CHAPTER 6
1,000,000 LEADERS
A World of Leaders
What if every human being on the planet could describe the way leaders we want to follow think and act? What if every child, as part of the kindergarten curriculum, was taught the fundamentals of how to lead? What if every time leaders failed us, we knew how to redefine success, ask for what we needed, and, when necessary, become the leaders who discover and implement the ideas of how to fix the problems that inevitably arise in a growing population on a finite globe?
We have a dream for a braver new world: we want a world of leaders. The paralysis facing us in so many geopolitical conflicts, uncertain economies, and struggling communities and organizations in every country is a failure in education about leadership. We hold up the great leaders as heroes and turn them into mythical demigods when, in many cases, any one of us could do what they did if we simply were given the right knowledge early and were supported as we learned the hard lessons that every leader must experience.
What leaders do is not complicated; it is simply difficult. But difficult tasks are the foundation of human evolution. The evolution we want to see, like the first sea creatures finding their legs as they learned to walk on dry earth, is a new consciousness about what it truly means to lead. Too often leadership is confused with management—with the art of getting things done. Leadership is the act of making new realities possible. That’s what the three commitments do: they create a new reality.
We want this simple way of thinking to become muscle memory in every child. When a child experiences confusion on a team, we want her to know that it usually happens because everyone on the team is not clear. When a child feels insecure, we want him to know that he can take specific steps to rebuild the stability, which infuses the environment with renewed trust. When a child feels stuck, we want her to not lose a beat before looking for the block in the rhythm that always pops up in a chaotic life in a constantly changing universe.
We want the three commitments to become the foundation of an evolution in the way human beings lead for the future. They are not the ultimate answer to all the troubles of humanity; they are the cornerstones of creating cultures in which we’re all focused on alleviating the troubles of humanity. We’ve been paying attention to the wrong parts of how we live and work together, and what we need to do differently is about spreading the message about how simple the change in thinking needs to be.
Kissing Your Enemy
As we can’t build a team of leaders without believing every person can lead, creating entire cultures where others become leaders begins when we treat people in a way that transcends our reactionary emotions under stress and fear, even in the worst circumstances. In the Egyptian revolution of 2011, one of the key leaders was a Google marketing executive, Wael Ghonim. He was instantly held up as an example for the value of social media when gathering people for change. His story as an unintentional leader is also a pivotal example for how we build a world of leaders. He never wanted the role; he experienced the worst of other human beings, and he still treated even his captors with dignity.
Ghonim was arrested as one of the organizers of the protests, culminating in the hundreds of thousands who shut down Cairo’s Tahrir Square. After his release from jail, the story he told in an interview on CBS’ 60 Minutes is one of the most profound examples of creating an environment where everyone can lead. He described what he felt and did after being blindfolded, handcuffed, and beaten. He said, “I forgive them, I have to say. I forgive them because . . . they were convinced that I was harming the country.” He explains that he was beaten by the soldiers, not the officers who lead them. “These are simple people, not educated . . . For [the soldier], I’m sort of like a traitor. I’m destabilizing the country. So when he hits me, he doesn’t hit me because he’s a bad guy. He’s hitting me because he thinks he’s a good guy.”
When someone on our team makes a mistake that ruins a deal or slows down our progress, or when one of our neighbors gets angry at a town meeting when his perspective is completely opposite to our own, imagine being this understanding. Even when we’re tired or frustrated, every one of us can be so deeply connected to the humanness of the people in our lives that we don’t overreact. It matters so much because the way we behave when things are at their worst has everything to do with how others will behave in the future. When Ghonim was freed, what he did is one of the greatest moments leadership history will ever capture: “On the last day, I removed my blindfold, and I said, ‘Hi,’ and kissed every one of them. All of the soldiers. It was good. I was sending them a message.”
Ghonim’s kisses sent the world a message. He was not just trying to overthrow a government that was beating its people; he wanted to send a clear message about what needed to happen next. Ghonim, in the way all of us are capable if our minds know what to focus on, hoped for freedom even for the people who wanted the worst for him. As leaders today, our role is not just to see what needs to get done; we have to anticipate, particularly when others can’t, environments where all of us have the opportunity for lives of meaning and connection.
