PREFACE

      Often the best things result from the most unexpected collaborations. Based on this belief—a belief at the very core of this book—we set out to examine today’s leadership environment and to share some insights about how to navigate it. We concluded that a forty-one-year-old UC Berkeley professor and a forty-one-year-veteran U.S. Army general have very little in common except a deep and unwavering belief that most of the hard problems we face in our businesses, in our local communities, at the national level, and internationally can be solved with better leadership. Along the way, we learned that listening to each other was the first and most important step in our journey and that including diverse perspectives always produced surprising and valuable leadership insights. Ultimately we arrived at a message and how we would deliver it, a task that felt both more difficult and more important with the passage of time.

      We feel a genuine urgency about our message. Few would dispute our assertion that the world began to change dramatically in 2001, but we have found the character and pace of change since 2001 more remarkable than we expected: challenges to the predictable and familiar “order of things” in business, government, international relations, and even our sense of national identity; increasing religious extremism; the emergence of global peer competitors; the proliferation of technology, and—since about 2010—ubiquitous access to data and information for virtually everybody, all the time, everywhere. Status quo companies, militaries, countries—those that for a very long time enjoyed unchallenged power—are now palpably fearful that their power is eroding. Their instinct is to exert control. It’s the wrong instinct.

      • • •

      Although the world has changed, the way we think about leadership hasn’t kept pace. Often the result is suboptimal objectives decided upon too late, measured with the wrong metrics, and implemented with overconfidence by a workforce that is not sufficiently empowered to deliver them.

      This book challenges us to refresh our thinking about leadership. It’s not that the things we’ve always done as leaders won’t work anymore. In fact, we will suggest that some of them should be reinforced. But we’ll also suggest that there are several emerging leadership principles and instincts that are gaining in importance and that demand careful thought and serious consideration—that is, if we want our leadership to match the times and meet their challenges.

      To be sure, this book was written during a period of considerable political disagreement about our country’s future, especially about how much selectivity to exert about who belongs within and who is excluded outside our borders and our communities. But this book is not a commentary on political leadership. While we’d like to think that it has something to offer to those who have been elected to lead the country through the most pressing issues of our time, we believe that it will most strongly resonate among organizational leaders, especially those facing industry, market, and cultural transformations. This book is an exploration of what happens when there’s a mutation in the very core DNA of an organization.

      Whether it’s being a member of a family, attending a school, or serving our country, belonging to a community or a cause bigger than ourselves is core to our very humanity in three specific ways: belonging shapes our identity, it provides our sense of security, and it creates the order we need to survive.

      We develop our identity based on the communities we join (“I’m a dad,”

      “I’m an American,”

      “I’m a soldier”). Being part of a community, in turn, provides us with security—when a parent sacrifices everything for their kids, when a teammate stays late to help a coworker finish a project, and in a thousand other ways, being a part of a community means that there are others who are committed to our success. Finally, in being a part of a community, we can expect our fellow members to abide by a certain set of rules, making our day-to-day existence predictable and thus productive.

      Part of the very contract of belonging, though, is exclusion. We cluster ourselves in neighborhoods, hold tryouts for sports teams, and require exams for certain schools, thereby creating a sense of belonging among those who make the cut. Soldiers will often do anything—even against their own interests—to help a fellow combatant. This bond is so strong that we have a name for it: brothers in arms. You are brothers because you’ve both gone through boot camp, you both wear the same uniform, you both fight for the same country.

      But what happens when there’s a simple change in a company’s organizational structure, or even a country’s? Rather than being selective—or having any barriers to entry at all—what happens when a community is open for anyone to join?

      We’ll begin by looking at the forces knocking down organizational fences and checkpoints. We’ll explore how selectivity—border control, if you will—comes at an economic cost that may or may not make sense.

      What are the costs of control? Clearly, there’s a measurable economic price to keeping a sentry at the gate. But in exerting control, we may be paying a more serious but harder-to-measure cost: the ability to accurately view reality.

      Indeed, it has become a cliché to say that we live in a complex, unpredictable, and rapidly changing world—so cliché, in fact, that we fail to appreciate how profoundly people are affected by it.

      In 1770 John Adams declared that “facts are stubborn things.” Today, we argue, facts are vulnerable. Emerging technology is making facts increasingly vulnerable, and all of us will soon have trouble discerning