In Chapter 4 we introduced you to the late Anita Roddick, the teacher, activist, and The Body Shop CEO who relied on her ability to articulate and inspire others with her vision of a company true to its core values: ethical community‐based trade, the protection of animals and the environment, fair labor practices, and—in an industry famous for imposing cartoonish standards of beauty—a global campaign to boost women's self‐esteem.

Roddick once said: “I want to work for a company that contributes to and is part of the community. I want something not just to invest in. I want something to believe in.”² Those words may not sound all that radical now, but in the 1980s, when The Body Shop was beginning to grow, the company seemed bathed in a revolutionary aura. It was a remarkable achievement: Roddick and her brand, a decade before the dawn of the information age, were able to capture the collective consciousness. To step into a Body Shop store was to travel to a world of noble ideals, and the act of buying cosmetics was designed to awaken concerns not many were voicing yet: about the ozone layer, the objectification of women, overseas sweatshops, and testing cosmetics on animals.

For Roddick, capitalism didn't have to be a fulfillment of the social Darwinism that had dominated the industrial era—the idea that the strong should see their wealth and power increase, while the weak should continue to decline. “I am still looking for the modern equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses, made money because they offered honest products and treated their people decently,” Roddick once said. “This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten.”³ The Quakers, it was said, came to America to do good, and they ended up doing well. To do good and to do well can be two sides of the same coin.

In 2011, University of California–Los Angeles professor Jim Stengel, the former global marketing officer for Procter & Gamble, reported the results of a study in which he tracked 10‐year growth trends of 50,000 consumer brands worldwide. His team was looking for patterns that could explain the success of the fastest‐growing brands—and what they discovered surprised them. The data showed that the world's fastest‐growing brands were “organized around ideals of improving people's lives and activated these ideals throughout their business ecosystems.” The top brands, in other words, were driven by a higher purpose—and they outperformed other companies by a wide margin. This was true of every one of the world's 50 highest‐performing brands, and this group—the “Stengel 50”—grew three times faster than their competitors. Over the 10‐year period Stengel studied, an investment in the Stengel 50 would have been 400 percent more profitable than an investment in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index.

In the book derived from this research, Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World's Greatest Companies, Stengel wrote, “The team and I were totally unprepared for this, and for its consistency across very different businesses in different geographies, in both B2B and B2C categories.” The Stengel 50 included business management consultants, soft drink manufacturers, luxury apparel designers, IT and mobile communications companies, online retailers, brewers and distillers, credit card companies, and a chocolate maker.⁴ They couldn't have been more different in the goods and services they offered to the world—but they had similar ideas about the values they conveyed to themselves and their customers. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, in Built to Last, studied the most successful organizations and reported similar findings.

This basic truth also applies to individuals. Stanford professor Damon, one of the leading scholars of human development, writes in his book The Path to Purpose: “Study after study has found a person's sense of life purpose to be closely connected to virtually all dimensions of well‐being.” The studies Damon refers to focus on both psychological and physical well‐being. Remember that in the Blue Zones, where people tend to live longer and better, Dan Buettner pointed to a sense of purpose as one of the key enablers of longevity and wellness. As Damon points out, people driven by a deeply held sense of purpose are also better equipped to deal with hardships—knowing where you're headed, and why, makes it harder for you to get knocked off the rails.⁵ In the book Psychological Capital, management professor Fred Luthans, Carolyn M. Youssef, and Bruce J. Avolio write: “It is truly amazing to see how persistent some individuals are to a cause if they have a very deep belief in that cause, purpose, or mission.”⁶

As Rick Warren reminds us in his best‐selling book The Purpose‐Driven Life, a strong sense of purpose also helps us set priorities: “Without a clear purpose you have no foundation on which you base decisions, allocate your time and use your resources. You will tend to make choices based on circumstance, pressures and your mood at the moment. People who don't know their purpose try to do too much, and that causes stress, fatigue and conflict.”⁷

But what if we're not fortunate enough to work for Roddick or another leader who helps connect business objectives to purposeful pursuits? How can we as individuals working for a less‐than‐ideal organization find meaning at work? Or, how can we as leaders create a meaningful workplace for our colleagues? The answer lies in a distinction made by Viktor Frankl, author of the classic Man's Search for Meaning, between meaning of life and meaning in life.