On February 8, the crowd started chanting, “One hand, one hand,” meaning we are one—that all Egyptians were united. In front of 100,000 people, Ghonim said, “I’m not the hero. I was just typing on my keyboard. You are the heroes.” He could have rallied the crowd against the government. He could have instigated extreme violence. Instead, he spoke of unity. He created stability with his words. “This is not a time to settle scores for personal gains, and it’s not a time for parties or ideologies. It’s time to say one thing: Egypt above all.” He urged a new rhythm for every citizen—a life of opportunity where everyone mattered. He didn’t call for himself to be the focus of attention; he called them for them to be heard—for a new country, a nation of leaders, where every person has the freedom and fairness they need to play their role—to be leaders as well.
The Math
We need a million people. This is not a pipe dream; the three commitments are a way of making life better for all of us. We believe a million of us can make the commitments, and we need your help. First, go to threecommitments.com and “like” the commitments. It seems as if it’s such a simple act, but if we don’t actually make the mental move of registering our desire to live this way as leaders, the moment we put this book down, it may become just another good concept that collects cobwebs in our consciousness. This is absolutely our attempt to draw attention to this way of thinking. We absolutely need your help. We ask you to take this first action to prove to yourself you are a leader who wants to take these simple ways of being and make them a daily part of your life.
Now let’s imagine: a million people each teach five people the three commitments and then ask them to teach five. If that pattern continues a few more times, starting with the first million, we will only be six degrees of relationship away from the whole world knowing how simple it is to lead. The world population is fast approaching seven billion people. Look at how quickly the commitments could spread exponentially:
1 to 5
5 to 25
25 to 125
125 to 625
625 to 3,625
3,625 to more people than perhaps will ever inhabit the world
You talk to five people every day who have leadership roles about the places where they want to see things done better. You may have five people in your family.
Our dream about spreading the three commitments is based on a desire to change the collective consciousness of the globe about leadership. As 2011 brings revolution across countries in Africa and the Middle East, the consciousness of the leaders was raised by what was wrong. What if the same tools of social media that fought police brutality and government corruption could also be used to develop people? We want the pace of leadership development to take a quantum leap. We want the world to know how simple it is to lead so that the kind of revolutions spawned by dictatorships and broken lives can transform into new realities of possibility and communities in which people don’t have to be oppressed for generations to build lives in which they have what they need.
Of course, we’re assuming we can gather the first million people. Wait, one million people making the three commitments is a huge number. That’s going to be so hard to achieve. Yes, but maybe not: the first million will be the easiest million. In the world of social media, we can use the tools to connect to people all around the globe, quickly and in a way that positively changes our lives. We’re not asking people to do the really hard stuff like giving up chocolate or cheeseburgers.
We’re asking you to make three simple words the way you interact with your colleagues, neighbors, and families. We’re asking you to like this way of thinking and click a button. We’re asking you to live this way so that others want to learn your secret and you can start their learning with three words.
The Musicians’ Village
When we apply the three commitments to the natural disasters that seem to be swallowing our world city by city, suddenly epic pain becomes the seeds of communities being reborn.
When Harry Connick Jr. sat at the piano next to Ellis Marsalis at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts in the 1970s, New Orleans didn’t know it was their piano lessons that would save one of the city’s most precious possessions. When Hurricane Katrina devastated the Crescent City in 2005, the world didn’t realize it almost lost the heart of jazz.
Jazz music is one of the clearest examples of a team of leaders working together. But the kind of virtuosity needed to excel at jazz, the kind of team leadership exhibited by the legendary 1950’s ensemble The Quintet, is learned in stages: after mastering their chops—the basic notes, instrument technique, and patterns of music—jazz players practice for hours a day with other musicians learning to support one another and take the lead on a piece.
The art is handed from more experienced players to younger students. The life of a jazz musician is not easy and the money is not good. The pleasure is in the playing and the jamming together, the passing on of the classic tunes and the constant innovation of new styles. When the hurricane destroyed the houses and the neighborhoods—the places where the musicians lived so they could gather at night to play—jazz left the city. The music could not return until the musicians had a place to lay their instruments down for the night. Without its musicians, the city almost lost its rhythm.
