Now we've laid out the five performance multipliers in our strengths, health, absorption, relationships, and purpose (SHARP) framework, one by one, and detailed some of the research affirming (1) the value of each to living productively and happily and (2) the costs to people and organizations when these attributes remain undeveloped.

You've probably noticed we're not the pioneers who discovered and developed the five elements of our SHARP framework. The brilliant business leaders, psychologists, and researchers we've mentioned in previous chapters have written extensively on their importance, and on how to develop them.

You may have also noticed that so far, we've discussed these components in a discrete sequence, using our SHARP acronym to tie them all together. It's a common tactic; Western thinkers and researchers tend to grapple with complex ideas by cordoning off territories and diving deeply into specialties and subspecialties. The value of exploring these ideas fully, in depth, is considerable, but as we've pointed out, there's also a price to pay, in the disaggregated world, for keeping them in separate boxes. If we pigeonhole these concepts, we miss the opportunity to think systematically, to connect different ideas and disciplines, and to maximize results.

The good news is that even if you wanted to zero in on one of the SHARP components and develop it in isolation, you'd find it impossible. In the sophisticated system that includes you, your work, your family, and your friends and coworkers, you'll find that developing or neglecting any of these components is likely to have a profound effect on the development of the others.

The next step in becoming a 10X leader is to be able to integrate the insights and skills we've introduced in the SHARP framework and apply them to flourish both within and beyond the work environment.

In the late 1990s, a term arose in the IT community to describe a large‐scale phenomenon that sometimes occurred in highly interconnected systems: cascading failure. The term is fairly new, but the phenomenon—a failure in one component that triggers the failure of other components, which triggers further failures, ultimately bringing the whole system to its knees—isn't. It's often used in reference to electrical grids: In 1996, for example, a single power line in the state of Oregon failed, funneling increased loads to other lines, which also failed, ultimately triggering a power outage for millions of customers across much of the western United States and Canada.

We don't come across many cascading failures in our lines of work, but when we do, they're harrowing. Donal Skehan (see Chapter 5), celebrity chef, worked impossibly long hours, ate terrible food, and slept very little, until his teetering health finally collapsed and laid him out in a Vietnamese hospital bed: unable to exercise his strengths, to focus his mind on a task other than recuperation, to develop relationships with anyone outside his hospital room, or to pursue a purpose any loftier than his body's immediate needs. His work and his life came to a grinding halt.

Most of the failures we encounter are subtler examples, the decline or neglect of one SHARP component adversely affecting others. If you spend all your time developing your strengths, it's likely you'll feel more motivated, and improve your performance in the short term—but if you're not connected to others in your workplace, or not acting out of a sense of purpose, you're likely to feel you're grinding through tasks in isolation, missing opportunities that come about through collaboration or the ability to remain mindful of your top priorities. If you focus solely on becoming healthier, you'll have more energy—but without a purpose toward which to direct all that energy, you'll find it difficult to sustain the effort. You might become disengaged from your work, and because you won't be as committed as other team members, your relationships could suffer as a result. It's conceivable that these five components could, as they atrophy, drag one another down—along with your well‐being and your career.

And your well‐being or your career might suffer anyway, if you manage to sustain some of these performance multipliers and ignore others. It's possible to be terrible at maintaining good working relationships while exercising your strengths, staying healthy, and remaining absorbed in work that's driven by a powerful sense of purpose. Such people exist, and they're often star performers who simply don't believe mutual support or good working relationships are necessary for success. Jack Welch, for one, fired such star performers—no matter how impressive their individual results, he simply didn't want people around who didn't care about other people. In a slide show articulating its unique company culture, Netflix explicitly says that while some companies tolerate “brilliant jerks,” it prefers not to employ them. Their cost to effective teamwork is too high.

When we set out to determine what makes a 10X leader, we were careful not to simply observe effective leaders and pluck individual traits, a la carte, to cram into some maddeningly unattainable formula. This is a crucial point to make: We chose the SHARP components not because they make a snazzy acronym but because they were traits we often found effective leaders using in combination to achieve impressive results—to achieve, in other words, the cascading success that occurs when all five performance multipliers are working together.

