely menial task. It would

save the organization money but it wouldn’t fix the fundamental strategic

issue: a lending organization—even if it became more agile—could never

solve the problem of global poverty. Global poverty would only be solved

when people in poor countries themselves knew how to solve their own

problems. Money could facilitate the relief of poverty, but it could never

be the solution, unless combined with knowledge.

In 1996, the World Bank had a great deal of knowledge relevant to

solving the problems of global poverty. We had world-class experts in a

wide array of fields—agriculture, banking, finance, health, education, you

name it—but access to this knowledge was problematic. If you were

involved in a lending operation with the World Bank, you might discover

some of this expertise, but otherwise you were out of luck. I began to

think: suppose we were to generate quick and easy global access to our

knowledge for everyone, wherever they were? Then we could become a

pretty interesting organization, even an exciting organization.

Why not become a knowledge-sharing organization?

I thought this was not just a good idea: once you thought about it, it

was breathtakingly obvious. There was just one problem. In the World

Bank of early 1996, no one was willing to listen.

Eventually, in April 1996, after weeks of buttonholing anyone I could

find, I managed to get a few people’s attention. As a result, I was offered

ten minutes in front of the Change Management Committee of the World

Bank to explain my ideas on sharing knowledge. This committee com-

prised the managing directors as well as a few vice presidents and some

senior advisers to the president. It had been set up to “orchestrate change”

in the World Bank. It wasn’t obvious to anyone that this was what it was

up to, but clearly I needed its support. To be offered even a few minutes

before it was a major breakthrough.

So now I had ten minutes in which to persuade a group of skepti-

cal, change-resistant senior managers that we should embark on a new

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xi

strategy to make sharing knowledge a central preoccupation of the

organization.

My presentation, which is included in Appendix 1, was quite simple

in structure. It talked about the problems the organization was facing in

sharing its knowledge. It included a brief anecdote from Zambia, which

suggested what the future might look like. And it gave a couple of simple

road maps as to how we might get from here to there.

After I gave my presentation, I was taken aback by the overwhelmingly

enthusiastic reaction. One of the vice presidents, Jean-François Rischard,

raced up to me very excitedly. “Why don’t we do it?” he asked. “What’s the

next step? Why isn’t it being implemented? What’s the blockage?”

At the time, my first thought was that this was a very strange conver-

sation. Until ten minutes ago, vice presidents had hardly been willing

to give me the time of day. And now it was as if I wasn’t doing enough to

implement Rischard’s idea.

Then it dawned on me. How wonderful! The idea of sharing knowl-

edge with the world was no longer just my idea. Now it was also his idea.

And indeed it was Rischard who shortly afterward played a key role in

communicating the idea of knowledge sharing to the bank president and

sponsoring its implementation across the entire organization.

These were among the first inklings that there was something

remarkable in that simple ten-minute presentation. And yet if I had been

asked at the time why it was effective, I would have answered that the

underlying idea was a good one and people recognized a good idea for its

merits. At the time, I was only dimly aware that in most organizations

good ideas go nowhere, because they aren’t compellingly communicated.

I had no notion then that I had, almost by accident, stumbled on a partic-

ular form of leadership communication that could galvanize action, even

with difficult audiences. Even if I didn’t yet understand what I was doing

or why, I had begun to discover the secret language of leadership.

Later in the day, I learned that my presentation had been so well

received that I was to be invited to give the same presentation to the

entire senior management, except for the president.

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xii

The following week, when I made the presentation to this larger

group, the effect was just as electric. A number of the vice presidents were

highly energized. One of them told me: “This is the future!”

I was elated. I not only had a good idea: now I had support at high

levels of the organization including vice presidents and some of the pres-

ident’s top advisers. I concluded: my career is back on track!

I was, alas, mistaken.

Several days later, I was summoned to the office of one of the manag-

ing directors. In walking toward his office for the meeting that evening, I

was extremely upbeat. Given the reception of my presentation to the sen-

ior management group, I anticipated that the conversation would be

about how to implement knowledge sharing.

Instead, I was told that the managing directors had considered my

idea on making knowledge a key strategic thrust for the organization and

had rejected it. I was to stop bothering the senior management any fur-

ther, since it wasn’t going to happen. There would be no position or role

for me either in information or knowledge.

When I asked him what I was meant to do, he pointed to various

lower-level jobs that were being advertised.

Needless to say, I left his office feeling crushed. I was back in no-

man’s land. What made the turn of events disturbing was not just the

apparent collapse of my career, but even more so, the senselessness of it

all. I knew I had a good idea. I knew the idea had strong support among a

number of vice presidents. Yet somehow it was being scotched by an odd

combination of corporate confusion and institutional politics.

I spent a dark night of the soul.

The next morning, despite little sleep, I was feeling better, even opti-

mistic, and sensing that everything could be rectified. I went to tell the

vice presidents what had happened. I was delighted to find that they were

as shocked as I was: there was no way that the idea of knowledge sharing

could be stopped in this cavalier fashion.

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xiii

Immediately, things started to pick up: one vice president asked me

to work with him, to make knowledge sharing a reality in his vice presi-

dency. Then, other vice presidents joined in and invited me to help them

as well.

As the scale of my informal assignment steadily grew, it was becom-

ing apparent that the knowledge-sharing initiative was attaining organi-

zation-wide proportions. So the vice presidents decided to inform the

managing directors what they were up to. I helped them prepare a joint

memorandum, which they signed and sent to the managing directors.

The memorandum didn’t ask for permission or resources. It simply

informed the managing directors of their plans.

A few days later, I was summoned by one of the managing directors

and told to cease and desist. I should, he said, stop bothering people

with my idea. Knowledge management wasn’t going to happen.

I asked him why he was talking to me, since I wasn’t even men-

tioned in the memorandum of which he was complaining. Why didn’t

he speak to the vice presidents, since they were the ones who had signed

and sent it?

He replied that it was obvious that I was behind it and I should stop

causing problems. I should apply for other operational positions, perhaps

in a field office, preferably far away from headquarters.

During the ensuing summer, I attended a management program at

the International Institute for Management Development in Lausanne,

Switzerland. This gave me time to reflect on what had happened and

what I would do next.

Here I had time to ask myself, What was my life about? What were

my options?

Would it be possible to get my career back on track? Apparently,

when the new president arrived, I had been in the wrong position at the

wrong time with the wrong connections to the wrong managerial clan.

With hard work, and knuckling under the new regime, would it be possi-

ble to reestablish myself?

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xiv

I could see now that this wasn’t realistic. I had been suffering from

what is known in psychiatric circles as “the delusion of a reprieve.” The

condemned man, in the period after he is sentenced, suffers from the illu-

sion he might somehow be reprieved. I imagined that there had been

some mistake, that somehow the mistake would be corrected and all

would be well.

Now, clearly, there was no mistake. There was no failure of commu-

nication. On several occasions, the managing directors had had opportu-

nities to allow me to proceed, and they had actively blocked forward

progress. Now it was clear: there would be no reprieve.

What to do? One option was to leave the World Bank and pursue my

career elsewhere. That’s what other senior managers who were being

treated this way were doing. They resented being dealt with so demean-

ingly, and for the most part, they opted to depart. Why persevere in such

an environment?

The question I pondered was, What was my life about? Was it about

advancing up the managerial ladder in a large organization? I had to

admit to myself that this had always been important to me—pride, ego,

ambition were all part of the mix. Was my life really about a career?

Or was it about accomplishing something significant?

Based on my discussions in Lausanne, I knew I had a big, bold,

promising idea for an organization whose mission was unquestionably

noble—relieving global poverty.1

I knew the idea had generated enthusiasm among working-level staff

on the front lines of the World Bank, who could see that both they and

the organization would be more effective if it was implemented.

And a significant coalition of senior managers—perhaps one-third of

the total—was now in place. They also believed that the future of the

organization lay in sharing our knowledge to the world, to complement

the provision of financial resources.

It was also well known that the president of the World Bank was open

to big, bold ideas, was indeed searching for them. True, he had sur-

rounded himself with managing directors who were acting as centurion

guards to prevent any big, bold ideas ever reaching him. I calculated that

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Preface: My Leadership Journey

xv

if only I could get directly to the president, then the success of the idea

would be inevitable. Even without that, surely it would be possible to

launch a pilot scheme in one or more of the vice presidencies? Once that

was implemented, then the idea could spread to the whole organization.

Now I had to choose.

Spend time resurrecting my career, either here or elsewhere? Or go

flat out for change?

Coming back from Lausanne in September 1996, I made my deci-

sion. I opted to set aside any idea of career advancement and commit

myself wholeheartedly to making change happen, accepting whatever

indignities I might have to suffer. I would do whatever it took, even if the

effort were to take a decade.

As it happened, an opportunity appeared within just a few days. And

it was grander than anything I could have anticipated.2

Late on Wednesday afternoon, September 18, 1996, I was sitting in

Jean-François Rischard’s office. We’d been discussing how to move the

knowledge-sharing initiative forward. We both thought that if we only

could get to the president, given his stance and his personality, he was

bound to support the idea. The timing was ideal, since the World Bank’s

annual meeting was just days away: the president’s speech was a perfect

opportunity to announce a bold new initiative. The problem was how to

get to the president: he was surrounded by those pesky centurion guards.

After discussing the ways of getting the idea to the president, we

finally decided that it was too risky. At the time, the centurion guards

were on high alert, indeed expecting people to be submitting risky new

ideas to the president. If we tried to get to him then, without their bless-

ing, there would be terrible punishments and taxes.

So we decided the timing wasn’t right. Instead we would wait until

after the annual meeting. Then in the dark of night, when no one was

watching, we would meet quietly with the president and sell the idea to

him and we would be off to the races.

Just then, at the very moment we were concluding our conversation

and deciding to lie low for the moment, Rischard got a phone call.

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xvi

It was the president.

Apparently he was in a taxicab in a traffic jam in New York, reading a

draft of the speech that he was to give in a matter of days to the annual

meeting of the World Bank. He was calling on his cell phone to say that

the draft speech was pablum, pure pablum—not a single new idea in it.

Surely, he said, there was at least one good idea in the whole goddamn

organization?

Rischard said that, as a matter of fact, there was, and began sketching

the idea of knowledge management: how the Bank should pool its

expertise on everything from civil service reform to electricity generation

in central databases, massively expanding the reach of its ideas in the

global struggle against poverty. He spoke for five minutes, then five more

minutes, and presently he hit the fifteen-minute mark. The president was

saying it was intriguing, actually quite good, and maybe he would think

about it.3

That night, the president went to dinner and tried out the idea on his

dinner guests. They said it was excellent.

The next day when he came in to the office, Rischard and I were

asked to draft a speech that the president would give to the board of

directors. Just over a week after that, on the morning of October 1, 1996,

the president was giving the speech to the annual meeting of the gover-

nors of the World Bank, a huge public occasion—more than 170 finance

ministers and all their entourages—explaining the new strategy of

becoming a knowledge-sharing organization. We were going to become

“the knowledge bank.”

It’s an understatement to say I was elated. In just a few days, the idea

of knowledge sharing had gone from something undiscussable to some-

thing that was a central organizational strategy for the future. Visions of

success and accomplishment danced before my eyes. The possibility of

implementing the new strategy was now within my grasp.

What I didn’t realize was that winning the support of the president

wasn’t the end of the war of innovation. It was simply the beginning.

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xvii

It was not just that we were starting the long, hard slog of turning the

vision of a knowledge organization into a reality.

The biggest shock was my discovery that the opposition from the

managing directors didn’t disappear with the president’s endorsement.

On the contrary, it intensified.

Obviously the support of the president was a hugely positive ele-

ment. Jim Wolfensohn was mercurial, quick, able to see the promise in a

bold new idea and decisive about endorsing it. His instant acceptance of

knowledge sharing, his announcement of “the knowledge bank” at the

annual meeting in 1996, his subsequent sponsorship of a formal strategy

paper embracing external knowledge sharing in 1997, his adoption in

1999 of a formal mission statement for the World Bank that assigned

knowledge sharing the same level of importance as providing financial

resources—these were all crucial steps in launching and implementing

knowledge management at the World Bank. Without them, we could

never have achieved what was achieved.

The managing directors were a very different story. Up to that point,

they’d permitted me to wander the corridors and buttonhole anyone who

would listen to the idea of becoming a knowledge-sharing organization,

because the possibility of that fantastic dream ever becoming a reality was

nonexistent. They believed that I would tire of my quixotic mission and

either find something more conventional to do or leave. They thought that

their adversary was a person, albeit a determined one. They hadn’t grasped

that they were fighting an idea.

Now, with the president having unexpectedly endorsed the idea in the

most public, formal forum available to him, it was obvious that they had

underestimated the threat. Even if they couldn’t see that the idea made sense

or believe that it would ever become a reality, they now had to deal with the

fact that the president had made a major commitment in the most public

way to implement it. Now they couldn’t oppose the idea outright, but as wily

bureaucrats, they could and did find subtle ways to undermine or sideline it.4

Four years later, by 2000, despite the well-intended efforts of the

managing directors to preserve the World Bank as a lending organization,

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xviii

substantial progress had been made. Knowledge sharing was in the mis-

sion statement of the organization, on a par with the provision of finan-

cial resources. It was in the organizational chart. It was in the personnel

system. It was in the budget, albeit still underfunded in terms of real

resources. And over a hundred knowledge communities were in place,

most of them energetically sharing their knowledge. There were measure-

ments of the effectiveness of the communities of practice. And there was

external recognition: we were benchmarked several times as a world

leader in knowledge management and as one of the world’s most admired

knowledge enterprises.5

Obviously, much remained to be done. Budgets needed to be sorted

out. The less effective knowledge communities and vice presidencies

needed to be dealt with. The blemishes in technology had to be rectified.

But these challenges were largely those of management. It was a matter of

strengthening, refining, and reinforcing what was already mainly in place.

By contrast, the work of leadership in knowledge management at the

World Bank was by then largely complete. The DNA of the organization

had been changed. Thereafter the specifics of the knowledge-sharing pro-

gram might wax or wane, but the notion of external knowledge sharing

had been ingrained in the World Bank’s genetic code. Once people had

seen the vision and realized that it could be implemented, it became an

ideal the organization had no choice but to aspire to.6

Looking back on the experience, I can see that the World Bank in the

period from 1996 to 2000 was an extraordinarily difficult environment,

though probably not too different from what many change agents face in

other large organizations today when they pursue transformational

change.

In fact, the difficult environment at the World Bank was ideal for

observing what it means to be a leader: the organization became a giant

leadership laboratory.

One tremendous source of strength was the team of people that I had

to help implement the vision. Roberto Chavez, Carole Evangelista, Adnan

Hassan, Seth Kahan, Peter Midgley, and Lesley Shneier constituted one of

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xix

the very few high-performance teams with which I have had the good

fortune to be associated in my career. I benefited from their unflagging

energy and support and learned much from them. Seth Kahan, for

instance, taught me much of what I know about storytelling. Lesley

Shneier showed everyone how to launch knowledge fairs. Adnan Hassan

provided key strategic insights on the evolving role of knowledge.

I also benefited from a network of practitioners in the emerging field

of knowledge management associated with the American Productivity

and Quality Center in Houston and with Larry Prusak’s Institute for

Knowledge Management at IBM. These networks provided invaluable

encouragement and guidance about how to turn the idea of knowledge

management into a reality at times when the scene inside the World Bank

looked extremely bleak.

And the challenges inside the organization were massive. The fact is,

making knowledge management happen in a large, complex organization

requires an extraordinary amount of collaboration from a huge number

of people. In the absence of any hierarchical power to compel compli-

ance, with no ability to direct or control or hire or fire or impose incen-

tives or disincentives, and with only sporadic support from the president

and continuing hostility from key senior managers, we were dependent

on our ability to inspire people to buy into the idea and act collabora-

tively. We had no alternative but to invite people to espouse common

objectives and modalities.

As a result, throughout the organization, people found themselves in

a situation facing choices. Every day offered new opportunities for people

to make decisions that determined whether they would contribute to the

common goal of sharing knowledge or not. There were of course limits

and constraints as to what they could do. But in the final analysis, what

they did was the result of their own decisions as much as the context.

Different people acted differently.

For some, the lack of managerial clarity was a reason to hold back,

doing nothing until the signals were less ambiguous. They would commit

to sharing their knowledge only when they had clear directives, adequate

resources, and clear unified support from those in charge.

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xx

For some, the scene was an invitation to set aside institutional goals and

pursue individual interests. Some set out to build systems and approaches

that they thought might nurture their own careers or promote their units

but were barely compatible with the overall institutional goal.

And yet there were also many people who were inspired to overcome

the mixed signals and the dysfunctional management scene. They saw the

opportunity to forge ahead with the common objective of building

robust institutional arrangements for sharing knowledge aimed at reliev-

ing global poverty. These people opted to unite toward implementing a

goal that they saw as right. They ignored the difficulties and persisted in

contributing to the collectivity.

Of all the staff involved in knowledge sharing at the World Bank,

many rose to the occasion. They chose the difficult road of committing

themselves to the common goal of making knowledge sharing a reality.

Yet as these leaders emerged, few of them were thinking of them-

selves as being in any way heroic, or even exercising leadership. They saw

themselves as trying to resolve the crises of the day as best they could,

doing what was necessary to get the job done. These people accepted the

ambiguity and the chaos and the turmoil in which they found themselves

and created their own meaning.

These people had a fundamentally different attitude from those who

did not contribute or who resisted. They focused less on what the organiza-

tion would do for them and more on what they could contribute to the

mission. Their response consisted not merely in talk but in right action and

right conduct. They took responsibility to find the answer to problems con-

fronting them and set out to fulfill the tasks it set for them as individuals.

Rather than wait for leadership from above, they themselves became

leaders. Lacking hierarchical authority, they created their own moral

authority. Having been inspired to pursue a common goal of sharing

knowledge with the world, they set out to inspire others to work together

toward that goal.

The period from 1996 to 2000 in the World Bank was thus quite

remarkable for the change that took place. In the space of four years, a

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xxi

strategic shift had been catalyzed in one of the world’s most change-

resistant organizations so that it had become a leader in a new field.

How could such a transformation have taken place? What were the ele-

ments of leadership that enabled such a change to take place? Why were so

many people inspired to become champions when the obstacles to success

were so huge? Could what was learned here be applied to leadership chal-

lenges that others might be facing both inside organizations and beyond?

By December 2000, I believed that I had some preliminary answers to

these questions. So I left the World Bank as a full-time employee and

began sharing my ideas with a wider audience. I went on the road and

started passing on what I had learned about leadership with organiza-

tions all around the world.

I had come to see for instance that storytelling had played an extraor-

dinary—and unexpected—role in the transformation at the World Bank.

A certain kind of story had demonstrated an unexpected power to com-

municate a complex idea and spark action even in difficult, skeptical

audiences. I called this kind of story a “springboard story” and wrote

about it in The Springboard (2000).

Outside the World Bank, I found that people were keen to hear about

my ideas and experiences, as many organizations were grappling with

resistance to transformational change and struggling with how to inspire

enthusiastic buy-in.

I was delighted to find that what I had learned about the specifics of

leadership proved useful in countries as diverse as the United States, the

United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Austria,

Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, and Venezuela. It worked in

public sector and private sector organizations. It was effective in large

organizations as well as small.

After several years, my work led to the articulation of other narrative

patterns related to different challenges of leadership, including commu-

nicating who you are, enhancing the brand, transmitting values, sparking

collaboration, sharing knowledge, taming the grapevine, and leading

people into the future. I shared these findings in my books Squirrel Inc

(2004) and The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling (2005).

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xxii

In those books, I explored the use of narrative tools, how they are

deployed, how they differ from each other, and their strengths and limita-

tions for the purposes of leadership. I focused principally on narrative, in

part because it demonstrated remarkable power to connect with both the

head and the heart and inspire leadership in others, and in part because

storytelling was so underused in organizations.

At the same time, I saw that narrative wasn’t the whole story. The

secrets of leadership lay not only in the stories that were being told but

also in the way the leadership goals themselves were formulated. Leaders

could also deploy other tools like frames, questions, offers, challenges,

metaphors, reasons, and so on. How did all these tools relate to each

other? Which ones were best for which purpose? And how were all these

communication tools combined into a seamless leadership message? How

could leaders get people’s attention? How could they combine storytelling

with logic and reason? In effect, what was the full array of communica-

tion tools that constituted the language of leadership and how should

they be used to greatest effect? More important: What was the role of

leadership in the world?

These are the questions that this book addresses. It’s about the nitty-

gritty of transformational leadership. It describes what works and what

doesn’t work when it comes to changing the world and making it a better

place. It’s a book about the specifics of getting things done and inspiring

other people to embrace new ideas and change.

It looks at leadership in finer granularity than is typical. It speaks of

what leaders need to do and say when they want people not only to act

differently but to want to act differently. The changes that leaders seek to

effect in the world may be great or small. They may relate to changing an

organization, or its brand, or a school, or a town, or a family, or a com-

munity, or a country, or even the planet. Whatever the scale or location of

the change, the principles of leadership communication remain the same.

This book also shows that transformational leadership will require

going down paths that are difficult, risky, and fraught with personal peril.

It notes that making the world a better place is often at odds with per-

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Preface: My Leadership Journey

xxiii

sonal advancement. The book is intended not for those who seek domi-

nance or the ease of a wealthy, trouble-free existence but rather for those

who aspire to a meaningful life. Rather than generating power over oth-

ers, it shows how to create power in and with others.

This book shows what’s involved in inspiring people to want to do

something different and become leaders who themselves generate endur-

ing enthusiasm. It translates general theories of transformational leader-

ship into specific, identifiable, measurable, trainable behaviors that can

be used to galvanize action. It’s about the discipline of leadership com-

munication: the secret language of leadership.

Washington, D.C. Stephen Denning

July 2007

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Denning.fpref 8/17/07 8:52 AM Page xxiv

[ P A R T 1 ] WHAT IS

TRANSFORMATIONAL

LEADERSHIP?

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Denning.p01 8/17/07 8:53 AM Page 2

3

TEN MISTAKES

TRANSFORMATIONAL

LEADERS MAKE

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the

stormy present. . . . As our case is new, so we must think

anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves.

—Abraham Lincoln1

In the U.S. presidential campaign of 2000, Al Gore’s robotic perform-

ances were the fodder of late-night comedy. The charisma-challenged

candidate put everyone to sleep. His petulant sighs and stiffly aggressive

manner made him look like the smart kid we all hated in eighth grade.

No one wanted to listen to what he had to say. Despite a strong case on

the merits, he lost the election.

Fast-forward to 2006, and what do we see? Millions of people have

paid more than US$40 million to watch a movie of Al Gore’s PowerPoint

presentation.2 And Gore’s live talks enjoy the response of a rock star. Even

deep in Republican territory like Boise, Iowa, Gore can pack a 10,000-seat

arena—and tickets for his talk sell out faster than for Elton John.3

Why did Al Gore fail so badly in 2000, when in 2006 he was success-

ful in communicating a difficult change message? It’s sometimes said that

the 2000 election was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, or by the hang-

ing chads of the voting slips in Florida, or even by the presence of the

third-party candidate, Ralph Nader. But long before any of these factors

[ ]INTRODUCTION

”“

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The Secret Language of Leadership

4

touched the race, Gore had put himself in a position to lose the election

by failing to understand the language of leadership. He had committed

ten common leadership mistakes that aspiring leaders make.

Mistake #1: Unclear, Uninspiring Goal

On October 3, 2000, around 90 million viewers tuned in to see the first

televised debate between Vice President Al Gore and George W. Bush. It

was the most-watched single event of the U.S. presidential election cam-

paign. It was the first opportunity for many Americans to assess the con-

tenders for more than the flash of a television commercial or a glimpse

on the evening news. Just thirty-five days before the U.S. presidential elec-

tion, the race was still breathtakingly close: polls showed the two candi-

dates to be in a statistical dead heat. The debate was a pivotal moment

since most of the crucial swing voters would be viewing.

As the incumbent vice president, Gore had a great deal going for him.

The country was at peace and enjoying unprecedented economic growth

and prosperity. The national debt was being reduced. Welfare had been

reformed. Crime rates were declining. Home ownership and job creation

were at all-time highs. Major foreign policy successes had been accom-

plished with agreements in the Middle East, Ireland and the Balkans.

Gore himself was one of the few vice presidents in history to have made a

substantive contribution to an administration. He had played a role in

the environment, technology, budget discipline, administrative reform,

urban and foreign policy. And unlike most U.S. vice presidents, Gore had

the strong, explicit backing of the then president, Bill Clinton, whose

policies, despite a sex scandal, remained remarkably popular.

But for better or worse, Gore did not run as an incumbent. “This

election,” he told the Democratic convention, “is not an award for past

performance. I’m not asking you to vote for me on the basis of the econ-

omy we have.” Instead, the economic record, good as it was, was “not

good enough.” Crime had fallen, but “there’s still too much danger and

there’s still too much fear.” In the presidential debate, he hardly men-

tioned his record and did not associate himself with the president with

whom he had worked for almost eight years.

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Introduction

5

Gore ran for election as a transformational leader. He was not run-

ning as vice president but as himself. His campaign was based not on

what he had done in the past but rather on what he would do in the future

as president. Instead of dwelling on the question, by analogy with Ronald

Reagan in 1980, “Are you better off today than eight years ago?” he asked

“Will we be better off four years from this day?” For most voters, the

answer to the first question would have been a resoundingly positive

“Yes!” The answer to the second question was much less certain. While

Bush generally embraced the successful economic policies that Clinton

had pursued for the past eight years, paradoxically Gore ran as someone

who wanted to change policy. He presented himself as someone who

wanted to fight.

But fight for what? By most accounts, the electorate hadn’t been pay-

ing very much attention to the campaign. On the night of October 3, 2000,

some 90 million people tuned in to find out what it was all about. What

they learned from Gore was that he was going to fight for a large number

of government programs. In the first ninety seconds of the debate, Gore

managed to mention eleven such programs. These included balancing the

budget, paying down the national debt, putting Medicare and Social Secu-

rity in a lockbox, cutting taxes for middle-class families, ensuring safe

schools, giving parents the tools to protect their children against cultural

pollution, and investing in education, health care, the environment, and

retirement security. That was just the beginning. As the debate wore on, he

mentioned even more programs that he was fighting for.

Clinton had been warned by his advisers in 1992, “If you say three

things, you’ve said nothing.”4 Clinton took the advice and concentrated

on a single theme, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Here in 2000, at the outset

of the debate, Gore was saying, not just three things, but eleven things in

ninety seconds, and then some.

Absorbing the implications of eleven programs in ninety seconds

would be tough for any audience, even an expert one paying rapt atten-

tion. For an electorate that wasn’t paying much attention to the cam-

paign, it was overload. Instantly, “Memory full!” signs were flashing in

people’s minds.

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The Secret Language of Leadership

6

But was there an overall theme to what Gore was saying? The closest

Gore came in the debate to answering that question was at the end of the

debate when he said: “I would like to have your support for me because I

want to fight for you as president and fight for all the people.” In his two-

minute closing statement, he used the words fight or fought seven times.

It was as though the goal itself was to fight. For an electorate that was

tired of the partisanship of the Clinton presidency, the prospect of

another four years of fighting was neither clear nor inspiring.

Mistake #2: Lack of Total Commitment for Change

“I’m not,” said Gore toward the end of the first presidential debate, “a

very exciting politician.” When Gore said those words, it wasn’t news: he

was confirming what his critics had often said about him. But he was

revealing something fatal in a transformational leader. He was conceding

that even he wasn’t fully convinced in himself as a leader. If Gore wasn’t

excited about his own candidacy and his change agenda, how could he

expect the electorate to be?

The critics were correct that Gore’s campaign hadn’t been the most

exciting. His public performances were stiff and uninspired. But to be a

transformational leader, Gore needed to overcome this criticism. And the

first step was to believe in himself and to have an unshakable faith that

the changes he was pursuing were exciting in themselves and capable of

inspiring excitement in others.

To those who knew Al Gore in private, his stiff public persona was a

mystery. They knew him as a skilled storyteller, a practical joker with a

quick, acerbic wit and a facility for coming up with the deadpan retort

that eased the daily tension of the workplace. Yet he was reluctant to

reveal his humor on the public stage, because of its sharp, cutting edge.5

Moreover, he was guarded because his advisers had told him not to

discuss the very things he was passionate about. As a result, Gore tem-

pered his views on issues. “He didn’t talk about tobacco because he was

worried about being called a tobacco farmer,” said one of his campaign

aides. “And he wouldn’t talk too much about the environment because he

was afraid his book would be used against him.”6 He didn’t talk about his

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Introduction

7

long-term partner and president, Bill Clinton, because his advisers felt

voters would disapprove of Clinton’s personal conduct.

In fact, Gore was still going through a personal struggle with his advis-

ers as to what sort of a candidate and person he was. He had made whole-

sale changes to his team of advisers in the preceding year. The struggle was

still visible in what he said at the debate itself. At the start of the debate, he

came out as a rational bureaucrat, with programmatic solutions for every

problem. By the end of the debate, he was presenting himself as the pas-

sionate advocate for change, determined to fight on behalf of the little guy.

Who was the real Al Gore? Becoming comfortable with who he was and

what he stood for was something that Al Gore had to do for himself. It was

an internal decision to adopt a stance, an orientation toward the world.

With all the different personae warring within him, Gore opted to

converse from behind a mask, hiding what was most precious to him

while attempting to project a persona that he hoped might appeal to the

electorate.

If Gore had been committed, mind, body, and soul, to a clearly artic-

ulated goal, come what may, whatever it took, then he would have seen

the goal—and his own role—as exciting. But this was a bridge that Al

Gore had not yet crossed. Because Gore was still vacillating in his own

mind as to which persona to adopt, he himself wasn’t excited—and so he

was unable to inspire widespread excitement in the electorate.

Mistake #3: Incongruent Body Language

It was extraordinary that at the time of the first presidential debate in

October 2000 Gore was still largely unknown to much of the electorate.

His father had put the family name in the national political domain more

than sixty years earlier. His own record of public service as congressman

and senator from Tennessee and vice president of the United States cov-

ered twenty-four years. He was the coauthor of a best-selling book. He had

given three prime-time addresses at successive Democratic conventions.

He had participated in each of the past four presidential campaigns,

including his run for the Democratic nomination in 1988. And yet his

political persona was still a mystery beyond a few persistent stereotypes.7

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The Secret Language of Leadership

8

The first presidential debate was a chance for Gore to reveal to the

electorate in an unscripted environment what sort of a person he was. In

a sense, the election was ultimately about Al Gore. The election was his to

lose. In a time of peace and great economic prosperity, why should the

electorate make a change? All he had to was connect. But up till this

point, he hadn’t connected. He was still an unknown quantity.

On the substance of what was said during the debate that night, Gore

was widely regarded as the winner. In the instant polls, CBS showed

Gore winning 56 percent to 42 percent; ABC, 42–39; CNN, 48–41; and

NBC, 46–36.8 His arguments were clearer. He was more articulate than

Bush, who stumbled for words and didn’t seem as familiar with the

issues. But this wasn’t a high school debate: it wasn’t enough to win on

substance. The question on swing voters’ minds was: What sort of a per-

son is Gore?

On this issue, in terms of what Gore himself said that night, the view-

ers didn’t get much help. Gore had a positive story tell, but he never got

round to telling it. As a result, the viewers had to make their own judg-

ment from Gore’s body language as to what sort of a person he was. The

picture wasn’t pretty.

Gore spoke hurriedly, sounding brash and combative, rather than

like the seasoned statesman he actually was. Several times, he jumped into

the discussion, betraying his eagerness to argue. He knowingly violated

the rules of the debate. He said, “I know we’re not supposed to ask each

other questions” and went ahead and asked Bush a question anyway.

He came across as aggressive and hard-hitting. He hammered his

points relentlessly, mentioning “the wealthiest 1 percent” ten times and

the “lockbox” into which he planned to place Social Security and

Medicare a total of five times during the debate. Overall, his behavior

suggested an element of inner insecurity.

Even more damaging was Gore’s body language while Bush was

speaking. He shook his head, pursed his lips, frowned, grimaced painfully,

rolled his eyes, and sighed loudly at Bush’s answers, as if to say, “Oh really

now!” Gore looked supercilious, like a class showoff smirkily displaying

his superiority.9

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Introduction

9

The result was that Gore came across as a rather unlikable fellow—

knowledgeable and articulate, yes, but also relentless, overbearing, offi-

cious, petulant, hectoring, interrupting, bullying, not someone you would

want as a next-door neighbor. To swing voters, the thought of having to

watch and listen to another four years of this was not an alluring future.

While Gore’s words said that he was ready to be president, his body

language said something else. It was the body language that the audience

listened to. So although immediate polls showed that Gore “won” the

debate on substance, in the aftermath of the debate Bush moved forward

in the polls and went on to win the election.

Mistake #4: Misreading the Audience

In October 2000, America was at the height of the dot-com boom. Eco-

nomic growth, the stock market, employment, incomes, homeownership

were all flourishing. As a result, most voters viewed themselves and the

country as prosperous and were satisfied with the policies of the Clinton-

Gore administration, even if there was significant disapproval of the

Clinton’s personal conduct.

Yet Gore spoke as though most people were suffering because of high

drug prices, overcrowded classrooms, fear of crime, and the machinations of

big business. He was offering to fight for them to deal with these problems.

But most people didn’t see them as major problems. They were satisfied

with economic progress and the way the country was being run: in Octo-

ber 2000 few Americans were crying out for anyone to fight for them.10

Gore’s proposal to fight for them was at odds with the overall mood

of the country, particularly the swing voters who would decide the out-

come of the election. Gore was offering to solve problems that weren’t at

the top of their agenda. Moreover, he was offering to solve them by resort

to government programs, which were not widely perceived as either effi-

cient or effective.

For Gore to succeed as a transformational leader, he needed either to

address issues that the electorate already recognized as serious problems

or to convince voters that their problems were more serious than they

realized. Since Gore did neither, he lost.

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The Secret Language of Leadership

10

Mistake #5: Lack of Narrative Intelligence

For much of the debate, Al Gore spoke in abstractions about programs

and policies, in large numbers and with considerable precision. He gave

mind-numbing detail. He was asked complex questions and he gave long,

complex answers. In substance, they were good answers. He demon-

strated intellectual grasp of the issues. In the instant polls that were taken,

Gore won.

Yet Gore knew that electoral campaigns were won or lost on the basis

of stories. He knew that stories could connect with the audience. So he

came prepared with stories. And he wove them into his answers. But they

didn’t work. Why?

Midway through the debate, Gore told the tale of a fifteen-year-old

Florida girl in an overcrowded classroom.

I would like to tell you a quick story. I got a letter today as I left Sara- sota, Florida. I’m here with a group of thirteen people from around the country who helped me prepare. We had a great time. Two days ago we ate lunch at a restaurant. The guy that served us lunch gave me a letter today. His name is Randy Ellis. He has a fifteen-year-old daughter named Caley, who is in Sarasota High School. Her science class was supposed to be for twenty-four students. She’s the thirty-sixth student in that classroom. They sent me a picture of her in the classroom. They can’t squeeze another desk in for her, so she has to stand during class. I want the federal government, consistent with local control and new accountability, to make improvement of our schools the number one priority so Caley will have a desk and can sit down in a classroom where she can learn.

There were several problems with the story told in this way. First,

Gore began by saying it was just “a story,” as if to imply—prophetically, as

it turned out—that it wasn’t entirely true.

Second, the story had a lot of confusing detail at the start, including

the lunch in the restaurant in Sarasota, the group that was there in Boston

having a great time while helping him to prepare, and then about the guy

who served him lunch in Sarasota and afterward gave him a letter. What

did these details have to do with the story of Caley Ellis? Gore wasted pre-

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Introduction

11

cious seconds on irrelevant, confusing detail, not realizing that to use

narrative effectively in this setting, it was critical to be succinct.

Finally, the heroine of the story, Caley Ellis, the Florida schoolgirl

without a desk, was not typical of the education problems of the country,

and hence the story wasn’t one that most of the audience knew of or

would connect with.

A second story, which Gore included in his closing remarks had even

worse unintended consequences. It was a story about a woman called

Winifred Skinner. The woman had been featured in the network news a

few days earlier. Gore tried to weave in her story halfway through the

debate, but managed to mention only her name, much to the mystifica-

tion of the viewers. So in his closing remarks Gore opted to end by telling

her story. The results were unfortunate.

What Gore Actually Said

There is a woman named Winifred Skinner here tonight from Iowa. I mentioned her earlier. She’s seventy-nine years old. She has Social Security. I’m not going to cut her benefits or support any proposal that would. She gets a small pension, but in order to pay for her prescription drug benefits, she has to go out seven days a week several hours a day picking up cans. She came all the way from Iowa in a Winnebago with her poodle in order attend here tonight. I want to tell her, I’ll fight for a prescription drug benefit for all seniors and fight for the people of this country for a prosperity that benefits all.

How Gore’s Speech Was Parodied

My opponent wants to cut taxes for the richest 1 percent of Americans. I, on the other hand, want to put the richest 1 percent in an ironclad lockbox so they can’t hurt old people like Roberta Frampinhamper, who is here tonight. Mrs. Frampinhamper has been selling her internal organs, one by one, to pay for gas so that she can travel to these debates and personify problems for me. Also, her poodle has arthritis.11

Gore’s decision to close with this story caused multiple problems. A

story at the end of a communication is weighed by the audience in terms of

the evidentiary value it adds. Even a credible story about a single individual

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The Secret Language of Leadership

12

would in principle have added little. In this case, the suggestion that seventy-

nine-year-old Winifred Skinner drove 1,300 miles from Des Moines to

Boston to listen to the debate, suggested that this wasn’t an authentic story,

but rather a self-serving piece of public relations generated by the Gore

campaign machinery. The strangely discordant details—being seventy-

nine years old, driving 1,300 miles in a Winnebago, owning a poodle, and

yet spending several hours a day having to pick up cans to earn money to

pay for her medication—rendered the story so implausible that it became

an easy target for opponents.