It was saved by the relationship between Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr., who learned to play with the five Marsalis brothers at the knees of their father, Ellis. Harry Connick Jr. and Branford, the oldest of the five brothers, realized that the clearest action they could take for the city after the storm was to create new homes for their peers. Most had lived in dilapidated housing before the flood, and the dream was to create a village for musicians and their families where the bright-colored houses—orange, purple, yellow, and pink—would surround a performance center. If they wanted to maintain the tradition of New Orleans jazz, they knew that the artists needed stability in their lives to focus on their music. Harry Connick Jr. and Branford Marsalis knew that for the traditions to be passed on as father had to sons, there had to be a life that facilitated the rhythm of teaching and collaboration that produces jazz greatness.
The fund-raising began after Katrina; in conjunction with Habitat for Humanity, they began to build 72 single-family homes on eight acres of land in the Ninth Ward, the part of the city most affected by the hurricane. They were clear on their goal: save jazz. They knew the stability that was needed: homes. They built a rhythm of effort in which volunteers from around the world came to hammer the pieces of a shattered culture back together, room by room and family by family. The houses are now complete and by fall 2011, the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music will open in the center of the neighborhood, complete with a 150-person auditorium, classrooms, and the administrative support young musicians need to focus on their music as a way of life.
The music passed from Ellis Marsalis to his sons and others then became leadership passed from them to a world that would build the Musicians’ Village. This is the way a world of leadership spreads. The enthusiasm of a few passes on as they make the three commitments and then the way they lead infects everyone who touches projects such as the Musicians’ Village. And the energy doesn’t stop flowing once the project is done. The story travels with every person who visits, goes there to see a concert, or reads about it. Every note that comes out of the neighborhood will continue the rebuilding of a community and the building of a world of leaders.
Leaders for Life
Once we become leaders, it is not something we stop doing. Leaders never retire. We change venues, but we never stop leading. The reason we want our children educated in this way of thinking and prioritizing how they work with others emerges from a problematic Western attitude toward progress, and ultimately, the human race: too many of us are doing what we do so we can stop.
In business, fueled by the Internet boom of the 1990s and the beginning of the first decade of the new millennium, starting a company has too often become about selling it so we can stop and retire on an island. Winning an election is about the victory and gaining the position of power, not how to use the office as one opportunity in a life of helping others. We want the position, the best seller, or the deal so we can have the wealth to stop, but serious success is actually the moment that our impact as people truly begins.
The desire for total freedom is completely natural, but it’s simply not the attitude of a leader. When we really lead, we always look for the ways we can create lasting experiences that truly make other’s lives better. The three commitments create the kind of personal attention to what it means to lead so that leadership becomes a part of our DNA every day, at every stage of life.
The day that Aaron Feuerstein turned 70 years old, on December 11, 1995, his company burned to the ground. Malden Mills, the original creator of Polartec, was a $400 million dollar company that had just expanded with a trajectory to be a billion dollar firm by the turn of the twenty-first century. As Feuerstein—a third generation owner—celebrated his birthday with friends and family, an explosion rocked one of the factories, ultimately destroying three of nine buildings at the company’s Lawrence, Massachusetts factory.
Feuerstein is still considered one of the ultimate case studies in ethical leadership. He could have taken hundreds of millions in insurance money and moved on. He could have moved his factory overseas. He certainly didn’t have to maintain the $1.5-million-a-week payroll obligations as the factory was rebuilt. Instead, he kept 3,000 employees on the payroll— costing him $25 million. He made a clear commitment to maintain the stability of his people in a time where they lost all their normal rhythm. The company eventually needed to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2001, but he never wavered in the clarity of what he was doing and why, the stability he wanted to retain for his team and the Lawrence community, and the rhythm of life he wanted to return to his organization.
With his team of leaders, he ultimately brought the company back to its previous heights, including a $16 million contract with the U.S. Department of Defense. Feuerstein actually lost control of the company to creditors with the 2001 bankruptcy but kept his presidency and position as chairman of the board. He resigned from those posts in 2004 to try to repurchase his legacy. As the leadership began shipping jobs overseas, he was committed to his people. The company filed for bankruptcy again in 2007 and has since been sold. Almost sounds like Feuerstein failed.