One of the myths we discussed in Chapter 3—The key to fulfillment lies in seeking and finding the meaning of life—often prevents many people from finding meaningful work. Given the centrality of work to our life, people often look for the dream job that will provide that meaning. Anything short of this ideal place to work is immediately discarded as a compromise, as, at best, a stepping‐stone to what they were really meant to do with their lives. Needless to say, with the bar set so high, this approach leaves little chance for fulfillment from work—or from most other activities.

In lowering the bar, it is important to recognize that the work we do in and of itself may not be inherently meaningful, and to draw on the existentialists' argument, life itself may not be inherently meaningful. However, some people, particularly those with an internal locus of control, are able to inject their work—and life—with meaning. Roddick understood that there may be nothing inherently meaningful in manufacturing and selling beauty products, or in any other business venture. We either inject meaning in what we do, or we don't—and if we don't, we're almost sure to find our work, and our lives, unsatisfying. Injecting our work and the work of our colleagues with meaning is something we can all do—and this, precisely, is what 10X leaders do.

Crafting Our Work

The research we discussed by Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton in Chapter 3 suggests how it is possible for us to find meaning in our work. Their research demonstrates how employees in almost any industry and any organization experience their work as a job, a career, or as a calling. Janitors in hospitals, for example, can experience their work as a calling, as can doctors in those same hospitals; and then there are janitors and doctors in those very same hospitals who experience their work as a job. The same applies to hairdressers, engineers, teachers, or managers—some of whom experience their work as a job, as meaningless, whereas others experience the same work as a calling, as meaningful.

If asked to predict the findings of Wrzesniewski and Dutton's research in hospitals on work as a job, career, or calling, most people would have guessed that those who found their work most meaningful—a calling—were exclusively physicians and nurses. Yet, that is not what the research demonstrated. Some janitors—as well as some doctors—at the hospital viewed their work as a job, but others saw it as a calling, even though they did the same work as other janitors: cleaning soiled linens, mopping hallways, and stocking restrooms. Clearly, official job titles and descriptions have little to do with it. The janitors who viewed their work as a calling felt these official duties were only part of what they did.

The idea of job crafting draws on the work of Wrzesniewski and Dutton and helps redefine one's work in meaningful ways by injecting meaning into it. People of any rank within an organization can make different meanings of their work—and of themselves at work. There are three broad categories of ways to do this: first, altering the tasks you perform, to spend more energy on tasks you find more gratifying; second, changing relationships in the workplace, to spend more quality time with people who make you feel better about yourself and your work; and third, using cognitive reframing to change the way you perceive your work.

Janitors in hospitals who saw their work as a calling did just what the professors prescribed. They saw their work as another aspect of the hospital's mission to promote health, cure sickness, and relieve suffering. These janitors were more likely to engage with doctors, nurses, and patients and their families, to listen when someone felt like talking. They charged themselves with doing whatever they could to comfort patients and their families. Some helped calm patients when nurses inserted IV lines. Others helped visitors find their way around the hospital. They weren't paid for this so‐called extra work—but some said this aspect of the job was what motivated them to get out of bed every morning. They internalized the broader mission of the hospital—not because of their official job description but almost in spite of it. Summarizing their findings, Wrzesniewski and Dutton point out, “Even in the most restricted and routine jobs employees can exert some influence on what is the essence of their work.”⁸

Another example of cognitive reframing is offered by Di Blackburn of Sainsbury's, one of our clients, who dreads, almost above all the other tasks she confronts in her working life, dealing with e‐mails. “It can be real drudgery,” she said.

“Oh, gosh, here come another 20 e‐mails.” But when I thought about my purpose in life, it's—whether I'm at work or at home—developing people. I got frustrated thinking about the time all these e‐mails consumed, but what I realized, when I looked at what was actually in the e‐mails, was that they were about helping people and building on that helping relationship. It was something I needed to do for them I get quite a large amount of e‐mail, but now I enjoy doing it and have a different approach to it. I can spend more time in that zone, leading and developing, if I think about it in the right way.

The same work can and often is experienced in very different ways. There is a story about a person who walked past a construction site in Italy and asked the builders what they were doing. The first builder said that he was laying bricks; the second said that he was building a wall; and the third said that he was building a cathedral to the glory of God. These are totally different subjective experiences of the same work, and no doubt with very different levels of life satisfaction and performances.