As a result, Gore’s story was parodied on late-night comedy to the

hilarity of the nation, thus cementing in place the perception of what was

wrong with Gore’s candidacy—someone who was trying to pull on the

audience’s heart strings with irrelevant, implausible stories.

Mistake #6: Not Telling the Truth

Throughout his career, Gore had acquired a reputation as someone with a

tendency to exaggerate, to stretch the truth to suit the political moment

and to embellish his own role in what had been accomplished. His own

staff had drawn Gore’s attention to his tendency to go out on a limb in

the 1988 presidential campaign as a serious issue. The media—and his

opponents—made fun of his supposed claims to have invented the Inter-

net, to have discovered the toxic waste danger at Love Canal in New York,

and to have been the model for the novel Love Story.12 In reality, Gore was

a serious public servant with a commitment to doing the right thing. But

loose lips sink ships and Gore’s verbal slips continued to dog him through

his political career. His campaign had been ineffective at putting the cred-

ibility issue to rest. Most newspapers did stories at some point during the

campaign as to whether Gore was a big liar or a little fibber.13

The issue had died down somewhat after the Democratic Conven-

tion in August 2000. But in the debate, it was obviously crucial for Gore

to be scrupulously honest and to be ready to show that he was a straight

shooter.

As is customary in political debates, both candidates tossed out num-

bers that night about different programs. Each disputed the other’s statis-

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13

tics. As usual, the audience was in no position to figure out whose num-

bers were right. Bush, however, linked the dispute on numbers with the

more general and memorable question of Gore’s character and his appar-

ently casual attitude toward veracity. Thus when Gore challenged some of

his numbers, Bush replied:

Look, this is a man who has great numbers. He talks about numbers. I’m beginning to think not only did he invent the Internet, but he invented the calculator. It’s fuzzy math. It’s scaring—he’s trying to scare people in the voting booth.

If it had remained a question about whose statistics were more accu-

rate, Bush’s comment might have been no more than a cute, forgettable

one-liner. On the spot, Gore had no response to the charge, even though

he should have known it was coming. And it began to have real resonance

when it transpired after the debate that three of the stories Gore had told

contained some exaggerations.

It turned out that Caley Ellis’s school did not make her stand in sci-

ence class every day. That may have been true on that particular day when

$100,000 worth of new science equipment was stacked up and waiting for

installation. The school had a practically brand new campus. It was said

to be one of the top schools in the nation. All students were in regular

classes with nine hundred computers and six hundred Internet sites.14

Gore also overstated his role in the handling of some fires in Texas.

The issue arose because the moderator, Jim Lehrer, had asked each candi-

date to point to a decision or action “that illustrates your ability to handle

the unexpected, the crisis under fire.” Bush responded by talking about

the emergency responses to the disastrous fires that ravaged Texas in 1996

and complimented James Lee Witt of FEMA for the good work done in a

crisis. Gore immediately attempted to claim some of the credit, saying: “I

want to compliment the governor on his response to those fires and

floods in Texas. I accompanied James Lee Witt down to Texas when those

fires broke out. And FEMA has been a major flagship project of our rein-

venting government efforts. And I agree it works extremely well now.” It

turned out, however, that Gore had not accompanied Witt to Texas in

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The Secret Language of Leadership

14

1996. Rather Gore had visited Texas with Witt in 1998 during a spate of

smaller fires.

The story of Winifred Skinner was not shown to be factually incor-

rect, but the discordant details—a seventy-nine-year-old woman spend-

ing hours each day collecting cans, driving 1,300 miles in her Winnebago

to hear the debate, and owning a poodle—made the story sound so

implausible that it too added to the impression of untrustworthiness.

While the disputes over statistics were quickly forgotten as part of the

normal give-and-take of political jibber-jabber, the actual or apparent

exaggerations in Gore’s stories were memorable and stuck in people’s

minds. They led to an indelible impression that Gore was a candidate

who didn’t tell the truth.

The reality was that Gore was a man of deep principle and distin-

guished public service, and was profoundly concerned about doing what

was right. But that night, his language communicated something else.

And afterward, his campaign was somehow unable to convey that his

misstatements were trivial in the overall scheme of things, and that mole-

hills were being turned into mountains. Gore even made the mistake of

defending the Caley Ellis story as essentially accurate.15

In the final days of the campaign, Gore finally did take action to

address the issue. He went on a special edition of Saturday Night Live and

make fun of his tendency to moralize, saying: “I was one of the very first to

be offended by the material on Saturday Night Live.” And on David Letter-

man’s late-night show, Gore parodied his own tendency to exaggerate, say-

ing “Remember America, I gave you the Internet and I can take it away.” As

in all effective self-parody, Gore was now implying, “If I can make fun of

these flaws, you shouldn’t be worried about them either.” But it was too lit-

tle, too late. By then, most of the 90 million viewers of the October 3

debate had already made up their minds: Gore was not a truth teller.

Mistake #7: Attention Misdirected

For the most of the campaign, people weren’t listening. The country was

at peace. The economy was prosperous. There were no obvious pressing

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Introduction

15

national issues. The candidates seemed to be saying similar things. When

some 90 million viewers tuned in, the first presidential debate was a real

chance to get the electorate’s attention.

At the outset, Gore came on as the rational bureaucrat mentioning

all the government programs he was going to implement. His objective

was presumably to demonstrate competence. But in the mind-numbing

recitation of programmatic arguments, it is probable that he lost the

attention of many viewers then and there.

Yet Gore was aware of the power of narrative to get attention and he

had come armed with stories aimed to do just that. In addition to the sto-

ries of the fifteen-year-old Caley Ellis who had to stand in her science class

and the seventy-nine-year-old Winifred Skinner who had to collect cans to

help pay for prescription drugs, he also told the story of the seventy-year-

old Milwaukee hypertension patient, George McKinney. McKinney and

his wife, Gore said, had to travel to Canada to buy affordable prescription

drugs. This story showed that there was a problem, but it focused atten-

tion on another question that didn’t help Gore: why hadn’t the problem

been solved in the seven years Gore spent as vice president? The stories

drew attention to problems that had occurred during his administration,

rather than to Gore’s positive accomplishments or to his future programs.

Moreover, while Gore cited the Caley Ellis story to make the case

for federal funding for education, the story actually showed the oppo-

site, since this was an excellent school that didn’t need federal funding.

Thus the story reinforced his opponent’s point that Gore was too eager

to throw government money at problems, thus contributing to large-

scale waste.

Thus Gore’s stories got people’s attention, but in a way that under-

mined his case. As one commentator put it, they made “despair look pos-

itively sunny.” It was as though Gore was saying:

“1. I’ve been vice president for the past seven years.

“2. Here are some particularly wretched situations that Americans

have found themselves in during that time.

“3. Therefore, you should vote for me for president.”16

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Mistake #8: Inability to Elicit Desire for Change

Rightly or wrongly, Al Gore presented himself as a candidate for change.

Subsequent commentators have noted that Gore would have been more

likely to have won the election if he had presented himself as an incum-

bent, dwelling on the many successes of the Clinton-Gore administra-

tion, adding the possibility of incremental change at the margin and

urging, as George H. W. Bush had done in 1988, that this was no time for

the on-the-job training of his less experienced opponent.17 Instead, Gore

opted to present himself as a challenger who would do things differently

and fight for change on behalf of the little guy against the wealthy, the big

insurance companies, the big oil firms and other special interests.

The difficulty for Gore, as indeed it is for most transformational

leaders, was that there was no obvious demand for the fight he was plan-

ning to launch. The electorate was content with the current economic

policies. They were prosperous. They were happy. The future looked

bright. They were complacent. Why change?

What were the rhetorical options open to Gore to succeed as a

change agent?

One was to describe the problems of people who weren’t faring well

in the economy. Gore did this, but merely stating the problems didn’t

generate desire for change. It was an appeal to the mind. To generate

desire for change, he needed to appeal to the heart. Gore’s abstract argu-

ments didn’t generate enthusiasm.

Another was to tell future stories about what he planned to do and

how this would make things better. But future stories are always nebulous

and difficult to make inspiring. Moreover, Gore didn’t make clear how he

would proceed except by using government programs or by fighting—

not an enticing prospect for the electorate.

Gore did use a couple of striking stories set in the recent past—George

McKinney and his wife, Caley Ellis, Winifred Skinner—that got people’s

attention. But they were negative stories of questionable credibility—the

wrong kind of stories to stimulate a desire to change. Negative stories

typically stimulate the listeners’ reptilian brain with a fight-or-flight

response; they don’t generate enthusiasm for a future course of action.

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Introduction

17

What Gore needed, and what he failed to use, was the most powerful

kind of motivational story—true, positive stories about the successful

accomplishments of the past seven years. When well told, such stories

could have generated positive stories about the future in the minds of the

listeners and so stimulated enthusiasm for other changes. Instead of

dwelling on those stories, Gore chose to tell stories about problems. A

future full of problems and fights wasn’t a future that the electorate

wanted to contemplate.

Mistake #9: His Reasons Backfired

The more reasons Al Gore gave as to why he should be elected and what

he would do if he was, the more boring he sounded and the less people

listened. Why?

One clue comes from the work of Frank Luntz, the legendary Repub-

lican pollster, who in 1992 was running a focus group in Detroit to test

television ads for Ross Perot, the presidential candidate. There were three

ads: a biography, a Perot speech, and testimonials from other people. In

these sessions, he set out to find the consensus and then see whether he

could undermine it. What he found at first was that he couldn’t under-

mine support for Perot. His support remained strong.

But at the session in Detroit, by mistake, Luntz ran the ads in reverse

order: first, the testimonials, then the speech, and finally the biography.

With this order, the people said that they didn’t like Perot at all. His opin-

ions seemed intemperate if they didn’t rest on the foundation of his

impressive rags-to-riches life story. Suddenly Luntz realized: the order in

which you give people information influences how they think. If they’re

already positively oriented to the subject, their reaction to what you are

saying is very different from what it would be without that connection.

Luntz had discovered, accidentally, that it is vital to establish an emo-

tional connection at the outset.18

Without the emotional connection to Gore and his change program,

Gore’s reasons lacked traction. The more reasons Gore offered, the more

he started an argument with the audience, and the less likely he was to

win their support.

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Mistake #10: The Conversation Died

Leadership communications begin as monologue. If they are successful they

turn into dialogue and then into conversation. The conversation emerges

because of the enduring enthusiasm for change that has been inspired. The

conversation mobilizes the energies of listeners who contribute to finding

solutions of how to get there and inspire others to do likewise.

Gore’s presentation during the presidential debate failed to do this,

because it didn’t inspire desire for change. Instead, Gore implied that he

would use the power of the presidency to force change. He was going to

put Social Security and Medicare “in a lockbox.” He was going to “fight”

to make change happen with the hierarchical power of the office of the

presidency in adversarial struggles on behalf of the little guy against the

wealthy, the big insurance companies, and big oil and special interests.

Instead of trying to inspire people and organizations to want change, he

was going to fight to require them to change.

In effect, he was asking for a four-year mandate to undertake adver-

sarial warfare against the opponents of change, not to continue a conver-

sation. As the electorate was tired of partisan fighting, it opted not to give

him that mandate.

Learning the Language of Leadership

The object here is not to pick on Al Gore but rather to point out mistakes

that are often made by aspiring transformational leaders. Gore wasn’t

passionately and unconditionally committed to a clear, inspiring change

idea. Most of the time, he was trying to make his case through abstract

arguments, discussing and analyzing problems and proposing solutions.

This left the audience dazed rather than inspired. He failed to engage

them at an emotional level through appropriate stories. The stories he did

use directed attention to issues that undermined his cause rather than

reinforcing it. His body language communicated an aggressive, unlikable

person, rather than someone with whom the audience would want to

interact. As a result, the conversation between Gore and the audience

never got going—and so he lost the election.

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Introduction

19

Yet in 2006, Al Gore was able to sell out whole stadiums to people

who wanted to hear his change message. What’s the difference between

the Al Gore of 2000 and the Al Gore of 2006?

In his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore conveys passion for a

subject he cares deeply about—the environment. Now he isn’t merely

repeating what his political managers or handlers have told him to say, as

in his 2000 campaign. He talks frankly about his family’s tobacco farm

and the role that it may have played in his sister’s death from lung cancer.

It also helps that he has become less pompous in his public speeches and

is able to poke gentle fun at himself.

Even more important, the Al Gore of 2006 has abandoned speaking

in a tangle of complex abstractions and used appropriate narratives.

From the start of the movie, he gets our attention by telling a series of

frightening stories about the scale and scope and causes of global warm-

ing and the reasons why no action is being taken, as well as engaging sto-

ries about himself, his life, his family, and what the environment means to

him personally.

As the immensity of the problem we are facing becomes apparent, he

asks the question: is it feasible to do anything about it? He answers this by

pointing to the many cities, states, and corporations that have already

decided to take action. And he gives some vignettes showing how the

human race has managed to fix other huge global problems, including

winning two world wars, curing smallpox, establishing civil rights, put-

ting a man on the moon, and even fixing the hole in the ozone layer.

These massive problems were solved by concerted action by governments

and countries all around the globe. So we were able to solve huge global

problems before. What if we were to do the same thing here?

Finally, he outlines the practical steps that would be needed to bring

the problem under control, including more efficient use of electricity,

more efficient buildings, improved vehicle efficiency, greater use of mass

transit, greater use of renewable energy, and cleaner power plants and

industrial activities. These actions are feasible. This is not a technical prob-

lem. This is not a political problem. It’s a moral problem. When the whole

future of the planet is at stake, it is time to rise up and secure the future.

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20

Whatever one thinks about the scientific merit of Gore’s arguments

or his politics, his presentation has proved to be remarkably effective in

getting people’s attention and pushing them to act.19 What we see in the

Al Gore of 2006 is that he had a clear change idea that was capable of gen-

erating enduring enthusiasm and to which he was genuinely committed.

He had learned how to connect emotionally with the audience through

narrative. His body language had become calm and assertive, rather than

aggressive, and he was able to reveal his droll sense of humor. He commu-

nicated by getting the audience’s attention and stimulating desire for

change. After he had stimulated an interest in change, he reinforced this

with reasons. After the movie came out, he continued the conversation in

talks, on television, and in person.

By 2006, Al Gore had learned the language of leadership.

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21

Human communication has its own set of

very unusual and counterintuitive rules.

—Malcolm Gladwell1

The head of a major drug company is in trouble because her firm’s

pipeline of new products has run dry. The managing editor of a major

newspaper has difficulty inducing reporters in the newsroom to change

their behavior to meet new types of competition.

A director in a global fast-food firm knows how to repair its swoon-

ing share price, but he can’t get the CEO to listen. Young staff in a dys-

functional unit of an enormous engineering firm can’t persuade its

management that open source collaboration will help productivity, not

harm it.

A health care provider can’t get heart surgery patients to change their

lifestyles: without healthy diet and exercise, they will be ill—or dead—

within a year or two. A global conglomerate sees its share price tank;

despite sterling earnings, profits, and growth, Wall Street doesn’t under-

stand its strategy.

A change-oriented presidential candidate can’t connect with the elec-

torate and loses an election he should have won. A nonprofit aimed at

redressing global warming struggles to mobilize policymakers around the

world in a more agile fashion.

THE SECRET

LANGUAGE OF

LEADERSHIP

1

”“

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22

A father puzzles what to do about a teenage boy who vanished into

his room at the age of thirteen and hasn’t been seen for several years. A

mother ponders what to do about her teenage daughter who questions

everything and won’t submit to her authority.

What links these people—in this book as in life—troubled CEOs,

stressed change agents, hard-pressed marketers, stymied idealists, mys-

tery politicians, puzzled parents—is a wish to induce change. They have

to transmit bold new ideas to people who don’t want to hear them, and

have the ideas implemented with sustained energy.

What Is Transformational Leadership?

In principle, we know what transformational leaders are meant to do.

They change the world by generating enduring enthusiasm for a common

cause. They present innovative solutions to solve significant problems.

They catalyze shifts in people’s values and ideologies. They demonstrate

willingness to sacrifice personal interests when necessary. They help oth-

ers get through critical moments of crisis. They inspire people to want to

change, so that positive energy sustains the change over time. They don’t

just generate followers: their followers themselves become leaders.

But if the what of transformational leadership is reasonably clear, the

how has remained almost totally obscure. How exactly do leaders commu-

nicate complex ideas and spark others into enduringly enthusiastic action?

What words do they use to inspire others to become new leaders? Why are

some leaders able to accomplish the feat while others fail miserably?

It’s become fashionable to see leadership almost solely as an issue of

inner conviction. Find the leader deep within yourself.2 Become the person

others will want to follow.3 Discover your strengths.4 Become emotionally

intelligent.5 Merely through increased self-awareness, self-regulation, and

positive modeling, authentic leaders develop authenticity in followers.6

When you visualize, then you materialize.7 Be true to yourself and change

happens.

Would it were so.

The reality is that sustained, enthusiastic change doesn’t occur by

osmosis or extrasensory perception. If leaders’ inner commitment to

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23

change is to have any effect, they have to communicate it to the people

they aspire to lead. True, the leaders’ actions will eventually speak louder

than words, but in the short run, it’s what leaders say—or don’t say—that

has the impact. The right words can have a galvanizing effect, generating

enthusiasm, energy, momentum, and more, while the wrong words can

undermine the best intentions and kill initiative on the spot, stone dead.

The Pitfalls of the Traditional Approach to Communication

Think back for a moment to the last memo or essay or journal article you

wrote, or the last time you gave a presentation. If you followed the tradi-

tional model of communication, you went through a familiar trinity of

steps.

You stated the problem you were dealing with. Then you analyzed the

options. And your conclusion followed from your analysis of the options.

Define problem >> Analyze problem >> Recommend solution

If this was your model, it wasn’t unusual. You were doing what has

always been done in organizations or universities. It’s the “normal,” the

“commonsense,” the “rational” way of communicating. It’s an appeal to

reason—a model that has been the hallowed Western intellectual tradi-

tion ever since the ancient Greeks. It reached its apogee in the twentieth

century. And it works well enough when the aim is merely to pass on

information to people who want to hear it.

But if you’re trying to get human beings to change what they are

doing and act in some fundamentally new way with sustained energy and

enthusiasm, it has two serious problems. One, it doesn’t work. And two, it

often makes the situation worse.

Giving reasons for change to people who don’t agree with you isn’t just

ineffective. A significant body of psychological research shows that it often

entrenches them more deeply in opposition to what you are proposing.

In 1979, a psychologist named Charles Lord and his colleagues at

Stanford University published their classic research on what happens

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24

when people are presented with arguments that are at odds with what

they currently believe.8 Lord’s team selected twenty-four proponents and

twenty-four opponents of capital punishment. They showed them studies

that confirmed the penalty’s deterrence as well as other studies that

refuted it. What happened? The proponents of capital punishment inter-

preted the studies as supporting capital punishment, while the opponents

of capital punishment concluded that the evidence refuted the approach.

Both proponents and opponents found clever ways to reinterpret or set

aside any contrary evidence so as to confirm their original positions.

For instance, whereas a participant in favor of capital punishment

commented on a study confirming the deterrence effect that “the experi-

ment was well thought out, the data collected was valid, and they were

able to come up with responses to all criticisms,” an opponent of capital

punishment said of the same study, “I don’t feel such a straightforward

conclusion can be made from the data collected.”

On another study showing the opposite, that is, disconfirming the

deterrence effect, the roles were reversed. The opponent’s meat became

the proponent’s poison and vice versa. The end result was that the propo-

nents and the opponents of capital punishment became even more set in

their positions. After they had reviewed the evidence, they were more

polarized than before.

The phenomenon, which psychologists call the confirmation bias, was

noted by Francis Bacon almost four hundred years ago: “The human

understanding when it has once adopted an opinion . . . draws all things

else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number

and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either

neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in

order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of

its former conclusions may remain inviolate.”9

The confirmation bias isn’t entirely illogical. Thus when I glance at a

tabloid at the supermarket and read the headline, “Scientists Discover

4,000-Year-Old Television Set in Egyptian Pyramid,” I smile and question

the reliability of the tabloid, not my belief as to when television was

invented. When we think we know something to be objective truth, our

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25

immediate reaction to news indicating the opposite is to jump to the con-

clusion that there must be something wrong with the source. And for

many purposes, the confirmation bias serves us well.

But why aren’t we more willing to reconsider our positions in the

face of serious factual evidence that should at least give us pause? Aren’t

we thinking at all? Apparently not, according to a recent study by psy-

chologist Drew Westen and his team at Emory University.10 The team

conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans on

fifteen “strong Republicans” and fifteen “strong Democrats” in the course

of the 2004 presidential campaign while they were reviewing blatantly

self-contradictory statements by the two candidates, George W. Bush and

John Kerry. As we would expect from earlier studies of the confirmation

bias, the Democrats found ways to reconcile Kerry’s inconsistencies and

became even more strongly Democrat, while the Republicans had no dif-

ficulty explaining away George W. Bush’s self-contradictions so as to

become even more fervently Republican.

But the fRMI brain scans showed something new. While the partici-

pants were considering the inconsistent statements, the part of the brain

associated with reasoning revealed no signs of activity at all. “We did not

see,” said Westen, “any increased activation of the parts of the brain nor-

mally engaged during reasoning. What we saw instead was a network

of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be

involved in regulating emotion and circuits known to be involved in

resolving conflicts.”11

But there was something even more startling. Once the participants

had seen a way to interpret contradictory statements as supporting

their original position, the part of the brain involved in reward and

pleasure became active, and the conclusion was “massively reinforced . . .

with the elimination of negative emotional states and the activation of

positive ones.”12

Remember that involuntary smile that sprang to my lips when I read

the headline about the 4,000-year-old TV in the Egyptian pyramids?

That smile wasn’t as innocent as it looked. My brain was giving itself a

psychic reward for having been able to stick to its original position. The

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26

emotional reaction, not my thinking mind, was causing me to be even

more passionately attached to my original belief.

The confirmation bias helps explain why the traditional approach of

trying to persuade people by giving them reasons to change isn’t a good

idea if the audience is at all skeptical, cynical, or hostile. If a leader offers

reasons at the outset of a communication to such an audience, the

maneuver will likely activate the confirmation bias and the reasons for

change will be reinterpreted as reasons not to change. This occurs with-

out the thinking part of the brain being activated: the audience becomes

even more deeply dug into its current contrary position. Reasons don’t

work at the outset, because the audience is neither listening nor thinking.

Worse, we also know that skepticism and cynicism are contagious and

can quickly turn into epidemics. They are instances of rebellious, antiso-

cial behavior. In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell has described how

such epidemics occur in many different settings.13 We see it with hooli-

gans. We see it with teenage smoking. When one person in a group is

openly skeptical or cynical, it can create a license for others to be likewise:

being a skeptic or a cynic can quickly become the cool thing. In the bar,

after work, if the coolest person in the group says that the presentation

that day was pure BS, how many others in the group are going to take the

social risk of saying that they thought the presentation made a lot of

sense? If they were thoroughly convinced, maybe. But if they themselves

found the presentation confusing and hard to understand, the risk is that

they’ll go along with the cool guy, and agree that yes, it was all BS.

So although we might imagine that giving a presentation discussing

and analyzing problems and reaching rational conclusions in favor of

change can’t do any harm, we need to think again. Giving a lecture full of

abstract reasons arguing for change can quickly turn an audience into an

army of strident cynics.

The Language of Leadership in Action

To find out what language is capable of generating enduring enthusiasm

for change, I have spent the last decade studying how successful leaders

communicate in scores of organizations, large and small, around the world.

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27

What I’ve seen time again is that massive differences in the impact of

leadership communication can be achieved by paying attention to the

tiniest details of the words that are used, the patterns they form, the order

in which the patterns are deployed.

Successful leaders communicate very differently from the traditional,

abstract approach to communication. In all kinds of settings, they com-

municate by following a hidden pattern: first, they get attention. Then

they stimulate desire, and only then do they reinforce with reasons:

Get attention >> Stimulate desire >> Reinforce with reasons

When the language of leadership is deployed in this sequence, it can

inspire enduring enthusiasm for a cause and spark action to start imple-

menting it. Moreover, successful leaders don’t stop with a one-time com-

munication. As implementation proceeds, it is inevitable that the cause

they are pursuing will evolve. While that is happening, leaders and their

followers stay in communication and co-create the future by continuing

the conversation.

Of course, words alone won’t work. The language of leadership is

most effective when certain enabling conditions are in place, including a

truthful commitment to a clear, inspiring change idea that is illuminated

by narrative intelligence, appropriate body language, and an understand-

ing of the audience’s story. When all these enabling conditions are present

and working in sync with the language of leadership deployed in the right

sequence, transformational leadership takes off.

The Introduction illustrated the difference between the communica-

tions of Al Gore in 2000 and Al Gore in 2006. Here are two more exam-

ples of transformational leadership in action.

In the spring of 2002, Craig Dunn faced a perfect storm of bad news.

AMP was famous in Australia as an icon of financial security, but the last

few years had been a disaster for the company. Some major acquisitions in

the U.K. had bombed and were now being undone. A major downsizing

was under way. The stock price was plummeting. Rumors of an imminent

hostile takeover were rampant. Many thought that AMP wouldn’t survive.

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28

Dunn, who had recently been appointed managing director of AMP’s

financial services business unit to help execute a turnaround, recalls

going to a meeting of distributors in Melbourne at the height of the

storm. “It was,” he says, “just the worst meeting you ever went to. We had

insults thrown at us. There was a lot of anger and disappointment. People

had lost faith in the firm they partnered. And they had good reasons for

feeling the way they did. We all had to face the fact that there had been a

lot of poor management decisions in the recent past.”

Little in Dunn’s background had prepared him for this kind of chal-

lenge. Before joining AMP, he had worked as an analyst for KPMG in

Europe and Indonesia, and then taken over as CEO of a Malaysia-based

insurance company. In those roles, the environment was orderly. He gave

people reasons and, by and large, they did what they were told. Now peo-

ple were shouting and screaming abuse at him. They were furious. In

such a crisis it was obvious that just giving people reasons wasn’t going

to work.

So he recalls going to a meeting in Melbourne and talking to the staff

face-to-face. He began by acknowledging the problems AMP was facing,

and said, “This is hard, this is difficult, but this is what the organization

means to me.”

Then he told them about a family in Adelaide that had bought one of

AMP’s insurance policies:

The guy was still quite young, still in his early thirties, and he had a couple of kids. But he had contracted multiple sclerosis. He was just moving to the stage where he would be in a wheelchair. He had an income protection policy with us, and in that instance we went beyond what we were required to do legally. One of our claim managers had traveled over to Adelaide. He went through the house that we had just renovated for the family, and agreed to put in a new bathroom so that they could access it in a wheelchair, and to lower the kitchen benches.

I told them what we had done for that family and what they had said to our claim manager. I was reminding people of what our firm was all about. And the value that we added to people’s lives. It was true that the firm had lost its way in the past few years, but the sorts of

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29

things that we’d done for that guy and his family in Adelaide were still happening. They were happening every day. I showed them that this was an organization worth fighting for.

And he went on to explain the actions that he planned to take to

enable AMP to survive. Three years later, when AMP had not only sur-

vived the crisis but was back on the road to profitability, Dunn said: “What

I came to see was that the communication is more emotional than logical:

we had to draw upon people’s emotional connection to the organization,

to draw on that piggy bank of good will to the firm and use that as the way

forward.”14

Bill Gates is rightly given credit for issuing his “Tidal Wave memo” of

May 26, 1995. In it, he communicated his decision to change course at

Microsoft so that the nascent World Wide Web would become an integral

part of the firm’s computing software rather than a sideshow to the then-

dominant desktop applications. The company’s strong response crippled

its competitor, Netscape, and won Microsoft more than 90 percent of the

global browser market.

But as Gates points out in his book, Business @ the Speed of Thought,

the issuance of the memo was more the end of the process than the

beginning.15 The memo had been preceded by a great deal of leadership

activity needed to stimulate the desire for change.16

In the early 1990s, Microsoft wasn’t thinking very much about the

Internet, but it wasn’t totally oblivious. In 1991 it had hired a twenty-two-

year-old specialist, J. Allard, to help ensure that it would develop the right

technologies for interoperability. By mid-1993, basic Web support had

been built into Windows NT. Allard had seen the promise of the just-

emerging technology and set about trying to convince others in the

organization that they needed to make the Web central to all their soft-

ware. He set up three machines on a folding table in the hallway of a

Microsoft office block, and dragged everyone he could find, from product

manager to group vice president, to show off the Web and get people

enthusiastic about its potential. It wasn’t just that the demonstration

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looked impressive; Allard could back it up with reason: the fact that in a

ten-week period, customers downloaded twice as many copies of an MS-

DOS upgrade from this Internet site as from CompuServe helped him

prove that something big was already under way.

Then in early 1994, Gates’s technical assistant, Steven Sinofsky, went

to Cornell on a recruiting trip and got stuck there for several days as a

result of a snowstorm. He used the time to check out how the university

was using computers. He was amazed by the changes that had taken place

since the year before. E-mail use by students was almost universal. Cor-

nell’s instructors were communicating with students online. A wide vari-

ety of information, including the library catalogue, schedules, grades,

accounts, financial aid data, and a directory of who was who in the school

community were available on the Web.

Allard and Sinofsky began writing memos and e-mail about how

important the Internet was going to be. The e-mail began circulating

among a large number of people in the firm.

In 1994, Gates was still thinking that the Internet was years away,

because of the limited bandwidth available at the time to most Web users.

The Microsoft strategy was to establish a network that would sit on top of

the Web.

But the priority of the Internet in Microsoft was steadily rising from

the bottom toward the top. The e-mail from Sinofsky and Allard circu-

lated to a large number of people and sparked a firestorm of electronic

conversation about what the Web would mean for Microsoft, how its pro-

grams would be affected, what capabilities they would need to have, and

what new products should be developed. Sometimes ideas won quick

agreement. Sometimes discussion was fierce. In the melee, many new

ideas emerged.

“Hallways and e-mails,” says Gates, “That’s how it happened.”17 Gates

himself became involved in e-mail exchanges with many different parts of

the business. The Internet development plans were made available on the

Microsoft network so that everyone could see them. In April 1994, as a

result of the efforts of Allard and Sinofsky, Gates devoted Think Week to

the Internet.

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By early 1995 every team had defined its Internet charter and begun

development. Internet add-ons, integration, and products were being

actively produced.

So when Gates sent out his Internet Tidal Wave memo in May 1995,

it was important, because it meant that Gates as the top manager was

announcing a change of course. But the memo was nearer the end of the

process than the beginning. It was the signal of a formal decision for a

change that was already largely in place. Without the spirited conversa-

tion that had preceded the memo, it would have had little effect.

The Language of Leadership: Key Steps

What’s going on in these examples? Let’s look in a little more detail at

each of the three key steps of the language of leadership, before turning to

some enabling conditions—six elements that enable the language of lead-

ership to achieve its maximum effectiveness.

Step #1: Getting the Audience’s Attention

If leaders don’t get people’s attention, what’s the point in even trying to

communicate? If people aren’t listening, speakers are simply wasting their

breath. And in most settings today people are not listening in any atten-

tive way. They are mentally doing e-mail, preparing for their next meet-

ing, reminiscing about what happened at last night’s party, planning

lunch, or whatever. They may be aware in a vague, background way that

someone is talking, and even conscious of the subject under discussion.

The first step in communicating is to get their urgent attention.

How do you get people’s attention? A couple of years ago, Tom Dav-

enport and John Beck conducted an experiment with sixty executives to

see what got their attention over a one-week period. Their conclusion:

“Overall, the factors most highly associated with getting attention in

rank order, were: the message was personalized, it evoked an emotional

response, it came from a trustworthy source or respected sender and it

was concise. The messages that both evoked emotion and were personal-

ized were more than twice as likely to be attended to as the messages

without these attributes.”18

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Social scientists have also shown that negative messages are more

attention-getting than positive messages. Here are some of the more

effective ways to get the audience’s attention:

• Stories about the audience’s problems (“These problems are serious . . . ”)

• Stories about the likely trajectory of the audience’s problems (“These

problems are getting worse . . . ”)

• A story of how the presenter dealt with adversity that is relevant to

the issue under discussion—particularly if the presenter is new to the

audience

• A surprising question or challenge in an area of interest to the audience

Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, uses all these tools to get the

attention of an audience that isn’t particularly interested in making fun-

damental adjustments to their lifestyle as a result of global warming.

Gore talks in conversations by a stream at his home of his family growing

tobacco and his sister dying of lung cancer, thus helping to establish an

emotional connection between him and his audience. Such an approach

can be especially effective when, as in Al Gore’s case, the audience may

have a false impression of the kind of person he is.

J. Allard got people’s attention by buttonholing everyone he could

find and physically dragging them to come and look at the Web in action

on the computers he had set up in the corridor. Sinofsky’s e-mail about

what was happening at Cornell helped alert others that something very

different was under way. What if Microsoft were to miss the wave that was

already rolling?

In Craig Dunn’s case, he got the attention of the audience by

acknowledging the problems that management itself had generated.

Step #2: Eliciting Desire for a Different Future

As Al Gore discovered in 2000, failing to distinguish between getting

attention and stimulating desire can have disastrous results. That’s

because what gets people’s attention typically doesn’t stimulate a desire to

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act. Whereas getting attention is generally done more effectively by nega-

tive content, getting people to want to do something different needs to

accentuate the positive. Negative stories, questions, or challenges wake us

up. They activate the reptilian brain, suggesting fight or flight. They start

us thinking, but they also generate worry, anxiety, and caution. They

don’t stimulate enthusiastic action.

Nor does the traditional practice of using a comprehensive set of

analyses of the reasons for change generate enthusiastic action. For one

thing, it’s too slow. By the time the traditional presenter is approaching

the conclusion, the audience has already made up its mind—largely on

emotional grounds. For another, it’s addressed to the wrong organ of the

body. To gain enthusiastic buy-in, leaders need to appeal to the heart as

well as the mind. The audience has to want to change. To be effective, a

leader needs to establish an emotional connection and stimulate desire

for a different future. Without the emotional connection, nothing hap-

pens. And stimulating desire is key, because decisions are made almost

instantly, or as Malcolm Gladwell might say, in a blink.19

The task here isn’t about imposing the leader’s will on an audience,

which, in any event, is impossible. It’s not about moving the audience to

a predetermined position that the leader has foreseen. It’s about en-

abling the people in the audience to see possibilities that they have hith-

erto missed. It means creating the capability in the audience to see for

themselves the world and their relations with others in a new and more

truthful light. It involves pointing a way forward for people who find

themselves—for whatever reason—cornered by the current story that

they are living.

The idea that storytelling might be important is not particularly

extraordinary: great leaders have always used stories to spark change. But

the kinds of stories that are effective for leaders in stimulating desire for

change are very different from what we might suspect. Some of the most

effective stories are not big, flamboyant theatrical epics, well-told stories

with the sights and sounds and smells of the context all faithfully evoked.

Stories told with a bullhorn don’t necessarily elicit desire for change.

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In fact, some of the strongest stories are the smallest and the least

pretentious. It’s precisely because they are small and unpretentious that

they work their magic. It’s a question of understanding the right form of

story to elicit desire: generally, it’s a positive story about the past where

the change, or an analogous change, has already happened, and it is told

in a simple, minimalist manner.

Such stories look unassuming, but they can be astoundingly power-

ful. They operate by sparking a new story in the mind of the listener. It’s

this new story that the listeners generate for themselves that connects at

an emotional level and leads to action. In the new story, listeners begin to

imagine a new future. Thus:

• In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore used several stories to show that

the human race had handled other massive global challenges before.

These help spark a new story inside the minds of listeners: if we have

solved problems like this before, then surely we can solve the problem

of global warming!

• Craig Dunn told a story about the kind of role that his firm has

played in the lives of real Australians, sparking a new story in the

minds of the listeners: this is a firm worth preserving!

• Sinofsky’s stories about what was happening on the Cornell campus

pointed to the massive changes already under way on the Web. This

led managers at Microsoft, including Bill Gates, to imagine a new

story: if that’s what the Internet could accomplish at Cornell, just

imagine what it could do all around the world!

Quickly stimulating desire for a different state of affairs is the most

important part of the communication: without it, the leadership commu-

nication goes nowhere. It’s also the piece that is most consistently missing

in the communications of aspiring leaders. And it’s the trickiest facet of

leadership, because it involves inducing people to want to do something

different. The key insight is that if the listeners are to own the change

idea, they have to discover it for themselves in the form of a new story.

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And it’s not “just” a story. What’s generated becomes a new narrative

to live by, a story that is both credible because it makes sense of their lives

as they understand them, and capable of being put into practice. The

newly emerging narrative is constructed both from the ongoing stories of

the people and their organization, and from the new story put forward by

the leader. It is born in the listeners’ minds as a more compelling version of

their ongoing life stories. The listeners themselves create the story. Since

it’s their own story, they tend to embrace it. What the leader says is mere

scaffolding, a catalyst to a creative process going on inside the listeners.20

LEADING CLEVER PEOPLE

In a recent Harvard Business Review article titled “Leading Clever People,” Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones do a disservice to the concept of leadership when they write, “If clever people have one defining char- acteristic, it is that they do not want to be led.” Goffee and Jones argue that clever people need “benevolent guardians” rather than “tradition- al bosses.” Because clever people are difficult, managers should use reverse psychology and suggest the opposite of what they really want.21

These are not helpful suggestions. The truth is that if leaders are unable to lead clever people, it means that they don’t know how to be good leaders. What clever people object to is not being led, but being led badly. They object to being managed, commanded, con- trolled, or manipulated by people who aren’t knowledgeable in the area where they are working or who are working in pursuit of goals that don’t make sense. And they don’t respect “benevolent guardians” any more than “traditional bosses.” Reverse psychology works on clever people only when they have experienced a track record of bad decision making: in such settings, it’s rational to give close attention to the opposite of what management says.

Although “benevolent guardianship” may do less poorly with clever people than traditional command-and-control management, it is a suboptimal solution. What clever people want, like all people, is good leaders, that is, people who can inspire enduring enthusiasm for a worthwhile cause.

