When you read the title of this chapter, you might think of Steve Jobs and Apple computer’s classic 1997 advertising campaign. If you aren’t old enough to remember the ad, which many consider the greatest marketing campaign of all time, google it. The TV commercial at the center of the campaign, which marked Jobs’s return to Apple after a fifteen-year absence, features a series of clips of history’s great minds—Einstein, Dylan, Earhart, King Jr, Lennon, Ali—while a voice reads: “Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” As the screen goes to black, the words “Think Different” along with the Apple Macintosh logo appear, accompanied by silence.

It’s a powerful message, even today. At the time, it was revolutionary. When Jobs unveiled the campaign during one of his now iconic “reveal” speeches, it drew a standing ovation. People didn’t know it at the time, but the “Think Different” tagline would eventually become synonymous with the Apple brand, and shape the ethos of a company that brought us some of the most revolutionary technologies in history. And “thinking differently” has, for many people, become an essential quality of twenty-first-century leadership—for others, a way of life.

So I have to give Jobs and the late ’90s Apple marketing team at least some credit for inspiring the first dimension of Intelligent Leadership. But I didn’t just cherry-pick it from them, willy-nilly. I learned about the power of thinking differently and thinking big directly from Jobs himself.

I had the privilege of working with Steve as a coach in 2010. This was during the later years of his life, and he was beginning to think about his legacy. He wanted me to help him go deep into his own inner core so he could make sure to have the biggest impact on the world—his family, friends, company, and beyond—before he passed on.

I can honestly say that even though Jobs had hired me to be his leadership coach, I learned more from him than he learned from me. This may not seem that surprising, given that Jobs is considered to be one of the brightest and most influential minds of his generation. But what made the deepest impression on me wasn’t necessarily his brilliance; it was the profound sense of purpose that he felt driving his career. There was one exchange in particular that I will never forget—one that ultimately shaped my own approach to leadership development.

“Mattone,” he said (he never used my first name during our sessions), “I want to tell you something that I’ve shared with very few people before.” He had my attention. He continued, “You remember the Think Different campaign, right?”

“Of course,” I said.

“Well, that initiative was definitely centered around relaunching the Apple brand and selling our products, but when I took the stage that day to give my speech, I was in many respects speaking symbolically.”

That struck me and I asked him, “What do you mean by ‘symbolically’?” His answer gave me chills. It went something like this:

“I knew this was my one opportunity to share, not only with my people at Apple, but with the entire world, everything I had learned during my fifteen years away from the company. During that time, I did a lot of soul searching and grew tremendously, both as a leader and a person. What I learned became one of the key tenets that Apple was built on: If you want to get different results in your personal life or in your businesses—if that is the vision that you embrace—then you have to have the courage to step outside of your comfort zone and disrupt yourself. You have to be willing to think as big as possible about yourself and what you have to contribute to the world.”

For Jobs, “Think Different” was more like a spiritual epiphany than it was a marketing slogan. The marketing campaign—he revealed to me—was just an excuse to share that epiphany with the world. And it worked. A whole generation of people has been inspired, not just by the awesomeness of Apple’s products (sorry, if you’re an Android or PC person), but also by the philosophy that Steve laid out that day.

Thinking differently and thinking big has become a cornerstone of my own work, because I’ve found—over and over again—that if you want to become a truly great leader, it all starts with your mindset. If you really want to become something more, to change, to become something different, it’s inevitable that you’re also going to have to change the way you think. You’re going to have to leap into a bigger view of yourself and the world and, in the process, you might have to leave behind some of your older, more narrow ways of thinking. You’ve got to be willing to think differently than you have before, bigger than you have before.

This insight is the primary step on the journey of Intelligent Leadership. That’s why I’ve made this the first dimension of Intelligent Leadership. It’s a non-negotiable tenet of becoming a truly great leader.

In this chapter, we’re going to unpack what thinking differently and thinking big actually looks like, why it’s so crucial to strong leadership, and how you can start to embrace this mindset in your own life.