To experience purpose, one does not need to be engaged in extraordinary, world‐changing, life‐transforming work. Writes Damon, in The Path to Purpose: “A purpose can be noble without being ‘heroic’ or requiring daring, life‐endangering adventures. Noble purpose may mean this, and our history books are full of dramatic accounts of courageous acts that really did save the day. But noble purposes also may be found in the day‐to‐day fabric of ordinary existence.”⁹

It's interesting to point out that one of the primary indicators of success in the working world—salary—doesn't seem to be a very significant predictor of whether one finds work meaningful. Gallup's 2013 State of the American Workplace report found that employees with college degrees—a strong predictor of higher earnings—were less likely than those with less education to report being engaged in their work.

One notable exception, studied intently by Bunderson and Thompson and reported in 2009, is zookeepers: Though more than 80 percent of the zookeepers Bunderson and Thompson studied had college degrees, their average annual income was less than $25,000. Their typical job description involved scrubbing enclosures, cleaning up more animal waste in a day than most people clean up in a lifetime, and working holidays and weekends. Difficult as their work often was, there weren't (and still aren't) many opportunities for zookeepers in the United States—there are only so many zoos, after all.

Yet Bunderson and Thompson found that many zookeepers had volunteered for years while they waited for a paid position to open up. While many zookeepers were committed to the conservation mission of zoos, that was only part of the reason for their inspiration—nearly all expressed the idea that they were born to do the job.¹⁰ They were the kind of ideal employees Aviva's Karen Stefanyszyn envisioned in a 2011 speech describing employees who would make a business vibrant, successful, and valuable: “We don't want people who can do the job,” she said. “We want people who can't not do the job.”¹¹ Or as one of Tal's students, Ebony Carter, wrote, “Instead of focusing on what we can live with, we should be thinking about what we can't live without.”

Purpose as Meaning and Commitment

Damon offers a clear definition of purpose: “a stable and generalized intention to accomplish something that is at the same time meaningful to the self and consequential for the world beyond the self.” He also makes an important distinction between purpose and goals (though we see goals as important tools for fulfilling one's purpose, as we'll soon explain). Purpose, Damon said, involves (a) a long‐term commitment and (b) meaning or value beyond oneself.¹²

Douglas Conant, the former CEO of Campbell's, highlights these two aspects in “The Power of Idealistic‐Realism,” a 2012 article he wrote in the Harvard Business Review:

An idealistic vision is what motivates all of us. We want to know that we are working toward something consequential, something noble. This simple truth applies to every single person within your organization, from the receptionists to the general managers. That is the real job of a true leader—to offer a vision that inspires and motivates. But as difficult as that is to achieve, it is not enough. People also need to know that you yourself, as a leader, are in touch with reality, that you are willing to roll up your sleeves and engage in the hard work that execution entails.¹³

In other words, in addition to having a meaningful ideal, a leader needs to display a real commitment to that ideal. President John F. Kennedy delivered one of the most inspirational speeches of the twentieth century on September 12, 1962, at Rice University in Houston, Texas, the site of NASA's new Manned Spacecraft Center. On that day, Kennedy announced his intention to marshal the resources of the U.S. space program and land human beings on the moon within a decade. It was an astonishing example of what's referred to today as a stretch goal. The most NASA had done so far had been to send astronaut Scott Carpenter into three consecutive earth orbits, but Kennedy tied the goal to a higher purpose—to several higher purposes, actually: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills The growth of our science and education will be enriched by new knowledge of our universe and environment, by new techniques of learning and mapping and observation, by new tools and computers for industry, medicine, the home as well as the school.”

Kennedy also urged and inspired the assembled scientists and engineers to commit themselves to the mission. “We must be bold,” he said. “But it will be done. And it will be done before the end of this decade.”¹⁴

Though Kennedy didn't live to see it, NASA's space program—overcoming unheard‐of challenges and setbacks, many of them as tragic as his own 1963 assassination—fulfilled his audaciously stated purpose when the Apollo 11 mission landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon on July 20, 1969. And nearly a half century later, as he predicted, Americans and others around the world—in their schools, their hospitals, their private businesses, and their homes—continue to reap the benefits of this historic burst of technological inquiry and exploration.