But that’s not the end of the story. A group of employees who Feuerstein believed in throughout the years opened Mill Direct Textiles, in Lawrence. As Feuerstein continued to fight for his employees, his living the three commitments translated into a team of leaders who is now continuing his legacy. In addition to dollars and cents, we measure leaders in lives changed, ideas generated, and the legacy they inspire. Leadership is not something we do for a while and then because we have some good results, we go to Disneyland. Leadership is a way of life that at its highest level infects others with the capacity and courage to lead too.
The conclusion to the story of Malden Mills is even better than Feuerstein’s always paying attention to what his teams needed or the team of leaders he inspired to create Mill Direct. The city of Lawrence was renewed. Buildings that had been empty for decades filled with businesses and homes. The mall that had been empty since the early 1990s is now being rebuilt as a health and technology education center for the local community college. Crime has dropped and still remained below peak levels, with increases due to the global recession of 2008. The downtown shopping district, a ghost town since the 1970s, is open for business. Are all these improvements a result of the lifetime leadership of Feuerstein? Of course not. They are a result of the places in which he created clarity, stability, and rhythm—and a city of leaders that continues to reemerge.
A Community of Aspiration
The three commitments is a philosophy of aspiration. To aspire is to soar. It’s to have a vision that leaps beyond the horizon we can see and yet is grounded in a confidence that knows that new realities can come into being. The problem with most world-changing leaders is that we do not have enough fellow leaders around us to support the work we’re doing. No matter how great our team of leaders and no matter how grounded we are as people, every single one of us who takes up the mantle of leadership goes stale sometimes. We go dry because we give everything we have. What we need are communities of leaders who surround us with the kind of stimulation that revives our desire to lead in the places where the world simply isn’t complete without us.
Where do you go when your well is dry? Let’s assume that you pay attention to your personal renewal, and you have a rhythm that keeps your body and mind healthy. The way we can lead for our whole lives is to stay in touch with a community of leaders who push us when we want to quit, keep us accountable to what it means to lead well, and constantly challenge us with new ways to lead effectively. There is no “proper” community that will fill this need for you, just like there is no absolute way to fulfill the three commitments. But there are types of communities that will fuel your ability to be the leadership giant the world needs you to be.
The first category is colleague groups. Whether you are an executive who has a CEO roundtable or a professional—such as a doctor, lawyer, teacher, or minister—who has a regular practice group that explores the best ways to live out your vocation, you need people who will value your desire to lead and keep you honest about whether you’re living up to your potential as a leader. Don’t choose a group just because they are in your town or you do the same thing. You want a group of people who will move you: we have to want to attend the group, respect every member deeply, and be willing to open ourselves to the group so we can truly learn. With the advent of social media, we can form these groups around the world and meet in ways that simply weren’t possible even a few years ago. Our only limitation in finding the right colleagues to help us keep our three commitments is our level of willingness to find them.
A second category is community centers. In every city and town there are faith communities, YMCAs, and art centers where we can be deeply moved by committed volunteers, thinkers, and creative human beings who love to share what they do. We all need a community like the Artists Collective in Hartford, Connecticut. Begun in the 1970s in borrowed buildings around the city, its classrooms and stages today promote the music, dance, and drama of the African diaspora.
Visit the center, and as you walk the halls you will not only be amazed by the energy of the students, you will quickly grasp that every staff member—from the executive director to the custodian—not only feels empowered to lead, they also know exactly what they do, why they do it, and what Artists Collective stands for. As leaders, when we walk into a community center that knows its mission and passes its purpose on to every person who walks through its doors, as leaders we can’t help but soak up the vibe and find new ways to fulfill the three commitments.
A third category is conferences. When you sit around a table with colleagues who face the same issues, you very quickly realize you are not the only leader who has that unique challenge. The problems most of us face aren’t unique. The classic methods of solving problems may sometimes evolve slowly. What’s unique are the ways we will employ tested solutions, and the creative ideas we need emerge only when we have teammates with whom we can craft the next solutions. Be thoughtful about the conferences you choose, because many can be as much about business as they are about connecting leaders in different disciplines and around powerful ideas. And conferences can be the retreat every leader needs to connect with a community of leaders who care just as much about the world we’re trying to build.