Being a Trendsetter

At the beginning of the book we defined leadership simply as “an example for others to follow.” One of the qualities that attract people to great leaders is their ability to think outside the box—to innovate new approaches to common issues that change the course of any initiative, whether it’s a project, a business, or an entire country. Being willing to question the “status quo” within whatever context you’re operating can help set the tone for your team. And if you’re striving to think differently yourself, you’ll encourage the same in those around you. You’ll create a culture of innovation and evolution.

Steve Jobs is, of course, a perfect example of this quality. He had an uncanny ability to think about technology through the eyes of the user while so many of his competitors were ignoring—or not placing enough value on—this essential component of the human-technology interface. His dedication to empowering individuals through technology changed the game forever, bringing us everything from the personal computer, to the iPod, to the smartphone. He wasn’t afraid to think differently, and he changed the world.

Thanks in part to Jobs, “thinking differently” has become pretty sexy in our world today. Who wouldn’t want to be an innovator or revolutionary thinker? But a big part of thinking differently is having the courage and strength of character to stand behind your ideas when they aren’t popular. Thinking differently, by definition, will place you directly at odds with the status quo. You may have heard the story of the Oakland As in the early part of this century, as portrayed in the movie Moneyball starring Brad Pitt. The legendary general manager Billy Beane changed the game of baseball forever by his outside-the-box thinking. The Oakland As were on the brink of irrelevance in 2002, with little budget and an even worse roster. Beane partnered with a little-known Yale economics grad named Peter Brand (portrayed by Jonah Hill in the film), who had a radical approach to recruiting new talent based on complex math and statistics. Unsurprisingly, Beane faced outrageous resistance to his broad-scale implementation of Brand’s approach—from his coach and players, from his fellow GMs, from the sports media, and even the fans. But Beane stuck to his instincts and didn’t compromise, and by the end of the season he took his likely bottom-dwelling team into the playoffs. His willingness to think differently, and stand behind that thinking, eventually changed the entire culture of professional baseball.

And yet, the “thinking differently” mindset isn’t as common among top business leaders as you might think. Avra Lyraki is an executive coaching colleague of mine from Greece who has spent most of her career in human resource development and corporate communications across several different industries. She’s found that the whole notion of thinking differently terrifies most of the CEOs she works with. While they are powerful individuals with a lot of extraordinary leadership qualities, they tend to be more conservative in their thinking.

This makes sense. When you’re in a position of authority, there’s a tremendous amount of pressure and responsibility on your shoulders. You are beholden to your investors, your board, your employees, your customers, your clients. You don’t want to make mistakes, because there’s so much riding on your decisions. So CEOs tend to be very risk averse. As long as things are running smoothly, profits are trending in the right direction, and there are no big problems, the most logical path often seems to be keeping things stable and consistent.

There is, of course, a lot of value to this more conservative mentality. As a leader, you can’t be disrupting and challenging the status quo all the time. You’ve got to create some stability for your team. It’s also important to build on the time-tested elements of your strategy and systems that are really working. But if you don’t also include a dose of disruption from time to time, and keep yourself open to new ideas, opportunities, and ways of doing business, you’re bound to get stale and fall behind.

Holding a Massive Vision

In his address to United States Congress on May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy uttered a bold claim: by the end of the decade, the United States would put a man on the moon. It was a radical statement, and met with a lot of skepticism. At the time, the U.S. space program was not evolving at a pace nearly fast enough to achieve such a massive goal, lagging significantly behind its Cold War rival, the U.S.S.R., and few people thought it could be done. But Kennedy, no doubt supported by his advisors, saw a different possibility for Project Apollo. By making such a public declaration on that day, he put a figurative stake in the ground that would mobilize the political, economic, and financial resources necessary to make such a seemingly impossible goal achievable. Eight years later, just before the decade ended, Kennedy’s vision was made reality as Neil Armstrong took those first lunar steps, with the whole world watching.