Meaningfulness is about the connection we feel toward an activity—whether we experience it as personally significant and aligned with our ideals. Commitment is about the motivation or energy we bring to the activity—and consequently, how likely we are to persevere in what we're doing. In his book, which was focused mostly on how young people chose the direction their lives would take, Damon categorized people into four groups—the disengaged, the dreamers, the dabblers, and the purposeful. We adapted Damon's idea into a simple matrix (Figure 8.1) that applies to professional adults working in organizations.

You know already that the place you least want to be in one of our matrices is at the bottom left. You're drifting here, doing something that has no meaning for you and to which you feel no commitment. Back when Tal was in school and had his eyes on a career as a professional squash player, he couldn't have cared less about his calculus class. In the classroom he was drifting and purposeless.

At the top left, a person feels a strong sense of meaningfulness in a cause or activity but has little or no personal commitment to it. For Tal, a personal example is environmentalism. He cares deeply about the future of the planet, and he knows how important it is to do something about it—but he doesn't do much, other than recycle his family's bottles and paper and, occasionally, argue passionately for taking care of the environment.

Early in his career, Angus often found himself at the bottom right of the matrix. To earn a reputation as a team player, he would take on client projects that were outside his fields of interest. Once he'd started these projects, though, he would find he had no deep connection to them. The work was difficult, but not at all fulfilling—it was a grind.

Today, in his leadership development work, helping people become happier, more engaged, and more successful, Angus finds himself squarely in the top right, where meaningfulness and commitment meet. It's not always easy—it involves plenty of difficulties and challenges—but he rarely feels as though it's a grind or as though he's drifting.

The truth is that the variety of working experiences, and the rapid pace of change, in today's disaggregated world will put us in each of these four quadrants at some point. We all have distasteful chores or tasks that need to get done, and that we'll do, even though we neither care much about them nor have much commitment to them. We all have dreams we don't do much about. We can't live every waking moment enrobed in the splendor of meaningfulness and commitment. But we can actively move more of our lives to that upper‐right sweet spot—we call it the Purposeful Life Zone—where we connect, as often as possible, with the ideals that give us a deep sense of meaning, and where we're willing and able to dedicate ourselves to realizing those ideals.

Tools for Purposeful Living

Damon's two distinguishing characteristics—a long‐term commitment and a meaning or ideal beyond oneself—are necessary for identifying one's purpose. But let's face it: They aren't of much practical use. Long‐term commitment is difficult, and in many cases unsustainable. And an ideal greater than oneself is—like Roddick's dedication to ideals such as justice and self‐esteem—an abstraction that's hard to grab on to.

We discussed recrafting our work as a powerful tool to inject our work with meaning. There are other practical tools we can use for living with greater purpose. For example, the very characteristics that make goals lesser, so to speak, ambitions than ideals—goals are aimed at the short term and at concrete and specific outcomes—make them useful for aligning oneself with a larger purpose. Eliminating animal testing in all Body Shop product lines, for example, was a goal the company achieved in 1993—and three years later The Body Shop gathered 4 million signatures on a petition to ban cosmetic testing on animals throughout the European Union. The EU ban went into effect in 2004. Similarly, Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade provided a deep sense of purpose to NASA employees and many others.

And the goals we set do not have to be extraordinary ones, like Roddick's or Kennedy's. Although it's not possible to live every moment fulfilling our greater purpose, it is possible to set up and pursue shorter‐term goals that will inject our day‐to‐day activities with both meaning and commitment.

The greatest challenge in developing goals, however, is precisely that in setting them, we often misidentify our larger purpose. In Chapter 3, we discussed Dan Gilbert's study of the professors who'd earned tenure. Achieving that goal merely created a short‐lived spike in happiness among those who participated in his study. Other research indicates that similarly self‐focused goals—earning a bonus or raise, winning the sales contest, or being promoted—are likely to similarly disappoint.