We hesitate to use the word because, of all the buzzwords floating around out there now, it's become one of the most tiresomely and imprecisely used, but in this case, synergy—the interaction of elements that, when combined, produce an overall effect greater than the sum of their individual effects—perfectly describes the way in which SHARP components feed one another to truly multiply one's well‐being and performance as a leader.

SHARP: Real‐World Synergy

One of the leaders we find most fascinating is Bill George, the Harvard professor and former Medtronic CEO we introduced in Chapter 7. In George's tenure at Medtronic, from 1991 to 2001, the company's market value grew from $1 billion to $60 billion. He's since become one of the leading voices on business leadership, a mentor, and author of best sellers such as Authentic Leadership and True North.

George credits much of his success to weekly meetings he's been having for decades with a group of close friends outside of work. In these Wednesday morning conversations, George and his friends talk about recent personal events, sharing both triumphs and disappointments. This group, he says, has helped remind him that he's more than a business executive—but also helped him clarify his own thoughts and values, and make important work‐related decisions, even when the talk isn't work related. “Enduring relationships,” he has written, “are built on connectedness and a shared purpose of working together toward a common goal. Every person has a life story and wants to share it with you, if you are open to hearing the story and sharing in return. It is in sharing our life stories that we develop trust and intimacy with our colleagues.”¹

On his blog, George writes that this support team has helped him through the most trying periods in his life, including the time his wife, Penny, was diagnosed with breast cancer and the difficult months that followed as she went through treatment. He credits Penny, a psychologist whose work focuses in integrative health and healing, with helping develop his own ideas about mindfulness and wellness. “Progressive companies are recognizing the importance of their employees' health to their productivity and resilience by emphasizing wellness, healthy diets and nutrition, regular exercise and sleep patterns,” he said in a March 2016 interview with the Huffington Post.²

Penny took Bill to his first transcendental meditation workshop in 1975, and today he's among the most prominent advocates of mindfulness in the workplace. He used to meditate in secret, behind a closed office door, but now he meditates 20 minutes twice a day, with the door wide open. Meditation “was the best thing that ever happened to me, in terms of staying grounded,” he told ABC News in February of 2015. “To be a successful leader you need to be authentic, grounded, and you need to be mindful.”³ In his leadership course at Harvard, he requires students to practice reflection, either through meditation or through answering introspective questions in a journal.

In a 2012 article he wrote for the Harvard Business Review, George explained how mindful absorption helps both strengthen relationships and create a powerful sense of shared purpose: “The pursuit of mindful leadership will help you achieve clarity about what is important to you and a deeper understanding of the world around you,” he wrote. “Mindfulness will help you clear away the trivia and needless worries about unimportant things, nurture passion for your work and compassion for others, and develop the ability to empower the people in your organization.”⁴

It took years—decades—for Bill George to reach these kinds of conclusions. He began his career in a culture in which leadership was defined by power and intimidation. Over time, he saw that the fear generated by this approach wasn't confined to underlings—it also affected leaders and forced them to be inauthentic. “By being vulnerable,” he wrote in 2015, “you can connect authentically with others. By being open, you retain the power, rather than acting in fear of being unmasked and exposed.”⁵

Of all the leaders we've studied from recent history, probably none was more vulnerable—nor more powerful—than Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post through two of the most turbulent decades in American history. It wasn't a job she wanted, at first; a self‐described “doormat wife” to Philip Graham, the Post's publisher since 1946, she reluctantly took the reins of the Post and its sister magazine, Newsweek, after Philip's death in 1963. As the owner of the controlling shares in the corporation, she felt she had no choice.

Graham would later confess her unreadiness and insecurity in her astonishingly frank Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir, Personal History. The daughter of a rich Wall Street executive, she'd been raised to embrace a lifetime of raising children and hosting dinner parties. When she took over the Post at the age of 47, she knew nothing about business; in her book she explained how her financial mentor, Warren Buffett, taught her to read a balance sheet: Assets on the left, liabilities on the right. Buffett would later recall the time he visited her office and saw—10 years after she'd taken over the newspaper—a piece of paper on her desk that read Assets on the left, liabilities on the right.