Kennedy, like so many great leaders, understood the power of holding a big vision in order to bring something new into existence. This is one of the key dimensions of intelligent leadership: if you want to lead, you need to have the ability to inspire people to think about themselves, their lives, and their work, in a bigger context. You have to cultivate, at least to some degree, a capacity to create an overarching purpose to which others can orient themselves.

This requires a lot of personal courage. Thinking big moves people out of their comfort zones, which can be scary. Most people, whether they’ll admit it or not, aren’t that interested in “thinking big.” They’re satisfied with the status quo, of achieving a basic amount of security, and simply living their lives rather than shooting for a more significant outcome. Even the idea of “thinking big” can make the hair stand up on the back of their necks. Give it a try: imagine a big vision for yourself—becoming wildly successful, pursuing a dream you’ve always had but never gone for, stepping up to a new level of leadership in some area of your life. I’d bet that there’s at least some small part of you that’s afraid of the vision you’re holding—a part of yourself that wants absolutely nothing to do with the success or change that you’re conjuring.

If you’re finding any personal resistance to thinking big, it’s okay. That’s a natural response. The status quo isn’t just something “out there” in society or an organization; it’s also something inside all of us. This is a useful inner voice in many circumstances. It’s a healthy fear of disruption and the unknown that keeps us grounded. It’s the well-hewn path of comfort and stability that makes many things in our world possible.

But if you want to be a leader, you need to learn to see this fear of big thinking for what it is, and occasionally take action in spite of it. You’ve got to have the courage to throw down your own “man on the moon” declaration, whether it be for yourself or for something bigger, and then muster the resources to make it a reality.

How Big Do You Think?

At this point, I hope you’re starting to reflect on just how much you embody the qualities of thinking differently and thinking big. In my experience, this kind of reflection can go in a couple different directions. You might already consider yourself to be the kind of leader who isn’t afraid of shaking things up by thinking outside the box or creating a big vision for your team; you might see a lot of yourself in the examples I’ve given so far. On the other hand, you might be feeling somewhat intimidated by all of it, and feeling that it just doesn’t fit who you are. Or you might be feeling some mixture of both.

No matter the case, if you want to cultivate this dimension of leadership in yourself, or amplify the qualities you already embody, it’s important to do some reflection.

Below are a series of qualities and behaviors that are often associated with thinking differently and thinking big. These are “leading indicators” of how much you embody this dimension of leadership, and are meant to help you measure yourself so you can determine what areas need improvement. They are also behaviors that you can put into practice right away to help expand the way you think.

As you read them, I encourage you to reflect upon how much you do or don’t consistently exhibit these behaviors. Once you’ve gone through them yourself, reach out to your support network and ask them if they agree with your assessment.

Beginning with the End in Mind

Now that you’ve had a chance to reflect on your own capacity to think differently and think big, you might be wondering what you can do to cultivate these capacities in yourself. Even if you consider yourself to be already strong in this dimension—an out-of-the-box thinker and visionary type—and others perceive you this way, there’s always room to amplify these qualities in order to have an even more significant impact. The question is, how?

The biggest mistake that people make when trying to apply this dimension of Intelligent Leadership is thinking that they need to will their way into some new form of behavior. Their minds immediately go to strategizing ways that they can think outside the box in their personal or work life, or they sit down and try to conjure the biggest vision for their life or company possible.

These are, of course, natural responses. They’re also useful, but only to a limited degree. Like so many dimensions of Intelligent Leadership, thinking differently and thinking big require that you work at a deeper level than your outer core behaviors and dive into your inner core. This is what Steve Jobs did during the fifteen years of soul-searching that he did en route to his revolutionary return to Apple. And the conduit to your inner core is getting in touch with what I call your “core purpose.”

What do I mean by “core purpose”? When it comes to Intelligent Leadership, understanding your core purpose is the ultimate form of big thinking. It starts with asking yourself the really big questions:

• Why am I here?
• What was I put on this earth to do?
• What is the unique gift that I offer to the world?