These are the obvious places to look for a community of leaders. Ask yourself, “Where will I go to find the support, energy, and insight I need to never stop leading?” We want a million leaders because we want communities of aspiration in every town and city, in every state and province. We want teams of leaders in the places we lead, and communities of aspiration that connect us to the ways each of us can stay inspired. We need one another. The three commitments are a way of thinking about leadership that starts conversations among those of us who lead. The infinite ways to fulfill them change each day and with each new revolution of our world. It is in communities of fellow leaders that we will find the energy to never stop leading.
The Inevitable Doubt
We need communities of aspiration because the risks of leadership are real. The moment when the leadership enthusiasm goes from words to actions, it’s not that we don’t know what we have to do—the three commitments show us where we need to focus our attention—but the problem is that we may wonder if the risks are worth it.
In Martin Luther King Jr.’s memoir, Stride Toward Freedom, he recounts the story of 50,000 fellow civil rights leaders boycotting the segregated buses over two years. On the night of January 27, 1956, over a year into the struggle, he wondered if he should quit. His phone rang just as he was falling asleep. The voice said, “Before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.” After making coffee and hours of pacing, with his mind filled with dark thoughts and doubts, he sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands.
He knew every day that his life and his family’s lives were in danger. Did the need for a leader justify the potential cost? Being a leader, whether we’re in a movement or an organization, is not safe. Whatever we are called to build or change or renew, there will be those who will oppose us. In some cases, they oppose us because they too think they are fighting for what is right. On King’s deep, dark night, he described hearing a voice. He told the story in a sermon a year later, he knew he had to “Stand up for the truth. Stand up for righteousness.” Despite the real danger he knew was coming, he could not let the world exist as it did at that moment.
Three days later, his house was bombed. Sometimes a leader who makes it possible for the whole world to lead has to be able to face even bombs. King stood before a crowd of hundreds and assured them he and his family were fine. Notice the clarity with which he spoke. He immediately created stability with his calm voice and said:
Don’t get panicky. Don’t do anything panicky. Don’t get your weapons. If you have weapons, take them home. He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword. Remember that is what Jesus said. We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies. Be good to them. This is what we must live by. We must meet hate with love.
He paused when the crowd got noisy. He created a rhythm with his words that modeled the nonviolent protest. He wouldn’t let those that wanted to derail the future tens of thousands in Montgomery knew could happen—a future of freedom and equal opportunity—with a few careless acts of violence. He continued:
I did not start this boycott. I was asked by you to serve as your spokesman. I want it to be known the length and breadth of this land that if I am stopped, this movement will not stop. If I am stopped, our work will not stop. For what we are doing is right. What we are doing is just. And God is with us.
The movement could have ended with the riots. The power of the civil rights struggle was the nonviolent way it emphasized the unspeakable wrongs being done to people based only on skin color. A break in that model would destroy the power of its purpose. Even though he doubted, even though he faced unbelievable risks that ultimately took his life, the way King spoke, the way he lead, created an environment in which instead of the movement’s dying, it thrived. Because he led, millions became leaders too.
Lead Every Day
We don’t lead just because we’re the CEO of a corporation or the coach of a professional team. We lead everywhere, and we lead every day. Some of us lead at home and others in our communities. We don’t have to be elected to Congress or earn the big promotion; to lead, we simply have to want to help new and better realities come into being. What’s better to you is the place where you have leadership worth doing.
We keep the momentum of our leadership going day after day by paying attention to where we lead. The method we have to use each day as leaders is too rarely a part of our lives: reflection. We talk to too many leaders who have so many good ideas, but caught in the landslide of their desire to be great at everything they do, they never stop. As we’ve asked you to reflect on all three commitments, we want to finish the book building a new ritual for your daily life.