What is the answer, then? How can we consistently inject a sense of purpose in our life? By changing the expectations we articulate for our goals. Rather than perceive them as ends, expecting their attainment to make us happy, we need to see them as means (recognizing that we'll be happy in the pursuit of them, if they're in line with our ideals). It's a bit of a paradox, we know: A goal is a means, and the experience is the end. Well‐designed goals give us a road map that helps us enjoy the present, and enjoy the journey we're taking toward achieving it. They help us focus our energies on the things we find most meaningful, and they energize us to make the most of opportunities we encounter along the way. Surely it's gratifying to reach our destination, but the main generator of happiness is the journey that constitutes the path to that destination. In the words of psychologist David Watson, author of the Handbook of Positive Psychology: “It is the process of striving after goals—rather than goal attainment per se—that is crucial for happiness.”¹⁵ And as Tal wrote about in his book Happier, “Happiness is not about making it to the peak of the mountain, nor is it about climbing aimlessly around the mountain; happiness is the experience of climbing toward the peak.”¹⁶

The Power of Story

When Wrzesniewski and Dutton's team sat down to talk with hospital janitors, they learned about their work attitudes by listening to their stories. Perhaps without being aware of it, the janitors were crafting narratives, with themselves as the main characters, about their trials and triumphs in the hospital.

Storytelling, one of the oldest human art forms, is one of the most powerful ways in which people articulate their connection to the larger world. As children we build knowledge, skills, and moral sensibilities through stories, and as we mature, stories help us understand the culture we're part of, make sense of the world, and understand the meaning of our own lives. Our brains are wired to connect the isolated episodes we encounter over time and chain them into a narrative that explains who we are and what we're doing on this earth. In the words of Drew Gilpan Faust, the esteemed American historian and president of Harvard University: “We create ourselves out of the stories we tell about our lives, stories that impose purpose and meaning on experiences that often seem random and discontinuous. As we scrutinize our own past in the effort to explain ourselves to ourselves, we discover—or invent—consistent motivations, characteristic patterns, fundamental values, a sense of self.”¹⁷

The study Wrzesniewski and Dutton conducted is one in a growing body of research that finds storytelling to be a compelling way to connect oneself—and one's coworkers—with a larger purpose at work. When he was a 22‐year‐old graduate student at the University of Michigan, Wharton management professor Adam Grant proposed a study set in a university fund‐raising call center, among students working as phone solicitors.

Phone solicitor may be among the least glamorous job titles imaginable; it's a repetitive and often emotionally demanding job, and callers in the center faced daily abuse and a rejection rate of about 93 percent. Their manager had tried every incentive in the book, including competitions and cash prizes, with little if any success. Grant tried something different: He arranged for a recent graduate, who had attended the university on a scholarship funded by such contributions, to meet with the students. The graduate told the story of how the scholarship had changed the course of his life, and how grateful he was for their solicitation efforts.

Even Grant was surprised at the results: One month after the graduate's visit, the student workers' time on the phone soliciting donations had increased by 142 percent—and revenue had increased by 171 percent. Revenues rose by over 400 percent in a subsequent study.¹⁸ There are, clearly, both psychological and financial benefits to meaningful stories that assign value to the work we do.

In recent decades, stories have found their way into the world of corporate strategic planning. In the 1990s, the 3M Company—although it had a strong culture of storytelling in product development, sales and marketing, and human resources—built strategic plans in the traditional way, with bullet lists of goals: increase market share by 25 percent; increase profits by 30 percent. One of 3M's managers decided to change this up, turning the bullet points to stories and the list into a longer narrative. It was a successful approach that spread within 3M and to other companies.

In 1998, a group of 3M leaders wrote about this change in the Harvard Business Review: “If the language we use in writing strategic planning reports were only a matter of presentation, of the way we package ideas and offer them to others, it would not matter much how we wrote them. But writing is thinking. Bullets allow us to skip the thinking step, genially tricking ourselves into supposing that we have planned when, in fact, we've only listed some good things to do.”¹⁹

In the same way, stories can also be useful for individuals to articulate meaningful goals for the future. Many performance management systems and training programs involve these bulleted lists of goals and plans—but they're often dry, the results typically uninspired. A story, on the other hand, can connect specific changes you plan to make right now, or in the near future, to the longer‐term purpose you've defined for yourself. We strongly encourage you to craft stories in which you are the protagonist, focused on getting from where you are today to a purposeful future.