Grappling with your core purpose is meant to throw your life and personal pursuits into the biggest and brightest possible light. From here, you can see your tremendous potential—and also the many ways in which you may be unconsciously holding that potential back.

This kind of inquiry can be challenging at first, because most of us aren’t used to thinking about ourselves, or our lives, in a context this big. Many of us avoid asking these questions because we’re afraid of what we’ll find out. I’ve worked with many successful executives in their sixties who have never before asked themselves these questions. They’ve either never considered doing so, or on some level have been avoiding the questions for fear of where the answers might lead them.

This is the paradox of change. On one level, we all desire to become more, reach our potential, and have a massive impact on the world. But on another level, we are deeply afraid of the kind of havoc that this kind of change will wreak in our lives. Many of us are more addicted to the status quo than we realize, or care to admit, and are often quite comfortable with living a life that is merely adequate.

The truth is that we need more leaders who are willing to ask these big questions. We owe it to ourselves, but more importantly, we owe it to the people relying on us—our families, our teams, our organizations. If you really want to be someone who makes a truly positive impact on the world around you, then you need to go this deep. The reward is well worth it. The same executive clients who had never before done this kind of inquiry have experienced profound results from daring to think of their lives in this big context. They have discovered gifts and strengths in themselves that have been hidden to them their entire lives.

Can you see how this inquiry will allow you to embody the spirit of Jobs’s “Think Different” campaign? To create your own personal Apollo project? Those people who are deeply connected to who they are and why they’re here on this earth exude a kind of clarity that can cut through any kind of resistance—internal or external. This is the key to being a truly independent thinker and leader. “Purpose-driven” leaders have an orientation point that all their actions are moving toward, and a solid inner foundation that allows them to express their unique perspectives and gifts, regardless of the status quo.

So, I ask you, do you know what your purpose is? Do you know what you were put on this earth to do?

Don’t Let Your Big Thinking Give You a Big Head

I believe that there’s a healthy and unhealthy expression of every human quality, including the dimensions of IL. Each dimension of IL should be balanced with all the others so that one quality isn’t exaggerated over the others. It’s like the old saying “everything in moderation.” As we progress through the chapters ahead, we will explore the ways in which the various dimensions of IL interact with one another to create a powerful expression of leadership. And we will also highlight the potential pitfalls that can be found in each dimension when not properly balanced.

Having too much of thinking differently and thinking big, for example, can lead to arrogance and the inability to build strong relationships. Steve Jobs himself embodied both the good and the bad of big thinking. His unwillingness to compromise at times made him difficult to work with. Jobs’s intense commitment to always thinking different often created a sense of superiority and kept him on the outside of the many relationships he held in his career. It has been reported by many that he drove people too hard, often in pursuit of big thinking, which contributed to his being fired by Apple in 1985. If you are too focused on your big vision, and overlooking the important details and relationships that it takes to make that vision a reality, then you can find yourself in a similar position to Jobs.

So as you engage with this dimension of IL, make sure to keep your ego in check. Pay attention to how your big thinking is affecting others, and be aware of your underlying motives. One of the telltale signs that thinking big is giving you a big head is that you start to be more interested in appearing to be the one with the new ideas than you are in the ideas themselves. You may have trouble with big, new ideas that aren’t coming from you, and feel competitive with others who are exercising this dimension of IL.

Don’t worry—this tendency is only natural, and it’s easy to course correct if you find your ego getting in the way. You simply need to stay aware, and then recalibrate if you see any negative consequences starting to emerge. Do whatever you need to do to keep yourself humble. Return to your core purpose statement and ask yourself if your current behavior is in line with that big vision. The other dimensions of IL can also help you to stay humble, particularly the next two: The Vulnerability Decision and Having a Mindset of Duty. When exercised in combination, as we’ll explore later, these three dimensions of IL create a powerful balance of confidence, strength, and humility that will supercharge your leadership capacities.