At first painfully shy around the newspaper's executives, too embarrassed to speak to reporters, Graham learned, to her own surprise, that she had an unshakeable sense of moral duty as publisher of the Washington Post. At a time when many Americans questioned the integrity of their institutions, Graham decided her newspaper would tell the unvarnished truth. She hired the best reporters she could find, invited them to share in her righteous vision, and stood by their decisions, even when confronting substantial opposition. Graham and executive editor Ben Bradlee, in a case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, defied the Nixon White House and published the Pentagon Papers in 1971; the following year, when reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein began unraveling the story of the Watergate scandal, Graham's lawyers and accountants advised against publishing the more shocking revelations—because doing so, they cautioned, could result in the newspaper's being shut down.

The duty to inform the public about the Nixon administration's crimes far outweighed any financial concerns, Graham decided—and with that decision, she won the unswerving loyalty and admiration of her staff, and established the Washington Post as the preeminent journalism outlet of the era. Profits of The Washington Post Company, the fifth‐largest publishing empire in the United States, grew 20 percent annually from 1975 to 1985.⁶

Graham's obituary in the New York Times, published on July 17, 2001, recalled her as the person who had “transformed The Washington Post from a mediocre newspaper into an American institution and, in the process, transformed herself from a lonely widow into a publishing legend.”⁷ What intrigues us most about Graham is that she was a leader so clearly made, not born. Thrust into a position of prominence with no experience or apparent skills, she discovered her greatest strength, used it to define a noble purpose for her organization, and then used that purpose to attract and forge authentic and positive relationships with the best people she could find for the job.

In 2004, when Bill George published the article “The Journey to Authenticity,” it's easy to imagine he was writing about Graham: “The one essential quality you must have to lead is to be your own person, authentic in every regard,” he wrote. “The best leaders are autonomous and highly independent. Those who are too responsive to the desires of others are likely to be whipsawed by competing interests, too quick to deviate from their course or unwilling to make difficult decisions for fear of offending. My advice to the people I mentor is simply to be themselves.”⁸

It's also easy to imagine George was writing about Herb Kelleher, the near‐legendary founder and CEO of Southwest Airlines, who, with Rollin King and banker John Parker, outlined their business concept on a cocktail napkin in a San Antonio restaurant. In 1971, when the airline began operations, the industry wasn't any friendlier than it is today—multiple competitors, astoundingly high overhead and capital requirements, a customer base highly sensitive to price, and boom‐bust cycles that were often unpredictable.

But Kelleher and King also saw plenty of room for improvement in an industry that was almost universally loathed by customers. They decided to create their own market within this hypercompetitive market by flying passengers shorter distances, often to smaller airports, at a lower cost, quickly, and on time.

As CEO, Kelleher was the very embodiment of this no‐frills approach. He was funny, genuine, and often quirky; Kevin Freiberg's history of the airline, published in 1998, was titled Nuts!, a reference to Kelleher's personality as well as the bags of peanuts the airline distributes in lieu of expensive (and usually terrible) airline meals. Kelleher also made it clear he valued input—or merely simple conversation—from everyone at the company, from the baggage handlers to the junior executives. He was often simply walking around among employees and customers at Southwest airport terminals, chatting and joking. He's been spotted passing out donuts to passengers at the gate, helping clean out the cabin after a flight, and unloading baggage to help turn a plane around quickly. Before semiretiring in 2008, he was the apotheosis of Robert Greenleaf's servant leader.

Because Kelleher never ranked himself, in human terms, above his employees, he avoided the kinds of perks other business leaders enjoyed—and which often made them seem inauthentic when they tried to get chummy with the help. Kelleher never, for example, opted for a corporate airplane for himself or other Southwest leaders; he would either fly with the passengers or charter—at his own expense—a Southwest plane to get his group to its destination.