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Step #3: Reinforcing with Reasons

An emotional connection by itself isn’t enough. Reasons are still relevant.

The desire for change may wane unless it is supported and reinforced by

compelling reasons why the change makes sense and should be sustained.

But where the reasons are placed in a presentation is crucial.

When we encounter strange new ideas, we are subject to the confir-

mation bias and seek to preserve our existing viewpoint. By contrast,

when we have made a decision to explore change, we actively look for ele-

ments that confirm the decision we’ve already made.

So if reasons are given before the emotional connection is established,

they are likely to be heard as so much noise. Worse, if the audience is skep-

tical, cynical, or hostile, the reasons tend to flip and become ammunition

for the opposite point of view. By contrast, if the reasons come after an

emotional connection has been established with the change idea, then the

reasons can reinforce it, because now listeners are actively searching for

reasons to support a decision they have in principle already taken.

Giving people reasons at a time when they are ready to receive them

is one of the keys to communication that leads to action. Reasons are put

at a different position in the flow from the Western intellectual tradition.

They come, not at the beginning or middle, but at the end.

Moreover, the most effective way to present reasons that will really

resonate with your audience is to give people reasons in the form of sto-

ries. The most effective stories usually include:

• The story of what the change is, often seen through the eyes of some

typical characters who will be affected by the change

• The story of how the change will be implemented, showing in simple

steps how we will get from “here” to “there”

• The story of why the change will work, showing the underlying causal

mechanisms that make the change virtually inevitable

Instead of relying on pure reason, on facts and figures and argu-

ments, stories give reasons an emotional punch. They appeal to the heart

as well as the mind, so as to cement the reasons in place and make the rea-

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sons memorable. These three steps—one, getting attention, two, stimu-

lating desire for change, and three, reinforcing the desire for change with

reasons, are the same whatever the leadership setting. Of the three steps,

the middle step—stimulating desire for change—is the most important.

Without desire for change, people will have no energy or enthusiasm.

Indeed without desire for change, there is hardly any point in getting the

audience’s attention. And without desire for change, there is nothing for

reason to reinforce. It’s desire for change that drives the change process.

So if transformational leaders do only one thing, they should make sure

they stimulate desire for change.

The three steps form a flexible template. They offer a way of making

sense of any leadership presentation. In some situations where resistance

in the audience is particularly high, the speaker may need to spend a great

deal more time getting attention than when the audience is already some-

what interested. By contrast, in an “elevator speech,” there may only be

time for the critical middle step—a story that kindles desire for change.

Where generous time is available, the speaker may be able to give a large

number of reasons in favor of change. The template can be tailored to

meet the needs of the specific audience and the time available.

Leaders who talk in this way sound very different from typical

authority figures of the past—managers, teachers, parents or politicians.

True, some of those people were inspiring. But most of them communi-

cated in the familiar top-down, paternalistic, authoritarian, domineering,

I’m-in-charge-so-I-know-what’s-right manner that people in positions of

Negative stories to get attention

Get their attention

Positive story to get action

Elicit desire

Neutral stories to explain what, when,

how, and why

Reinforce with reasons

Effective presentation to get action

The Secret Language of Leadership.

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authority have been adopting for the last couple of thousand years. Too

often they sounded hollow, flat, distant, uninviting, arrogant, almost

inhuman.22

By contrast, the true language of leadership feels fresh and inviting,

energizing and invigorating, challenging and yet enjoyable, lively, spir-

ited, and fun, as when equals are talking to equals. It generates laughter

and energy. It is not laughter at others, but laughter with others. It’s the

exhilaration of the discovery of possibility. Leaders show people that the

end they thought they were coming to has unexpectedly opened: they

laugh at what has surprisingly come to be possible.23

In short, it feels like being engaged in a great conversation that opens

up new vistas and wider horizons.

And once started, the conversation must be continued. Leadership

isn’t about making a single presentation, after which the audience sees the

light and rushes out to do what the leader says. It’s about an ongoing

openness to dialogue, combining a fierce resolve with a continuing will-

ingness to listen.

The Language of Leadership: Key Enablers

The language of leadership will make the maximum impact if certain

enabling conditions are in place. Without these enablers, the words that

leaders use—the spoken language of leadership—risk sounding glib and

superficial.

Enabler #1: Articulating a Clear and Inspiring Change Idea

When people are pursuing a clear and inspiring goal, they exude a quality

that is real and recognizable but also difficult to describe or define.

There’s a look in the eye, the spring in the step, an eagerness in the voice,

a willingness to interact with each other and with outsiders, an openness

to innovation. They exhibit enduring enthusiasm in pursuit of the idea.

There’s excitement, anticipation, a feeling of movement, a sense of pur-

pose and direction, an impression of going somewhere. When those qual-

ities are absent, everything feels different: work becomes work, a chore

rather than a joy.

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Although a few exceptional people are able to pursue any activity

with enduring enthusiasm, most people find it difficult to pursue an

activity with sustained gusto unless they are pursuing it for its own sake,

not merely to achieve some instrumental or external good such as money,

status, prestige, power, or winning. The perceived inherent worth of the

activity being undertaken is foundational.

Instrumental benefits may accompany activities being pursued for

their own sake, but if they become the principal, or worse still, the sole,

objective of undertaking the activity, then the activity itself becomes

degraded: energy tends to fade and enthusiasm dies.

Thus the goal of Al Gore in 2006 was not just the instrumental goal

of lowering levels of CO2 emissions, but the moral goal of preserving the

planet. The goal of Craig Dunn was not just the instrumental goal of

improving the profitability of AMP; he was out to preserve a firm that

does worthwhile things for the community. The goal of J. Allard and

Steven Sinofsky at Microsoft was not just the instrumental goal of pro-

ducing more profitable software, it was the inherently valuable purpose of

integrating all software with the World Wide Web.

CAN WINNING BE THE GOAL OF

TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP?

Transformational leadership concerns activities that are pursued pri- marily for their own sake, not merely for the sake of instrumental ben- efits such as money, prestige, prizes, or the status of being considered a winner. If at any point, instrumental benefits become the principal goal of the activity, then the chances of its being the subject of sus- tained enthusiastic commitment are reduced, if not eliminated. An alternative view is articulated by Jack and Suzy Welch, in their book, Winning:

I think winning is great. Not good—great. Winning in business is great because when companies win, people thrive and grow. There are more jobs and opportunities everywhere and for every- one. People feel upbeat about the future; they have the resources to send their kids to college, get better health care, buy vacation

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homes, and secure a comfortable retirement. And winning affords them the opportunity to give back to society in hugely important ways beyond paying more taxes. . . . Winning lifts everyone it touches—it just makes the world a better place. When companies are losing, on the other hand, everyone takes a hit. People feel scared. They have less financial security and limited time or money to do anything for anyone else. All they do is worry and upset their families, and in the meantime, if they’re out of work, they pay little, if any taxes.24

There are several reasons that a focus on the achievement of instrumental goals like money, prestige, prizes, or winning per se is unlikely to be the subject of sustained enthusiastic commitment.

One is pragmatic. It is an intractable fact of human nature that most people find it difficult to remain genuinely enthusiastic for a sus- tained period of time about primarily instrumental goals. When every- thing is done for the sake of something else and nothing is done for its own sake, then purpose is obliterated. When purpose is obliterat- ed, life loses its meaning. When meaning dies, energy fades and enthusiasm dies.

Instrumental goals like winning are fundamentally about acquiring the title of “winner” as accorded by other people. When people spend their lives trying to elicit such decisions from other people rather than doing what they themselves believe is worthwhile, they end up as prisoners of other people’s opinions. With no genuine views of their own, they have little to be enthusiastic about.

Moreover, it isn’t true that winning lifts everyone it touches. Wher- ever there are winners, there are by definition also losers—usually many more than winners. As a result, winning is necessarily an aspect of win-lose activities. This is because external goals like money, status, prestige, and the title of “winner” are finite resources, and are gov- erned by a win-lose dynamic. If A wins, B loses. If C becomes famous, everyone else is less so. If D is president, no one else can be presi- dent at that time. In the world of instrumental goals, truly win-win outcomes are rare, perhaps nonexistent. Even having money is not so much about the absolute fact of having money—it’s about having more money than other people. In such zero-sum games, the inherent

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Enabler #2: Committing to the Story of Change

Managers are appointed by other people. Leaders appoint themselves.

Deciding to be a leader is a choice we have to make on our own. No one

else can do it for us. It’s an internal decision to adopt a stance, an orienta-

tion toward the world, to pursue an activity for its own sake and to set out

to induce others to do likewise. Are we genuinely ready for the challenge

of leadership? Are we ready to commit mind, body, and soul to the goal?

This was a crucial difference between the Al Gore of 2000 and the Al

Gore of 2006. In 2000, Gore hadn’t yet crossed this bridge. By 2006, he

was talking about a goal to which he was totally committed. As a result, he

sounded very different. He was no longer wearing a mask, trying to

worth of the activity is often subordinated to the goal of getting ahead of others, and to doing whatever is necessary to achieve vic- tory. When that happens, one has entered a rat race: the activity shifts from inspiring to deadening, from fun to dull, from energizing to bur- densome: it becomes mere work. By contrast, when activities are pur- sued for their own sake, innovations that any one individual makes tend to be shared with others and so everyone benefits. An advance by one helps all. The dynamic is inherently win-win.

Finally, the suggestion that those who focus primarily on winning will eventually get around to doing something worthwhile in itself, such as “give back to society,” has meager evidence to support it. Even if we set aside the inevitability of a large group of “losers” who by definition accompany the “winners” and who won’t have anything to give back to society, the reality is that winning as a primary goal becomes a drug. Because winning doesn’t satisfy in itself, people need more of it to keep going. Hence people who devote their life primarily to winning usually never get round to doing anything worth- while in itself. Instead, they find themselves on their deathbeds, won- dering where their lives went.25

Transformational leadership invites people to stop postponing their lives and start right now doing what is genuinely worthwhile—and inviting others to join in.

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project a persona that he hoped would appeal to the audience. Instead, he

was telling the electorate what he, Al Gore the person, genuinely believed.

When leaders decide to commit themselves to change, they take a

stand. They adopt a position. They cross a Rubicon. Conscious of the

need for the change and what it will take, they commit to making it hap-

pen. They decide that it’s worthwhile and that they’re willing to pursue it,

come what may, whatever it takes. Their inner commitment gives life to

the words they use. It becomes a central part of their new life story.

Enabler #3: Mastering the Audience’s Story

Story also has enormous implications for the way we understand our

audience as well. We like to spend a lot of time thinking about the content

of what we are going to say. No less important is figuring out the story

that the audience is currently living. If we don’t understand the story of

the people we’re talking to, how can we craft a new message that will res-

onate with them?

It’s easy to underestimate the effort involved in getting inside the lis-

tener’s mind. Abraham Lincoln once said, “When I’m getting ready to

reason with a man, I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself

and what I am going to say—and two-thirds thinking about him and

what he is going to say.”26

That’s because as leaders we need to overcome what psychologists

call fundamental attribution error. This is the tendency that we have as

human beings to assign the cause for other people’s actions to disposi-

tions or personality-based explanations of behavior, whereas we tend to

assign the causes of our own actions to the situation we are in. We tend to

think: “I didn’t get much done today because I got to bed late last night;

you didn’t get much done today because you’re lazy.” In effect, we have an

unjustified tendency to see people’s actions as reflecting “the sort of peo-

ple they are” rather than on the social and environmental forces that

influence their actions.27

We need to work hard to overcome fundamental attribution error and

understand the world of our listeners in all its peculiarity, its strangeness,

its stubborn differences. We have to stop thinking of people as obstacles,

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as enemies, as resisters, as opponents, as malcontents, as stupid or obsti-

nate or irresponsible or ill-willed, and rather as people we deeply want to

understand, people whose world in its own way makes sense, albeit in an

incomplete fashion. And the best way to do that is to work on under-

standing the listeners’ story.

We need to start from where the audience is, not where we are. We

need to figure out why our followers don’t see the change idea as posi-

tively as we do. Within what story do they find themselves cornered?

What artificial walls have the listeners constructed around their current

existence so that they don’t see the same future we do? What imaginary

constraints are hampering them from imagining something different?

What mythical limitations are hobbling their vision? Which of their most

heartfelt dreams are currently unfulfilled? If we can understand these

aspects of the audience’s story, then crafting a new story that will resonate

with them is often relatively simple.

How do leaders make sense of the listeners’ world even if they know

the answers? Although agreement on a comprehensive framework for

human personality is not complete, psychologists are tending to the view

that the best way to make sense of this subjective world is through stories:

stories are ideally suited to capture how a human actor, endowed with

consciousness and motivated by intention, enacts desires and beliefs and

strives for goals over time and in a social context.28

Formulating the listeners’ stories can help leaders reach out imagina-

tively and get inside the subjective world of the people they are seeking to

change, develop a sense of what it is like to be living in that world, and get

a feel of its logic and power and order, even its compelling beauty.

Enabler #4: Cultivating Narrative Intelligence

Stories aren’t the only rhetorical tool available to leaders. Later chapters intro-

duce others: questions, metaphors, images, offers, challenges, conversations,

arguments, data, and the like. But among the communication tools that are

most effective in terms of inspiring action, stories tend to predominate.

In principle, we shouldn’t be surprised at the primary role of story-

telling in communications about change. We know that human beings

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think in stories. They dream in stories. Their hopes and fears reside in sto-

ries. Their imaginations consist of stories. They plan in stories. They gossip,

love, and hate in stories. Their emotions have a narrative character.29 Their

decisions rest on narratives: as philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre has pointed

out, “I can only answer the question, ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the

prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”30 Story-

telling is closely associated with the very conception of the self.31

Although we shouldn’t be surprised by the idea that storytelling is

important to leadership communications, the fact is that we are. In fact,

at first glance, it often strikes business executives as profoundly counter-

intuitive. This is not what we were taught at school. It’s not how we’ve

been trained. It’s not the norm in formal organizational meetings. Our

mantra has been that analytic is good and anecdotal is bad: it isn’t logical

to generalize the idiosyncratic vagaries of a single story to an entire popu-

lation. And so we go on making PowerPoint presentations full of abstrac-

tions and bullet points, like medieval doctors slicing patients’ veins to

remove excess blood, not realizing that everything we are doing and say-

ing is making the situation worse.

The notion that a deep understanding of narrative is key to transfor-

mational leadership strikes many people as surprising and in some sense

unacceptable idea. And yet it has an even more surprising dimension

than that.

If it’s true that we think in stories, and make decisions in the form of

stories, then what this means is that all forms of communication directed

toward action—not just stories themselves, but questions, metaphors,

images, offers, challenges, conversations, whatever—are effective to the

extent that they generate a new story in the mind of a listener. If yes, then

the communication is effective. If not, then the communication fails.

These varied communication tools are effective when they point to a

story. Story provides a unifying concept to understand whether and to

what extent any communication directed toward action will be effective.

And if that is so, then narrative intelligence—the ability to “think

narratively” about the world—is central to leadership.32 But what exactly

does it mean to think narratively about the world? It means the capacity

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45

to understand the world in narrative terms, to be familiar with the differ-

ent components and dimensions of narratives, to know what different

patterns of stories exist and which narrative patterns are most likely to

have what effect in which situation. It also means knowing how to over-

come the fundamental attribution error and understand the audience’s

story. It implies the ability to anticipate the dynamic factors that deter-

mine how the audience will react to a new story and whether a new story

is likely to be generated in the mind of any particular audience by any

particular communication tool.

The ability to think narratively—that is, narrative intelligence—

reflects a recognition that the narrative aspects of the world matter

because human goals matter, and narratives encapsulate human goals.

The pattern of words that we use matters: are they abstract, cold, impar-

tial, objective, inert, seemingly remote from human goals? Or do they

have all the richness and texture and objectives of human existence, mak-

ing them likely to engage an audience? And the sequence of patterns mat-

ters: one order generates excitement; the opposite generates hostility. And

the stories that these patterns of words elicit in the listeners’ minds mat-

ter. And the responses, witting or unwitting, in the form of a nod, a smile,

or a frown from the listeners matter. And what the leader does about

those responses matters, whether the responses are encouraging or dis-

couraging. And the interaction among narratives matters, an interaction

that is taking place in seconds: a single word, or phrase, or sequence, at

the right time—or out of place—makes all the difference. The out-

come—one way or the other—will be decided in a flash. An ability to act

and react agilely in this quicksilver world of interacting narratives is the

gist of narrative intelligence.

Overall, cultivating narrative intelligence will be a key enabler of

using the language of leadership to full advantage.

Enabler #5: A Commitment to Telling Authentically True Stories

In some activities of the human species, such as espionage, lying is re-

quired: deception is the essence. In other activities lying is frowned on

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46

but widely practiced. Politicians and salespeople routinely shade the truth

to win office or make a sale.

Transformational leaders are in a different situation. If they are to

inspire enduring enthusiasm for change, they must tell the truth. Lying

and leadership are like oil and water: they simply don’t mix. The distrust

that lying breeds is devastating to trust and credibility.

Honest mistakes are possible, of course, but it’s vital that when a mis-

take is discovered, leaders level with people and explain the mistake and

how it came about, rather than wait to be found out, as if deliberately

hiding something.

And when leaders tell the truth, it’s not just a matter of factual accu-

racy. It’s not merely telling a story that’s true as far as it goes. It’s about

telling the authentic truth, including everything that’s relevant to under-

stand the story. It needs to be a story that once people check it out—and

if the story has an impact, they will check it out—and all the facts are

known, people will still say, “Yes, that’s pretty much what happened.”

Here’s a famous example of a story that is factually accurate as far as

it goes, but isn’t authentically true:

Seven hundred happy passengers reached New York after the Titanic’s maiden voyage.33

No one could quarrel with these facts—but the story leaves out the

little detail that the Titanic sank and fifteen hundred passengers drowned.

And when those facts become known, if they aren’t already known, then

the negative backlash on the story and the storyteller is massive.

That was the problem with Al Gore’s presidential debate story about

Caley Ellis, the fifteen-year-old schoolgirl who had to stand in the class-

room. What Gore said was factually accurate as far as it went. But when it

emerged that she had to stand through class only on opening day—and

that was because of extra equipment stacked in the classroom, not, as

Gore had implied, on a permanent basis because of a lack of facilities, the

backlash against Gore’s candidacy was inevitable.

Although telling a story while omitting relevant facts is a very bad

way to tell a story, ironically, many corporate communications follow

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47

exactly this pattern. They paint a rosy picture of some situation when—

just around the corner, just below the surface—some omitted negative

element lurks. The omission creates a massive backlash against the story

and the storyteller once it becomes known, if it isn’t already known—and

instantaneously if it is known.

Enabler #6: Deploying the Body Language of Leadership

Cesar Millan doesn’t train dogs: he rehabilitates them. It’s the owners he

has to train. And what he trains them in is leadership. He shows the dog

owners how to embody in their behavior the calm assertiveness of leader-

ship vis-à-vis the dogs they own.

The dogs he works with are difficult dogs—dogs of all breeds and

sizes that have been terrorizing their host families, often for a consider-

able time. Typically they are dogs that combine warm, loving behavior

with a dark side—barking, biting, chewing, jumping, pulling—all the

things that vicious, uncontrollable dogs do. Often they are dogs that dog

trainers have given up on in despair. Now these dogs are terrorizing their

owners’ households and turning their lives into nightmares. Often the

families are desperate and on the verge of doing away with the dog. They

call Cesar Millan as a last resort.

Some of the most striking examples involve contrasts in size—say, a

tiny chihuahua owned by a burly policeman who is fearless in dealing

with criminals on the mean streets of a big city, but is terrorized when the

tiny, biting canine doesn’t get what she wants. When you see what the dog

gets away with, it’s as though the chihuahua owns the policeman rather

than the policeman owning the chihuahua.

Usually these dogs are even more difficult and aggressive with strangers

than with their owners. But when Cesar Millan walks into the room, these

dogs typically stop barking and snarling and pulling and jumping. Then

they do a strange thing: they sit down. They gaze calmly and quietly at

Millan and wait to see what he’s going to do next. When these dogs see

Millan, they immediately recognize that they are not dealing with one of

the pliable human beings they have been terrorizing for so long. Dogs

grasp in a flash that Millan is someone who can’t be shoved around. They

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see at once that they are dealing with someone who means business. They

sense in Millan someone who is 100 percent there for them. They under-

stand the body language of leadership. They see immediately that they are

in the presence of a leader.

There is nothing particularly extraordinary about Cesar Millan’s

physical appearance that would give him an edge in what he does. He is

medium height and stocky in build, not physically dominant. Born in

Mexico, he is mild in manner and pleasant in his demeanor. As you watch

him go about his work with dogs and with people, it is evident that the

calm assertiveness of his behavior comes not from any surface character-

istic, but from within. It is evident in the way he holds himself, the way he

moves, the way he looks at his surroundings, and the way he talks.

What’s even more striking is how quickly and easily the calm assert-

iveness of leadership embodied in Cesar Millan is mastered by the dogs’

regular owners. The body language of calm assertiveness is relatively sim-

ple to learn: square shoulders, open body stance, feet firmly planted on

the ground, the right kind of eye contact. It adds up to “being there” for

the audience.

Perhaps what’s most extraordinary is that as soon as the regular dog

owners embody these behaviors, they are at once treated as leaders by

their dogs. They can immediately resume ownership of their own house-

holds. They discover that if they are there for the dog, the dog will be

there for them.

The body language of leadership that Millan teaches to dog owners is

the same body language that leaders need to master if they are to be effec-

tive in their communications with other human beings. Without the calm

assertiveness of the body language of leadership, the verbal language of

leadership will have little, if any, effect.

This is one of the differences between the Al Gore of the first presi-

dential debate and the Al Gore of 2006: the aggressive brashness of the

2000 presidential debate has morphed into the calm assertiveness of An

Inconvenient Truth. Whereas the Al Gore of 2000 was a tedious bore, the

Al Gore of 2006 is rock-star popular. Small differences in body language

can have a massive impact.

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Mastering the Language of Leadership

For a very long time, we’ve been living with the idea that leadership and

change are driven by the efforts of a few exceptional people. This book

puts forward a different idea. It says that change and leadership don’t

require exceptional people at all. Leadership and change are driven by

ordinary people who act and speak in a different way. Once people grasp

what is involved in acting and speaking in that way and take the trouble

to master it, then they find that anyone can drive change, if they want to.

For too long, we’ve been thinking that leadership was some kind of

innate gift, a mysterious kind of genetically inherited charisma. But once

we’ve deciphered the language of leadership and understood its essential

enabling conditions, transformational leadership is no longer a mystery.

Once the hidden patterns of the language of leadership are made explicit,

leadership becomes accessible to anyone.

While the main elements of the language of leadership are relatively

simple and quick to understand, putting them into practice is something

else. The bare essentials can be grasped in minutes, but fully mastering

them may take a lifetime.

For some, particularly those habituated to the practice of hierarchical

command-and-control management, learning the language of leadership

will entail deep change. It isn’t some kind of party trick. It isn’t just a set

of superficial techniques—it’s a different way of thinking, speaking, and

acting. It requires that we understand our own values, thinking through

what we are attempting, exhibiting more than a little humility, and being

able to level with others and speak from a genuine point of view. It

involves acquiring a new perspective on the world, a profound clarifica-

tion of what it means to be leader.

The three steps of the central triad of the language of leadership—

getting attention, stimulating desire, reinforcing with reason—offer a way

of making sense of any leadership communication. They provide us with

a flexible structure that can be populated with suitable leadership con-

tent. In Part Three, I discuss in detail how they operate: if you want to get

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The Secret Language of Leadership

50

right into the nitty-gritty of the leadership presentation itself, you may

want to skip ahead and start there. Appendix 2 contains a set of exercises

and templates that can facilitate preparation of the various communica-

tion tools discussed in the book.

But to get the maximum value from the language of leadership, it’s a

good idea to make sure that the enabling conditions are in place. Part Two

addresses those issues. Is our goal clear? Is it potentially inspiring? Are we

fully committed to it? Do we understand the people we are trying to con-

vince? Have we developed appropriate narrative intelligence? Are we

being authentically truthful in our communications? Is our leadership

presence up to snuff? If any of these enabling conditions are not in place,

the language of leadership will have some impact, but it won’t be optimal.

If the enablers are in place, they will ensure that the language of leader-

ship inspires truly enduring change.

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[ P A R T 2 ] THE LANGUAGE

OF LEADERSHIP:

KEY ENABLERS

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53

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a

purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one;

the being thoroughly worn out before you are

thrown on the scrap heap; 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.

—George Bernard Shaw1

In 1983, John Sculley became CEO of Apple Computer. He was brought

in to help sort out the chaos created in part by the brilliance and inexpe-

rience of its chairman, Steve Jobs. Sculley had been a star manager at

Pepsi and, once Jobs left Apple in 1985, Sculley was quickly able to ration-

alize its products and services and stabilize the corporation. In the early

1990s, however, new possibilities were opening up for Apple. Sculley saw

that Apple could, like Dell, produce low-cost computers, or create port-

able, handheld devices like the PalmPilot, or like Microsoft capture the

huge potential revenues to be gained from selling computer operating

systems to businesses. If Apple exploited these possibilities, it could have a

very much brighter financial future.2

ARTICULATING

A CLEAR,

INSPIRING GOAL

2

”“

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Sculley tried multiple managerial methods to implement these strate-

gic shifts. He moved to turn Apple into a more conventional corporation,

hiring executives from old-line computer companies and dropping the

firm’s emphasis on consumer sales to enable a direct assault on business.

He introduced structural changes, systems, and processes in order to

stimulate buy-in for the changes he envisioned.3

To no avail. The Apple staff saw themselves as continuing to follow

Steve Jobs’s goal of creating cool, innovative electronic products—a pur-

pose that they saw as worthwhile in itself. The staff really weren’t inter-

ested in becoming just another computer company. They didn’t embrace

Sculley’s instrumental goals, and he was forced out in 1993.

Sculley’s talents as a manager didn’t prepare him for the principal chal-

lenge of leadership, namely, how to inspire the staff to pursue new goals

energetically and enthusiastically. The staff were still pursuing Apple’s orig-

inal purpose, which they saw as more compelling and seductive. The mana-

gerial tools of communication deployed by Sculley could not dislodge that

purpose from their minds.

Sculley’s successors at Apple met the same fate. Apple’s board first

appointed Michael Spindler, head of the company’s successful European

operations, as CEO. He was out after three years, after vainly trying to sell

the company. The board then named Gil Amelio, who had led a successful

turnaround at National Semiconductor. He raised revenue, improved

quality, and slashed costs, but some staff saw him as a carpetbagger.4 He

was removed after only eighteen months, and the ousted Apple founder,

Steve Jobs, came back as interim CEO. On his return, Jobs didn’t try to

change the company’s purpose. Instead he resumed the focus on design-

ing cool, innovative electronic products such as the iMac and iPod. The

“interim” was removed from Jobs’s title and Apple is once again flourish-

ing in both the computer and music industries.

Articulating a Worthwhile Purpose

Transformational leadership entails engendering enduring enthusiasm

for a cause. Why did Steve Jobs’s goal of making cool, innovative elec-

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55

tronic tools generate enduring enthusiasm while John Sculley’s business

objectives didn’t? What is at the root of enduring enthusiasm?

The word enthusiasm comes from the Greek, en theos, a god within.5

Thus the word’s origins imply that transformational leadership involves

“inspiring a god within one’s followers.” The “god within” is an energiz-

ing, ebullient, effervescent source of energy. It’s restless, kinetic, and irre-

pressible. It is more than contentment: it leaps, bubbles, and overflows. It

is contagious. It carries ideas forward and catalyzes action.6

While enthusiasm can be fragile and liable to fade, in some circum-

stances it endures over an extended period of time. Let’s look at some

examples.

Think of two children learning to play the piano. One child loves it.

She thrills to the sound of music. She practices as often as she can because

it’s a joy. It fills her life with meaning. She inspires her friends with her

playing. She has won a prize for her effort and accolades from her school-

teachers, but this recognition isn’t nearly as important to her as the joy

that she gets from the playing itself. Meanwhile another child studies the

piano, playing the same pieces, because her parents have told her that she

must. She dutifully practices the pieces she is assigned. Because she has a

natural aptitude for music, she does quite well, but it gives her no more

than mild pleasure. She finds her practices monotonous and forlorn.

These two young girls are engaged in the same activity, but they have

a very different attitude toward it. One feels energized and enthusiastic

about it and energizes others by her attitude. The other sees it as a drag

and a bore.

Think about the practice of sharing knowledge in organizations, an

approach known as knowledge management.7 Since this movement began

in organizations in the mid-1990s, some practitioners have approached

the goal with sustained enthusiasm. They have committed their working

lives to making the best knowledge available to those who need it when

they need it. They practice the virtues of honesty and openness. They per-

ceive their own personal growth in pursuing the practice and also con-

tribute to the wider community of knowledge management practitioners

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56

across many organizations. Knowledge management may have commer-

cial benefits for the organization in which they pursue their work, but for

these people, the bottom-line benefits of knowledge management are less

important than inherent value of sharing knowledge itself. If the organi-

zation in which they work should ever cease to support knowledge man-

agement, they would leave that organization and find another context

where they could continue to pursue their goal.

Compare these people to others who are pursuing knowledge man-

agement solely because of its commercial return. For them, knowledge

management is simply one of a number of management gadgets that can

be used to enhance the firm’s capacity to make money. So long as it is

commercially profitable, they pursue knowledge management. If it ceases

to have a handsome return for the firm, they set it aside for other more

commercially viable practices. For this group, knowledge management

has no inherent value: it is pursued for its instrumental benefits.

The description could continue with other types of activities: teaching,

law, medicine, architecture, retail, restaurant or hotel management, engi-

neering, farming, sports, or whatever else, illustrating the same distinction.

A principal difference between these two different ways of viewing

an activity is that when the activity generates sustained enthusiasm, the

activity is being pursued for its own sake, not merely to achieve some

instrumental or external good such as money, status, prestige, power, or

winning. The perceived inherent worth of the activity being undertaken

is foundational.

In Built to Last, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras suggest that bold mis-

sions—what they called “Big Hairy Audacious Goals” or BHAGs—are at

the heart of generating sustained enthusiasm, and I believe that they are

partially right. Large, bold goals are more likely to generate excitement

than difficult-to-understand, hard-to-remember mission statements.

However some of the BHAGs they cite, such as Boeing’s goal to build the

707, are finite in time and so sidestep the question of where to go after

that. It’s not enough to generate truly enduring enthusiasm that BHAGs

be bold, hairy, and audacious. In addition, they must be worthwhile in

themselves, so as to be self-motivating on an ongoing basis.

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A wide range of activities can be pursued for their own sake, rather

than for external, instrumental objectives. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s

book Flow describes how even a few workers in boring routine jobs

somehow manage—for a time—to view steadily improved performance

as valuable in itself.8

Both Viktor Frankl and Alexander Solzhenitsyn have written persua-

sively how even prisoners in a concentration camp can find meaning in

living in a certain way, as opposed to accepting the horrors of prison life

as given. Objectively they were slaves, but subjectively they had sufficient

psychic energy to create meaning for their lives.9

People who are able to find inherent value in whatever they are doing

are sometimes called “autotelic personalities”: they have the capacity to be

intrinsically motivated by almost any activity. No matter how threatening

or oppressive the external environment, they somehow manage to discover

new opportunities for improvement. However, even autotelic personalities

have difficulty sustaining their enthusiasm if the activity itself lacks a mini-

mal degree of suitability for sustained enthusiastic commitment.10

Thus some activities are more likely than others to generate sustained

enthusiasm. Ideally these activities have four main characteristics:

• The participants in the activity can see themselves making progress

toward something that is good for its own sake, not primarily because

it will lead to something else. The activity is, or can be seen as,

inherently rewarding. Additional effort is a joy and not a burden:

participants perceive that in the here-and-now the world is a better

place because of this activity.

• The participants experience their own personal growth and

development as part of the activity. If they do not perceive themselves

as making progress, they risk becoming discouraged. Studies show

that it’s helpful if the participants get feedback in terms of the

successes and failures they generate in the course of the activity, so

that their behavior can be adjusted as needed. A balance between

ability level and challenge—the activity is neither too easy nor too

difficult—is also conducive to enthusiasm.11

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• Through the activity, the participants see themselves as contributing to,

raising the sights of, and enhancing the efforts of other people pursuing

the same activity. If the participants are focused only on themselves,

on enhancing their own practice, their enthusiasm is less likely to be

sustained.

• Although the instrumental benefits of the activity are not the central

driving force for undertaking the activity, the external effects are not

irrelevant. Ideally, the activity should bring some positive instrumen-

tal benefits: income, status, prestige. But even without that, it should

at least be without negative instrumental effects. If the medical or legal

work or teaching or knowledge management bankrupts the commu-

nity or causes physical harm, this will sooner or later become appar-

ent and become a drag on exuberance and energy.12

If these four elements are in place, chances are good that the enthusi-

asm and energy level can be sustained. If one or more of them is missing,

the activity risks tending toward entropy.13

The language of leadership can of course be used in an attempt to

induce enthusiasm for activities with merely instrumental benefits, and

that attempt may even be successful for a time. The enthusiasm is, how-

ever, unlikely to be sustained unless the goal can eventually be articulated

as something perceived as worthwhile in itself.

As noted, the primacy of goals pursued for their own sake in trans-

formational leadership does not mean that instrumental benefits are

unimportant. In practice, instrumental benefits reinforce the pursuit of

goals for their own sake. Thus it’s easier to pursue an inherently worth-

while activity, be it art or law or medicine or journalism or knowledge

management or teaching or whatever, when the instrumental benefits are

there, too: one earns a living or acquires respect or prestige through the

activity. In fact it is a very rare person who can pursue an activity for its

own sake on a sustained basis if it never has any external benefits whatso-

ever.14 However, if people focus principally on instrumental goals and

ignore the inherent value of the activity, then the activity changes in

nature. Enthusiasm is likely to die. Life becomes work—an irksome chore.

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One central aspect of the language of transformational leadership is

therefore to articulate goals and activities in terms that can be viewed by

participants as worthwhile in themselves, not merely pursued because

they lead to instrumental benefits:

• Unlike John Sculley’s instrumental goals of making money from

hardware and software, Steve Jobs’s goal was one that the Apple staff

saw as worthwhile for its own sake: producing cool, innovative

electronic devices.

• The goal of Craig Dunn wasn’t just the instrumental goal of improving

the profitability of AMP, it was to preserve a firm that does worth-

while things for the community.

• The goal of J. Allard and Steven Sinofsky at Microsoft wasn’t just

the instrumental goal of producing more profitable software, it was the

inherently valuable purpose of integrating all software with the World

Wide Web.

The same logic applies to corporations: they are most inspiring when

they pursue large goals that are worthwhile in themselves:

• The goal of Toyota is “to enrich society through the building of

cars and trucks.” The idea of enriching society means offering car

customers reliability and mobility while investing profits in new

plants, technologies, and employees. It reflects a company-wide

obsession to keep on building better cars and to plan for the long

term—financially, technically, imaginatively. “The company thinks

in years and decades,” Michael Robinet, a vice president at CSM

Worldwide, a consulting firm that focuses on the global auto

industry, recently told the New York Times, “They don’t think in

months or quarters.”15

• In the mid-1940s, Johnson & Johnson adopted a credo by Robert

Wood Johnson that defines the company’s responsibilities as first, to

the consumers and medical professionals using its products, second,

to employees and managers, third to the communities where its

people work and live, and fourth and last, to its stockholders.16

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• Costco’s goal is to provide its members quality goods at low markups.

Under Jim Sinegal, who co-founded the company in 1983, Costco has

obsessively pursued the goal. Its margins are among the slimmest in

retailing. To the delight of its customers and to the annoyance of Wall

Street, Costco declines to take advantage of windfall profits when it

negotiates a lower price on an item: instead it passes the savings

directly to customers.17

• Given that publicly held corporations are under continuing pressure

to grow and do whatever is profitable, regardless of the intrinsic

worth of the activity, it is often easier to pursue an inherently worth-

while purpose in a privately owned corporation. In Small Giants, Bo

Burlingham has written about fourteen privately held corporations

that explicitly decided to stay relatively small and close to their local

communities in order to pursue worthwhile purposes.18 The group

includes Anchor Brewing, the original American microbrewery in

San Francisco, and Zingerman’s Community of Businesses, a group

of small food-related firms in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Burlingham

makes the case that these are firms that have chosen to be great,

rather than big—a choice that closely held private ownership

facilitates.

• In politics, Mahatma Gandhi sought not merely the instrumental

goal of getting rid of the British but what Indians perceived as the

intrinsically valuable goals of political and economic self-sufficiency

through nonviolence. The goal of John F. Kennedy was not merely

creating the Peace Corps (instrumental) but inspiring people to ask

themselves what they could do for their country (namely, something

intrinsically valuable). The goal of Abraham Lincoln was not merely

to win the Civil War or save the union but to create a new birth of

freedom in his country.

Transformational leaders typically present their goals as larger than any

particular task or organization or time-bound objective. When they suc-

ceed, the goal can survive the severance of the relationship between leader

and the institution in which it was formulated. Thus Abraham Lincoln

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61

can be assassinated, but his vision of a nation pursuing a new birth of

freedom lives on. John F. Kennedy can be shot, but his vision of changing

race relations in the United States is implemented by his successor. Mar-

tin Luther King Jr. can be murdered, but a whole nation continues the

work that he started. Steve Jobs can be fired from Apple Computer, but

his vision of producing cool electronic tools lives on in the minds of both

staff and customers, who are such passionate evangelists for the vision

that his successors are unable to change it. Toyota’s purpose of enriching

society through the building of cars and trucks isn’t dependent on any

individual executive; it pervades the entire organization.19 When parents

and teachers succeed as leaders, their children and students adopt their

values throughout their entire lives, even long after their parents or teach-

ers are gone.