Exercise: Developing Your Core Purpose Statement

To help you get connected to your own deeper purpose, I’d like to introduce an exercise I do with all my clients at the very beginning of our work together: creating a “core purpose statement” (CPS). This is a simple description of the biggest and most fundamental vision you can articulate for yourself. Your CPS should capture the essence of the person you want to become, what qualities you want to develop, what you want to accomplish, and what contributions you want to make. Your CPS is meant to become your personal constitution, the basis for navigating the many decisions—both simple and profound—that you encounter throughout your life.

Creating a CPS is actually quite common among leaders. Here are some great examples from successful CEOs:

• Denise Morrison, CEO of Campbell Soup Company: To serve as a leader, live a balanced life, and apply ethical principles to make a significant difference.
• Joel Manby, CEO of Herschend Family Entertainment: I define personal success as being consistent to my own personal mission statement: to love God and love others.
• Oprah Winfrey, founder of OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network: To be a teacher. And to be known for inspiring my students to be more than they thought they could be.
• Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group: To have fun in [my] journey through life and learn from [my] mistakes.
• Amanda Steinberg, founder of DailyWorth.com: To use my gifts of intelligence, charisma, and serial optimism to cultivate the self-worth and net-worth of women around the world.

While the examples above are all one sentence long, an effective CPS may consist of a few words or several pages. It can be written in poetry, prose, music, or art. To give you a sense of a different kind of CPS, here’s one that I did for myself:

• I want to develop self-knowledge, self-love, and self-allowing. I want to use my healing talents to keep hope alive and express my vision courageously in word and action. In my family, I want to build healthy, loving relationships in which we let each other become our best selves. At work, I want to establish a fault-free, self-perpetuating, learning environment. In the world, I want to nurture the development of all life forms, in harmony with the laws of nature. To act in a manner that brings out the best in me and those important to me, especially when it might be most justifiable to act otherwise.

Now that you’ve seen some examples of what a CPS looks like, it’s time to make one of your own. To guide you through the process, I’ve put together a series of questions that will help you to hone in on your CPS. Do your best to answer these questions as fully as you can prior to making your first draft.

As you go through the exercise, it’s important that you don’t become overwhelmed or feel the need to make it perfect. Writing an empowering CPS is not a “to do” to be checked off. It is a living document. You must ponder it, memorize it, review it, update it, and write it into your heart and mind.

To help you get started, ask yourself the following questions:

• What would I really like to be and do in my life?
• What are my greatest strengths?
• How do I want to be remembered?
• Who is the one person who has made the greatest positive impact in my life?
• What have been my happiest moments in life?
• If I had unlimited time and resources, what would I do?
• If I were to do one thing in my professional life that would have the most positive impact, what would it be?
• If I were to do one thing in my personal life that would have the most positive impact, what would it be?
• What are the three or four most important things to me?
• How can I best contribute to the world?

Now, project yourself forward. Visualize the end of life. You are surrounded by your loved ones, friends, and the colleagues you have touched along your life’s journey. One by one they lean over to whisper their final words to you.

• What would each person whisper to you?
• What difference have you made in their life?
• What qualities or characteristics will you be remembered for?
• What outstanding contribution of yours would they mention?

Now that you’ve gone through the preparatory questions, you’re now ready to write a draft of your core purpose statement. Again, your CPS can be anywhere from a sentence to a page long, and take any form that will have the most value for you. Write a draft and then let it sit for some time. Return to it in a couple of days or a week and look at it with fresh eyes. Adjust as necessary and keep returning to it as often as you need.

This exercise is one of the most important things you can do to connect to your inner core, which is the source of your leadership potential—and human potential. If you take it seriously, you will find that, in the process, you begin to naturally embody the first dimension of Intelligent Leadership, and exhibit the “Think Different” mentality that has driven so many great leaders throughout history. Try it. I guarantee you’ll be happy with the results.