Because circulating among employees and sharing his vision was clearly the part of his job he enjoyed the most and was best at, Kelleher was completely absorbed in his work, and his employees, seeing this, often felt the same; they were friends, working together to fulfill the airline's purpose. In a 2013 interview with Forbes magazine, which has called him perhaps the best CEO in America, Kelleher told of a conversation he once had with a ramp agent who said: “Herb, I finally got it. You're making work fun, and home is work.”⁹

Southwest Airlines has earned a profit every year since 1972. By the early twenty‐first century, its market value had surpassed that of all the other major U.S. airlines combined. The culture that has distinguished Southwest—airplanes emblazoned with large paintings, flight attendants who tell corny jokes and sing in‐flight announcements—is one in which people take themselves lightly but their jobs seriously. Southwest has one of the best safety records among U.S. airlines. There has been only a single on‐ground fatality among the millions who've flown Southwest since the airline began operating with that name in 1971, and the airline has consistently received the lowest ratio of per‐passenger complaints since the Department of Transportation began tracking customer satisfaction in 1987.¹⁰

A few Southwest employees enjoyed being around Kelleher so much that they spent their entire careers with the airline. Colleen Barrett worked for several years in the 1960s as Kelleher's executive assistant, when he was a lawyer in New Jersey. She came to work for the airline in 1978 and rose steadily through its ranks, finally serving as the company's president from 2001 to 2008. A few days before she stepped down as president, she gave a presentation at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of business, in which she explained the purpose that drove her and so many people to work so hard for so many years. In 1971, she said, when the company began, only about 13 percent of Americans flew—and those 13 percent were almost exclusively male business travelers.

“We wanted to really give America the freedom to fly,” Barrett said. “We helped people achieve their dreams.” Because of Southwest, grandmothers could visit their grandkids several times a year, and Barrett heard often from people such as these: letters from divorced parents, who thanked them for helping them watch their kids grow up, and e‐mails from people who were opening business offices, asking if Southwest planned to maintain service to their city—because they wouldn't open an office without knowing they could rely on the airline. She received multiple wedding invitations, from couples who had lived in different states and had been able to keep their relationships alive, sometimes for years, by taking frequent Southwest flights. “Herb used to go to all the receptions and meet all the women,” Barrett said, “and I used to buy all the wedding gifts.”

This purpose—to “democratize the skies,” as Barrett put it—was more than lip service.¹¹ In treating everyone at Southwest equally, Kelleher proved he really meant it. He was committed to fulfilling such a noble and ambitious purpose.

So how did Kelleher make sure he recovered from difficult stretches and maintained the energy he needed to run the nation's most successful airline? We'd love to tell you it was through a healthy diet, regular exercise, and plenty of sleep. Yes, unlike most senior managers who spend most of their time sitting behind their desks, he did get much exercise walking around interacting with customers and employees. But at the same time, he was—until he quit in 2010, because he found himself frequently out of breath—a smoker with a five‐pack‐a‐day habit. He was often photographed with a cigarette in one hand, and sometimes photographed with a whiskey glass in the other. He was one of those rare people who are most energized, at all times, by being on the job. “For me,” he said in a 1999 interview, “working with these people is like going to the spa for a couple of weeks. They restore you and rejuvenate you and they renew your dedication to Southwest.”¹²

SHARP: Not One Size Fits All

Kelleher's clear infraction, according to the SHARP framework we've so neatly spelled out for you, makes an important point, which we emphasize to participants in our 10X leadership program: The SHARP framework isn't a one‐size‐fits‐all formula. Not every concept we present will resonate equally with everyone. SHARP is a guideline, not a prescription, for experiencing joy in leadership. You won't get anywhere with our program if you're looking to become someone else. As George has written: “Leadership is the sum total of who you are.”¹³

We know, because we've seen it time and again, that effort guided by the SHARP framework can amplify your performance, productivity, and well‐being. We also know that change is hard—that knowing what will make you happier and more effective is one thing; knowing how to change into that happier and more effective person—or, for starters, to believe it's possible to change—is the more difficult task.

Two additional purposes remain for us as authors of this book, before we release you into the disaggregated world: to demonstrate to you that lasting behavioral change, though challenging, is eminently possible, and to introduce briefly some of the tools we use to help people become—and remain—more fully who they are.