Goals that are articulated as worthwhile in themselves enhance the

possibility of sustained enthusiasm, and hence the possibility of transfor-

mational leadership. Of course, articulating the goal as worthwhile in

itself doesn’t mean that listeners will necessarily see it in this way. Oppo-

nents, cynics, and skeptics may perceive ulterior motives and interpret the

professed pursuit of a worthwhile goal as a superficial, deceptive mask,

mere public relations, hiding personal ambition, political manipulation,

or worse. And if indeed this turns out to be a correct assessment of the

leader’s actual motivation, or is revealed in the firm’s actual conduct, then

that fact is likely to become apparent all too soon and in due course

undermine any enthusiastic commitment. But when leaders themselves

embrace the goals they have articulated and embody the worthwhile goal

relentlessly in their own behavior, then they turn themselves into an

unstoppable force for change. This is because the opponents, critics, and

skeptics are no longer fighting a person: now they are fighting an idea.

When people pursue a goal for its own sake, they may experience

advances (“wins”) or setbacks (“losses”) along the way, but in a larger

sense, they don’t win or lose. This is because there is no ultimate winner

or loser: when an activity is pursued for its own sake: the activity never

ends. Since the activity is valuable for its own sake, participants do their

best to continue the activity and to reach new standards of excellence.

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They encourage others to join the activity and the effort to attain new

levels of excellence. The activity is usually not bounded by any preestab-

lished set of rules or limits, or even any particular institution. The activity

and its rules are always evolving, flowing through networks and across

institutional and other boundaries. In this way, participants anticipate

and welcome surprise and change. The work may be perplexing, back-

breaking, and tedious, and yet participants see the effort and the difficul-

ties as a challenge, worthwhile in itself, and an opportunity to do better.20

Setting Priorities Among Goals

Not having a clear and inspiring goal is one common failing of leader-

ship. Another is having too many of them. Many people—and corpora-

tions—see a plethora of goals that they could be pursuing, but haven’t

made up their minds which goals to pursue with a single-minded focus.

Indeed, given the infinite number of problems to be solved in the

world, the number of goals that could address them is also infinite. If we

sit staring at the cornucopia of possible problems that confront and con-

found us and the possible actions we could take, we will never generate

lasting change. Then like Hamlet:

The native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.21

When people try to tackle a large number of goals, they fail in all.

Leadership is such a demanding activity that any one individual can

probably pursue no more than a couple of significant change ideas at any

one time. Priorities must be set.

We always face simultaneous leadership challenges in multiple

domains, whether it’s an organization, or a community, or a family, or a

town, or a country, or even the planet.

An organization generally offers multiple grounds for improvement.

Maybe it’s the entire organization, which perhaps has no clear, inspiring

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purpose. Or maybe it’s just one aspect of the organization that has

become a drag on performance. Maybe the values of the organization

aren’t reflected throughout the organization as they should be. Maybe

knowledge isn’t being shared. Maybe innovation isn’t happening as rap-

idly it should. Maybe the organization isn’t adapting fast enough to the

dramatic changes now taking place in the world economy. Maybe the

global marketplace is unaware of the genuine excellence of the firm’s

products and services.

The change could concern one’s community, which may have a few

unattractive wrinkles. Or maybe it’s the family: perhaps it’s a teenage son

who needs to rejoin the human race. Or a teenage daughter who con-

stantly snaps back. Or a spouse who is acting distant. Or excessively intru-

sive in-laws. Or it could be the town, which has a few potholes in need of

fixing. Or maybe the country: perhaps it’s a longing for peace and security,

with widespread prosperity and the budget in balance, and honest public

servants pursuing the public good. Or it might be some grander, global

challenge, like addressing global warming, coping with international ter-

rorism, or ending world poverty.

No one can be a successful leader in all these domains simultane-

ously. In most areas, we will necessarily have to follow the lead of others.

Selecting a goal, or at most several goals, and then persevering relentlessly

in their pursuit is a sine qua non for success as a transformational leader.

To illustrate the power of single-mindedness, one need only glance at

the presidency of Ronald Reagan. To some, it is a mystery how such a man

could combine the roles of leader and politician. Clark Clifford labeled

him “an amiable dunce.” Yet Reagan handily won two terms as U.S. presi-

dent and launched the conservative revolution in the United States of

aggressive pursuit of the cold war, smaller government, and lower taxes.

One key reason for Reagan’s success is that he had the single-minded focus

of a leader. He had a relatively small number of goals—defeating the

Soviet Union and reducing taxes and the size of government—and he pur-

sued them single-mindedly.

Timing will also play a role in the decisions as to which goal to pur-

sue. “Ripeness is all,” wrote Shakespeare. Launching a leadership activity

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prematurely, before it has any realistic chance of success, is one way of pre-

venting the activity from ever coming to fruition. On the other hand, per-

manently waiting for the right moment will also ensure that the change

never takes place. The challenge is to achieve the appropriate balance

between doing nothing and choosing at least some leadership domains

where progress can be made.

It is one thing to articulate a clear and inspiring goal. It is another to

embrace it. Selecting a goal will have little effect unless and until the

leader makes a whole-hearted commitment to it. It is to this issue that I

turn in Chapter Three.

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That a man may be scarce less ignorant of his own powers,

than an oyster of its pearl, or a rock of its diamond; that he

may possess dormant, unsuspected abilities, till awakened

by loud calls, or strung up by striking emergencies, is

evident from the sudden eruption of some men, out of

perfect obscurity, into public admiration, on the strong

impulse of some animating occasion, not more to the

world’s great surprise than their own.

—Edward Young1

Abraham Lincoln did not begin his presidency as a transformational

leader. In his first inaugural address, on February 23, 1861, Lincoln

stressed his intent to maintain the status quo laid down in the U.S. Con-

stitution. He was explicit in declaring that he had no intent to abolish

slavery, referring to his earlier speeches as a candidate for president:

“‘I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the insti-

tution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful

right to do so and I have no inclination to do so.’ Those who nominated

and elected me did so with full knowledge that I had made this, and many

similar declarations and had never recanted them. . . . I now reiterate

those sentiments.”

THE LEADER’S

OWN STORY

Committing to the Goal

3

”“

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Lincoln’s explicit goal was to preserve the Union. For a prudent

politician, this made perfect sense, since there was no consensus for abol-

ishing slavery. So Lincoln was assiduous in asserting that he had no such

plan. Because many influential northerners were not in favor of military

action to deal with the South, Lincoln used the outbreak of hostilities at

Fort Sumter when Congress was not in session to initiate military action.

Lincoln declared martial law, suspending the writ of habeas corpus

among other questionably legal acts. In this way, he was able to present

the seceding southern states as having launched the Civil War by prevent-

ing the federal government from implementing the Constitution.

In due course, Lincoln came to the view that the Union couldn’t be

preserved without abolishing slavery. When he assembled his cabinet on

July 22, 1862, he surprised them by reading a preliminary draft of a

proclamation promising emancipation for all slaves.

Privately, he continued to argue that his goal remained the pragmatic

one of preserving the Union. But publicly, Lincoln became a leader in a

moral cause. His plan cost him the backing of moderate Republicans—

without bringing him the full support of the radical Republicans, who

wanted a more definitive legal step unlimited in time and geography.

On December 1, 1862, he made the case for change in his Annual

Message to Congress:

We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We—even we here—hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.

In this new moral language, Lincoln the transformational leader has

emerged from the chrysalis of Lincoln the politician. In his earlier speeches,

including the first inaugural address, Lincoln had justified his actions on

instrumental, legal grounds. Now he puts forward a new vision of the

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future, based on moral grounds, something worthwhile in itself. Lincoln

asks his listeners to move beyond their limited worldviews and embrace a

different kind of future.2

The case for change became even more explicit in his Gettysburg

address on November 19, 1863, where he calls for “a new birth of free-

dom” for the nation:

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devo- tion; that we here highly resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain, that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

In his insightful book, The Eloquent President, Ronald White points

out that Lincoln was here “no longer, as in his inaugural address, defend-

ing an old Union, but proclaiming a new Union. The old Union con-

tained and attempted to restrain slavery. The new Union would fulfill the

promise of liberty, the crucial step into the future that the Founders had

failed to take.”3Lincoln thus assumes the mantle of transformational

leadership, stimulating people to want to do something different, inspir-

ing them to higher levels of aspiration and conduct.

Viewed as a leadership speech aimed at sparking change in the

immediate audience seated in front of him, the Gettysburg address had

no discernible effect. It followed an oration by Edward Everett that lasted

two hours and eight minutes. Lincoln’s address lasted only three minutes.

The audience was still dazed by Everett’s marathon performance and no

doubt expecting a much longer speech from Lincoln. The address ended

even before the official photographer could take his photograph. It is

probable that Lincoln was sitting down again even before he had got the

audience’s attention: if the speech had not been written down and

reprinted, it would have had little if any impact.

Even in print, initially the speech passed unnoticed. Most newspapers

included the text of Lincoln’s speech after Everett’s without comment. It

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was only the next day that some editors began to point to the extraordi-

nary nature of what Lincoln had said: Josiah Holland, writing in the

Springfield Republican, called it “a perfect gem,” and James Burrill Angell

wrote in the Providence Daily Journal that it was a speech “of the very

highest eloquence.”4

Meanwhile, Lincoln’s opponents criticized it viciously. The Chicago

Times wrote of its “silly, flat and dishwatery utterances.” The Harrisburg

Patriot and Union hoped that “the silly remarks of the President . . . shall

no more be repeated or thought of.”5

The opposite was of course the case. The speech had its impact

through endless repetitions and recitations in families, schoolrooms,

churches, courthouses, and legislatures, as the idea of “government of the

people, by the people, for the people” came to represent a vision of what

the United States should stand for, an idea that continues to stimulate the

desire to bring it to fruition.

Politicians as Leaders

Although it is often said that we look for leadership in our politicians, the

actual practice of modern politics has little overlap with transformational

leadership. Modern politics is characterized by a sharp focus on the

acquisition and retention of political office rather than on appealing to

people’s higher moral values and inspiring people to undertake enduring

change.

The reasons that this is so are powerful and practical: for the most

part, politicians who are not sharply focused on the acquisition and

retention of power either don’t acquire office in the first place or, if they

do manage to acquire it, don’t survive for long.

The fact is that politics has different goals, different dynamics, dif-

ferent modalities of action, and different measures of success from those

of transformational leadership. Successful politicians are the ones who

are elected and reelected. The means by which they acquire and retain

political office are different from leadership. The relevant principles are

not too different from those described by Machiavelli, some five hun-

dred years ago.

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The successful politician is one who is willing to fight, to attack the

established order and be ruthless in the pursuit of power. Those without

the stomach for such fights, who are often the best people, never make it

to high office.

The successful politician needs to be well armed, which in the modern

setting means “well funded.” Being well armed with financial resources is a

sine qua non of political success, and enables candidates to conduct the

vigorous campaign necessary for winning elections. As Machiavelli said,

“Among other ills which ensue from being disarmed is contempt.”6

Politicians must be willing to play hardball. This means going as close

to the edge of the law as is possible without actually being convicted of

illegality, and where necessary, bending the law to their own advantage.

Attack ads, the release of damaging information about opponents at the

most inopportune moment, secret charges, innuendo and rumor—these

have become the standard modus operandi of the modern politician. The

most skillful exponents do all this without leaving fingerprints: no traces

of the candidate’s hand show in the brutal tactics that are used to accom-

plish the victory.

A politician must be flexible and adjust the agenda to reflect unpre-

dictable shifts in the situation. This may mean a willingness to break

campaign promises, which in any event tend to be vague and general, in

order to preserve flexibility. This is at odds with the commitment needed

for transformational leadership—where a sharp, explicit, laser-like focus

on a worthwhile goal is paramount. A politician who tries to act as a

leader based on an unchanging goal risks being labeled as a doctrinaire

ideologue: dogmatic, impractical, stubborn, and unrealistic.

Despite the hardball tactics actually practiced to win elections, which

may involve amoral behavior like breaking one’s word or practicing char-

acter assassination of opponents, the successful politician must endeavor

to preserve a public image of being honest, compassionate, moral, and

devout.7 Often this entails using underlings to do the dirty work of get-

ting elected.

A successful politician typically pursues those issues on which there is

already a consensus in the electorate, rather than those on which people

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have to be persuaded to do something different. This is because, as

Machiavelli famously explained that the innovator “makes enemies of all

those who derived advantage from the old order and finds but lukewarm

defenders among those who stand to gain from the new one.”8 On occa-

sion, politicians may be able to find issues that have a hidden consensus

and put together new coalitions, but they tend to avoid the heavy lifting

of leadership, namely, persuading people to raise their moral sights and

agree to do something fundamentally different.

As a result, retaining power is principally about listening to the elec-

torate. “If you want to get elected, learn to speak,” said Tom Daschle, for-

mer Democratic leader in the U.S. Senate. “If you want to stay elected,

learn to listen.”9 The great shifts in power in the United States—in 1994,

from Democrat to Republican, and in 2006, from Republican to Democ-

rat—were both reactions to the abuses of the party in power and its

seeming indifference to the interests of the voters. As the journalist Matt

Bai has written, “Ruling parties and presidencies are almost never felled

by issues alone. Rather, it is the more general perception of a creeping

chaos—the sense that leaders no longer have a firm grasp on events or the

credibility to unite disparate constituencies—that causes political powers

to come undone.”10

As a result, politicians are typically ambiguous about their commitment

to change. To the extent that political candidates present themselves as “can-

didates for change,” they typically define the change either in terms of some

existing consensus or in such general terms that it is hard to know what

exactly is promised. They say, “get this country moving again” or “clean

up the mess of the previous administration” and the like. For a politician

to urge a specific change for which there is no discernible consensus is to

risk not acquiring power in the first place. Hence few successful politi-

cians make explicit commitments to specific transformational change.

It is common to criticize modern politicians for their “frequent fail-

ure to rise to the full need for leadership.”11 But should we really be sur-

prised at the lack of leadership in politics? Nothing in the terminology of

politics suggests that the people are electing “leaders.” Thus the top politi-

cian is elected to become, not a “leader,” but rather the “president,” that is

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to say, someone who presides over the body politic, without any implica-

tion of change.12

Similarly for those countries where the number one politician is

called a prime minister: a minister is someone appointed or elected to

some high office of state, especially the head of an administrative depart-

ment. The prime minister is the minister who heads the entire govern-

ment. Here again, no concept of change or leading change is inherently

built into the concept.

Equally, the members of Congress are elected to the House of Repre-

sentatives, that is, they are the people who represent their districts. Sena-

tors are elected to a body whose function is to advise and consent. Again,

nothing in the explicit language of politics suggests that political activity

has anything necessarily to do with leadership.

In practice, those who hold office—president, mayor, governor, sena-

tor, representative—have to deal with myriad issues. If they are single-

mindedly focused on a narrow set of issues as a leader, what is going to

happen to the other issues that clamor for attention?

In any event, politicians who are not leaders can perform a useful

social function by holding the body politic together. Successful politicians

contribute by setting boundaries and establishing values, norms, and reg-

ulations. They build on the status quo and hold the space in which many

different types of energy can flourish—those who pursue change as well

as those who defend the existing values.

They can invite different voices to have a say in defining problems

and solving them. They can contain conflict so that it may be resolved.

They can guide the forces of change by giving them direction, value, and

purpose, while providing a sense of stability to help frame the change

being promoted. These are not qualities to be sneezed at, even though

they are not necessarily the qualities of a transformational leader.

CEOs as Leaders

When Alan Klapmeier, who co-founded Cirrus Design, a Duluth, Min-

nesota–based manufacturer of private aircraft, went to air shows and

began telling people about a new flight panel display that made piloting

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an airplane more intuitive and safer—an innovation that he believed

would change the industry—his own board of directors tried to stop him

from introducing it. They had good reason: Klapmeier had just com-

pleted a market research study that showed that, of all the product devel-

opment ideas surveyed, a new flight panel display was the one that

elicited the least interest.

Klapmeier argued that the results of the market survey were decep-

tive: “You can’t ask a question of somebody who doesn’t understand the

question and make a decision based upon their answer. They don’t know

how good this stuff is going to be—how it will change the way they fly,

change safety, change utility. They’re just wrong.”13

In due course, Klapmeier convinced his board of directors: the inno-

vation was introduced and it turned out to be a commercial success. The

directors had done their duty to the organization and its shareholders: as

for all boards of publicly owned corporations, the decisive issue for them

was not whether the innovation was inherently worthwhile; it was the

overriding institutional preoccupation: Would it help the company’s bot-

tom line?

While traditionalists like Milton Friedman have lamented the politi-

cal necessity for publicly owned corporations to show responsiveness to

the inherent value of what they do under the heading of “corporate and

social responsibility,” even if only to fend off insurgent stakeholder cam-

paigns, strategists like Michael Porter have spotted in examples like that

of Klapmeier the possibility of competitive advantage for a corporation.

If a firm can focus its efforts on activities valuable in themselves where it

has, or can develop, an edge over its competitors, social responsibility can

become not a drag on the firm’s profitability but rather a strategic busi-

ness opportunity. Companies can do well while doing good.14

However, the fact that ingenious and courageous leaders like Klap-

meier or brilliant theorists like Porter can devise goals that are both

worthwhile and profitable doesn’t remove the inherent tension between

the pursuit of worthwhile activities and the goal of enhancing the bottom

line. In the world of publicly owned corporations, businesses tend to be

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fair-weather corporate citizens. When they are pursuing activities that are

both worthwhile and profitable, they can present themselves as good cor-

porate citizens. But when the firm faces a conflict between the two, Wall

Street insists that the bottom line take precedence. If Klapmeier’s innova-

tion had failed in the marketplace, he would have been out of a job.

As a result, leaders who single-mindedly pursue a worthwhile cause

from within a publicly owned corporation frequently find themselves

encountering abrupt involuntary severance. If they are merely managers

when the severance occurs, this really is the end: the organization turns

the page and moves on with someone else at the helm; the manager’s

tenure is inherently forgettable. With genuinely transformational leader-

ship, by contrast, severance from the institution is typically just the

beginning. Typically other leaders who have been inspired by the vision

step into the breach and carry on. Or the leaders themselves may carry on

the vision in a different institution.

Given that, in the current climate, publicly held corporations are

under continuing pressure to grow and do whatever is profitable, regard-

less of corporate purpose, it is usually easier to pursue an inherently

worthwhile purpose in a privately held corporation. Thus the fourteen

corporations discussed in Bo Burlingham’s book, Small Giants, which

are pursuing what they perceive as worthwhile goals, all found that

closely held private ownership was an important, even essential enabler.

Some owners, such as Gary Erickson of Clif Bar (a maker of organic

energy bars and other health foods), had the opportunity of making

more money by selling their company; they ultimately decided to keep

the organization private to pursue what they saw as a worthwhile pur-

pose. Private ownership can help keep the focus on a purpose, provided

of course that the shareholders agree. Where they don’t agree, then either

the shareholding or the company may have to be broken up. In the case of

Clif Bar, one of the two co-owners didn’t agree to keep the company pri-

vate, and so the other co-owner bought her out, at a cost of $65 million—

a striking example of an individual—and a company—adhering to a

worthwhile purpose.

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Speaking to the CEO

For any major change to take hold in an organization, eventually the very

top of the organization will have to support the change. How is that

accomplished? How does one communicate strange, disruptive new ideas

to people with great power and get them to listen? This is one of the

toughest leadership challenges. Often powerful people appear overbear-

ing, intimidating, with no time to listen. How can they be persuaded to

change?

People with immense power—CEOs, senior managers, presidents,

senators, representatives, whatever—all have different personalities,

styles, and approaches. Nevertheless they tend to share some common

characteristics, stemming from the nature of the burdens of office.

In discussing people with great power in this section, I’ll call them by

the generic term, “CEO,” on the understanding that what I am saying

applies to anyone with significant power, regardless of the specific job or

title.

As with all communications, the first step in communicating with

CEOs is to understand their situation. This can help overcome the ten-

dency to interpret apparently threatening behavior as aimed at you per-

sonally, rather than as the normal accompaniment of having great power.

The reality is that it’s tough being a CEO. If you put yourself in the

shoes of CEOs and understand their stories, you can begin to under-

stand their behavior. CEOs bear responsibility for an organization’s suc-

cess or failure, but many of the key determinants of success lie outside

their control. They have more power than anyone else in the organiza-

tion, but actually using that power can be counterproductive. Although

swamped with information, they have difficulty finding out what’s really

going on. They are deluged with requests for help by people both inside

and outside the organization. Worse, they’re not even the final decision

makers: they have board members scrutinizing what they do. And they

have to deal with an array of investors, shareholder advocates, regulators,

attorneys general, and nongovernmental organizations who all want a

say in how the organization manages its affairs. They are conscious of

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lurking journalists on the hunt for news and hungry for a juicy scoop. So

it should hardly come as a surprise that CEOs feel besieged and aren’t

easy to deal with.15

As a result of the pressures on them, CEOs tend to function mostly in

the intuitive mode. They have no time for slow, deliberative arguments.

They want answers—and they want them now. And they want them in

the form that they like to receive them. And they want them from people

they can trust.

The apparent aggressiveness of CEOs isn’t necessarily personal. They’re

responding to the difficult situation they face. Often they don’t have time

to reason, and so they push for action. It’s generally not their intention to

hurt anyone. Usually they’re just trying to get things done.

Learning everything you can about the CEO’s individual manners,

preferences, hopes, predilections, fears, and fetishes—in effect, under-

standing that CEO’s individual story—will give you the best chance of

making an effective communication and persuading the CEO to change.

A recent study by Gary Williams and Robert Miller of some sixteen hun-

dred executives indicates that 80 percent of top executives fall into three

groups: charismatics, skeptics, and followers, along with 20 percent who

are controllers and thinkers.16 If you can figure what sort of person you’re

dealing with, you can adjust the communication to fit that mind-set. The

authors suggest that for a charismatic, the boldness of the idea should be

featured. A risk-averse follower needs to be reassured that others are

doing it. A skeptic may need to hear the message from someone they

trust. Controllers and thinkers may need to be given more detail.

Who delivers the message may be crucial. If you are not already a

member of the CEO’s trusted inner circle, then you may be perceived as

either an opponent or part of the irrelevant periphery—not the most

promising roles from which to launch a disruptive new idea. It’s not

impossible to succeed in such a setting, but getting the CEO’s attention

will be a major challenge. Just think. If you’re seen as an opponent, then

the CEO is likely to be worried that this is a trap. If you’re viewed as part

of the periphery, then the CEO will probably not be listening at all. So it

may be easier if you can find someone who is already a member of the

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CEO’s inner circle, someone who is already trusted, to make the case, or

at least sponsor the interaction.

Attention getting with normal people is key. With the CEO, it’s

almost the whole ballgame. To get the attention of CEOs, usually the

most promising approach is to focus on issues of interest to them now.

CEOs usually won’t buy the idea unless it becomes part of themselves.

There is often no in-between—it’s either the CEO’s own idea or it’s not

worth anything.17 As noted in Chapter Five, indirect narratives can help

the idea become the listener’s own—something that’s crucial in the case

of the CEO.

Being clear on your own story is also important. It can help over-

come the feelings of awe that often arise in the powerless when they

encounter the powerful.18 You need to see that it’s the truth and authen-

ticity of your own story that gives you moral authority. Rather than try-

ing to persuade the CEO of anything, you are seeking to enable the CEO

to see hitherto hidden possibilities. It means helping the CEO view the

world and the others in it in a new and more truthful light through the

lens of a new story.

The Leader’s Own Story

Thus an important foundation of leadership is for leaders to settle on

their own story: Are they themselves ready for the challenges of leader-

ship? Are they ready to commit to the worthwhile goal? The answers to

these questions are not as obvious as they might at first seem.

Is the Leader Committed to the Goal?

The commitment I’m talking about here is not just a mental commit-

ment but a commitment of mind, body, and soul to making it happen.

Committing to a goal in this way is not a trivial undertaking. As David

Whyte notes, “A firm persuasion is a kind of self-knowledge. . . . It must

be discovered, cultivated and earned.”19

If the leaders have not achieved sufficient commitment, the goal will

seem small and even boring, as though spending energy and effort in

accomplishing it will make little difference in the overall scheme of things.

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They will find themselves beating around the bush, avoiding issues, say-

ing things they don’t really mean.

Once a commitment is made, the goal will seem larger, bolder, and

more exciting. Leaders will find themselves saying what they really mean,

speaking truth to power, sometimes saying things they didn’t know they

knew. They now have a sharp focus on the goal: the discussion focuses on

why the goal must be achieved, because it’s vital for the future.

Once the commitment is made, leaders need to fix on it like a laser

beam. They need to see it intensely, even obsessively. They feel it. They

hear it. They taste it. They smell it. It becomes part of them, their very

identity, because it is something that they are committed to make hap-

pen, come what may, whatever it takes.

Commit to Making the Change Happen

Deciding to be a leader is thus a choice we have to make. Leadership isn’t

something we can be appointed to by other people, like being named

manager. It’s an inner decision to adopt a stance, an orientation toward the

world, to see ourselves as pursuing an activity for its own sake and to set

out to induce others to do likewise. Not everyone will make this decision.

For one thing, as noted earlier, becoming a leader can be dangerous.

It can put us on a potential collision course with the powers that be,

because the traditional function of management is to prevent destabiliz-

ing change.

But leaders also face other risks. Becoming a leader can be disruptive

for the life of the leader. Leaders may have to undertake stressful new

responsibilities. They may have to stop doing things that they know about

and like doing, and start doing things they are unfamiliar with. They may

have to venture into the unknown, making mistakes and learning from

them. They may have to press ahead, knowing that previous change

efforts were unsuccessful, without any certainty of success.

Becoming a leader may lead to changes in relationships with others,

particularly those not initially supporting the change. Leaders may end up

hurting the feelings of colleagues or friends who disagree with them. They

may find themselves having to confront the fact that change sometimes

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gets sabotaged. They may have to consider at least temporarily giving up

any friends or colleagues responsible for the sabotage.

Even more painfully, leaders may get no personal recognition for

generating the change; they may even be punished for its success. Great

change agents induce strong opposition. Being a successful leader may

sometimes entail sacrificing yourself to the cause. Even if the sanctions

suffered by Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and John F. Kennedy—who

were assassinated—aren’t a serious possibility, the risk that leaders will

not get credit for sponsoring a successful change is significant. Leaders

may have to sacrifice their ego, ambition, and pride to make the change

happen.

If the change fails, the risks may be even higher. There’s a risk of los-

ing managerial perks and privileges, such as the large corner office, the

right to hire and fire, and the right to give people bonuses and promo-

tions, a nice income, vacations, health care, business class travel, and off-

site retreats at places like Pebble Beach.

In fact, committing to being a leader will sometimes be in tension

with having a career. If everything pleasurable, human, emotional, bodily,

frivolous is subordinated to one’s career, that is to say, to getting ahead in

an organization, then no psychological space is left for a thoroughgoing

commitment to change. There may be no room to be a genuine leader.

Leadership isn’t for the faint of heart. Leaders need to understand

these risks—before they enter the fray. It is open to everyone to accept the

challenge, but realistically, not everyone will do so.

Potential leaders may thus have to decide: Am I ready to tackle this

leadership challenge at this time? Some will decide no, not now. They will

decide that they don’t want to risk their career, their family, their friends,

or their financial well-being at this particular time for this particular

issue. So be it. But they should make that decision consciously, fully aware

of the implications of the decision they are making.

By contrast, when leaders make a definite commitment to some goal

that is worthwhile in itself, the world comes into sharp and thrilling

focus. Now they can say what they really believe. They can feel the rapture

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of being comfortable in their own skin, living a life that is truly their own.

It’s an opportunity to lift their game to a new level, to get beyond spin

and manipulation and diplomacy and careerism. They become their own

persons, making mind, body, actions, and values consistent.20

Making the decision to be a leader isn’t a decision to be taken lightly.

Most of the great heroes of history have hesitated when faced with the

issue of whether to proceed with leadership or not. Homer’s Odysseus

hesitated for seven years before leaving the island of Ogygia, where he was

living with the nymph Calypso. Hamlet spent forever agonizing over

whether to act or not. And Chris Vogler pictures the scene in The Call to

Adventure: “The tribe is gathered around the campfire. An elder emerges

from the smoke and points to you: ‘Our Tribe is in danger. You have been

chosen to undertake a quest. You will venture your life so that the Tribe

may go on. Do you accept the call?’”21

John Milton eloquently captures the feeling of what it’s like to decide

to lead change in his essay Areopagitica, published in November 1644,

written at the height of the English civil war, when he was making the

case for the freedom to print without a license:

Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks; methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam; purging and unscaling her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance; while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter about, amazed at what she means, and in their envious gabble would prognosticate a year of sects and schisms.22

Committing to the goal is central: immersing oneself and fixating on

the story of the change is vital. But the change itself can become problem-

atic if it is not linked to a deep understanding of the audience’s story. It is

to this issue that I now turn in Chapter Four.

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I know that you believe you understand what

you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize

that what you heard is not what I meant.

—Robert McCloskey1

On September 5, 2001, Howell Raines took over as executive editor of the

New York Times with a bold change strategy. He was a man in a hurry and

full of justifiable self-confidence.

He had a coherent, comprehensive game plan. As the man in charge

of the ancient newspaper known as the “Gray Lady,” he knew that it was

too complacent. He planned to shake it up and make it not just the

authoritative newspaper of record but exciting as well. He planned to

“raise its competitive metabolism.” The matter was urgent: unless his

game plan was implemented, he saw that the very survival of the organi-

zation was at risk.

Raines had worked out the details for implementing his plan. He

wanted more original stories on the front page, which had become “calci-

fied.” He envisaged “big stories” being covered with “overwhelming force.”

He intended the masthead—the senior editorial staff whose names appear

under the executive editor on the editorial page—to have more of a say

in shaping and coordinating coverage. He envisaged closer integration

between the print edition and the new online media. He intended the

Times to be first with the news, and to set aside its traditional cop-out: “It

isn’t news until we say it is.” He thought the newspaper should listen

MASTERING THE

AUDIENCE’S STORY

4

”“

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more attentively to the real interests of its potential readers in all age

groups and geographic areas and cover the top stories in those areas. His

aim was that “the world’s greatest newspaper” would become as good as it

could be.

He had the advantage of knowing the firm and its staff intimately. He

had worked there for more than two decades in different offices: New

York, Atlanta, Washington, and London, performing different roles as

journalist, correspondent, bureau chief, and most recently as overseer of

the editorial page.

He had the luxury of time to prepare for his assignment. He learned

of his appointment in May 2001 and was able to spend that summer get-

ting to know the newsroom, in the course of many breakfasts and lunches

with the managers and staff. Moreover, he had been preparing for this

assignment since the early 1990s. He felt as though he had come home.

He was expecting to have fun.

He had the strong backing of his boss, publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger

Jr., who had seen and liked his aggressive approach to running the edito-

rial page, and had supported him in the face of complaints from President

Clinton and Mayor Giuliani. Sulzberger not only endorsed this bold change

strategy: he told Raines to implement it quickly.

Raines was given the right to hire and fire, which he used extensively.

He was able to push aside his only rival, Bill Keller, who was given a

biweekly column and a writing assignment for the magazine. He was able

to pick key lieutenants, people who shared his view of what needed to be

done, such as Gerald Boyd as deputy managing director. He promoted

Andrew Rosenthal as assistant managing director. He named Roger Cohen

as acting foreign editor. He brought back Michael Gordon from London.

He moved Patrick Tyler to the Washington bureau to write “lead-alls”—

stories that brought together the different threads of a news story.

Fate was also kind in giving him a flying start. He took office on Sep-

tember 5, 2001, with the intent of “hunting big game, not rabbits.”2 He

had the good journalistic fortune to have the biggest story of them all—

the tragedy of 9/11—occur only six days later. It was the perfect opportu-

nity to implement his strategy of covering a story with “overwhelming

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force.” The newspaper won universal recognition for dominating every

aspect of that story: the following year, the Times was rewarded with an

unprecedented seven Pulitzer prizes for its work. Thus in his first year, he

was able to show “that a paper that was being driven like an elderly Buick

had the horsepower to run at Grand Prix speed.”3

Raines thus had every managerial advantage. But only a few months

later, he and his deputy, Gerald Boyd, were dismissed, with the change

strategy in tatters. The publisher decided to placate large segments of the

staff by promising to ease up on Raines’s strategy of “more, better, faster”

and denied that there was any complacency at the Times. “Never has been,”

Sulzberger said. “Never will be.”4

The catalyst for Raines’s dismissal after only nineteen months on the

job was the revelation that a young reporter—Jayson Blair—had been

found guilty of plagiarism and lying.

But the misdeeds of Jayson Blair were hardly Raines’s fault. As execu-

tive editor, he had no way of knowing, and no cause to be consulted

about, Blair’s rapid promotion from trainee to reporter, his lack of pro-

fessionalism, or his frequent errors. Once the problems were spotted,

Raines had insisted on complete disclosure.

The underlying reason for Raines’s dismissal is that he had “lost the

newsroom.”5 He had failed as a leader to win the hearts and minds of the

staff on the New York Times to implement his bold change strategy.

Why?

In Raines’s failure, many factors were at play, some of which he him-

self now recognizes. He should have listened more. He should have done

something about the look of “an angry hawk” that came across his face

when he talked about something important. He should have noticed that

his aggressive management style intimidated people. He should have rec-

ognized that his constant use of military metaphors and his frequent ref-

erences to dictatorial football coach Bear Bryant weren’t helping. And

perhaps his lack of an Ivy League background also counted against him.6

But more important than these tactical issues was the fact that Raines

failed in the central task of leadership, namely, stimulating a desire in the

managers and staff of the New York Times to want to become a very differ-

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ent kind of organization. He felt intensely the necessity of expanding news-

paper readership and making the newspaper more profitable. Yet Raines

was unable to communicate to the managers and staff why their lives as

journalists would be better if they started to conduct themselves differently.

Managerial Action Is Less Effective Than We Realize

Raines’s strategy was apt and he aggressively applied the tools of manage-

ment to implement it. But what Raines discovered, like most CEOs, was

that the tools of management are not merely ineffective: they actively get

in the way of transformational leadership intended to inspire deep change.

One of the hardest things managers like Raines have to learn is that

neither the sincerity of their intentions nor the soundness of their ideas

can guarantee that their behavior will be perceived as constructive or

helpful. The cultural, psychological, and political complications of any

power position like that of top management mean that the situation is

never innocent. When managers assume that the meanings they intend

with their actions are inevitably the ones that their audiences will take

from them, they are in for the kind of surprise that Raines encountered.

The first right of a manager is to give instructions and be obeyed.

Managers speak as the lords of the world, magisterially, insisting on the

obedient silence of their staff, obliging them to listen. Raines instituted a

daily meeting of the masthead editorial staff and issued orders as to what

was to be done to put together the next edition of the paper. However, the

orders were often perceived as interference in the intellectual integrity of

the journalists and the section editors.

Managers generally have the right to a corner office. But that right

doesn’t necessarily help connect managers with the people they need to

lead. In fact, it often takes managers physically and emotionally further

away from them. One of the grievances against Raines was that he stayed in

his corner office and didn’t wander round the newsroom and have conver-

sations with the staff. The area where staff attended the morning masthead

meeting became known as “the DMZ,” because it separated the newsroom

from where the masthead editors had their offices. The physical layout of

the office space reinforced the psychological chasm that developed.

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Raines was able to exercise the power of the hierarchical manager to

hire the right people. According to Jim Collins in From Good to Great, the

first thing a leader should do is to hire the right people. Raines followed

the advice and placed his own people in key positions. But for the most

part he inherited the staff that he had. And for the people he did select,

Raines was accused of playing favorites: he defended his moves by saying

that these were the “best people.” However, this simply offended the staff

even further by implying that they were not the best people, thus further

undermining support for his changes.

Raines also had the right to fire people and he moved aggressively. But

did that help him become a leader and get people to change? Firing peo-

ple usually ends up by keeping the people who know how to work the sys-

tem, who know how to play organizational politics—the people with

connections, the flatterers, the people who fit into the existing way of

doing things, the people who tell the bosses what they want to hear. It was

thus no accident that a flatterer like Jayson Blair flourished: he delivered

exactly the kind of graphic story that Raines was demanding. The prob-

lem was that Blair’s stories weren’t true.

Then there are incentives. Managers get the right to give bonuses or

promotions, or what plain folks might call bribes. And if managers do

that, people may go through the motions of doing what they’re told, but

usually they do it unenthusiastically and grudgingly. They tend to feel

(and sometimes say), “If we keep our heads down, maybe this too shall

pass.” Moreover, incentives lead to gaming the system—the nemesis of

enterprise ranking, rating, and reward systems since time immemorial. At

best, incentives pick up the stragglers, but they don’t inspire people. They

don’t create enthusiastic champions. They don’t create the energy, the zest

and enthusiasm needed for sustained change.

Hierarchical managers may have other resources to bring to the dis-

cussion and can get into a bargaining mode with staff under their jurisdic-

tion. The problem with bargaining is that it induces a narrow, cramped,

legalistic approach to issues. Negotiating for better performance doesn’t

spark the generous enthusiasm that is willing to go the extra mile without

any reward. And managers find that they quickly run out of rewards to

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offer for all the things that need to be done to get superior performance.

At the Times, Raines had immense power but he didn’t have enough

rewards to offer for all the changes he planned.

So the attributes of hierarchical leaders—ordering, assigning office

space, hiring, firing, offering incentives and disincentives—don’t neces-

sarily help leaders connect with people and do the most important thing

that genuine leaders have to do: instill in people the sustained desire to do

something fundamentally different.

Even when managers reach out and act in ways they think of as dem-

ocratic and respectful, like the many preparatory lunches that Raines held

with staff at the Times in the summer of 2001, the behavior can be seen as

threatening and manipulative.

Audiences Are More Difficult Than They Used to Be

The irony is that once upon a time, the kind of things Raines was doing as

CEO at the Times would probably have worked.