But we don't encourage fantasy. As the award‐winning screenwriter Robert McKee once wrote for the Harvard Business Review: “You emphatically do not want to tell a beginning‐to‐end tale describing how results meet expectations. This is boring and banal. Instead, you want to display the struggle between expectation and reality in all its nastiness.”²⁰ The film It's a Wonderful Life would not be so wonderful if George Bailey had galloped from one triumph to another. When you write your story, you need to foresee and describe the potential challenges you'll encounter and the ways in which you'll overcome them. By including the struggles and obstacles, you'll write—and ultimately live—your working life as an adventure.

The Inspirational Leader: Animating Others with Purpose

In a 2013 interview, Jane Dutton put her finger on a potential drawback to emphasizing how employees can create their own meaning at work. “People could argue that this contributes to how organizations can extract labor from people,” she said. “‘I’ll give you a crappy job and it's up to you to make something good out of it.'”²¹

A good leader ensures that this form of exploitation does not happen, becoming the coauthor of the story she and her employees want written for themselves. As Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner point out in their book The Leadership Challenge, “A leader's dynamism doesn't come from special powers. It comes from a strong belief in a purpose and a willingness to express that conviction.”²² Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, Fortune magazine's CEO of the twentieth century, adds: “Yesterday's idea of the boss, who became the boss because he or she knew one more fact than the person working for them, is yesterday's manager. Tomorrow's person leads through a vision, a shared set of values, a shared objective.”²³

We came up with four important principles to follow for leaders who want to rally a team or organization to commit to a shared vision:

1. The leader must help others see the connection between their own work and the greater purpose. One of Gallup's Q¹² questions is: Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel your job is important? As Wrzesniewski and Dutton clearly demonstrate, people are happiest when they feel they're working at something valuable; a higher purpose is critical for workplace well‐being, engagement, and loyalty. And as the work of Adam Grant proves, leaders who rally employees around a shared vision and higher purpose can increase—often dramatically—a team or organization's productivity.
2. For a purpose to inspire others to action, it has to provide the right kind of challenge. In Built to Last, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras point out that visionary companies set “big, hairy and audacious” goals for themselves.²⁴ President Kennedy's goal of a manned lunar landing might have been the biggest, hairiest, and most audacious goal ever achieved, but it's also important that a company's stretch goals be attainable—if it's too far beyond the reach of employees, it will be discouraging and counterproductive.

   Probably the most effective way to make an audacious goal attainable is to break it down into smaller, bite‐size goals—an approach validated by Ellen Langer's research. “People can imagine themselves taking steps,” she wrote, “while great heights seem entirely forbidding.”²⁵

3. A purpose or vision must be communicated to others in a way that's positive. We often use contrasting examples from the approach taken by two American leaders: Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Carter was considered by many to be one of the most intelligent U.S. presidents of the twentieth century and was elected during one of the most turbulent periods of twentieth‐century America. After his inauguration in 1977, he helped negotiate several important foreign policy victories, including the historic Camp David accords and the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks II agreement with the Soviet Union. But today Carter may be best remembered for the speech he delivered on July 15, 1979, titled “Crisis of Confidence.” The whole point of the speech, apparently, was to rally Americans to help solve the energy crisis the recent Iranian Revolution sparked, but the tone was ominous and scolding. “Too many of us,” Carter said, “now tend to worship self‐indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does but by what one owns.”²⁶ Unsurprisingly, nobody much cared for President Carter's “malaise speech.” Nobody was inspired by his purpose, which was difficult to untangle from his negative opinion of the people listening to it.

   Weeks after the malaise speech, Carter lost his bid for reelection to Ronald Reagan, whose vision of America was decidedly more optimistic. Reagan focused on the greatness of the American people and, at a time when things were arguably not going well, inspired them with his hopeful message. He was also a great storyteller, able to influence others and disarm critics with an anecdote or a well‐timed punch line. It was difficult not to like him, even if you disagreed with him. Reagan, unlike Carter, won reelection to a second term in 1984.

4. Communicating purpose effectively is to epitomize it—to walk the talk. As Gandhi once implored: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Words are not enough, no matter how positive they are, or how moving the story they tell. If words aren't accompanied by action, they'll only inspire cynicism.

   Actions speak louder than words is a truism, a cliché—but for some reason, it continues to be ignored too often. In his 1875 essay “Social Aims,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.”

   Visionary leaders are, above all, role models. They demonstrate their vision, their aspiration to a purpose larger than themselves, every day—not merely through what they say but also through who they are and what they do.