At the end of each day, ask yourself two questions. First: where did you lead today? Where did you take the three commitments seriously and apply them to the real challenges and dreams of your daily life? Fulfilling the three commitments and making them a way of living for the people around you so they can lead too doesn’t have to come with giant plans and complicated infrastructure. Who did you speak with in a way that shared knowledge and helped someone else find clarity? Where did you build a little more stability through the resources you provided and the trust you inspired? There is absolutely some place in the past 24 hours where you paid attention to the flow of your team’s work and to the timing of how you lead. Where did you build that new world?
Second, and this may be the simplest way to build a team of leaders around you: where did you compliment someone else for leading? As we all run with our heads down when we make mistakes, we’re not just scraping our knees. The leadership failures in our world today are more akin to pushing entire buildings of people off a cliff: Enron, Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns; Egypt, Syria, Haiti, and Libya. We don’t have to look far to see how difficult and precarious our interconnected world is and how dangerous poor leadership is—that’s why when we notice great leadership happening around us, we have to say so.
On one of our retreats while writing this book, we were at a hotel with a conference of U.S. military officers. We noticed the way they interacted with one another and every stranger they met. As we took an elevator with one of the leaders, we commented on how impressed we were with the way they conducted themselves, and that their behavior was clearly a reflection of the group’s strong leadership. The next day, as we sat writing in the lobby, the master sergeant heading the group sought us out. He presented us with a medal.
He wanted to thank us for noticing what they were trying to accomplish. He had told the story to all his officers and it had reinforced how important the work they were doing could be. The story sounds absurd: a medal from a member of our military, given to a civilian just for paying attention? But the master sergeant was actually emphasizing the importance of noticing the efforts of others’ leadership. If we’re leaders, when we walk into the room, everyone looks at us. They look up to us. They need us. We are always leading every day and it matters in every moment.
The question is, are we up to it? Do you have the courage to fulfill the three commitments every day, to build a team of leaders, in fact, a world of people ready to evolve the human race into a new level of creative possibility? If we do not pour ourselves into developing teams of leaders as intently as we pay attention to the core activities of what we do—such as finance, product development, and talent management—we will run out of energy. We can’t run our governments, businesses, and communities without a team of leaders so vast that when our bodies and minds need to pause, there are able teammates just as ready as we were to take the lead.
If we’re up to it, we, the leaders—whether we have the authority yet or we are the ones with the kernel of a dream— can turn every company and country, every individual and team, every single community into a place where people have the clarity, stability, and rhythm to live lives of true happiness. The three commitments are about improving performance and helping organizations increase their results; perhaps the greatest result we can hope for is a world where the things that separate us as people become the opportunities to apply the three commitments and rebuild a world of leaders where each of us has what we want, need, and love.
Postlude: The Unexpected Prize
You are a leader. You have a team. You run an organization. There is a moment that can make all the pain and struggle of leadership worth it. Someone calls you up after a few years, sometimes even after a few decades. You were his boss at his first job or his coach in high school. You might have been his spiritual leader or the government official who took his call. He says, “I really need us to get together.” Because you take leadership seriously every day, when someone says it’s important that you meet, the alarm in your brain goes off. You start to imagine what’s wrong, because that’s too often what your life is about—fixing problems—and you wonder why he’s calling you.
You ask if there is something you can do for him now, and he says no. He tells you where to meet him. It’s a good restaurant around the corner from your office. When you arrive, he is already waiting. He looks at you with a smile that would soften the hardest heart and make the grumpiest day worth enduring. You sit down, and he tells you why he wanted to see you.
The person just wants to say thank you.
He wants to say thank you because you were the leader who paid attention. You saw the potential in each teammate and you nurtured it. You created an environment where people wanted to work together—where teammates made each other better, felt free to challenge what was being done, and take risks to improve the work. You had the courage to take on the real needs that most people ignored, not knowing what to do. He noticed, and he wants you to know your leadership had an impact.
And there is a second unexpected moment in leadership, a prize that few of us have been taught is possible. This is what you will make happen when you fulfill the three commitments everywhere you lead. As leaders we can create the environment through our actions in which every person on our team can become a leader too. The ultimate result of the three commitments is not just your leadership acuity; it’s your ability to develop a team of leaders. If we do, when they take us out to dinner, it won’t be just to thank us for our leadership, it will be for supporting them in becoming the leaders they always wanted to be.