Once upon a time, people lived and worked where they were born. As

a result, they shared common assumptions, beliefs, and values. The world

was static—nothing much changed. Men had jobs. Women stayed at

home and raised the kids. Within organizations, communication was

top-down: people had little choice but to accept the word of those in

authority, which in any case was more of the same. A few owners of prop-

erty had control. Bottom-up communication hardly existed: in a static

world, there was little need or possibility of persuading one’s higher-ups

to change. Politics was run by insiders: the task of persuading the popu-

lace to accept whatever had been decided was more or less an after-

thought. In the marketplace, choices were few: oligopolies ruled. In the

family, the parents’ word was the law. In this world, those in authority

were in charge. Leadership was hardly needed. By and large people did

what they were told. Top-down command-and-control methods of com-

munication generally got the job done.

That world is now a distant memory. For one thing, today’s audiences

are much more difficult than they used to be. Managers are dealing, day

in and day out, with people who are tired of being talked at, of receiving

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choreographed, scripted messages, the latest directive. People are fed up

with being commanded, controlled, compelled, directed, pushed, pulled,

bullied, and browbeaten. They expect to be treated as adults. They want

to be talked to as intellectual equals. And in the modern economy, the

workers often have some control over the key means of production—

knowledge—so their demands can’t always be ignored.

Burgeoning diversity also makes the communication challenge even

tougher. It’s amusing to read the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle and

find that his notion of a diverse audience is one comprising middle-aged

men from Athens and Sparta.7 By modern standards, those audiences look

remarkably homogeneous. Now the audience in the workplace or the

marketplace comprises not just Athenian and Spartan men of the same

age, but people of different gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, life-

style, age group, and geographical location. Common assumptions, values,

and beliefs are the exception rather than the rule. How do you connect

with people when they have different views about virtually everything?

Basic Change Is More Disruptive Than We Expect

And the kind of changes we’re asking people to undertake these days are

much bigger than anything we used to consider possible.

When Howell Raines asked the staff of the New York Times to start

acting very differently—more rapidly, more collaboratively across organi-

zational boundaries, covering new subjects, for new kinds of readers, with

a new priority to online information, with a new priority to timeliness—

he was asking for major changes in behavior. The managers and reporters

at the New York Times had a huge stake in the status quo, which was

familiar and comforting. It wasn’t perfect, but at least it was stable and

safe. There were grievances or irritations, but compared to the terrors of

launching into the strange new world that Howell Raines was describing,

the status quo looked like a rational, sensible, secure place.

The fact is that leaders often underestimate what they are asking peo-

ple to do when they propose basic change.

Just think. In 1993, when Lou Gerstner took over IBM, the quintes-

sential computer hardware firm, and told staff that in future they were

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going to make a large part of their profits from services by integrating dif-

ferent computer systems, that implied a whole lot of people acting very

differently from the past. For those who had been working at IBM for a

long time, their very identity was bound up in working for a hardware

firm. So when Gerstner came and started telling them that now they were

going to be working for a firm that provided services, he was asking them

not just to do a different job but also to assume a new role, in effect to

take on a new identity. That was a very large thing to ask. Who was Lou

Gerstner to tell them what sort of a people they should be?

Or in 2001, when Jeff Immelt came to GE, the quintessential process-

driven organization, and told these process-driven people that they were

part of a “green corporation” that was going to put “imagination to

work,” this meant far more than that people would take on different

work—it implied assuming a new role and new values. In effect, he was

asking the staff of GE to become different kinds of people. That was a

large thing to ask.

Leaders Must Understand the Audience’s Story

If leaders are to meet these more difficult challenges and succeed in

inspiring enduring enthusiasm for more basic changes in more difficult

audiences, they need to set aside any idea of imposing their will or mov-

ing their listeners to a predetermined position. The task is rather one of

enabling the audience to see possibilities that they have hitherto missed.

It means creating the capability in the audience to view for themselves the

world and their relations with others in a new and more truthful light. It

involves pointing a way forward for people who find themselves—for

whatever reason—cornered by the current story that they are living. It

entails enabling the audience to recognize a new, different, and more

promising story that they could be living, which they for some reason

have not visualized up till now.

If leaders are going to have any success in prompting the audience to

discover this new story and imagine a different kind of future, they first

need to understand the current story that their listeners are living. What’s

going on in that world? How does it hang together? Why does the world

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that people are currently living in make sense? What is it about their atti-

tudes, beliefs, hopes, dreams, and fears that makes that world fit together

in a way that is broadly plausible? There may be some tensions between

different parts of their worldview—unrealized dreams, dissatisfactions,

inconsistencies between actions and values. But overall, the world coheres.

Why? How?

On the surface, this world will consist of the familiar, observable,

routine, predictable activities of the human animal. But below this sur-

face of routine and predictable activity is a realm of deeper feelings—of

the joy and exhilaration of being alive, of the desire of loving and being

loved, of the pain of not realizing deep ambitions, of the dilemmas of bal-

ancing personal goals with those of others, of a looming sense of mortal-

ity. It is this deeper world that is the source from which all enduring

enthusiasm for change will come. And it is this world that leaders must

understand.

Since this world is not directly observable, how do leaders get to know

it and understand it? To a certain extent, they must proceed by surmise, by

guesswork, by hunch, by inference. They must fathom it like an artist.

They question. They explore. They intuit. They wander. They mingle.

They live in it. They listen. They watch. They exercise the patience of a

hunter tracking a wild animal. They get to know the habitat. They become

a part of that world. They learn what that world values and scorns. If lead-

ers probe with patience, persistence, and skill, they will eventually find

within that world the dignity, the humor, the humanity, the order, and the

energy that will laugh at boundaries and find a path through obstacles to a

new future.

This is not a matter of gathering data about that world, analyzing it,

calculating the percentage of time spent on this or that activity, or doing a

quantitative survey. It’s not about observing people as a scientist or

voyeur, although such data-gathering may provide useful inputs.

It’s a matter of imaginatively reaching out and getting inside the sub-

jective world of the people who need to change and getting a sense of

what it is like living in that world, so that the leaders feel its logic and

power and order and compelling harmony. They are drawn into a rela-

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tion with that world. As Martin Buber might say, these people cease to be

an “It” and become a “You.”8 It’s a matter of getting to understand their

story.

If leaders succumb to the fundamental attribution error and think of

their followers as obstacles, as enemies, as resisters, as opponents, as mal-

contents, or as stupid or obstinate or irresponsible or ill-willed, the risk of

a disconnect will be significant.

So leaders need to understand the world of their listeners in all its

peculiarity, its strangeness, its stubborn differences. The best—and perhaps

the only—way to do that is to reconstruct the story the listeners perceive

themselves to be living. As psychologist Dan McAdams says,

People carry with them and bring into conversation a wide range of self-stories, and these stories are nested in larger and overlapping stories, creating ultimately a kind of anthology of the self. Although no single story may encompass all of the many narratives that any given person can use to make sense of his or her life, some stories are larger and more integrative than others and come closer, therefore, to func- tioning as identity formats for a given person. Thus identity may not be captured in a single grand narrative for each person, but identity nonetheless is accomplished through narrative.9

We usually spend a great deal of time thinking about what story we

are going to tell. But the hard part of communication is often figuring out

what story the audience is currently living. If we are to make the imagina-

tive leap and get inside the listeners’ stories, we need to have a very differ-

ent relationship from traditional hierarchical managers. Instead of

talking down to people we need to talk with people. We need to be con-

ducting conversations with the people we hope to lead.

Through conversation, we can learn what’s going on in our listeners’

world, and figure out what story might be able to inspire new enthusi-

asm. This will require active interchange with them, rather than detached

observation. Detached observation operates as a distancing device. When

we are trying to connect with the people we lead, distancing is the last

thing we need. Through the mutually shared experience of exchanging

stories we discover what’s going on in our listeners’ world.

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Finding and Encouraging New Leaders

In the course of such conversations, CEOs may also be able to find poten-

tial leaders within the organization who are already evangelizing and

implementing needed change.

When Larry Prusak and Tom Davenport examined how large organi-

zations actually succeeded in implementing major innovations, they

found that the impetus for change usually didn’t come from the CEO at

all.10 Usually it was people in the middle of the hierarchy, who, often

without any formal managerial mandate, became the evangelists for

changes that were eventually adopted by the CEO, just as Allard and

Sinofsky became evangelists at Microsoft in 1993 for change that was

eventually endorsed by Bill Gates in his 1995 Tidal Wave memorandum.

Prusak and Davenport call these mid-level evangelists for change

“idea practitioners.” In case after case, in companies like Dell Computer,

Xerox, Johnson & Johnson, Intel, Hewlett Packard, Bristol-Myers Squibb,

Eli Lilly, Société BIC, W.L. Gore and Associates, and the Canadian Imper-

ial Bank of Commerce, the driving force behind new ideas was not the

CEO but an idea practitioner—someone below the very top of the hierar-

chy who believed passionately in the innovation and was eventually able

to win support from the hierarchy.

If CEOs can find the people in the organization who are already

doing things differently, they can endorse their efforts and encourage

others to join them. It will save them the trouble of having to inspire new

leaders.11

Raines’s Mistake

So what should Howell Raines have done? Raines’s communications with

his staff were mainly one-way tellings rather than two-way conversations.

He didn’t do enough about “the look of an angry hawk” that came across

his face when he was talking about something important. He paid inade-

quate attention to the way the staff didn’t say much at the lunches he held

in the summer of 2001, which weren’t real conversations. As a result, he

never got to understand their stories.

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Instead it was Raines who was formulating his view of the future and

taking the decisions about who were the best people and which news to

give prominence to. He didn’t draw on the prodigious talents of the staff

at the New York Times to contribute to the task of inventing the future. It

was Raines who flexed his managerial muscles and made decisions in a

hurry. In so doing, he killed motivation by not engaging in a real dialogue

with the section heads and staff so that they could contribute to the

future. So when a crisis came, he found he had “lost the newsroom” and

had no way to get it back. Like so many of his peers, Raines had been so

busy being a manager he never got round to being a leader. He was so

busy imposing his vision on his followers that it never became theirs.

Raines needed the staff of the New York Times to realize that there

was a new, a different, a more promising story that they could be living,

which they for whatever reason had not visualized before. But without

understanding their current story, how could he know what new story

would energize them? How could he inspire them to adopt this different

way of looking at the world?

Thus while Howell Raines was complaining about “attitudes of enti-

tlement and smug complacency that pervade the paper” and lamenting

that “routine work, too, is praised as excellent . . . and sloppy work is

accepted as adequate,” he was unable to figure out what would imbue

these people with new enthusiasm.12 For Raines to have been able to craft

a message that resonated with those people, he would have needed a

deeper understanding of their story.

Understanding the story of the change idea and the audience’s story

will require a certain degree of narrative intelligence. What is narrative

intelligence? How does one acquire it? What are its elements? How does it

relate to other ways of changing people’s minds? It is to these issues that I

now turn.

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How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!

–Jane Austen1

On the evening of Sunday, January 24, 1965, a twenty-four-year-old doc-

tor was driving along a two-lane country road from Sydney to Goulburn.

It had been a sunny, pleasant day for him in Sydney, relaxing by the swim-

ming pool with his mother, sister, and brother. Now he was returning to

work in a hospital in Goulburn, his first assignment since qualifying as a

doctor. It was early evening, and as he drove along, the olive green fields

of the Australian countryside were silently dissolving into night. Traffic

was light that evening, and he had no particular reason to pay attention

to the car that was traveling toward him from the opposite direction. Its

headlights were on, and it was easily visible. But when the car was only a

few yards away, he suddenly realized that a second car was overtaking it at

high speed so that there were now two cars heading straight for him in

parallel on the two-lane road. To avoid a head-on collision, he swerved off

the main road onto the gravel shoulder. However, just at this point in the

road, there was a deep concrete culvert. His car fell into the culvert, struck

a cement wall, and came to an instant stop. The young doctor had been

wearing a seat belt, but the collision was too much. His aorta collapsed on

impact, and he died instantly.

CULTIVATING

NARRATIVE

INTELLIGENCE

5

”“

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The young doctor was my brother. Naturally, his death was a shock to

our family—my parents and my sister and me. The fact that the life of a

young man, with everything still ahead of him, could be snuffed out so

pointlessly was horrible for us to contemplate. The unexpectedness was

devastating.

My mother experienced deep grief for months. But gradually, as she

emerged from her despair, she began to think about the issue of traffic

safety. She discovered that many young people were being killed on the

roads in Australia. Most of the deaths were needless. Safety belts were not

compulsory. Speed limits were not respected. Drunk driving was a wide-

spread problem. Many of the roads were not constructed with safety in

mind, with hidden concrete culverts waiting to trap unsuspecting drivers

in an emergency. Nothing could be done about my brother’s death, but,

my mother began to realize, something could be done about the lives

being needlessly lost on Australian roads.

For the next decade, she devoted herself to traffic safety. It became

her passion. She was unstoppable in lobbying to introduce legislation for

compulsory seat belts: tirelessly advocating measures to make driving

safer, preparing materials, making statements, badgering politicians—no

effort was too much.

In this way, a real-world event changed my mother’s mind. Although

before the accident she had not shown the slightest interest in traffic

safety, the loss of her son caused her to become a champion, a leader in a

field that desperately needed champions. For the rest of the family—my

father, my sister, myself—the event was shocking but not directly life-

changing. We were more aware of highway safety than we had been, but

we didn’t spend the rest of our lives directly dedicated to the issue.

For me, the accident had an unexpected effect. At the time, I was work-

ing as an articled clerk in a corporate law office in Sydney by day, while pur-

suing my law degree at Sydney University by night. The death of my

brother did cause me to think: What am I doing with my life? Life is brief.

If I were to die now, would I consider my life to have been worthwhile?

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In the ensuing months, one incident brought things into focus. In

our law firm, I was assigned to help on a case that was going to trial.

Our client was one of the most disagreeable people I’ve ever met. She

was a woman of middle years—morose, critical, intolerant, and unpleas-

ant in the extreme. Nothing was ever right, and she let everyone know

that: it was too bright, too dark, too hot, too cold, too dry, too humid, too

quiet, too loud. She wore dark glasses at all times. She was the daughter of

an extremely wealthy man who had died leaving a reasonable sum to her,

but he had left most of his fortune in trust to promote the cause of a sys-

tem of shorthand that he had invented. She had engaged our law firm to

prove that her father had been mentally incompetent when he drew up

the deed that deprived her of most of his wealth.

As I read through the old man’s letters and papers, it was evident that

he had been far from insane. I found occasional non sequiturs in his writ-

ings, as one might expect in any elderly gentleman. But he was lucid about

his daughter’s character. It seemed that he had carefully considered the

issue on the merits. He had asked his lawyer to draw up a suitable trust.

On the day of the signing, the two men had gone to lunch. They discussed

the pros and cons over the meal. They then came back to the lawyer’s

office, and the deed was signed. By all accounts, the old man’s demeanor

was calm and deliberate. There was nothing impetuous in his actions.

The lawyer had no personal interest in the matter. The old man gave every

sign of knowing what he wanted to do. To me, his actions in respect of his

estate were practically a guarantee of his sanity.

The law partner in our firm told our client that her lawsuit was hope-

less. But she wanted her day in court. Since the legal system is available to

anyone who feels aggrieved and is able to pay the legal bills, we continued

with the lawsuit, but it was obviously mission impossible.

I joined the case just as it was going to trial, which was expected to

last a number of days. Since I was an articled clerk, nobody asked my

opinion about the merits of what we were doing. My job was to schlep

bags, sort documents, and do minor research.

In the middle of the trial, however, I happened to see a copy of the deed

by which the old man had disinherited his daughter. I glanced through it

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and saw at once that it had a technical flaw: the trust was invalid under an

obscure and complex English law known as the Rule Against Perpetuities.

The law had been put in place to prevent anyone from tying up property

in trust indefinitely. The trust established by the deed exceeded the limits

set down by law. The law didn’t simply shorten the trust to a period that

was legal: instead it invalidated the trust entirely. As a result, the old man’s

wealth would flow to his daughter rather than to the cause that he himself

had chosen. When I pointed the technical flaw in the document to the

supervising partner, there was elation at the prospect of winning the case,

along with embarrassment at not having spotted it earlier.

It was hailed by all as a brilliant legal victory, although the insight was

primarily due to the fact that I was studying this obscure branch of the

law at the time, and so the subject was fresh in my mind.

While I was pleased to receive kudos for winning a difficult case, I

was also troubled. I had entered the legal profession with two hazy ideas.

One was an admiration for the brilliant legal victory of the lawyer played

by Charles Laughton in Witness for the Prosecution. The other was a dif-

fuse concern for social justice. Now that I had actually won a case that no

one expected us to win, I discovered that I wasn’t triumphant but dis-

mayed. If I spent my life doing this, I thought, would I not be devoting

my life to perverting justice rather than serving it?

With my brother’s death still fresh in my mind and the question of

how to spend my life still preoccupying me, I decided to get out of the

law, but to do what? I had no viable alternative at the time. So I kept on

working to complete my qualifications as a lawyer, but all the time I was

looking around for something different.

In due course, I completed my law degree and qualified as a lawyer in

Sydney, but still no alternative had turned up. So I went to Oxford Uni-

versity in England to earn a postgraduate degree in law. I was getting even

more deeply involved in the legal profession, but I was always on the

lookout for something worthwhile.

Then one day in Oxford, I overheard a conversation among some fel-

low students about interesting jobs at an organization called the World

Bank that helped developing countries deal with poverty. It was no more

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than that. Just an odd comment, overheard in the common room in Oxford.

At the time, I had never heard of the World Bank, and I had given no

thought to a career in international development. But the conversation was

intriguing, and so I began to find out all I could about the field. I learned

that the World Bank was an international organization that lent money to

help developing countries solve their economic problems. It was actively

looking to recruit young professional people. So I wrote to it offering my

services, and after interviews in London and Paris, I was duly offered a

position. Thus began my thirty-one-year career in the World Bank.

What led me to change my mind and leave the legal profession and

devote a large portion of my life to international development? In my

case, the final trigger was a seemingly insignificant event: an odd com-

ment about interesting jobs at the World Bank. The comment would

probably have had no effect, however, were it not for the two previous

events: first, my brother’s death, which had prompted me to reflect on the

meaning of my life, and then the dismay I felt at winning a legal victory

that my client didn’t deserve to win. All three events led to a process of

reflection that led to the change.

Why Do People Change Their Minds?

Understanding why people change their minds is central to leadership. Why

do we decide to devote our lives to one thing rather than another? Why do

we decide to become champions of one cause and not another?

As I look at my mother’s decision to devote a decade of her life to the

cause of highway safety or my own decision to devote a good part of my

life to international development, I can see that we didn’t sit down and

make a rational analysis of all the possible things that we could do with

our lives, and then use that calculus to decide on a course of action.

Rather, our eyes lighted on some particular course of action that caught

our attention, and then the reasons why that course of action made sense

came quickly.

In fact, people change their minds in three ways—by experience, by

observation, and by symbolic learning. They follow the same routes that

honeybees use to learn.

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Actual Experience

Our actual experience of an event can change our minds, often because

the emotions associated with it cause it to have a greater prominence in

our lives than it otherwise might. An experience associated with strong

emotion will receive more attention while it is occurring, will be remem-

bered more easily and longer than unemotional experiences, and is more

likely to have an effect on subsequent decision making.5

WHY HONEYBEES CHANGE THEIR MINDS

Honeybees follow the same three routes of learning as human beings. Honeybees learn by experience. A single bee will visit different

flowers in the morning and, if there is sufficient attraction and reward in a particular kind of flower, she will make visits to that type of flower for most of the day, unless the plants stop producing reward or weather conditions change.

Honeybees also learn by observation. In experiments, bees have been observed to enter a simple maze with a choice between two paths. One path, which leads to the food reward, is marked with the same color that is used at the entrance to the maze, while the other is marked with a different color. Bees learn to choose the correct path and update their knowledge when there is a change in the marker.2

Although it is sometimes suggested that animals can only learn by directly experiencing or observing an event, in fact honeybees can also learn through symbolic communication.3 Bees communicate what they have learned about the source of food and thus recruit other worker bees of the hive to forage in the same area. The communication takes place by means of a strange dance, called the waggle-dance, that honeybees perform when they return to the hive after a successful foraging trip. The nectar-laden bee dances on the comb in a circular pattern, occasionally crossing the circle in a zigzag or waggle pattern. The phenomenon was described by Aristotle in 330 B.C., in his History of Animals. In 1973, Karl von Frisch was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work showing that the runs and turns of the dance were correlated to the distance and direction of the food source from the hive.4

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So it was for me. When I experienced what it was like be a lawyer and

win a difficult case, I found that I didn’t feel triumphant in the way that

watching Charles Laughton in Witness for the Prosecution had led me to

expect. Instead, I felt dismay at having contributed to injustice. So I con-

cluded that the legal profession was not for me. In due course, this con-

tributed to a decision to do something different—to pursue international

development. The fact that my actual experience of working in the World

Bank largely corresponded to my expectations led me to stay on this track.

Observed Experience

We don’t have to actually experience real-life events to learn from them:

simply observing them can cause the same emotional effect as experienc-

ing them. In the public arena, 9/11 changed the way many people viewed

terrorism, in the same way that Pearl Harbor in 1941 changed the way

that the United States viewed the threat of Japan and the ongoing world

war. My mother and I didn’t have to be in a traffic accident ourselves to

grasp the impact. Merely observing the traffic accident of someone close

to us was enough to shift the course of our lives.

Symbolic Learning

Human beings don’t have to go through the complicated steps of the

waggle-dance of the honeybee to communicate their learning. They have

developed a symbolic means of communication, namely language, that

allows for the acquisition of the emotional properties of an experience

without needing to have the experience or observe it in person. The phys-

iological reaction of the body to symbolic learning can be similar to that

of undergoing or observing the experience itself.6

An idea may be introduced to us through language, either by hearing

about it from another person or by self-generating the idea ourselves, or a

combination of the two.

But the impact of an idea communicated symbolically is usually not as

powerful as direct experience. It is one thing to know about traffic accidents

in general. It is quite another to go through the experience of inspecting

the wreck of your brother’s crushed car and having to identify his body

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in the morgue. As William James said: “An impression can be so exciting

emotionally as almost to leave a scar upon the cerebral tissues.”7

Thus in my mother’s case, her observed experience of the death of

her son in a senseless traffic accident made a deep impression on her as to

how dangerous highways can be. The emotional scar left by the experi-

ence led over time to her becoming a passionate advocate for greater traf-

fic safety. In an intellectual sense, she didn’t learn anything new from the

accident: she already knew that people were killed in traffic accidents. It

took the directly observed experience of her son’s death to grasp the full

significance of those facts. And so she became an advocate for road safety.

In my case, the combination of direct experience (of actual work in a

law firm), observed experience (the death of my brother), and symbolic

learning (the casual comment about jobs in the World Bank) led to my

spending a large part of my life devoted to international development.

Getting Other People to Change Their Minds

Up to now I’ve been talking about how people decide for themselves to

change their minds. How does this apply to getting other people to

change? How do we persuade other people to do something different, not

just on a one-time basis but passionately, so that they’re willing to make

fundamental changes to their lives, enthusiastically and with gusto? When

it comes to getting people to change their minds, the same three routes

are the ones available.

Changing Minds Through Direct or Observed Learning

The more immediately we can involve people in an actual or observed

event, the more experiential the learning can be, the more likely it is going

to have an impact on them.

As managers, we may be able to change the experiences that people

have or observe and so contribute to changing people’s minds. This might

include acting as role models, so that we embody the behavior that we are

trying to induce. It could involve conversations that create interactive expe-

riences that may nudge people to adopt new points of view. It could con-

cern study tours that we can arrange, broadening people’s experience: visits

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to other people or organizations that are already implementing a change

we are seeking to introduce can give people a vivid sense of what’s

involved. It may mean role-playing exercises and simulations, in which

people get to experience what it is like to be acting differently: simula-

tions can provide much more frequent feedback than real-life experience;

when supported by coaching, they can help participants take corrective

action to overcome their cognitive biases.8 It could involve quick proto-

typing, which can enable people to experience a roughly improvised ver-

sion of a new product so that they can get the feel of what it is like to use

it.9 Training can also provide direct experience, by including practice for

people in trying out the envisaged change in behavior.

As parents and teachers, we may have a significant influence on the

kinds of experiences that our children or students have or observe.

Exposing them to healthy, joyful, energizing experiences is a continuing

leadership challenge. The role models that we embody as parents and

teachers are observed experiences that can have a significant influence on

the kinds of adults they become. The kinds of conversations we have with

our children may have a profound influence on the way they think.

Active experiential learning—either experienced or observed—has

several virtues. For one thing, it involves the emotions, and so has a

chance of playing a significant role in people’s lives. For another, it allows

the participants themselves to make up their own minds, not merely

absorb something imposed on them, which increases the chance that it

will become part of their own life story, their own passion. And studies

show that experiential learning is more effective than passive learning.10

In terms of leadership, the limitation of experiential learning is that

often leaders are in a situation where they lack the power to change other

people’s actual experiences. As a result, much of the burden of chang-

ing people’s minds inevitably falls on the use of language to persuade

people to change.

Persuading People to Change Through Language

We have four main ways to go about persuading people to change by way of

language, as laid out in Table 5.1. One is by giving people abstract reasons.

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A second is by giving people indirect cues or rules of thumb as to why they

should change. A third is by involving people directly in a story. And the

fourth is by inducing people themselves to generate a new story. I discuss

each of these methods, examining their various strengths and weaknesses.

Appeals to Reason The traditional approach to persuasion is the royal

road of reason. Give people reasons and they will do what you say. In the

modern world, this is the default assumption about how to persuade peo-

ple to change. The approach has a long lineage going back to ancient

Greece. It was the pride and joy of intellectual giants like Plato, Descartes,

and Kant.11 The essence of this approach: “To obtain the best results,

emotion should be kept out: rational processing must be unencumbered

by passion.”12

The approach has a number of advantages. It is honest. It is open. It

isn’t manipulative. It ties in with the idea that human beings should be

rational in their decision making.13

But when it comes to inspiring enduring enthusiasm for changing

behavior, it is worse than ineffective: it can be counterproductive.

Research shows that when people are presented with reasons to change

their behavior in a fundamental way, the confirmation bias kicks in. As

discussed in Chapter One, in difficult, skeptical audiences, the emotional

brain tends to dismiss or reinterpret reasons for change so that they pres-

ent no threat to preexisting points of view. People become more

entrenched in their current viewpoint, not less.

Even when reasons change opinions, they don’t necessarily lead to

action. For instance, the field of research on changing life-threatening

TABLE 5.1 Methods of Persuading People to Change Their Minds

Abstract Narrative

Direct and explicit

Indirect and implicit

Appeals to reason through detailed evidence and arguments

Appeals to intuition, through cues, signs and heuristics, and manipulative tricks

Narratives in which the object is to have the listener live the story as fully and movingly as possible

Narratives in which the object is to stimulate a new story in the mind of the listener

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behavior related to HIV infection has offered a perfect laboratory for a

rigorous examination of what works and what doesn’t work when it

comes to changing behavior. An exhaustive review of 354 separate inter-

ventions from 1985 to 2003 aimed at increasing condom use found no

significant increase in condom use from abstract reasons alone. It was

only when appeals to reason were combined with more active approaches

that any significant change in behavior was observed.14

Appeals to Intuition The fact is that most decisions made by human

beings aren’t made on the basis of conscious reasoning. They are based

on intuitive thinking. Intuitive thinking is fast, automatic, effortless, asso-

ciative, natural, and often barely conscious. By contrast, the operations of

reasoning are slow, serial, deliberate, and effortful. It’s true that intuitive

thinking is prone to a set of cognitive biases that are difficult to eliminate

or even modify, like the confirmation bias or the fundamental attribution

error, but for most decisions, most of the time, intuition is good enough.

Efficiency is more important than accuracy. In fact, if we were to try to

apply conscious reasoning to every decision we had to make, we would

never get out of bed in the morning, let alone get anything done.

Intuition operates by using more rapid pathways based on context

and similarity rather than the conscious use of logic and evidence. It effi-

ciently incorporates emotions and feelings. Intuition, suffused with

emotion, points out things we should quickly focus on in order to take

action. It guides attention and keeps us focused on things to do and

things to avoid.

The incentives and disincentives of the traditional workplace also

function as cues for decision making. “Do this and you’ll get a bonus.”

“Do that and your career is over.” These cues don’t invite people to exam-

ine the reasons why this makes sense or that doesn’t: instead, they aim to

invoke an intuitive decision to do what the system rewards and avoid

what the system punishes.

The fact that intuition is prone to a number of biases means that it is

apt to be exploited by those who want us to change our minds.15

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• Hype: Multiple voices exaggerating the virtues or benefits of some-

thing can cause us to pay attention to it and have a more positive

view of it than we otherwise would.

• Halo effect: The perception of one kind of trait can lead us to infer

the presence of similar traits. Attractive people are often judged as

having a more desirable personality and more skills than someone

of average appearance. Celebrities are used to endorse products that

they have no expertise in evaluating.

• Spin: The offering of positive interpretations of events may cause us

to have a more positive understanding of what is going on than is

warranted by the facts alone.

• Bait and switch: If people agree to do something, they are more likely

to honor that commitment, even if the incentive or motivation is

removed after they have already agreed. For example, in car sales,

unexpectedly raising the price at the last moment can be effective

because the buyer has already decided to buy.

• Groupthink: People will do things that they see other people are

doing. In a bookstore, we pay attention to bestsellers because other

people have bought the book. This phenomenon is commonly used

in the marketing of products, as with customer testimonials.

• Imposition of authority: People tend to be submissive toward

authority figures. The Milgram experiments in the 1950s showed that

participants were willing to apply apparently lethal electric shocks to

subjects on the instructions of those in charge. The politics of war

shows how easy it is for governments to pressure people into

supporting military action.

• Celebrity pressure: People are more easily persuaded by other people

that they like or admire. If we like Tiger Woods, we may be inclined

to consider buying a Buick if we believe he drives one.

• Artificial scarcity: If something is in short supply, that fact alone can

help generate demand. For example, making offers for goods that are

available for “a limited time only” may encourage sales.

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Appeals to intuition have several strengths in terms of getting people

to change their minds. They require little effort from participants. When

they work, they work rapidly. They are effective for low-involvement

issues where people don’t care much one way or the other, such as which

brand of toothpaste to buy.16

But as a leadership tool, appeals to intuition suffer from several

weaknesses, in addition to their vulnerability to cognitive biases. They

may require extensive financial resources or power to put in place the rel-

evant cues and rules of thumb. They are better for establishing attitudes

in the first place than for changing behavior in face of established atti-

tudes, which tend to resist appeals to intuition. Moreover when managers

offer quid pro quos in exchange for compliance, they may run out of

quids to offer for the quos. And once they start offering incentives, they

risk getting on an incentive treadmill, where people become unwilling to

do anything without incentives. Furthermore, such methods often gener-

ate pushback and cynicism, as people become aware that they are being

manipulated. In the marketplace, people have become hype-resistant and

cynical about big business. In the workplace, people don’t always trust

managers, and may resent changes if they don’t see the point.17

Moreover, cues don’t work in any consistent fashion. Thus, a synthe-

sis of more than 350 real-world experiments on the effects of television

advertising revealed that increases in the amount of advertising did not

yield any simple increase in product sales. Even commercials that were

effective (as assessed by consumers’ successful recall and reports of per-

suasion) did not strongly correspond to consumer purchases as reflected

in sales.18 In the workplace, studies suggest that major change programs

implemented solely by diktat rarely work.19

The best role for appeals to intuition may be a limited one, as a sup-

port for other communication tools. Cues can help pick up the laggards

and the resisters and give them a nudge, but cues are unlikely to be the

engine of change that transformational leaders need: appeals to intuition

don’t generate new champions. Even where they generate change in

behavior, they usually don’t generate sustained enthusiasm for change.

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So if appeals to reason don’t work, and intuition doesn’t lead to pas-

sionate action, how do leaders go about generating enduring, passionate

behavioral change?

Direct Narrative One clue comes from another branch of psychol-

ogy, where the difference between abstract and narrative thinking has

been highlighted. Thus the eminent psychologist Jerome Bruner writes in

Actual Minds, Possible Worlds that there are two modes of thought, that is,

“two distinctive ways of ordering experience, of constructing reality”:

They are complementary but irreducible to each other. . . . Efforts to reduce one mode to the other or to ignore one at the expense of the other inevitably fail to capture the rich diversity of thought. . . . A good story and a well-formed argument . . . can both be used as means for convincing someone of something. Yet what they convince us of is fun- damentally different: arguments convince one of their truth, stories of their lifelikeness.”20

Clearly stories have been hugely important throughout human his-

tory as tools for changing people’s minds. It is notorious that the great

religions have been built, and the great wars have been launched, using

story as the principal communications tool. One reason is that narrative

is integral to the way we make decisions. Rather than making decisions by

careful intellectual effort or following cues, we make most of our con-

scious decisions through narrative. We cannot decide what to do until we

decide what story or stories we see ourselves as living. If we want to

change the way people act, we need to change those stories.21

Acceptance of the use of narrative in organizational leadership has

been slow in coming, in part because of strong faith in the power of rea-

son. The incessant corporate mantra has been analytic is good; anecdotal

is bad. Yet it is increasingly recognized in business that storytelling is what

effective leaders actually do. Thus in 1997 Noel Tichy said, “Business lead-

ers need a teachable point of view—a set of ideas about success in the

marketplace and a set of values based on personal and organizational

success.” The best way to communicate that point of view is through a

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story. The winning leaders profiled in his book “all lead through sto-

ries.”22 Some academic journals are devoted exclusively to the under-

standing narrative.23 And business journals have begun to publish articles

recognizing the central role of storytelling in leadership.24

But how does a story persuade people to act? In some sense, we all

know what a story is. But for all that, story is still something of a mystery.

People tell many stories to each other every day. But it’s rare that stories

ignite enthusiastic changes in behavior. When we watch a great film or

read a great novel, we don’t typically rush into action. Why do some sto-

ries spark action and others don’t? What is it about some kinds of stories

that cause people to change their minds and behavior?

Some psychologists have suggested that the underlying mechanism

for stories that spark change is what they call transportation.25 Thus when

readers follow a story, they go on a kind of journey. They are trans-

ported—virtually—by the storyteller into a different world. The listeners

project themselves into a different mental location—the place where the

story takes place—even though they have never physically left their static

sitting position. The imagined reality they visit is a world elicited by a sto-

ryteller who stimulates this mental world into existence. The listeners

give up their groundedness in the here-and-now to project their new

existence in the mental elsewhere of the story. The more fully the listeners

can accomplish this transition, the more effective the story is as a story.

When the story is very powerful, the listeners may return to their real

world as changed persons. They change as a result of the experiences they

have had on their virtual journey, the characters they have met, and the

feelings they have experienced. They may be “mentally scarred.” As a

result, they may have very different attitudes to the subject from those

they held before they heard the story and so may act differently in future.

In the transportation model of narrative, the narrative immerses the

listeners as fully as possible in the story. The listeners are (mentally)

transported from the real world to the narrative world that the storyteller

has created. The story operates like real experience so as to influence atti-

tudes. Immersed in the story, the listeners may experience almost the

same feelings as if they were living the story for real. They may become

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attached to the characters in the story and develop feelings toward them.

By this process, the listeners are engaged; attention and interest are fos-

tered. If all goes well, the imaginary story becomes the story in which the

listeners decide to live. In this transported mode, the audience may be less

likely to raise counterarguments. The more absorbing the story, the more

effective it is.26

The strengths of direct narrative are numerous. It draws on the natu-

ral affinity of human beings for stories. Even the strongest critics of sto-

ries, such as Plato and Descartes, were adept in using stories to make their

case. Stories tend to be more interesting, fresh, and entertaining than

abstract argument. Stories fit the way people think and make decisions.

Story weaves in emotion in a way that rational argument can never do.

Story is flexible. It may be a grand narrative like the stories that are used

to win support for religions or wars. Or it may be a smaller story, such as

an ad for car insurance. “Imagine you have just had a car accident. . . .” If

the story is powerfully told, it can overcome lack of credibility on the part

of the speaker and lack of evidence supporting the story.27

We also know that stories appeal to diverse groups: As Howard Gard-

ner said in 1995:

Some storytellers are so skilled, however, that they are able to create narratives that appear to satisfy both parties to a controversy. Or to operate effectively at more than one developmental level. Through choice of words, through selection of examples, and through the use of nonlinguistic cues, a leader may be able to convince adherents of each perspective that he or she is on their side. The delivery of stories . . . can be sufficiently polyphonic so as to please individuals of different ages, persuasiveness and sophistication.28

And yet persuasion by direct narrative, it must be said, also has some

drawbacks. It can take time to tell a story that fully transports the listener

to another world: today’s hard-pressed listeners rarely have the patience

for such epics. And to get the story to stick, substantial financial

resources, coordination with multiple storytellers, and exercise of power

may be needed.29

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Indeed, the difficulty of getting a direct narrative to stick often leads

to a tendency to exaggerate the story, overstating benefits and demoniz-

ing opponents. Stories that are partially fabricated or exaggerated can

unravel once the audience gets an opportunity for an evidence-based

examination of the underlying facts.

Indirect Narrative A way of overcoming the drawbacks of direct nar-

rative is the indirect narrative. Here the story is told not so much to

engage the audience so fully in the storyteller’s story that each listener

returns a changed person as to spark a new story in the mind of the lis-

tener. The presenter’s story is deliberately crafted to be less than all-

absorbing: the idea is that the listeners not only hear the presenter telling

the story, they also hear their own silent voices within, as their minds

ponder the implications of an analogous story for their own lives.

The distinction between direct and indirect narratives is important.

They involve two fundamentally different mechanisms for getting results.

In the direct narrative, the emphasis is on absorbing listeners in the richly

told story of the storyteller—mentally transporting them to another

world. In the indirect narrative, the emphasis is on stimulating a new

story in the minds of the listeners. In the indirect narrative, it’s the lis-

tener’s story that’s key.

The Biblical parables are examples of indirect narratives. In a parable,

the interest of the story isn’t in the story per se: the characters are not

richly drawn. The events are described sketchily. The teller makes no effort

to transport the listeners to a different world by evoking the sights and the

sounds and the smells of the context so that the listeners imagine them-

selves transported to that context and return emotionally scarred by the

experience. Instead, the object is to spark a new story in the mind of the

listener about a similar issue that the listener may be facing. The parables

are a long way from being well-told stories. And yet they continue to be

effective after thousands of years, because they generate new stories in the

minds of the listeners.

For the exponent of direct narrative, anything less than 100 percent

listener concentration on the story itself is a shortfall and a cause for con-

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cern. But in indirect storytelling, less than 100 percent absorption of the

listener in the story is actually the goal: here the object is to have the two

voices of the listener and the storyteller continue in a kind of parallel

conversation. The storyteller deliberately tells a story in such a way as to

allow mental space for listeners to forge their own thoughts, with the

explicit objective of having the listeners invent analogous stories of their

own, in parallel to the storyteller’s explicit story.

In indirect narrative, the storyteller’s story is not necessarily very

interesting as a story: instead, it serves as a springboard, a point of depar-

ture for new stories that the listeners will generate in their own minds,

from their special contexts, from their own experience of problems. What

is memorable for the listeners on such a journey isn’t the storyteller’s

story but rather the virtual journey that they make of their own accord

with the story they tell themselves.

The distinction between direct and indirect narrative parallels the

distinction between abstract reasons and intuition. Direct narrative

occurs openly in the explicit spoken word that can be heard and recorded

and written down. Indirect narrative operates intuitively, spontaneously,

quickly, and silently in the mind the listener.

Indirect narrative is a principal route by which transformational

leaders stimulate desire for change. Thus when Al Gore’s movie, An

Inconvenient Truth, tells the story of the success in repairing the hole in

the ozone layer by concerted international action, he doesn’t try to tell a

well-told story. He doesn’t try to immerse the listeners in the sights and

sounds and smells of what was going on when people were taking steps to

fix the hole in the ozone layer. His story doesn’t transport listeners to that

different world. Instead, his telling of that story is minimalist in style. His

story may nevertheless succeed if it sparks a new story in the mind of the

listener: “We solved the problem of the hole in the ozone layer, so maybe

we can solve the problem of global warming!”

When telling the story of how AMP had helped the man with the

multiple sclerosis, Craig Dunn is successful if he succeeds in sparking a

new story in the minds of the listeners: “If we save this firm, we’ll be

doing worthwhile things like this for our community!”

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When telling his stories about how the Internet was being used at Cor-

nell University, Steven Sinofsky helped spark new stories in the minds of

his listeners: “The Internet will be central to everything Microsoft does!”

The indirect narrative has drawbacks. It doesn’t work on everyone:

any fair-sized group includes incorrigibles who resist any effort to imag-

ine a different future. And it requires a certain amount of narrative intel-

ligence to know how to craft such a story.

But it also has major strengths. It is quick and powerful, drawing on

the intuitive side of the mind. When it succeeds, the listeners’ stories are

self-generated, and it’s much easier for people to believe their own stories

than someone else’s. It takes advantage of the way stories fit the way peo-

ple think and make decisions. It is mainly based on telling true stories—

stories that actually happened. Hence it avoids any charge of manipulation

or deception. And because it is about something that actually happened, it

is difficult for skeptical, cynical, or hostile audiences to satirize or under-

mine. Moreover, it’s relatively easy to tell a story about something that has

already happened: it doesn’t require elaborate performance skills. Because

it’s quick, it’s suited to many different contexts—business, politics, family,

whatever. When successful, the indirect narrative can generate enduring

change that is free of cynicism. Because it generates the listener’s own

story, the change is espoused with energy, gusto, and enthusiasm.

Three basic principles of persuasion for the purposes of leadership

emerge from the review of the routes open to leaders wishing to create

enduring enthusiasm for change by way of language:30

• Experiential methods are more likely to be effective than nonexperien-

tial methods, because the emotional imprint of a live experience is

usually more pronounced than that of a virtual experience by way of

language.

• Narratives are more likely to be effective than abstract communica-

tions, because this is how human beings think and make decisions,

and because it simulates the emotional significance of experiential

learning.

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• Indirect methods are more likely to be effective than direct methods,

because indirect methods leave it up to the audience to make up their

own minds rather than having opinions forced upon them.

The Leader as Storyteller

It’s a mystery to some how Ronald Reagan managed to combine the roles

of leader and politician. Reagan handily won two terms as U.S. president

and launched the conservative revolution in the United States.

As noted, one reason for Reagan’s success is that he had the single-

minded focus of a leader. He had a relatively small number of goals—

defeating the Soviet Union, reducing taxes and the size of government—

and he pursued them single-mindedly.

But just as important in Reagan’s success was the fact that he instinc-

tively understood the language of leadership and effectively mobilized the

power of simple stories to defuse tension in areas about which he had no

strong views, while communicating his points in areas where he felt

strongly. Drawing on his actor’s talent for light comedy, Reagan used sto-

ries to lighten the “magnificent vagueness” of his political speeches as well

as his “banal conversation.”31

Reagan may have been regarded by his opponents as lacking in intel-

lectual depth, but when it came to leadership, the wider electorate saw in

Reagan’s storytelling something that was both persuasive and endearing.

Reagan’s stories helped bring the electorate along with him. In the few

areas where he was committed, he used stories to make his point. When it

came to the latest congressional or bureaucratic struggle over minutiae of

more distant concern, he would remove himself with a bemused shake of

the head and a one-liner.32

The fact is that Reagan had a talent that all leaders need, namely, nar-

rative intelligence. He knew how to craft and perform a story, with good

judgment as to what kind of effect it would have on the audience. In Rea-

gan’s case, this narrative intelligence was tacit. He couldn’t describe what

it was that he knew about storytelling or how exactly he was using it, any

more than he could explain how he was able to ride a bicycle. But in prac-

tice he was able to use storytelling to great effect in the political arena.

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Narrative intelligence can be even more effective when its principles are

made explicit, because then other people can learn how to use it.

The Central Role of Narrative Intelligence

In principle, the predominant role of storytelling in leadership commu-

nications about change shouldn’t strike us as extraordinary, given the role

that stories play in the human psyche and decision-making process.

When we look carefully at the world, including the world of business and

politics, it’s easy to see the pervasive role that stories play.

In The Rhetoric of Economics, Deidre McCloskey has gleefully exposed

the narratives that pervade even the writing of star economists like Paul

Samuelson, Gary Becker, John Muth, and Robert Solow. My own book,

The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, has documented the different narrative

patterns available to leaders to achieve a variety of objectives, such as

spark change, communicate who you are or what your brand means, get

people working together, transmit values, share knowledge, tame the

grapevine, generate innovation, or lead people into the future.

Yet there’s something profoundly counterintuitive about the whole

idea of narrative intelligence. We would all like to believe that it’s sub-

stance that convinces, that analytic understanding must surely be more

effective than any mere story, particularly a rudimentary story without

rhetorical flourishes. It’s hard to accept that something as primitive and

old-fashioned as a bland narrative can be more powerful than analysis in

the sophisticated business world of the twenty-first century.

What is even more challenging, though, is how far the idea of narra-

tive intelligence may extend. What if storytelling was not only one com-

munication tool among many but also a criterion for judging the

effectiveness of all forms of communication directed toward action?

Many books discuss different ways to persuade. For instance, some

books address using questions, like Michael Marquardt’s Leading with

Questions.33 Other books suggest that the key to persuasion lies in using

metaphors, like Anne Miller’s Metaphorically Selling.34 Other books,

including Edward Tufte’s Visual Display of Quantitative Information, sug-

gest that the key to communication lies in the clever presentation of

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images.35 Still others, including Susan Scott’s Fierce Conversations, argue

that conversations are the way to go.36 Yet again, other books, like Mark

Joyner’s The Irresistible Offer, suggest that the secret to changing people’s

minds lies in making an extraordinary offer.37 And some books extol the

virtues of story, like Annette Simmons’s Story Factor.38

Each of these books offers valuable insights for the particular com-

munication tool under discussion; more on them in later chapters. Yet as

we read these books and hear each author argue that this or that commu-

nication device is “the key” to persuasion, we are tempted to wonder if

they aren’t overstating the case for their chosen tool. Clearly, all these

tools are useful in varying degrees in different contexts. But which con-

text is appropriate? And why are these tools effective in some settings but

not in others? Is there any principle, or set of principles, that could make

sense of this smorgasbord? Is there some element, some organizing prin-

ciple, something else that could start to make sense and give some coher-

ence to this marketplace of competing vendors?

I believe the answer isn’t too hard to find. If it’s true that people think

in narratives and make decisions in narratives, then should it be surpris-

ing that questions, metaphors, offers, images, and the like are effective to

the extent that they generate a narrative in the mind of the listener? And

would it not be plausible that the ability to gauge the likelihood of a suit-

able new story’s being generated would be an important capability for

anyone seriously engaged in trying to inspire change? If this is true, then

we can start to get an idea of the real importance of narrative intelligence

for leaders.

The concept of multiple intelligences was put forward in 1983 by

Howard Gardner in Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelli-

gences.39 Initially, he identified seven core intelligences: linguistic, logical-

mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, and

intrapersonal. More recently, an eighth—the naturalistic intelligence—

has been added; work also continues on whether to add an existential

intelligence. In addition, the concept of emotional intelligence originated

with Wayne Payne in 1985, and was popularized by Daniel Goleman in

1995.40 None of these intelligences cover what’s involved in narrative

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intelligence, that is to say, an understanding of and a capacity to navigate

through a world of interacting narratives.41

But what exactly do I mean by narrative intelligence? It’s about under-

standing the world in narrative terms and grasping the pervasive role of

narratives in all aspects of human existence. It concerns knowing the dif-

ferent components and dimensions of narratives. It’s being familiar with

the different patterns of stories that exist and knowing which narrative

patterns are likely to have what effect in which situation. It’s knowing

how to overcome the fundamental attribution error and understand the

audience’s story. It’s having the capacity to anticipate the dynamic factors

that will determine how the audience will react to a new story. It’s being

able to judge whether a new story is likely to be generated in the mind of

any particular audience by any particular communication tool.

How much is known about narrative intelligence? Even though

there’s not as much research as the topic could use, some of the basics are

in place. Recognition of the foundational role of narrative in human

behavior has been the subject of a rapidly growing body of psychological

research.42 The central role of narrative in leadership is confirmed by

studies that show that stories are more effective than analytic reasons at

persuasion.43 And studies in social psychology show that information is

more quickly and accurately remembered when it is first presented in the

form of an example or story, particularly one that is intrinsically appeal-

ing.44 There is also evidence that whereas abstract presentations depend

on the credibility of the source of the material, effective stories tend to

operate independently of the source’s credibility. Once the audience is

engaged by a compelling narrative, the perceived credibility of the source

has diminishing influence.45

Do we have all the studies we need? Clearly not. More research is

needed. The fact is that for a very long time psychologists tended to

ignore storytelling because the dominant paradigm for research was that

of the human brain as an abstract information processor. That view has

been changing over recent decades. But we still have much to learn on

many aspects of the subject, particularly on the different kinds of narra-

tive patterns and the differential effects that they have, compared to each

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other and to other communication tools. But there’s no need to wait for

the further research before we get on with enhancing our own communi-

cations through narrative. Enough is known to make a dramatic differ-

ence in the impact of leadership communications. Overall, cultivating

narrative intelligence will be a key enabler if leaders wish to get the full

benefit using the language of leadership.

Appendix 3 offers a simple quiz for assessing your understanding of

the explicit principles underpinning narrative intelligence.

Narrative intelligence by itself won’t work unless it is founded on

truthfulness. Al Gore was undone in 2000 in part by his tendency to

embellish his stories. Even Ronald Reagan was handicapped by his casual

attitude to veracity. What is truthfulness? Is it really necessary? It is to this

issue that I now turn.

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The will to truth which will still tempt us to many

a venture, that famous truthfulness of which all

philosophers so far have spoken with respect—

what questions has this will to truth not laid before us!

What strange, wicked, questionable questions!

—Friedrich Nietzsche1

In the early morning of Wednesday, September 29, 1982, a twelve-year-old

girl in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, swallowed a capsule of Extra Strength

Tylenol. Shortly after that, she collapsed and died from cyanide poison-

ing. Within three days, six other people in the Chicago area had also

died in a similar fashion. Investigators soon discovered the link between

the deaths and poison in the Tylenol. Urgent warnings were broadcast,

and police drove through Chicago neighborhoods issuing alerts over

loudspeakers.

Since the poisoned bottles came from different factories, and the

seven deaths had all occurred in the Chicago area, the sabotage couldn’t

have occurred at the factories of the manufacturer—a subsidiary of John-

son & Johnson. Instead, the culprit must have obtained Tylenol from

stores over a period of weeks, adulterated their contents with cyanide,

and then replaced the bottles. In addition to the five that led to the vic-

tims’ deaths, three other cyanide-laced bottles were discovered.

TELLING

TRUTHFUL

STORIES

6

”“

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What happened next has become business legend. Even though

Johnson & Johnson didn’t cause the problem, the CEO, James Burke,

announced that his firm would take responsibility for it. Following its

credo of giving first priority to protecting consumers ahead of giving

returns to stockholders, on October 5, 1982, only seven days after the first

death, Burke announced an immediate product recall from the entire

country, which amounted to about 31 million bottles and a loss of more

than $100 million.

The company also placed advertisements in the national media telling

people not to consume any Tylenol. When it was determined that only

capsules had been tampered with, it offered to exchange all Tylenol cap-

sules already purchased by the public with solid tablets.

At the time of the scare the market share of Tylenol collapsed from

35 percent to 8 percent, but it rebounded in less than a year as a result of

Johnson & Johnson’s actions. Within a few years, Tylenol was the most

popular over-the-counter pain reliever in the United States.

A key factor in Johnson & Johnson’s decisive handling of the Tylenol

crisis was its institutional credo, which gave clear guidance as to the

course of action to take, namely, to give first priority to protecting con-

sumers. Given the credo, prompt, full, truthful disclosure to the public

and a product recall were obvious steps. As Johnson & Johnson’s CEO

James Burke said, “I think the answer comes down to the value system. . . .

What’s right works. It really does. The cynics will tell you it doesn’t, but

they’re wrong.”2

Even though the legend of the actions taken by Johnson & Johnson

to deal with the crisis has been told over and over, the lessons are not

always heeded. Thus when Exxon was faced with a crisis when the Exxon

Valdez oil tanker spilled 11 million gallons of oil into Alaska’s Prince

William Sound in 1989, the company acted very differently.

When Exxon’s spokesman first talked to the press, his answer was “no

comment.” This gave the impression that the firm was either hiding some-

thing or didn’t know what was going on. This impression was reinforced

when Exxon sent a team of individuals who were not trained in crisis

management. It took ten days before Exxon ran an advertisement in the

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newspapers, and then it was only done locally. It was two weeks before

Exxon’s chairman, Lawrence G. Rawl, flew to Alaska.

The Exxon Valdez accident turned out to be one of the largest man-

made environmental disasters ever to occur at sea. Exxon eventually

spent more than $2 billion on the cleanup. As of late 2006, litigation on

the amount of punitive damages assessed against Exxon for the spill was

still continuing.

When you think about Johnson & Johnson’s long-established credo,

which had guided its decision making for decades, it is hardly a surprise

that the CEO responded promptly and truthfully to the crisis, and in the

process generated increased trust in both the firm and the brand. Equally,

it’s easy to see why Exxon leadership, without that kind of explicit and con-

tinuously reinforced commitment to values, might improvise actions on

the fly and give the impression the firm didn’t care much about the envi-

ronment or the damage to the tourism and fishery industries in Alaska.

Truthfulness in the Marketplace

In collaborative activities, truthfulness is the normal condition: decep-

tiveness, or being less than forthcoming, is aberrational. Thus when the

honeybee does her waggle-dance to tell her fellow honeybees the where-

abouts of food, the truthfulness of the communication is crucial. Because

it’s truthful, the other honeybees can follow her directions and find the

food, and so the hive flourishes. The beehive, like any collaborative enter-

prise, rests on honesty and disclosure as central to its success.

Competitive situations are different. In The Liar’s Tale, Jeremy Camp-

bell reminds us that throughout nature, deceptiveness and nondisclosure

are the norm in competitive situations. Does the spider warn a visiting

insect of the prodigious stickiness of her web? Does the fox give any sign

of feeling guilty about pretending to be dead, when it is very much on the

alert, and famished? Does the leopard lying along a branch try to warn

passers-by of danger? Throughout nature, in the harsh competition for

survival, you can forget fair play and honesty and full disclosure. Decep-

tion, dissembling, feints, and bluffs are the name of the game.3

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Since transformational leadership is in essence a collaborative activity,

the relevant model is the honeybee, not the spider, the fox, or the leopard.

In leadership, truthfulness and integrity are essential. Lack of forthright-

ness or deliberate shading of the truth is devastating to trust and credi-

bility: it undermines the possibility of enduring enthusiasm. Even an

apparent lack of openness, as in the Exxon case, can be disastrous.

The marketplace presents interesting issues for transformational

leadership since it inevitably comprises a mix of collaboration and com-

petition. On one hand, vis-à-vis competitors, participants face a cutthroat

struggle for survival. It’s a world of one-upmanship, cunning, gamesman-

ship, outfoxing, outsmarting, or outwitting the competition. Only the

toughest manage to survive, let alone flourish.

On the other hand, vis-à-vis customers, sellers aspire to win trust so

that people become return customers and even enthusiasts on behalf of

the firm, perhaps becoming brand evangelists to recruit new customers.

Problems begin when sellers start applying the deceptive modalities

of competition to their relationships with customers. For instance, when

sellers use the kinds of manipulative tools surveyed in Chapter Five—

hype, halo effect, spin, bait and switch, groupthink, imposition of author-

ity, celebrity pressure, and artificial scarcity—and try to manipulate

people by surreptitious means to make decisions they wouldn’t otherwise

make, the risk of undermining long-run trust is considerable.

In the marketplace, the tension between competition and collabora-

tion is always in play. The dilemmas can be acute for individuals. In lead-

ership workshops, I am asked: “Do we really have to tell the truth? Surely

it’s advisable, even necessary, on occasion, to be ‘economical with the

truth’ to be successful in selling and marketing? How will we ever make

our sales quotas if we are completely truthful? Is everyone else strictly

honest? Is this being unrealistic?”

The answer to those questions is both obvious and difficult. It’s obvi-

ous in the sense that if the objective is transformational leadership,

namely, to achieve the enduring enthusiasm of customers, truthfulness is

crucial. Leaders have no choice: truth is their currency. Shading the truth

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may yield benefits in the short run and even result in a quick killing in the

sense of a sale and a profit, but it also risks a “killing” in a different sense,

that is, the death of trust. The practices of deception—shading the truth,

less-than-full disclosure—and the manipulative weapons of influence

don’t constitute a sound long-term basis for generating enduring enthu-

siasm for a product, a service, a brand, or an organization. To be a trans-

formational leader and inspire enduring enthusiasm, there’s really no

choice: truth-telling is foundational.

And yet the answer is also difficult. The temptation in the market-

place to slide into deceptive, dissembling, manipulative practices in order

to make the short-run sale is always there. Salespeople say: “If our com-

petitors are doing it, why not us? And if our earnings depend totally on

short-term sales, with no reference to long-term impact, how can we not

focus on short-term sales and do whatever is necessary to win? It’s irre-

sistible.” And of course, in a sense, they’re right. In the absence of clear,

explicit values, continuously restated and reinforced by the management

and embodied in their own conduct, as at Johnson & Johnson, it’s easy to

see how truth-telling can fall by the wayside and how the deceptive, dis-

sembling, manipulative practices of competition can take over.

In the world of branding, the temptation to shade the truth is even

stronger, especially now that companies have discovered how consumers

can develop strong relationships with their brands in an anthropological

sense, despite the lack of any real distinctiveness of the underlying prod-

ucts or services. Marketers don’t need a product that is physically differ-

ent: even pure commodities can become strongly differentiated in

customers’ minds: soap, flour, salt, oatmeal, even water.

Perpetuating the impression of a meaningful difference can, however,

become immensely expensive when there is no underlying difference,

because of the need for a never-ending supply of new branding messages

to perpetuate the impression. But even so, for many companies, the invest-

ment of large sums of money to this end has in some cases appeared cost-

effective. Brands relying on a perception of difference based on impressions

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and associations rather than any real underlying difference may even

become the most valuable asset on a firm’s balance sheet.

Some marketers endorse such practices and even urge firms to set

aside any notion of truth, crafting stories that will resonate with cus-

tomers regardless of whether they are true.4 On this view, even trying to

tell the truth in the marketplace is a losing strategy. Instead, marketers

should tell great stories about their products that play to consumers’ self-

regard and worldview. Making up stories is justified, because “consumers

demand it. . . . It doesn’t matter one bit whether something is actually better

or faster or more efficient. What matters is what the consumer believes.”5

Although this approach of saying whatever you can get away with

may have short-run gains, in terms of long-term trust and enduring

enthusiasm, it is a frequently trod path to disaster. “Doing the right thing

pays off. Storytellers who trick consumers get caught. They become

inconsistent and sooner or later they get punished.”6

Authentically Communicating Distinctiveness

Being a leader in the marketplace entails first making a commitment to

truth and authenticity—eliminating any untruthfulness inside the firm as

well as outside. In terms of marketing, the firm needs to make sure what

it’s saying is true before it advertises in the marketplace. The task of

authentic leadership in the marketplace is not to convince the world that

the firm is distinctive when it isn’t but rather to communicate a reality

that already exists. If the firm isn’t already consistently distinctive, then

the task is to make it so—before any attempt to communicate that dis-

tinctiveness to customers. In effect, companies need to fix the firm inside

before going outside.

Conceptually, there are three ways of communicating distinctiveness

in an authentic way. One is to tell the story of the firm itself. This is the

story of where the firm came from, how it grew, what values it acquired

along the way, and where it is heading. Some of the mystique of Apple

Computer and Microsoft comes from the stories of the early creation

of those companies by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates respectively. Southwest

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Airlines is a story of people living life to the fullest, with humor and a

sense of fun, being free to “roam about the country” because the airline

makes it affordable to do so by providing cheap, reliable, entertaining

flights to popular destinations. Its brand narrative is closely linked to the

wit and character of its founder, Herb Kelleher. And at Costco, co-founder

and CEO Jim Sinegal regularly uses stories of how he has built the firm by

a continuing commitment to provide high-quality, low-cost products to

customers, rather than raise margins, so as to convey the firm’s corporate

values and to illustrate how those values are being brought to life through-

out the company.

The second way of communicating the brand is something that looks

obvious but in fact isn’t. It’s the story of the products and services them-

selves. If you want to communicate what’s distinctive about your prod-

ucts or services, why not just tell people exactly that? Why not simply tell

the story of those products and services? The problem here is that in the

atmosphere of cynicism and distrust that prevails in today’s marketplace,

it’s hard for any company to tell credible stories about its products and

services. Given the track record of firms telling half-truths or quarter-

truths or even straight-out untruths, people have gotten into the habit of

discounting most of what they hear directly from marketers.

So what’s a company to do? One approach is for the firm itself to opt

out of trying to tell the story of its products and services, using few adver-

tisements or none. Instead it seeks to rely on its customers’ delighted

response to those products and services to tell and retell that story. Thus

Google is a highly valued and valuable company, not because of its clever

advertisements, but because hundreds of millions of people find its soft-

ware pleasant and easy to use, and they are happy to tell their friends and

colleagues about it. And Starbucks is a highly valued company, not be-

cause of large sums of money given to talented ad agencies and PR firms

or rock stars, but rather because people around the world enjoy its coffee

shops and their products, and are willing to pass on that message. These

companies spend little money and energy on issuing advertisements for

themselves or trying to tell their story. Instead they focus their energies

on providing high-quality products and services that consistently delight

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their customers, who in turn tell the story more credibly than the firm’s

marketing department ever could.

These companies’ objective is not just to make sales, rather to convert

customers into enthusiasts so that they share the company’s belief that its

activities are worthwhile in themselves. Ideally, the customers believe in

the company’s products or services to such an extent that they feel com-

pelled to spread the word and voluntarily recruit their friends and col-

leagues on the firm’s behalf. Most of this happens by word of mouth,

face-to-face. Although there is a lot of talk about the impact of the Inter-

net, blogs, and chat rooms, when it comes to word of mouth, research

indicates that around 90 percent of it occurs offline.7

Customers are likely to become brand evangelists only if they are con-

sistently delighted by what the company does. This in turn is only likely to

happen on a sustained basis if the company itself exhibits the values of

truthfulness, constancy, and integrity in its dealings with its customers.

The third way of communicating the brand is even less obvious: to tell

the story of the client. In How Brands Become Icons, Douglas Holt argues

that for any strong brand, there is a certain kind of person who loves, or

could love, the brand. If the seller can understand the story of this person

and tell that story, it can resonate and help turn the brand into an icon.

Thus Volkswagen has a track record of appealing to iconoclasts. When

it presented itself as a company that made cars for iconoclasts in the 1960s

and 1970s, it was hugely successful. In the 1980s and early 1990s, when it

appeared to forget this part of its history and presented itself as a maker of

cars for everybody, albeit higher-quality cars, it lost ground in the market-

place. In the late 1990s, when it suddenly remembered that its core clien-

tele had been iconoclasts, it once again prospered.8

In a similar vein, Budweiser offers its jokey television ads that suggest

that these funny people kidding around and having a good time together

are the kind of people who drink Budweiser beer. The implication is that

anyone could be as funny, and have as good a time, if only they also drank

Budweiser. The ads appear to be successful in promoting the brand, even

though the underlying logic is not exactly rock-solid. Although in today’s

marketplace, the ads can make the sale, the question for the longer term is

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whether they are building enduring enthusiasm for the brand. At best, the

continued strength of a brand based on such evanescent associations will

depend on disseminating a never-ending supply of new stories in an

effort to perpetuate the “impression” of Budweiser’s distinctiveness.

From Sales Pitch to Trusted Partnership

Given the risk of incurring long-term costs by employing less-than-

truthful practices aimed at short-term gains and sales, some firms are

exploring the possibility of reaching a more stable plane—to shift from

making sales pitches to becoming trusted partners. These companies

aspire to become reliable collaborators with their clients, so that clients

look to them for advice and dialogue about issues of common concern.

Here the conversation aims less at achieving immediate sales and more at

ensuring that the firm’s products and services will receive positive consid-

eration when the time comes to make decisions about purchases. The

object is higher margins, more repeat business, lower price sensitivity,

and shorter sales cycles. In assessing what’s involved in moving from

“sales pitch” to “trusted partnership,” these companies are having to

reflect on what is involved in the phenomenon of trust. What kinds of

behavior lead to trust, as opposed to behaviors that lead to distrust?

A sales pitch works in the “exchange economy” and it’s quid pro quo.

Sellers are typically only willing to do something if there’s something of

monetary value in it for themselves. In the marketplace, the sales pitch

often amounts to saying what you can get away with in order to make the

sale. The competitive practices of spin, hype, and the weapons of influ-

ence are rampant.

Social scientists have shown that trust is generated by very different,

collaborative behaviors. This is sometimes referred to as the “gift econ-

omy.” In this world, people do things out of a spirit of generosity and

make contributions without any clear expectations of a quid pro quo. A

scientific community is an example of this kind of interchange. People

write papers and contribute to conferences. In doing so, they have no

guarantee of getting anything back in return for making those contribu-

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tions to the community. They may receive eventual benefits: they may

win respect and renown or be offered academic positions or be invited to

write books or even win prizes. But none of this is guaranteed or agreed

or made explicit in advance. Participants make their contributions and

they take their chances as to whether or when they will get anything back

in return.

In a scientific community, certain behaviors are respected because

they lead to trust. Most scientists are transparently honest. They are care-

ful about what is being claimed and what is not being claimed. They are

scrupulous not to overstate benefits or to understate costs or risks. They

are always on the lookout for alternative interpretations. They are careful

to give credit to the work on which they are building. They talk confi-

dently only about what they definitely know. If they speculate or hazard a

guess, they explicitly describe it as such. If they don’t know, they admit

ignorance. Any hint of oversell is anathema in this world; any scientist

who engages in it risks being ejected from the community.

Similarly, in the pharmaceutical industry, strict laws and careful

enforcement by agencies like the FDA have to a certain extent created

analogous practices. Drugs are rigorously tested for effectiveness and side

effects before they are put on the market. Drugs that fail to deliver signif-

icant new benefits are withheld from the market, even if huge expendi-

tures have been made in their development. Claims made for a drug are

required by law to be supported by rigorous scientific testing. Supple-

mentary actions needed to garner the benefits of a drug are made explicit

at the time of sale. Risks are quantified and made explicit to doctors and

consumers at the time of purchase. Side effects are stringently scrutinized

and quantified. Discovered flaws are communicated systematically and

promptly to doctors and consumers. Drugs can be withdrawn from the

market if newly discovered flaws put in question the original hoped-for

benefits. Although the advertisements of pharmaceutical companies are

often characterized by use of the weapons of influence, the claims made

for any particular product must by law be supported by rigorous, objec-

tive evidence.9

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In other industries, the practices are very different. For instance, in

the software industry, products are tested for effectiveness before they are

put on the market, but it is normal for bugs to appear after the release of

the product, usually to be remedied by subsequent releases of the soft-

ware. Successive versions are launched, sometimes effectively forcing

users to upgrade both software and hardware, even if the incremental

benefits to them are not obvious. Claims made for software are not always

supported by rigorous scientific testing. “Outstanding” exploitation of

the software is sometimes portrayed as what the average user should

expect, or even what every user could expect. Significant supplementary

actions needed to garner the benefits of software, such as training and

support, are not always made explicit at the time of sale. Sales presentations

do not always highlight the risk involved in realigning an organization’s

entire business strategy or in making the major shifts in organizational

culture required to realize the promised benefits. Dissemination of infor-

mation on the levels of failure to generate expected benefits is rare. Flaws,

when discovered, are not always systematically and promptly communi-

cated to all users. Software is rarely withdrawn from the market or re-

funds offered, even if newly discovered flaws put in question the original

hoped-for benefits.

The reasons for these practices in the software industry are under-

standable. The interaction of products with many other types of software

and hardware is so diverse that bug-free software is said to be an impossi-

ble dream. Users are sometimes more interested in getting timely updates

of software than in avoiding risks from flawed product releases. Experi-

enced users understand the level of oversell normal in the industry and

are forced to adopt an attitude of “buyer beware.”

Nevertheless, the level of trust generated by such practices is unlikely

to be high. To the extent that these behaviors are being used to establish

the relationship of trusted partner, companies wishing to become trusted

partners will need to review their appropriateness. Customers in a “buyer

beware” mind-set take everything a vendor says with a substantial grain

of salt and are unlikely to view the relationship as a partnership.

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Companies may also need to consider when they conduct dialogue

with clients with the aim of establishing the relationship of trusted part-

ner, systematically emphasizing and encouraging known trust-building

behaviors:

• Showing real concern for the interests of counterparts: In trusting rela-

tionships, participants show genuine interest in the problems of

the people they are dealing with, even if there is nothing in it for

themselves.

• Revealing vulnerability. Trust entails asking people to put their faith

in someone, even though they have no certainty that that faith will

be honored. In effect, participants make themselves vulnerable. By

contrast, if the party seeking to be trusted holds itself invulnerable,

never admitting or risking anything, then the lack of reciprocity may

raise a question in the listeners as to whether a relationship of trust

is warranted.

• Sharing something of value early on. When people visit someone’s

house for the first time, they may bring a small gift to signify that

they come in a spirit of friendship. This behavior encourages trust to

develop. Analogous behavior by a company, for example, offering free

knowledge or samples of new products, may also help to initiate trust.

• Meshing with what has gone before. In making a sales pitch, the em-

phasis of the storytelling is usually on the “telling”: pointing out fea-

tures and benefits that have been identified by the seller in advance.

By contrast, in a trusted partnership, the process begins with “story

listening,” that is, understanding the customers and their story—

their dreams, their hopes, their fears, their current problems, what’s

making them tick. This means listening to what the customers are

saying as well as what they are not saying.

• Willingness to learn. Readiness to learn also helps generate trust.

In a relationship of mutual trust, participants don’t come to the

discussion with the attitude: “I’m not interested in what your

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situation is; I’m here to tell you what you should know.” If they do

this, it’s likely that the behavior will undermine trust. Instead, a

willingness to learn from, and understand, the listener’s story helps

build reciprocity and mutual trust.

Transforming traditional sales practices into trusted partner behav-

ior will be a significant shift for some organizations. Some staff may be

ready and waiting for the transition, while others will be more comfort-

able with the sales pitch. Leadership entails inspiring everyone to adopt

the new practices.

Truthfulness in the March to War

Transformational leadership is rare in politics, and when it occurs, it may

take us, as with Abraham Lincoln, in the welcome direction of a new

birth of freedom. But when presidents become leaders in pursuit of pre-

emptive military causes, the results can be ugly. The sequence is depress-

ingly familiar with wars of choice.

For politicians to persuade a country at peace to become enthusiastic

about launching a preemptive war against another country, they usually

have to demonize the enemy, exaggerate the offences it has caused, mini-

mize the difficulties that will occur in the prosecution of the war, and

exaggerate the benefits that will ensue.

Once the war is launched, the war can be glamorized with celebra-

tions of the bravery of young soldiers. Any who object to the war can be

victimized as dishonoring the troops or emboldening the enemy. As the

inevitable difficulties emerge, there are calls to stay the course, so that

those soldiers who have already died will not have died in vain.

As the reality of the origins of the war and the difficulties of imple-

mentation become apparent, recriminations against those who misled

the nation into war are muted by a fear of disregard for those who have

died in the cause. Calls for victory continue, and vitriolic criticism is

launched against those who want to “run up the white flag of surrender”

and “admit defeat.” As a result, the war often drags on long after the rea-

sons for fighting it in the first place have evaporated.

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Most of these phenomena could be observed in the First World War.

Although governments had always used various kinds of persuasion to

encourage support for wars, it was in 1915 that governments first system-

atically deployed the entire range of modern media to deploy propaganda

and rouse their populations to emotional assent by demonizing “the

Hun” and by presenting the war as a transcendent clash between “civiliza-

tion” and “Prussian barbarism.”

Although the term propaganda fell into disrepute, its practice to sell

wars didn’t end. Thus, in 1965, the White House and Pentagon used mis-

leading military rationales to frighten the American people to elicit initial

popular acquiescence in the war in Vietnam.10 President Lyndon Johnson

launched the war based on attacks on supposedly nonbelligerent U.S.

ships in the Gulf of Tonkin and on the argument that an international

communist conspiracy headquartered in Moscow and Beijing was driving

the Vietnamese revolutionary movement. Johnson used the rhetoric of

“liberation,” “freedom,” and “democracy” to justify the intervention.

Throughout the struggle, the story was told that if Vietnam fell, American

prestige would suffer an immeasurable loss and the rest of Asia, and possi-

bly the world, would fall “like dominos” into the hands of the communists.

In the result, after the U.S. departure in 1973, South Vietnam was over-

run by North Vietnam in 1975. But the rest of Asia didn’t fall like dominos

into communism. Instead, the other countries remained staunchly anti-

communist. In due course, Vietnam became one of the fastest-growing

free-market economies in the world. Although government and political

life is firmly controlled by the Communist Party of Vietnam, neither Viet-

nam nor its neighbors represent any threat to the United States, as con-

firmed by successive state visits of U.S. presidents in 2000 and 2006. In

retrospect, it is now evident that the supporters of the Vietnam War were

living the wrong story: they mistook a local civil war for a major interna-

tional menace.

Now a similar sequence is playing itself out in Iraq.11 The war was

launched by the United States and its coalition partners in 2003, using a

set of stories (outlined in Table 6.1) that reflect the communication tools

discussed in this book.

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Sadly, most of the stories used to launch the war turned out to be

false:

• Saddam Hussein was a vicious dictator, but he had no significant

connection with the terrorists of September 11, 2001, and had no

weapons of mass destruction.12

• While the immediate invasion of Iraq was quick and relatively easy,

the subsequent anti-American insurgency proved to be large and

difficult to deal with. The occupying armies were soon caught in the

crossfire among different Iraqi factions.

• As some military experts had predicted, the armed force used was too

small to pacify a country the size of Iraq. Even so, the war turned out

to be expensive, consuming around $400 billion by the end of 2006.

The prospect of permanent access to military bases and oil became

increasingly problematic.

• Popular support in the United States for the war was initially strong,

but it faltered in 2005 and collapsed by late 2006, even as fighting

continued. In the end, the U.S. invasion had unwittingly turned Iraq

into a breeding ground for terrorists—the very objective that the war

was intended to prevent.

TABLE 6.1 Stories of the Iraq War

Getting attention

Saddam Hussein is an accomplice of the terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attacks.

Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction are an immi- nent threat to the United States, Europe, and Israel.

Saddam Hussein is an unstable dictator who oppresses his people.

Stimulating desire

A preemptive war will be a quick and easy way to exact revenge on the terrorists behind 9/11.

The war will eliminate an imminent threat from nuclear attack.

A relatively small armed force will be sufficient to liberate the country from the tyrant.

Reinforcing with reasons

The United States will gain valuable military bases in the region and have access to large oil reserves.

Because Iraq has oil, the war will essentially pay for itself.

The U.S. forces will be greeted as liberators.

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Should we blame storytelling and the language of leadership for get-

ting the United States and its partners into misguided wars? Certainly the

experience suggests that we should be on our guard to verify the stories

used by politicians to persuade us into a war of choice.

Storytelling, like any powerful tool, can be used for benign or malign

purposes. Vietnam and Iraq show us both the force of storytelling and the

consequences of its misuse. Among the many lessons that we can learn

are that when a war of choice is being considered, we should verify the

stories. Are they true? We should take the time to gather the evidence and

pay attention to expert advice on the feasibility of future plans. Examina-

tion of risk is critical. What is the best that can happen? What is the worst

that can happen? What are the probabilities of different outcomes? What

is not known that could affect the outcome? We should be willing to learn

from prior experience.

Truthfulness is not just a quality of the mind. It must be reflected in

the entire person—mind, body, and soul—and reflected in the body lan-

guage of the leader. It is to this issue that I turn in Chapter Seven.

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It is no surprise that conductors live so long, as they

spend their life constantly exercising and bringing

into harmony body, emotion and thought.

—Peter Brook1

What is leadership presence? Is it something mysterious or magical? How

did great actors and great leaders come to possess it? Were they born with

it? Can it be learned?

Whatever it is, it’s important. Without it, no one listens. Without it,

our opinions get no respect. Without it, we’re not taken seriously. With-

out it, it’s hard to be a leader.

In their interesting book, Leadership Presence, Belle Linda Halpern

and Kathy Lubar define presence as “the ability to connect authentically

with the thoughts and feelings of others.”2 I’ve already discussed some of

the elements that contribute to presence in that sense: having a commit-

ment to a clear and inspiring goal, while being aware of your own story

and being attuned to the story of your listener. But this chapter is con-

cerned with something else—the physical things we do with our body

when we are trying to communicate.

If we’re able to project our energy so that it energizes others, and so

that our thinking, our feeling, our verbal messages, and our bodily move-

LEADERSHIP

PRESENCE

The Body Language of Leadership

7

”“

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ments are all congruent, that can hugely reinforce what we are trying to

communicate. If our body language contradicts what we are saying, it will

distract from or undermine our intended message.

Why is body language so important? One reason is that listeners are

not just fluent readers of body language. They are acutely aware of the

slightest bodily cues a speaker gives, wittingly or unwittingly, and can infer

immediately what they mean. Remember when President George H. W.

Bush glanced at his watch in the middle of a presidential debate in 1992?

Viewers immediately jumped to the conclusion: Bush wants the debate to

be over.

Whatever leaders communicate through their body language will

usually speak louder than their spoken words, because listeners will con-

clude that the body language is what the speaker really feels and means,

even if the words are saying something else. So although this book

devotes less space to the body language of leadership than to verbal lan-

guage, in performance, body language is at least as important.3

Some of the more interesting insights on body language from the

world of animal trainers. Vicki Hearne’s wonderful book, Adam’s Task,

notes that the people who come to visit the wild animals she works with

fall into several categories. First, there are the people with super-sized

egos, which she calls “Hollywood types”: they are self-absorbed and indif-

ferent to where they are. Their pompous strutting is essentially irrelevant

to, and ignored by, the animals.

Then there are the “researchers” who are testing abstract propositions

on the animals. These people are, she says, “contaminated by epistemol-

ogy.” Around dogs, they are what she calls “bitees,” that is, the people

most likely to be bitten as a result of the dogs’ frustration at their combi-

nation of intrusiveness and unresponsiveness.

Finally, there are the “animal trainers,” who exhibit soft, acute, 360-

degree awareness of who they are and who else is there. In the very way

they move, they offer mute acknowledgment of the presence of the ani-

mals and fit into the spaces shaped by their perceptions. It’s precisely this

“soft, acute, 360-degree awareness” that leaders need to exhibit in relation

to the people they are seeking to lead.4

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What Hearne is talking about is the body language of leadership that

Cesar Millan teaches to dog owners, which I discussed in Chapter One.

What Millan is good at demonstrating in his amusing program, The

Dog Whisperer, which can be watched on National Geographic television

or on the Web, is the calm assertiveness of leadership.5 In his program,

owner after owner learns to establish “presence” through the calm assert-

ive behavior that establishes someone as a leader.

Millan demonstrates with his own body language the difference

between being assertive and being aggressive. The body language of

aggressive behavior communicates the risk of some kind of imminent

attack on the listener, as when the “look of an angry hawk” came over

Howell Raines when he was talking to his staff. I don’t believe Raines

actually meant any bodily or other harm to his listeners, but that’s not

what the listeners took away from the encounter. If leaders’ behavior

looks aggressive, their listeners will wonder what’s going to happen next.

And they may be aggressive in response, perhaps not immediately, but, as

in Howell Raines’s case, later on, when counterattack becomes possible.

It’s not a reasoned response; it’s an emotional reaction of the reptilian

brain to aggressive behavior.

The calm assertiveness of real leadership implies energy, but energy

that has been harnessed, energy that offers no direct threat to the audi-

ence. Outward calm communicates an absence of hidden tensions with

which the speaker is wrestling, hidden tensions that might break out at

any moment and hurt someone. Calm assertiveness means confirming in

our outward demeanor that we are in control of our own fears and

desires. In acting thus, we show that we are there for the audience, ready

to give them full attention, available to listen and to interact with them

and to offer an invitation to the future.

One piece of good news from Cesar Millan’s work is that the agenda

of things a leader has to learn is not huge. It’s calm assertiveness, with

head held high, square shoulders, appropriate eye contact, and being

there for the dog. And what’s even better news, once the dog owner does

that limited number of things, the dog instantly accepts the dog owner as

a leader.

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The rapidity of learning that Millan’s work demonstrates jibes with

my own experience in training executives as leaders of people. In terms of

body language, they need only take care of a limited number of basics to

establish presence. Those basics can be mastered easily and quickly. With

these basics in place, the speaker captures the attention of the audience

for the duration of the speech. An audience is always ready to listen to

anyone who exhibits the body language of leadership.

Now just doing these few basics won’t turn you into Laurence Olivier

or Meryl Streep or Winston Churchill. The subtleties and nuances to learn

about body language and presence are infinite and you could spend a life-

time steadily enhancing your mastery of them. But the immediate progress

that can be made in taking care of the basics of the body language of leader-

ship is enough for most leaders to move from “boring” to “extraordinary.”

And What Are Those Basics?

The most important element is eye contact. Leadership is a highly inter-

active phenomenon, and eye contact is the highway on which the interac-

tion takes place. You look directly at the audience, person by person, not

sideways, which may be interpreted as shiftiness. You establish eye contact

with all the people in the room, particularly people in the back corners.

You symbolize through eye contact that you are ready to converse with

everyone who is there.

The second element follows from the first: throw away your notes.

You can’t have eye contact with an audience if you are reading from

notes. They are an obstacle to eye contact. They also symbolize a physical

barrier between you and the audience. Any physical thing between you

and the audience—even a piece of paper—blocks the flow of psychic

energy. Moreover, if you are reading from notes, you can’t be fully pres-

ent. By reading from notes, you are signaling that you aren’t speaking for

yourself, from your heart: you are a messenger reading a message devised

at another time. Perhaps the author was you—perhaps it was another

person. It hardly matters: the overriding implication of reading from

notes is that you are not fully present for the audience at this moment to

interact with them. You have become a mere courier, not a leader.

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Next, if you can, get out from behind any podium between you and

the audience. Podiums get in the way of direct bodily communication.

Like any physical object between you and the audience, they block the flow

of psychic energy. Subliminally the audience may see you as hiding from

them. Let the audience see you without anything between you and them.

Then make sure that you maintain an open body stance, square

shoulders, relaxed, calm, assertive, with a total focus on the audience. By

doing this, you signify that you are there for the audience. And if you are

there for them, they will be there for you.

You use gesture to signify that it’s not just your mind communicat-

ing. Gestures convey that your whole body is behind what you’re saying.

You make sure your gestures are in sync with the content of what you are

saying. Gestures serve as a kind of visual punctuation to the words. They

should also reflect contagious energy and enthusiasm. Stiff or jerky ges-

tures may be interpreted as inner tension and lack of resolution. Here

again, gestures should reflect calm assertiveness, signifying personal mas-

tery of your message.

Finally, you plant your feet firmly on the ground and face the audience

squarely and openly. If need be, wiggle your toes to remind yourself not to

perambulate, which is massively distracting. In particular, don’t walk from

side to side across the speaker’s platform. The audience will interpret this as

restlessness, lack of calmness, and perhaps even a hidden wish to quit the

room. If you must move, then move toward the audience to indicate a wish

to be closer and more interactive with them. Choose different individuals

in the audience and move toward them successively. This will be inter-

preted as a wish to connect and engage, rather than escape.

These elements may sound mundane, even trivial, but believe me, the

difference between someone who is respecting these simple principles

and someone who isn’t is stark. With these limited number of basics in

place, leaders will quickly see a dramatic difference in their impact on an

audience.

Beyond those basics, there are of course many more nuances of lead-

ership presence. Those readers who would like to explore the subject in

depth might consult some of the many interesting books on the subject,

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such as Leadership Presence by Belle Linda Halpern and Kathy Lubar,

mentioned earlier, as well as The Definitive Book of Body Language by

Allan and Barbara Pease, or the Book of Tells by Peter Collett.6

Practice, Practice, Practice

We often put so much time and energy into the content of what we are to

say that we don’t allow time to work on how we are going to say it. We

repeatedly overlook the fact that if we don’t use the right body language

and “sound like we mean it,” our presentation is going nowhere.

Why do we make this mistake? It’s partly our schooling. But there’s

more. Deep down, as Malcolm Gladwell points out, “we all want to believe

that the key to having an impact on someone lies with the inherent quality

of the ideas we present.”7 We want to see ourselves as people of substance,

not merely people with a persuasive style. The reality is that how we pres-

ent our ideas is going to be a huge part of determining whether our ideas

are accepted or ignored.

Style can’t be separated from the substance. The content of the leader’s

story is only a part of the impact. What gives it force and meaning for the

listener is the leader’s calm, energy, and enthusiasm.

In the course of delivering the communication, there is no division

between style and content. Leaders are both style and content. Listeners

don’t get a carton of content and a dollop of style. They get a cocktail

where style and content are all mixed in together.

With calm assertiveness, even the simplest, most mundane and every-

day things can come to seem wonderful, magical, even hallowed. The

stories I’ve quoted in this book that have inspired others to make funda-

mental changes in behavior aren’t in themselves particularly striking.

Craig Dunn’s story about an insurance agent who helps an invalid or the

stories J. Allard and Steven Sinofsky told about what was happening in

Cornell were not inherently mesmerizing. Leaders take ordinary occur-

rences and invest them with significance. In leadership, it’s not the story

itself that is striking—it’s the linkage the stories have to other things, to

the survival of AMP or to the future of software in the world as personi-

fied in the performance of the story, that makes the difference.

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The people telling those stories felt that they really mattered. By com-

municating that feeling, they made the stories matter to their audiences.

The stories acquired significance in the telling. It wasn’t the stories them-

selves that were extraordinary—it was the psychic energy that the speak-

ers invested in them that made them extraordinary to the listeners.

For the duration of the performance the speaker embodies the idea.

When leaders have a firm conviction in their minds, their stories become

holistic. When they re-experience and re-tell the story, they become the

story: they are at one with the audience, with themselves, and with their

message. Their voice expresses. Their demeanor expresses. The way they

hold their body expresses. Their tone of voice expresses. The look in their

eyes expresses. In this way, leaders communicate their true nature in the

simplest, most direct way, as one living being to another.

Performance is a matter of bringing into harmony body, emotion,

and thought. It draws on all elements: “on their bodies like athletes and

dancers, on their feelings like singers and lovers, and on their minds like

mathematicians and thinkers.”8

And leaders develop this capability by practice. It’s practice, practice,

practice, and then more practice. There is no end to practice.

At first, progress is generally rapid. To acquire the skills needed to do

a modestly competent job of incorporating stories into an effective lead-

ership presentation is not particularly difficult. People already do this

effortlessly in a social setting. All they need is to transpose skills they

already have to more purposeful settings.

What takes time is going beyond this modest competence and really

mastering the art. After their initial rapid progress, leaders realize that

they are no longer progressing leaps and bounds. Even though they try

very hard, the progress they make is gradual. It’s like playing the piano or

learning how to speak a foreign language: after moving rapidly through

the basics, you begin to make slow, imperceptible progress over long peri-

ods of time.

As leaders’ skills mellow, their experience becomes deeper and more

meaningful, both to themselves and to their audience. They will not be

able to say why precisely. But subtle, indefinable elements will enter into

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the performance, elements that weren’t there before. They will succeed in

putting more of themselves in what they say. They will find more reso-

nance between themselves and their audiences.

As performers, they will in a sense be getting better, even though

leadership isn’t really about getting “better.” It’s about connecting in a sin-

gle moment with the particular individuals who happen to be in front of

them on each individual occasion. To be sincere, speaking the language of

leadership from the heart and making a full effort to communicate what

you know, may often be enough. The listeners will recognize good intent

and help rectify any defects in performance skills by hearing what was

meant to be said.

Do Leaders Need Charisma?

The body language of leadership is not to be confused with charisma—a

characteristic that some writers wrongly suggest is an essential element of

leadership. Charismatic leaders, it is said, appear “so extraordinary, due to

their strategic insight, strong convictions, self-confidence, unconven-

tional behavior and dynamic energy that followers idolize them and want

to become like them.”9

We’ve been living for a long time with the legend of the born leader,

the colorful charismatic, the innate firebrand who walks into a room and

electrifies everyone with sheer physical presence. The fact is that the

charismatics—Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs—lacked any

particular physical characteristics that made them charismatic. Such peo-

ple do exist in the world: the film star good looks of John F. Kennedy

come to mind. But they are rare. The brute fact is that most successful

leaders are quite ordinary in physical appearance. Overall, the idea that

some kind of innate physical charisma is required for leadership is a per-

nicious myth.10

Take one of the most charismatic individuals of the twentieth cen-

tury: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. (Mahatma, meaning “great soul,”

was an honorific title he acquired.) Gandhi led an extraordinary life, fus-

ing the ascetic ideals of the ancient Hindu religion and culture with some

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revolutionary ideas for generating political change through satyagraha:

“force born of truth and love or nonviolence.” His efforts were successful

in mobilizing the Indian population of South Africa and then in leading

the entire Indian nation to independence. His example, preaching truth

and nonviolence, inspired leaders in many countries around the world to

emulate his example. When he was assassinated in 1948, practically the

whole world mourned him. He was compared to Socrates, to Buddha, to

Jesus and St. Francis of Assisi.

His life has been the subject of hundreds of biographies. Jawaharlal

Nehru has written: “No man can write a real life of Gandhi, unless he is as

big as Gandhi.” He was a man “whose eyes were often full of laughter and

yet were pools of infinite sadness.” He was “a pilgrim on a quest for Truth,

quiet, peaceful, determined, fearless, who would continue that quest and

pilgrimage, regardless of the consequences.” Gandhi “invested many of his

gestures with special symbolic meaning, and at one point or another some-

body has sanctified his every action and utterance, so that today in India—

and elsewhere—there exists not one Gandhi, but hundreds of Gandhis.”11

Yet the extraordinary charismatic qualities that were so obvious in

Gandhi after his achievements were apparently invisible to others before

those achievements. He was a short, thin, and sickly child. He was an indif-

ferent student who found schoolwork hard. He envied the big, strong boys

who were good at sports like cricket and gymnastics, at which he per-

formed poorly. A photo of him at the time shows not so much eyes that

were pools of infinite sadness as eyes displaying a hunted, apprehensive

look. With his large nose, he was an ugly young man, something that he

eventually became proud of, claiming to be “the ugliest man in the

world.” He was married by his parents at the age of thirteen to a girl his

own age, and, already demonstrating a healthy sexual appetite, consum-

mated the marriage that night. He was a jealous and imperious young

husband, forbidding his young wife to go anywhere, while declaring that

he found her company tedious.

Having decided to become a lawyer, he opted to pursue, not a rigorous

legal education in India, but the path of an expensive dilettante, reading

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for the English bar in London, an approach that required no coursework

and involved passing simple examinations that were practically a formality.

In England, Gandhi set out to become an Englishman. He bought

Western clothes. He took up ballroom dancing. He took up elocution les-

sons for a while, but eventually concluded that his efforts to become an

Englishman were futile. Instead he spent much of his time pursuing vari-

ous vegetarian causes, “to the irritation of practically everyone, Indian or

English, whom he came to know.”12

After three years in London, he returned to India, and he set up a legal

practice, first in Rajkot and then in Bombay. When he finally obtained a

case to argue, he stood in front of the court and couldn’t think of a single

question; he had to sit down and give the brief to a colleague. After that, he

didn’t get another case.

On one occasion, he interceded on behalf of his brother, who was

angling for the prime ministership of the tiny princely kingdom of Por-

bandar. Apparently his brother had offended the British political agent on

whom his career depended, and so Gandhi, who had casually met the

agent in London, took up his brother’s cause. The agent told Gandhi that

if his brother felt that he had been wronged, he could apply through the

proper channels. When Gandhi persisted, the agent told him to leave.

And when Gandhi continued to argue, the agent had his servant take

hold of Gandhi and throw him physically out of his office.

At this point in his life, Gandhi was the very antithesis of charisma.

He was unattractive in appearance. He was graceless in manners. He was

lacking in tact. In private, he was annoyingly persistent. In public, he was

too shy to open his mouth. He was unable to earn an income as a lawyer.

If his eyes were “pools of infinite sadness,” there is no record of people

noticing it at the time.

The fact is that Gandhi’s charisma was the result, not the cause, of his

accomplishments. No one sensed an inkling of charisma until after he

had made up his mind what he wanted to do with his life, which occurred

after an incident of racial discrimination in South Africa: he was holding

a first-class ticket, but he was thrown off the train by a white guard at the

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request of a white man, and left shivering in a dark waiting room. Within

a week of the incident, he convened a meeting of the Indians of Pretoria

and delivered an address on white discrimination. It was his first public

speech. Passion for the cause dissolved his shyness. He found the words

needed to communicate his commitment. And so began a long journey as

an agent of change, first in South Africa and then in India. It was only

after he had success in influencing people that people began to think of

Gandhi as having charisma.

Academic research confirms the same phenomenon at more mun-

dane levels. For instance, Nancy Roberts of the University of Minnesota

has written movingly of a highly successful school superintendent of a

district in the Mid-West. When she was appointed to her position, the

superintendent was not perceived as charismatic. It was only after she had

been in the position for several years and the change process that she

launched was well under way that people began to think of her as charis-

matic. This wasn’t the inevitable result of extraordinary personal qualities

but rather the result of her handling of the problems that the school dis-

trict faced at the time.13

Similar findings come from a five-year study by Warren Bennis and

Burt Nanus of sixty top-level corporate leaders and thirty leaders of pub-

lic sector organizations. Few of the individuals studied fitted the stereo-

type of a charismatic leader. They were not larger-than-life individuals.

Most of them were very ordinary in appearance, personality, and general

behavior. They were, however, strongly committed to a vision and

reflected that commitment in their decisions and behavior.14

Charisma is thus usually a consequence of leadership, not the cause

of it. Once leaders have accomplished something, they appear to acquire

qualities that no one noticed in them before. They seem to grow in size:

people begin to look up to them and start talking about their charisma.

Can Leaders Use Written Stories?

Most of this book concerns oral communication. Can leaders use written

communication to inspire enduring enthusiasm?

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It’s not impossible, as Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address demonstrates: a

speech that was ineffective when delivered had profound and lasting

effect in written form. And books have obviously had transformational

effects over time.

But in practice, in the hectic modern world where people want

results now, reliance on the written word will generally be insufficient to

inspire the kind of skeptical, cynical, or hostile audiences that one finds in

today’s workplace or marketplace to enduring enthusiasm for a cause. To

engage these kinds of audiences with strange, new, transformational

ideas, I have two words of advice: be there!

If leaders are physically present with those people, face to face, eyeball

to eyeball, with a powerful story to tell, a story they deliver with energy

and passion, then there is a chance that they will connect with a good por-

tion of the audience. Merely sending out an e-mail message, or an article,

or a book, or inviting people to go to a Web site won’t get the job done.

Of course, once leaders have got an audience positively excited about

the idea they are trying to communicate, then all those forms of commu-

nication will be helpful and should be used to reinforce the message and

continue the conversation: e-mail messages, articles, books, Web sites,

podcasts, and videos all come into their own. That’s because now the lis-

teners want to find out more. Now they’re interested. Now they’re excited.

Now they’re keen to find these materials and learn.

This is not to say that books can’t have an impact in changing peo-

ple’s minds. Obviously, down through the centuries, books have intro-

duced major changes in the world. But books and reading take time. It

might take someone eight hours to read a book. These days busy people

don’t have eight hours to spare. They’re only going to read the book if

they’re already motivated. Getting them motivated is why oral story-

telling plays such a central role in leadership.

Should Leaders Use PowerPoint?

While it’s common to rail at PowerPoint for causing excruciatingly bor-

ing presentations, this is analogous to complaining about the English lan-

guage. PowerPoint is a powerful, infinitely flexible graphics program. The

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only practical limit on adapting it to any need is the imagination of the

presenter.

This is not to deny that PowerPoint causes problems. In the 30 mil-

lion or so PowerPoint slide shows that take place each day around the

world, most are filled with illegible text and boring images and bland

abstractions. It’s these unsound practices that account for the dazed looks

on the viewers’ faces, not PowerPoint itself.

Should one forgo PowerPoint slides? It’s true that the occasional

speaker can mesmerize a crowd without any visual aids. The atmosphere

can become like that of a circus tent. All eyes are on the presenter, who

turns into a performer. The medium encourages the speaker to use the-

atrical tricks to keep the audience’s attention. It can be an effective per-

formance. But it is less likely that the message sticks as well as one that

combines words with images.

That’s because some people simply respond better to images than

words, while other people respond better to words than images. The evi-

dence is not gender neutral, that is, the bell curves of men and women

don’t overlap. On average, women respond better to words than pictures.

On average, men respond better to pictures than words. Obviously there

are exceptions—verbal men and picture-oriented women—but on aver-

age, that’s what the data shows.15 As a result, if you want to reach the

whole audience, it is a good idea to use both words and images.

My Web site offers a number of basic principles that can help avoid

the worst pitfalls in preparing PowerPoint slide shows.16 Most of the prin-

ciples are little more than common sense. Use text that’s legible. Make sure

images are relevant to your message. Use slides that are self-explanatory.

Following these simple principles of visual hygiene can help harness the

immense capabilities of PowerPoint to transform boring, abstract slides

into compelling, memorable presentations that lead to action.

Part Two of this book has explored the enabling conditions of the

language of leadership. The elements that can ensure that the language of

leadership has its maximum effect include articulating a clear and inspir-

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ing change idea, committing to the story of change, mastering the audi-

ence’s story, using narrative intelligence, telling the truth, and deploying

the body language of leadership.

With those elements in place, Part Three explores ways to proceed

step by step in using language of leadership: getting attention, stimulating

desire, reinforcing with reasons, and continuing the conversation. I begin

with getting the audience’s attention.

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[ P A R T 3 ] THE LANGUAGE

OF LEADERSHIP:

KEY STEPS

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No fresh and new experience is possible if there

isn’t a pure, virgin space ready to receive it.

—Peter Brook1

Quick. Complex. Interconnected. Confusing. The world today is such an

unpredictable kaleidoscope of shifting information, activities, people,

places, stories, and goals, all vying for a place in our minds, it severely

tests our ability to concentrate on anything in particular.

Is it any wonder, then, that attention has become a scarce resource?

Or that modern audiences usually aren’t listening when leaders start to

speak? Listeners may be physically present, but mentally they’re often

somewhere else. Before any meaningful communication can occur, the

speaker needs to clear the way and create an open space for the audience

so that their minds can consider something different. The most impor-

tant function of getting attention isn’t taking information in, but prepar-

ing listeners’ minds for something new.2

And the attention I’m talking about here is front-of-the-mind atten-

tion: conscious, focused, explicit, intense, and undivided. It’s the kind of

attention we apply when solving a problem, writing a letter, or watching

an exciting movie. While this is happening, our brains may be paying

back-of-the-mind attention to many other subjects—subjects that will

never come to conscious attention unless something unexpected occurs,

such as a cry for help, the smell of burning, or a ringing doorbell.

GET TING PEOPLE’S

AT TENTION

8

”“

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Getting attention means diverting the audience’s focus from any

external sensory signals—the squeaking of chairs, the noise of the streets

outside, the chattering at the back of the room, or the weird tie that guy is

wearing.

Equally important, the internal meanderings of the mind need to be

suppressed. What happened at dinner last night? Did I really turn the car

headlights off? Is my career heading in the right direction?

But most important is the need to generate a sense of expectancy that

something significant is about to happen. In a theater this is accom-

plished by the physical arrangements: the seating, the stage, the curtain,

and the lights, which together create the sense that something interesting

is imminent. In most leadership situations, an analogous effect must be

achieved by what we say.

Six general principles govern efforts to get attention:

First, attention is attracted to what is unexpected. Routine, run-of-

the-mill occurrences are relegated to back-of-the-mind attention, or

what psychologists call “automatic attention.” Most of what we do during

the day is handled in this fashion, thus freeing up focused attention for

more significant issues. It’s the unexpected that gets front-of-the-mind

attention.

Second, attention is engaged by the emotions. Emotions serve as

markers. Emotion slows down the process of analytic thinking, thus mak-

ing the object “interesting.”3 To elicit emotion, it helps to be specific. Gen-

eral notions and abstract schemes have little effect on the emotions or the

imagination: people may be unmoved by the slaughter of tens of thou-

sands of people in a foreign conflict, while the picture of a single child

burned by napalm can stick in their imagination forever. The more spe-

cific and concrete, the sharper the image people retain.4 Master commu-

nicators find and describe the telling detail, such as when Leo Tolstoy’s

heroine, Anna Karenina, notices for the first time how large her husband’s

ears are, once she has begun her adulterous affair.

Third, attention is engaged by what is personal to listeners themselves.

The more things have to do with ourselves, the more they are likely to be

of interest. As Tom Davenport and John Beck point out in The Attention

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Economy, if you want to get attention, you’ve got to give attention. People

are more likely to pay attention to you if you attend to what’s important

for them. “As much as possible the theme has to be, What’s in it for me?

How does this information tell me what I need to know? How is it tai-

lored to my situation?”5

Fourth, from a leadership perspective, it’s important that whatever is

used to get attention is relevant to the subject at hand. It should point to

the overall direction of the leader’s eventual theme and avoid introducing

a distraction from what is to come. Thus if speakers in an organizational

setting were to take off their shirts or stand on their heads, it would cer-

tainly attract attention, but it would also launch trains of thought that

could be highly distracting from what they were about to say. Thus the

stories that Al Gore used in his 2000 presidential debate drew attention to

problems that had arisen under the administration of which he was a

part, rather than to the solutions that he wanted to propose: as a result,

the stories got attention, but from Gore’s perspective, they focused atten-

tion on the wrong questions.

Fifth, the communication tool should be proportionate to the scale of

the task in changing minds. If the audience is already hugely distracted

and the behavior change aimed at is major, then speakers may need to

spend a great deal of effort getting attention. By contrast, if speakers are

in the lucky position of having an audience that is already curious,

inquisitive, and open to the message, then the speakers can pass quickly

on to stimulating desire for change. However, given the tendency of lead-

ers, particularly hierarchical leaders, to overestimate the extent to which

their audience is listening, it’s generally better to err on the side of cau-

tion and assume that at least some members of the audience are not pay-

ing attention.

Finally, and perhaps most important, attention is engaged by what is

negative. Psychological studies show that human beings give more weight

to losses than to gains, to pains than to joys, to negative events than to

positive events. And negative events are more attention-getting.6

Preferential attention to the negative is hardly surprising from an

evolutionary perspective. Averting danger, such as preventing loss of life

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or limb, often requires an immediate response. Positive activities, like eat-

ing and making love, though crucial for long-term survival, are less press-

ing. Overall, pain is more urgent than pleasure.7

Psychological studies suggest that we have an automatic vigilance

mechanism that serves to direct attention to undesirable stimuli. As we

look around the world, we make a primary appraisal of whether what we

see is “good for me” or “bad for me.” We do this easily, readily, and quickly,

and sometimes even without conscious thought. When our attention is

elsewhere, undesirable stimuli are more likely to attract our minds.8

Thus the main task of the speaker in getting the audience’s attention

is to evoke emotion in a relevant, unexpected, personalized way, if possi-

ble while directing attention to the subject at hand. And generally this is

most easily accomplished by accentuating the negative.

Which methods work best? In what follows, the possible communica-

tion tools are sorted into three broad categories: tools that are generally

effective, those that are moderately effective, and those that are generally

ineffective. Much depends of course on the skill with which the tool is used

and the context. Used unskillfully, all of these tools will fail. Applied with

flair and imagination, any of the tools can work to some extent. The rank-

ing here reflects the ease of getting the tool to work at all and the intensity

of the impact it is likely to have when it does work. More detailed, quanti-

fied research is needed in this area. The ranking offered here is no more

than a first step toward some sense of the layout of the terrain.

Generally Effective Tools for Getting Attention

Here are the methods that tend to work most easily and most effectively:

• Tell a story about the audience’s problems.

• Tell a story of how you handled adversity.

• Ask a question.

• Use a striking metaphor.

• Launch an unexpected exercise.

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• Issue a challenge.

• Share something of value.

• Admit a vulnerability.

• Give a musical performance.

Tell a Story About the Audience’s Problems

If leaders have done their homework and know what the audience is wor-

ried about and what keeps them awake at night, then often the most

effective way to get their attention is to begin talking about those prob-

lems and demonstrate greater understanding of those problems than

those in the audience do. If speakers can show that the problems are seri-

ous, perhaps even more serious than the audience imagines, the audience

will experience concern in an area that is personally relevant to them. By

concisely demonstrating competence, leaders also have an opportunity to

enhance trust.

If the resistance of the audience is considerable, then a large number

of stories may be necessary to get the audience’s attention. Al Gore’s

Inconvenient Truth, for instance, is mainly composed of negative stories

about the impact of global warming. He’s trying to wake us up to the

magnitude of the dangers we are facing, so that we start to pay attention:

ladies and gentlemen, this is serious!

Tell a Story of How You Handled Adversity

Another effective way to get the audience’s attention, particularly where

speakers are unknown to the audience, is to tell a brief but moving story

about how you handled some adversity in your life. A concise story about

a significant turning point in your life, particularly one that is in some

way related to the change under discussion, can be emotionally stimulat-

ing to an audience and personally involving if the listeners project them-

selves into the story. By leveling with the audience, the leader can also

build up trust. Thus Al Gore, in talking about his family tobacco farm

and the death of his sister from smoking, reveals a side of him that is

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surprising, affecting, and attention-getting. The Preface to this book

reflects a similar effort to get your attention.

Ask a Question

Questions are the staple of advertising’s efforts to get attention be-

cause they succinctly force attention on a set of issues selected by the

communicator.

With “Where’s the beef ?” Wendy’s was able to suggest that there was

more to its fast food than that of its competitors.

When “Got milk?” was combined with arresting images of celebrities

with milk on their upper lip, it helped draw attention to a familiar but

forgotten drink.

“Is it live or is it Memorex?” drew attention to the fidelity of Memorex

recording tape.

“Where do you want to go today?” helped Microsoft draw attention to

the multiple uses of its software.

“Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do

you want a chance to change the world?” Steve Jobs famously asked this

question to draw attention to the possible reason why John Sculley might

want to leave a secure, high-paid position at Pepsi to join a bunch of young

computer geeks in California.

Questions are also pervasive in political campaigning: “Are you better

off today than you were four years ago?” helped Ronald Reagan set the

agenda for the 1980 presidential campaign. By contrast, Al Gore didn’t

dwell on the analogous question in his 2000 campaign: “Are you better off

today than you were eight years ago?” In 2000, most people in the United

States actually did feel better off, and the question, had it been pressed,

might have reminded them of that.

In using a question, it’s important to think through what sort of

answer may be expected. An inappropriate question may direct attention

to issues that are unexpected or irrelevant to the speaker’s message. If lis-

teners look for the beef and find it’s missing, or conclude that they are not

better off today than four years ago, the question will have the opposite of

its intended effect. Equally seriously, if the underlying assumptions of the

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question are false the question may backfire: asking “Where’s the beef?”

may not work on listeners who are vegetarians.

Use a Striking Metaphor

“Metaphor,” said José Ortega y Gasset, “is perhaps one of man’s most

fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for

creation which God left inside His creatures when He made them.”9

Metaphors can help speakers shine light into darkness and ignite their lis-

teners’ minds with celestial fire.

Unexpected metaphors can forcefully grab our attention. For instance

in November 2005, as part of the ongoing political debate about the

implications of the coming retirement of the Baby Boom generation, U.S.

Comptroller General David Walker focused attention on the financial

risks by referring to “the fiscal hurricane” that was about to “hit the coun-

try” as a result of “the imminent demographic explosion”: it will be “a

retirement tsunami that will never recede.”10 Following a fusillade of

metaphors such as those, it’s difficult for organizations like AARP to pres-

ent the coming wave of retirements of well-educated people as a positive

opportunity for the U.S. economy. To recapture attention, AARP may

have to come up with its own competing set of metaphors.

The best metaphors are subtly effective. With overemphasis, a meta-

phor can backfire, as Al Gore found during the first presidential debate in

October 2000, when he hammered the metaphor of the lockbox in which

he planned to deposit the funds for Medicare and Social Security. Gore

mentioned the “lockbox” metaphor a total of five times during the debate.

The metaphor succeeded in getting people’s attention, but it caused as

much confusion as enlightenment. In one focus group, a viewer won-

dered, “What’s in the lockbox?” and another asked, “Who’s got the key,

anyway?”11 The metaphor also had hints of authoritarian control that

showed up in subsequent parodies of Gore’s performance. His metaphor

became a communication problem rather than a solution.

Finding a single metaphor that encapsulates the whole idea you want

to communicate can be difficult. Sometimes the problem can be solved by

offending the linguistic purists and mixing metaphors. This is a familiar

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way of pitching Hollywood movies: for example, if Alien is presented as “a

combination of Star Wars and Jaws,” its narrative structure may become

clear.

If the real-world referents of mixed metaphors are too different, they

can jar, as in “He stepped up to the plate and grabbed the bull by the

horns.” Nonetheless, in the hands of a master linguist like Shakespeare,

who frequently took arms against a sea of troubles, a mixed metaphor can

sound strangely harmonious.

Launch an Unexpected Exercise

One way to get attention is to have listeners themselves do something

unexpected. For instance, when I do workshops on business narrative, I

sometimes begin by inviting each participant to tell a sixty-second story

to another participant on one of two subjects: either about a time when

they discovered what their organization was really good at or about a

time when they encountered adversity. Then the pairs switch roles, and

the first listener tells a story on one of the two themes. Even without

preparation, most participants surprise themselves by performing the

task effortlessly and demonstrating some elements of narrative intelli-

gence. The exercise creates a direct experience of the techniques the

workshop aims to teach, and it also gets the audience’s attention.

Issue a Challenge

“What I am about to tell you is a bit frightening. Sometimes seminar

attendees walk out on me as I deliver this material because they’re dis-

turbed by what they hear. These are smart people walking out. I don’t

blame them for leaving. This is the stuff of nightmares.” Thus begins a

book by Joel Bauer and Mark Levy.12 It’s like a carnival barker’s ballyhoo

that’s used to snare people strolling by. Hokey, perhaps, but it can get

attention. In the field of leadership one needs to make sure that the chal-

lenge is factual. If people’s attention is captured by something that they

later discover to be misleading, the backlash can undermine the eventual

message.

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Getting People’s Attention

157

Share Something of Value

Just as an unexpected gift from a visitor can help generate feelings of

geniality and friendship, sharing something of value early on—perhaps

an unexpected announcement of some truly good news such as a promo-

tion, a victory, an accomplishment—can capture the audience’s attention

and enhance positive feelings of trust toward the leader. But again,

remember the rules of relevance and truth. If the unexpected announce-

ment is truly extraordinary, it may divert attention from the main mes-

sage you are trying communicate. Or if you announce an award to the

organization for being “one of the best places to work,” in a setting where

staff don’t agree that the award is justified, then the announcement will

be distracting rather than attention-getting.

Admit a Vulnerability

One way for leaders, particularly hierarchical leaders, to get attention is to

reveal the limits of their knowledge, to concede that they don’t know

everything and state their interest in learning, or to admit that mistakes

have been made, as Craig Dunn did in his encounter with the angry

workers of AMP. In organizational settings, such admissions can be unex-

pected and hence attention getting.

The wording of the admission can be important. Thus in early 2007,

presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama was asked about his pur-

chase of land near his home from a longtime friend who was indicted

(but not convicted) in 2006 on charges of extorting kickbacks from com-

panies seeking state business.

First version Later version

“I was stupid.” “It was a bone-headed move.”

As columnist William Safire notes, “‘Boneheaded’ was a good choice:

not as condemnatory or self-flagellating as stupid, nor as dismissive as

foolish, nor as formal as ignorant, nor carrying a secondary drug conno-

tation as dopey, nor as frivolous as silly, nor as inapt as dumb (considered

a slur by the speech-impaired).”13

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The Secret Language of Leadership

158

Putting the admission in the form of a simple narrative—“Here’s

how it happened . . . ”—can help show the mistake as driven by situa-

tional factors, a one-time error, a deviation from normal prudence, rather

than a permanent personal flaw such as stupidity.

Give a Musical Performance

Singing a song or performing a musical instrument can be so unusual in

an organizational context that it gets attention. Even if the performance

isn’t brilliant from a musical standpoint, it may be unexpected enough to

wake people up. But keep in mind the rule of relevance. If the musical

performance is really extraordinary, or if it has no connection to the sub-

ject under discussion, it may be the only thing that the audience remem-

bers. A rap song with lyrics directly related to the topic under discussion

might be very effective at getting attention and pointing the listeners to

that topic. Much of the effect comes from the unexpectedness. Singing a

song once will be a surprise; singing a song every time becomes routine.

Moderately Effective Ways to Get Attention

Here are some things that sometimes work but are harder to manage than

the first group:

• Show the real thing.

• Offer a surprise.

• Make an extraordinary offer.

• Talk about an opportunity for the audience.

• Tell a springboard story.

• Tell a joke.

• Show an image.

• Create a frame.

Show the Real Thing

In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Marc Antony waves the bloody tunic of the

murdered Caesar in front of the Roman populace to arouse their interest

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Getting People’s Attention

159

and sympathy—and get their attention. The risk here is that the real

object may have irrelevant elements from which it is difficult to divert the

viewers’ attention: Caesar’s tunic may look nondescript when the live

Caesar is not wearing it. So Marc Antony is careful to tell a simple story

that focuses the audience’s attention on the elements of the tunic that are

relevant to his objective, namely, how the murderers’ daggers came

through the holes in the tunic and entered Caesar’s body. Thus stories

about the object may be more effective to keep the attention focused on

what is relevant than the thing itself.

Offer a Surprise

A surprise—an unexpected announcement, some startling piece of news,

an unanticipated prop like holding a live snake—may be momentarily

effective in capturing the audience’s attention. However this approach is

only likely to be effective if the surprise is related in some way to the

objective of the presentation. Otherwise it may be difficult to shift the

attention from the surprise back to the course of action the leader is aim-

ing to communicate.

Make an Extraordinary Offer

If leaders can summarize what they offer in a concise but surprising state-

ment, this in itself might serve as the attention grabber. In a leadership

setting, it can be hard to frame such a statement so that it is relevant to

the subject at hand. For instance, announcing, “At the end of the lecture, a

member of the audience will win a valuable prize,” may get people’s

attention, but it may also distract the audience’s attention from the sub-

ject at hand: the audience may spend the rest of the presentation wonder-

ing who is to win the prize.

Talk About an Opportunity for the Audience

An alternative to dwelling on the audience’s fears is to focus on their

hopes and dreams. This can be tricky, since it’s difficult to tell a credible

story about a future opportunity. Suppose I say:

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The Secret Language of Leadership

160

Imagine that it’s two years from now. Imagine that our organization has reached its goal of being the predominant supplier of services in our field. Imagine that our profits are at record levels. Our stock price has soared. We are being featured in Business Week and Forbes. . . .”

The risk is that such a euphoric future story will elicit the response:

“It will never happen here.” Future stories are inherently incredible, par-

ticularly in organizational settings. If the story is seen as implausible, it

can quickly become the subject of ridicule, particularly if the audience is

difficult.

Tell a Springboard Story

A springboard story is a story that describes an example in which the

change idea that the speaker is proposing has already happened, at least in

part. If a leader can find such a story and the story resonates with listen-

ers, it can connect with them at an emotional level and generate a new

story in their minds in a way that leads to action. However, because a

springboard story is positive in tone, it may be less effective initially in

getting the listeners’ attention than a question or a story about the listen-

ers’ own problems.

Tell a Joke

If leaders know the audience well enough, they may be able to get atten-

tion with a well-told joke. As with other devices, this works best if the

joke is related in some way to the objective of the presentation. Otherwise

it may be difficult to shift attention from the joke back to the idea that

leaders want to communicate. And be sure that the joke is indeed likely to

viewed as funny by the audience: since humor often wounds, it is all too

easy to attempt a joke that offends some segment of the audience.

Show an Image

If the intended change has an attractive physical appearance or an attrac-

tive image associated with it, then that image may be a good way to

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Getting People’s Attention

161

attract attention. Thus the fashion industry typically uses no more than

images to sell its products, without any words: the image itself can be

attractive enough to do the entire job of selling. The situation is different

with complex ideas, such as knowledge management, the reform of Social

Security, or a new business model: it’s tough to build an image that suc-

cinctly and clearly communicates such ideas. When presenters use an

attractive image that isn’t relevant to the course of action being proposed

(for example, a photo of an attractive woman), the image may get atten-

tion—but it may also distract from the purpose of the communication

and so diffuse the focus of the presentation.

Create a Frame

A statement that frames a subject and invites an audience to look at it

from a certain perspective can be an effective attention-getting device.

Thus the Washington, D.C., Democratic mayoral primary in September

2006 ended up being decided on which candidate the electorate viewed as

most energetic. By that measure, the thirty-five-year-old Adrian Fenty

defeated a field of older, more experienced insiders. Why did energy

become the critical issue of the campaign, rather than maturity and expe-

rience? Fenty campaigned energetically and repeated the words “energy”

and “energized” on every possible occasion. In due course, reporters

started writing about energy and describing his campaign as energetic.

Here Fenty took advantage of what psychological research has found: it’s

more difficult to persuade people to change their minds on an issue than

it is to invite people to focus on a different issue—the one where the can-

didate is the strongest.14

Framing statements, if widely repeated, can be successful in changing

the way people thereafter view a whole of set of issues. They can, however,

have an adverse reaction if the audience intuitively rejects the proposed

frame. Frames are also vulnerable to being undermined by contrary sto-

ries. Thus in the U.S. elections, “the war on terror” was an effective frame

for the Republicans in the 2004 election, but it was trumped in 2006 by

powerful negative stories of the poor progress in the war in Iraq.

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The Secret Language of Leadership

162

Generally Ineffective Ways of Getting Attention

And here are ways that sometimes work but more often fail or backfire:

• Hype.

• Tell the story of who your company is.

• Just give the facts.

Hype

Repetition of a message may signify that something is important and

hence establish a mental frame. Public relations firms and ad agencies try

to use repetitious press coverage and media events that lead to an atmos-

phere of excitement and expectancy. With same idea appearing in differ-

ent media at the same time, the object is to generate a sense that everyone

is talking about the same subject, so it must be important. In such cir-

cumstances, it’s hard not to pay some attention. The problem here

becomes one of sustaining interest. Hype often generates both excessive

expectations and feelings of manipulation, which then cause their own

backlash. As a result, hype and the enduring enthusiasm sought by trans-

formational leadership tend to be inversely related.

Tell the Story of Who Your Company Is

In a presentation, speakers often begin with information about the com-

pany they work for. Sadly, this subject is usually of much more interest to

the speaker than to the audience. These speakers have forgotten the

maxim noted by Henry Boettinger in Moving Mountains: “Start where

THEY are, not where YOU are.”15 In the absence of definite evidence that

the audience is interested in some aspect of the organization and why

people are interested, speakers will usually be better off talking about the

audience and its problems. The firm’s own story can come later.

Just Give the Facts

By themselves, without more, facts are not particularly attention getting.

Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, in their classic The New Rhetoric,

describe the phenomenon:

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163

The authors of scientific reports and similar papers often think that if they merely report certain experiments, mention certain facts or enun- ciate a certain number of truths, that is enough of itself to arouse the interest of their hearers or readers. This attitude rests on an illusion, widespread in certain rationalistic and scientific circles, that facts speak for themselves and make such an indelible imprint on any human mind that the latter is forced to give its adherence regardless of its inclination.16

These observations about scientific papers are equally true of a lead-

ership setting. A simple recitation of facts by themselves is likely to be

boring rather than attention getting. And if the audience is difficult, rea-

sons may activate the confirmation bias and entrench the audience more

firmly in their existing position.

The various methods of getting attention described here obviously

aren’t alternatives. You might combine several methods, say, a question, a

challenge, and a story about the audience’s problems. If the audience is

very resistant or even hostile, you might need to commingle a number of

components to get the audience to listen: indeed, most of your speech

may be devoted to the quest for attention. Table 8.1 summarizes the vari-

ous approaches to getting the audience’s attention.

If the audience is already attentive, you may be able to spend little

time on getting attention. Instead, you quickly move on to the next (and

most difficult) step in transformational leadership: eliciting the audience’s

desire for a different state of affairs. This is the step where leadership pre-

sentations most frequently come to grief, and it is to this challenge that I

now turn.

Denning.c08 8/17/07 8:50 AM Page 163

TA B

LE 8

.1 U

ti lit

y o

f th

e Va

ri o

us C

o m

m un

ic at

io n

D ev

ic es

f o

r G

et ti

ng A

tt en

ti o

n

V al

ue in

G et

ti ng

C o

m m

un ic

at io

n D

ev ic

e E

xa m

p le

A tt

en ti

o n*

C o

m m

en t

G en

er al

ly E

ff ec

ti ve

Th e

st o

ry o

f th

e au

d i-

en ce

’s p

ro b

le m

s

Th e

st o

ry o

f ho

w y

o u

ha nd

le d

a d

ve rs

it y

A q

ue st

io n

A s

tr ik

in g

m et

ap ho

r

H av

e th

e au

d ie

nc e

d o

so m

et hi

ng u

ne xp

ec te

d .

A c

ha lle

ng e

Sh ar

e so

m et

hi ng

o f

va lu

e

A d

m is

si o

n o

f re

sp o

ns ib

ili ty

A m

us ic

al p

er fo

rm an

ce th

at is

r el

ev an

t to

t he

p re

se nt

er ’s

t he

m e

“I k

no w

w e’

re f

ac in

g p

ro b

le m

s w

ith x

a nd

y . A

nd in

f ac

t th

e p

ro b

le m

s ar

e w

o rs

e th

an w

e th

o ug

ht t

he y

w er

e. ”

A c

o nc

is e

st o

ry a

b o

ut h

o w

y o

u d

ea lt

w it

h a

tu rn

in g

p o

in t

in y

o ur

li fe

, w hi

ch is

s o

m e

w ay

r el

at ed

t o

t he

su b

je ct

u nd

er d

is cu

ss io

n. “

Le t

m e

te ll

yo u

ho w

I g

o t

in to

t hi

s si

tu at

io n.

. . .

”

“D o

y o

u kn

o w

h o

w m

an y

U .S

. w o

m en

t he

X Y

Z C

o rp

o ra

ti o

n ro

ut in

el y

re ac

he s?

”

“W e

ar e

fa ci

ng a

r et

ire m

en t

ts un

am i t

ha t

w ill

n ev

er re

ce d

e. ”

A sk

t he

m t

o t

ac kl

e an

e xe

rc is

e w

he n

th ey

t ho

ug ht

th ey

w er

e ju

st g

o in

g t

o li

st en

t o

a le

ct ur

e.

“W ha

t I a

m a

b o

ut t

o t

el l y

o u

is a

b it

fr ig

ht en

in g

. . .

.”

“I ’m

p le

as ed

t o

a nn

o un

ce t

ha t

w e

ha ve

ju st

w o

n th

e P

Q R

d ea

l t ha

t w

e’ ve

a ll

p ut

s o

m uc

h ef

fo rt

in to

.”

“W e

al l h

av e

to f

ac e

th e

fa ct

t ha

t th

er e

w er

e p

o o

r m

an ag

em en

t d

ec is

io ns

in t

he r

ec en

t p

as t.

. . .

”

Th e

p re

se nt

er s

in g

s a

ra p

s o

ng w

it h

ly ri

cs a

b o

ut t

he su

b je

ct u

nd er

d is

cu ss

io n.

H ig

h

H ig

h

H ig

h

H ig

h

H ig

h

H ig

h

H ig

h

H ig

h

H ig

h

Th is

is o

ft en

t he

b es

t w

ay t

o g

et at

te nt

io n.

O nl

y ap

p ro

p ria

te w

he re

t he

s p

ea ke

r is

r el

at iv

el y

un kn

o w

n to

t he

a ud

ie nc

e.

Th is

w o

rk s

b es

t if

th e

q ue

st io

n o

r th

e an

sw er

is s

ur p

ri si

ng t

o t

he a

ud ie

nc e.

B ew

ar e

o f

an y

un in

te nd

ed im

p lic

a- ti

o ns

o f

th e

m et

ap ho

r.

Th e

b es

t ex

er ci

se s

ar e

re la

te d

t o

t he

su b

je ct

u nd

er d

is cu

ss io

n.

B e

ca re

fu l t

o e

ns ur

e th

at t

he c

ha l-

le ng

e is

n o

t m

is le

ad in

g .

Th e

ne w

s m

us t

b e

un ex

p ec

te d

a nd

re le

va nt

t o

t he

li st

en er

s.

Le ve

lin g

w it

h th

e au

d ie

nc e

ca n

he lp

g en

er at

e tr

us t.

Th e

ri sk

is t

ha t

p eo

p le

m ay

r em

em -

b er

t he

r ap

s o

ng , n

o t

th e

m es

sa g

e.

Denning.c08 8/17/07 8:50 AM Page 164

M o

d er

at el

y E

ff ec

ti ve

G en

er al

ly In

ef fe

ct iv

e

Th e

re al

t hi

ng

A s

ur p

ri se

A n

ex tr

ao rd

in ar

y o

ff er

Th e

st o

ry o

f an

o p

p o

rt u-

ni ty

f o

r th

e au

d ie

nc e.

A s

p ri

ng b

o ar

d s

to ry

A jo

ke

A n

im ag

e

A f

ra m

in g

s ta

te m

en t

H yp

e

Th e

st o

ry o

f w

ho y

o ur

co m

p an

y is

Fa ct

s, d

at a,

a na

ly se

s

D is

p la

y an

o b

je ct

a ss

o ci

at ed

w it

h th

e to

p ic

a nd

em p

ha si

ze it

s im

p o

rt an

ce .

A n

un ex

p ec

te d

a nn

o un

ce m

en t,

s o

m e

st ar

tl in

g p

ie ce

o f

ne w

s re

la te

d t

o t

he m

ai n

m es

sa g

e.

“I ’ll

b e

o ff

er in

g a

p ri

ze a

t th

e en

d o

f th

e ta

lk .”

“I m

ag in

e th

at it

’s t

w o

y ea

rs f

ro m

n o

w . I

m ag

in e

th at

yo ur

o rg

an iz

at io

n ha

s re

ac he

d it

s g

o al

o f

b ei

ng .

. . ”

Te ll

a st

o ry

a b

o ut

a n

ex am

p le

w he

re t

he c

ha ng

e is

al re

ad y

ha p

p en

in g

.

“D id

y o

u he

ar t

he o

ne a

b o

ut t

he .

. . ”

A p

ho to

o f

9/ 11

c an

e lic

it f

ea r

o f

te rr

o ri

sm .

“T hi

s el

ec ti

o n

is a

b o

ut r

ee ne

rg iz

in g

t he

g o

ve rn

m en

t. ”

W id

es p

re ad

r ep

et it

io n

o f

p o

si ti

ve s

ta te

m en

ts .

“T he

X Y

Z co

rp o

ra ti

o n

ha s

a lo

ng a

nd d

is ti

ng ui

sh ed

hi st

o ry

. . .

”

“T he

X Y

Z C

o rp

o ra

ti o

n ha

s 41

,0 00

e m

p lo

ye es

a nd

sa le

s o

f o

ve r

$1 b

ill io

n. ”

M o

d er

at e

M o

d er

at e

M o

d er

at e

M o

d er

at e

M o

d er

at e

M o

d er

at e

M o

d er

at e

M o

d er

at e

Lo w

Lo w

Lo w

It m

ay b

e ne

ce ss

ar y

to d

ire ct

a tt

en tio

n to

t he

r el

ev an

t as

p ec

ts o

f th

e ob

je ct

.

M ak

e su

re t

ha t

th e

su rp

ri se

is r

el e-

va nt

t o

t he

s ub

je ct

a t

ha nd

.

Th e

d an

g er

is t

ha t

th e

o ff

er c

an b

e so

s uc

ce ss

fu l i

n g

et ti

ng a

tt en

ti o

n th

at it

d is

tr ac

ts f

ro m

t he

m ai

n m

es sa

g e.

W it

h d

iffi cu

lt a

ud ie

nc es

, i t’s

h ar

d t

o m

ak e

fu tu

re s

to ri

es b

el ie

va b

le .

P o

si ti

ve s

to ri

es a

re le

ss a

tt en

ti o

n- g

et ti

ng t

ha n

ne g

at iv

e st

o ri

es

A jo

ke c

an w

o rk

if it

is r

el ev

an t

to t

he su

b je

ct u

nd er

d is

cu ss

io n.

It d

ep en

d s

o n

fin d

in g

a n

im ag

e th

at ar

o us

es f

ee lin

g s

an d

r el

ev an

t to

t he

co ur

se o

f ac

ti o

n.

E ff

ec ti

ve ne

ss m

ay d

ep en

d o

n re

p et

i- ti

o n.

It c

an b

ac kfi

re if

t he

r ep

et it

io n

is s

ee n

as h

yp e.

It g

en er

at es

m is

tr us

t an

d f

ee lin

g s

o f

m an

ip ul

at io

n.

Th e

co m

p an

y’ s

st o

ry is

r ar

el y

an at

te nt

io n-

g et

te r.

It c

an w

o rk

w he

re t

he f

ac ts

o r

d at

a ar

e su

rp ri

si ng

.

*T he

r at

in g

s re

fle ct

e xp

er ie

nt ia

l j ud

g m

en ts

t ha

t w

ar ra

nt f

ur th

er q

ua nt

it at

iv e

re se

ar ch

.

Denning.c08 8/17/07 8:50 AM Page 165

166

We don’t do problems. We do solutions.

—Amory Lovins1

In December 2000, Bob Nardelli became CEO of Home Depot. He arrived

with impeccable credentials: he had enjoyed the best operating record in

GE, one of the most admired companies in America, and was the runner-

up to replace Jack Welch. Home Depot, however, was a mess, and Nardelli

set about cleaning it up. He introduced a military-style rule. He fired

most of the existing managers and replaced them with his own recruits,

many from GE and the U.S. Army.2 The company even started to look

and feel like an army.

He introduced centralized purchasing and a billion-dollar invest-

ment in technology, along with sharp reductions in staff and costs. As a

result, Home Depot had outstanding financials: Nardelli doubled sales

and more than doubled revenues. Home Depot’s gross margins also steadily

improved.3

But in January 2007, Nardelli was fired. Why? The apparent trig-

ger was his unwillingness to lower the amount of his extraordinary pay

package. This had become an issue because the stock price was down

7 percent since Nardelli had taken over, while his compensation remained

astronomical.

Why had Home Depot’s stock price lagged in the face of Nardelli’s

dazzling financial accomplishments? In short, Nardelli wasn’t able to gen-

erate sustained enthusiasm for what he was doing in the array of in-

STIMULATING

DESIRE

9

”“

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Stimulating Desire

167

vestors, shareholder advocates, hedge funds, private-equity deal makers,

legislators, regulators, and nongovernmental organizations who want a

say in how a company is run.

Investors were concerned that Nardelli’s dazzling financial results,

which had lowered service levels in stores, would not be sustainable. He

was also pursuing a strategy of expanding into the wholesale building

supplies market, and he hadn’t been able to convince Wall Street that this

move into a low-margin business would be worthwhile.

Nardelli now acknowledges he was “too focused on the idea that you

do your job, you take care of your numbers, and the rest will take care of

itself.”

“I used to play football,” he said when asked about the challenges of

being a public company CEO today. “In football, you always know the

score. Now, it’s like we are ice-skating, and you’ve got a bunch of judges

on the sideline shouting out the scores.”4

The problem for Nardelli, as it is for many CEOs these days, is that

this “bunch of skating judges” is now effectively in charge. Even the most

powerful CEO can’t force these judges to believe what the CEO wants

them to believe. Unless corporate leaders can generate sustained enthusi-

asm for the ideas they are pursuing, their very survival in the CEO role

becomes a question.

Generating desire for something different is the most difficult aspect

of leadership, because leaders usually have only seconds to make the case

for a new idea and get the audience to begin exploring a different, per-

haps a radically different, future. The audience will be making their initial

decision based on quick, intuitive, feeling-based processes.5 They will

make their decision long before leaders can complete a set of rational

arguments in favor of whatever is being proposed.

How can leaders win their audiences over to their way of thinking

and get buy-in for a new future even before they have had a chance to

present their arguments? How can they get people to see reason when

people are making decisions on emotional grounds? On the surface, the

problem seems insoluble.

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The first step toward solving it is to recognize that the challenge isn’t

about imposing the leaders’ will on the listeners—which, in any event, is

impossible. It’s not about moving the audience to a predetermined posi-

tion that leaders—in their greater magisterial wisdom—have foreseen.

It’s not a matter of a leader’s predetermining what is best and then getting

people to do it. It’s a matter of quickly stimulating desire for change.

General Principles

Eight general principles govern efforts to stimulate desire for change:

First, the underlying idea should be worthwhile for its own sake. Lead-

ers will have trouble eliciting sustained enthusiasm for a different future

if the goal is merely instrumental and time-limited. Skillful communica-

tion may win some short-term gains for an instrumental goal, but enthu-

siasm is unlikely to be enduring unless the idea is perceived to be

worthwhile in itself.

Second, the communication tool must make the idea memorable. If

the audience can’t remember the main elements of the change idea after

the presentation, it’s going to be hard for them to be enthusiastic about

implementing it. Hence catchy phrases or succinct stories that encap-

sulate the idea may work. Long, complex arguments that are hard to

remember won’t.

Third, the idea must become the audience’s own idea. Stimulating

desire for change is a subtle process of putting one or more options in

front of people and enticing them to co-create a new future. It entails

enabling the audience to imagine a different, more promising story that

they could be living, a story they for whatever reason have not visualized

up till now. It’s about respecting the audience’s ability to see that for

themselves, not about forcing something on them. If the idea does not

become the audience’s own idea, it will never inspire the enduring enthu-

siasm that is the hallmark of transformational leadership.

Fourth, the audience needs room to contribute. If the audience listens

to the idea and sees it as predetermined and predigested, and themselves

as passive observers with no say in how it is to be implemented, then sus-

tained enthusiasm is unlikely. This is because no significant change idea

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can be implemented without adaptation to the context: if listeners are

given no role in the process of adaptation, then they are unlikely to see it

as their own idea. Instead, it will remain an idea that they regard in a

detached fashion, something “out there,” something that the leadership

owns and they don’t. Instead, the audience must get inside the idea, real-

ize that it is unfinished, and see the possibilities ahead of them. As they

adapt the idea to their own context, they begin to grasp how it is relevant

for them and why it is sensible, logical, attractive, enticing, even obvious.

For the idea to become fully adapted to their needs, they must be the ones

to customize it, because only they can know their own needs.

Fifth, the idea must be positive. Since the sustained enthusiasm of

transformational leadership is a positive emotion, the leader’s communi-

cation of the change idea must be positive. If the leader’s speech is nega-

tive or neutral, then where will the positive energy come from? If the

leader is positive and enthusiastic, this is what spreads. It’s the conta-

giousness of the leader’s positive emotion and energy that stimulates

desire for a new future.

Sixth, the idea must be positive for the particular audience. The com-

munication must lead the audience to see gains for themselves, not just

for the organization or for the leader. An idea that makes the company, or

even the country, great may inspire people for a short time, but if there’s

nothing in it for the audience, then enthusiasm will inexorably fade.

Hence the communication must make it easy for the audience to see why

the change will be good for them personally.

Seventh, the more useful communication tools tend to be stories. Sto-

ries aren’t the only way to stimulate lasting desire for change, but they are

certainly among the more useful methods. Some of the other methods

that work, such as brilliant aphorisms or word pictures or motivational

songs, have the practical disadvantage that they require extraordinary tal-

ent to create them. By contrast, telling a story is simple and easy and

accessible to every human being. For the kinds of stories that can stimu-

late desire for change, no unusual talents are needed.

Eighth, communication tools in general are effective when they gener-

ate a new story in the mind of each listener. This is because people make

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decisions within a narrative framework. Non-narrative methods of elicit-

ing desire for a different future—questions, metaphors, challenges, offers,

and the like—are effective to the extent that they point to a new story in

the mind of the listener.

Which methods work best? In what follows, the possible communi-

cation tools are sorted into three broad categories: communication tools

that are easy to use and generally effective, generally effective tools that

require special talents, and tools that generally don’t work. Here as else-

where, much depends, of course, on the skill with which the device is

used and the context. Used badly, any of these tools will fail. Applied with

flair and imagination, any of them can work to a certain extent. The cate-

gorization here reflects the ease of getting the tool to work at all and the

intensity of the impact it is likely to have when it does work. In this area,

too, more detailed, quantified research is needed. The ranking offers a

first step toward giving readers and researchers some sense of the layout

of the terrain.

Most Promising Methods

These are the methods that can work most easily with a difficult audience:

• Seeing is believing.

• Tell a positive story.

• Externalize the obstacles to change.

• Use a metaphor that points to a story.

• Tell the story of who we are.

• Tell a “common memory” story.

• Offer a positive challenge.

Seeing Is Believing

Direct experience of the change successfully operating in an analogous

context is one obvious way of generating desire for change. If it works

there, then why not here? Thus in 1993, J. Allard didn’t just tell people what

was emerging on the Web. He set up demonstration computers on a folding

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table in the halls of Microsoft and dragged people there to see the Web in

use, to touch it, to feel it. As a result, people could see for themselves.

As noted in Chapter Five, managers, parents, and schoolteachers may be

able to create experiences that people have by becoming role models and

embodying the behavior that they are trying to induce. They can also orga-

nize study tours, role-playing exercises, simulations, or quick prototyping.

In the same way, marketers create experiential learning by embody-

ing the message that they are trying communicate, by giving out samples

and free trials, by offering test drives of automobiles or trial periods for

using new software, or doing demonstrations where people can observe

the product or service in action.

Tell a Positive Story

Often leaders will not be in a position to confront their audience with the

actual experience, particularly when they are trying to lead upward in a

hierarchy. The next best thing is often a story about such an experience. A

simple story about an example showing where the change is already hap-

pening can connect with an audience at an emotional level and generate a

new story in their own minds that leads to action.

I first came across this kind of simple but powerful story in my work

at the World Bank in 1996, with the story shown in Appendix 1. I found

that this particular kind of story had remarkable power to stimulate even

skeptical listeners to imagine a different future for themselves, for their

organization, for their world.

Since then, I’ve been helping many organizations craft similar stories

with the objective of communicating complex ideas and spark action. I’ve

called this kind of story “a springboard story.”6 Although these stories look

simple, crafting them with consistent success requires narrative intelli-

gence: it needs an understanding of the underlying mechanism and some

mastery of the relevant narrative pattern to generate the intended effect.

The object of this kind of story isn’t to tell the audience to implement

their change idea: that would lead to an argument. Instead, the springboard

story implicitly invites the listener to imagine a new story of which the

audience becomes the hero.

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This kind of indirect narrative will often be the easiest and most pro-

ductive route for leaders to stimulate desire for change. It works best

when it is told in a minimalist fashion, without much detail. When told in

this way, it leaves plenty of mental space for the listeners to imagine a new

story. In one part of their mind, the listeners are hearing the speaker’s

story. But in another part, the listeners are imagining a new story, in

which they have each become the protagonist. And in the process, for the

listeners, the story they imagine becomes for them a new idea. And

because it is their own idea, they don’t have to be persuaded of its merits.

Pride of ownership helps generate the enthusiasm. “What a great idea!

I’ve just had a great idea!”

The springboard story thus gets its effect indirectly. Unlike a direct

narrative, it doesn’t try to “transport” the listeners to another world and

occupy their whole mental space, so that they become totally absorbed

in the speaker’s story, and so that their own world totally vanishes.

Instead, the story is deliberately crafted so as to occupy the listeners’

minds only partially and to leave the rest of their mental space available

to imagine new stories in their own context. In effect, the storyteller

deliberately refrains from telling a “well-told story” because that would

fill the listeners’ minds with the sights and the sounds and the smells of

the context of the story, leaving no mental space for the listeners’ own

story.

The springboard story reflects William Gibson’s insight: “The future

is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed.”7 The springboard

story highlights an instance of the change idea already being successfully

implemented and prompts an analogous story in the mind of the listener.

To achieve this result, the story must have a positive tone: these are stories

with happy endings. They show how the idea has already succeeded in

another context. If the story succeeded in an analogous context, why not

here? The listeners’ enthusiasm flows from imagining their own stories

with similarly happy endings. Without the happy ending, the likelihood

of generating enthusiasm for the change is slim.

But a happy ending by itself isn’t enough. The story must satisfy two

further requirements:

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• The happy ending must be credible: If the story appears on the sur-

face to end happily, but the story doesn’t ring true, then the audience is

likely to be thinking, “It couldn’t have happened that way!” When that

happens, there is no springboard effect. Instead, there may be increased

skepticism vis-à-vis the change idea—and the leader. Thus, suppose the

leader aims to win support for a corporate acquisition and tells a story

about another example of a corporate acquisition that was successful.

Because listeners may know that around three-quarters of all corporate

acquisitions are unsuccessful, in the sense that they lose value for the

acquiring company, the risk is that listeners will be thinking: this story is

incredible. So for a springboard story to work, the speaker will need to

give enough detail to show why this acquisition was unexpectedly suc-

cessful, and different from other acquisitions that failed.

• The ending must be happy for the audience: It’s not enough for the

story to have a happy ending in a generic sense. The story has to be posi-

tive for this particular audience. Thus, many leaders in the corporate

world tell stories highlighting a success for the company without realizing

that the audience may be thinking: “That’s fine for the company and for

the CEO, but what about the workers who will be laid off? What about

the managers who will lose their jobs? What’s in it for me?” It’s vital,

therefore, to tell story that makes it clear to the audience that a similar

story will have a happy ending for them.

Appendix 2 gives a simple template with ten simple steps to assist

with crafting a springboard story. While the steps look straightforward,

crafting such a story isn’t easy. The challenge is to have all the elements in

place in the one succinct telling of the story. It’s not unlike designing a

watch: a number of moving parts have to work together in a tiny space.

Successful springboard stories usually require considerable fine-tuning

before speakers arrive at a version that works with the intended audience.

Externalize the Obstacles to Change

Another process by which leaders seek to generate enthusiasm for change

is to externalize the forces impeding the change. Thus, Abraham Lincoln

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in his Gettysburg address in November 1863 declared “a new birth of

freedom” for the nation. He was no longer defending an old Union, but

rather proclaiming a new Union. The “old Union” contained and

attempted to retain slavery. The “new Union” would fulfill the promise of

liberty. Lincoln here split the ongoing story of the United States into two,

the “old Union” and the “new Union.” Here the underlying problem is

objectified as an alien protagonist, who can be fought against as a kind of

enemy.

This is akin to narrative therapists who, for example, use externaliza-

tion to deal with anorexic patients. “By suggesting that the anorexia is an

enemy striving to inhabit one’s body, the therapist assists the patient to

‘fight’ against it. In this narrative, the personification of anorexia as the

externalized antagonist allows the client to become the heroine of the

story, emerging victorious in a battle against this evil force.”8

Externalization is often one of the driving forces behind frequent

reorganizations and restructurings that occur in business. By creating a

new administrative structure, managers hope to objectify some new

mode of operating, with new goals and new behaviors. If, however, the

new structure is simply a rearrangement of assignments and reporting

arrangements, then the existing organizational culture quickly reemerges

and the reorganization will fail in catalyzing significant change. It’s only if

the participants in the new structure begin to live a new story that the

new behaviors take and the culture changes.

Use a Metaphor That Points to a Story

Given that a sentence without a metaphor is like a day without the sun,

effective speakers make frequent use of metaphor, as well as its less force-

ful cousin, the simile. The right metaphor loosens the blindfolds that

have been covering the listeners’ eyes.

Nevertheless, although metaphors can enliven a presentation, they

won’t stimulate desire for change unless they point to a specific action.

Thus, when Senator John McCain described his role as chairman of the

Senate Commerce Committee holding polluters accountable as that of “a

mosquito in a nudist colony,” the metaphor suggested opportunity with-

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out pointing to any particular action.9 Or when Ross Perot said that his

role was that “of a grain of sand to the oyster. We’ve got to irritate Wash-

ington a bit,” the specific action was unclear. In terms of sparking action,

you might say that these metaphors are all hat and no cattle. Or all foam

and no beer. Or all missile and no warhead.10

By contrast, where the metaphor points to a relevant story, it may be

able to stimulate desire for a course of action. For example, in 1999, the

New York Times reported on the Sonagachi red-light district in India,

where Indian prostitutes, who depended on their profession for their

families’ livelihood and who needed to persuade their madams to insist

on their clients’ using condoms, said, “If you want to enjoy the fruits of

the tree, you must keep the tree healthy.”11

Tell the Story of Who We Are

Stories about the joint experiences and attitudes of the people within the

organization or community and their shared beliefs can also be motivat-

ing. At Nike, these would be stories about people who “just do it,” with

allusions to a kind of rebel force that can cut through the stodginess of

the sportswear industry. At Southwest Airlines, they would be stories

about how Herb Kelleher and his staff make travel fun and affordable so

that people are “free to travel about the country.”12

Similarly, Shakespeare used “the story of who we are” in his play

Henry V, in the famous speech in which Henry exhorts his soldiers into

battle. He has Henry first offer a safe passage home to those who don’t

want to fight. But for those who stay, he offers eternal glory.

But we in it shall be remember’d— We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition; And gentlemen in England now a-bed Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

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The focus of the speech is less on the purpose of why are we here in

this muddy field, far from home, fighting this battle against people of

whom we know little, and more on the group as a group—these few,

these happy few, this band of brothers, soldiers who are about to “gentle”

their condition if they win the battle. Shakespeare’s magical language

may work for a single battle, or even several battles. But the danger in real

life is that the question eventually arises: Is it sustainable? The story can

unravel if people begin to question: what’s the point?

Tell a “Common Memory” Story

A common memory story is one that draws on the audience’s shared

recall of some phenomenon. It’s about something that all, or most, listen-

ers would be familiar with. If the speaker can tell a story that reminds all

listeners of a time when they had positive feelings toward the course of

action proposed, or something analogous to it, this may be enough to

stimulate positive emotion toward the course of action offered.

Ronald Reagan was adept at drawing on stories that elicited common

memories and so was able to get many people to believe that it was once

again “morning in America.” The stories delved into a past world that was

simpler and more intelligible than the more complex environment of the

1980s, but the stories were effective in getting people to dream that they

could recapture that simplicity and intelligibility.

Offer a Positive Challenge

In the sporting world, challenges are often used in the hope of motivating

a team to a higher level of performance: “Let’s win one for the Gipper!” or

“Let’s show the opposition today what kind of players we really are!” If

the listeners buy in to the challenge, this may give the team a temporary

lift. For sustained enthusiasm, there is a need to elicit enthusiasm for the

activity itself, which is unlikely to happen unless the challenge points to

an enduringly positive story.

In 1999, Rob McEwen, CEO of Goldcorp, a struggling Canadian mining

company, offered a total of $575,000 in prize money to anyone in the

world who could come up with the best proposal for finding and recover-

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ing new deposits of gold in Goldcorp’s 55,000-acre property. In the secre-

tive industry of mining, McEwen took the counterintuitive step of mak-

ing available on the company’s Web site everything that was known about

the property and its mining history back to 1948. News of the contest

quickly spread around the world and over a thousand geologists, pros-

pectors, consultants, mathematicians, and military officers from fifty

countries offered answers to the challenge. Contestants identified more

than a hundred targets, of which half had not been identified by the com-

pany. Most of the new targets resulted in substantial quantities of gold.

As a result, Goldcorp went from a struggling $100 million company to a

$9 billion corporation that is one of the most innovative and profitable in

the industry. The extraordinary offer not only got people’s attention: it

stimulated a great deal of action.13

Methods Requiring Special Talents

Here are some ways of stimulating desire for action that require special

talents to have a chance of success:

• Compose stirring music.

• Invent a memorable aphorism.

• Paint a compelling word-picture of the future.

Compose Stirring Music

The history of “La Marseillaise” shows the power of music to motivate.

Written by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle at Strasbourg in 1792, under its

original name of “The Marching Song of the Rhine Army,” the song

became the rallying call of the French Revolution. It got its name because

it was first sung on the streets of Paris by troops arriving from Marseille.14

The French Empires of Napoleon and Napoleon III and the German

occupation during World War II banned its playing because of its power

to motivate. This was illustrated in the famous scene in the film Casa-

blanca, in which French sympathizers sang the song to drown out a patri-

otic German anthem being sung by the Nazi soldiers.”15

Thus, in principle at least, music can motivate. The practical problem

for leaders is that it takes huge musical talent to compose a song with the

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motivational power of “La Marseillaise.” Unless leaders have access to this

kind of talent, music may not be a practical option.

Invent a Memorable Aphorism

Abraham Lincoln’s idea of declaring new birth of freedom for the United

States would have had less impact if it hadn’t been enshrined in the

catchy phrase, “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address also gets much of its force from the

memorable sentence: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask

what you can do for your country.”

Kennedy’s challenge is in the form of what is known in traditional

rhetoric as chiasmus, that is, an expression comprising two parallel clauses

with the same words, but in reverse order.16 Further examples:

“Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”

“When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

The fact that these formulations are succinct and easy to remember

makes them liable to be repeated by word of mouth. Expressed differ-

ently, the same ideas might not have caught on. The difficulty here again

is coming up with a memorable aphorism. This requires highly devel-

oped linguistic skills, which are rare.

Paint a Compelling Word-Picture of the Future

Some writers like Noel Tichy say that the main function of a leader is to

“offer compelling stories of the future.”17 The problem is how to craft

such stories. I’m familiar with many stories about the future, but I’ve had

difficulty finding any that were compelling. That’s because the future is

unpredictable. It’s difficult to tell a convincing story about it. Even if a

story about the future is momentarily convincing as it is told, the future

inevitably changes in some unexpected direction, and so the story

becomes unbelievable.

A related approach is to offer a enticing word-picture of the future, as

was done in the famous examples of Winston Churchill’s “We shall fight

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on the beaches” speech in 1940, or Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a

dream” speech in 1963.

These speeches are sometimes said to contain compelling future sto-

ries. In fact, the relevant passages don’t have the central characteristics of a

story, namely, a set of events held together by causal connection. They are

brilliant word-pictures of a future state. They clearly required a high degree

of linguistic skill—they might even be called prose poems. For Winston

Churchill or Martin Luther King, who possessed those skills, crafting a

dazzling prose poem was a feasible option. But most of us don’t happen to

have such linguistic skills. And without the incandescent poetry, word pic-

tures of the future risk being unconvincing and are liable to be satirized.

Generally Ineffective Methods

And here are some ways of stimulating desire for the future that rarely

perform as intended:

• Present arguments and reasons.

• Tell “burning platform” stories.

• Create dissatisfaction to sell your point.

• Pose an unexpected question.

• Depict an actual image of the future.

• Employ satire and irony.

• Tell fictional stories.

Present Arguments and Reasons

If a leader presents arguments to people who are skeptical, cynical, or

hostile to their change idea, the audience will be listening to the argu-

ments through the lens of their negative attitude, silently answering every

argument with a rejoinder. As a result of the confirmation bias, the audi-

ence will be mentally fencing with the speaker. Bob Nardelli may say, “I’ve

got great financial results.” But the listener will be thinking, “What about

customer service in the stores?” When Nardelli offers a new argument,

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