To My Esteemed Colleagues

Imagine you are standing in Battery Park, on the southernmost tip of Manhattan. The city bustles around you, and on this clear morning you have stunning views of New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty. History is beneath your feet: one of the oldest settlements in North America. From these early hubs, the western migration of settlers began. Soon, you will follow in their footsteps.

As you stand in the park, you are oblivious to the sounds of the city—the horns and sirens, the pulse of the metropolis. Gathered around you are 4,000 people from 40 countries. And your job is to lead this diverse group of people on a cross-country trip by foot over the next five years—from New York to Santa Monica on the Pacific shore, a distance of 2,500 miles by the most direct route. That is the vision, the destination of this organization.

On that early morning, you know that a solitary walker, putting in about 10 hours a day, could make it from New York to Los Angeles in about 90 days. However, you have been given five years (a typical tenure of a CEO) to reach Santa Monica, which means your team of 4,000 people will walk about an hour every day for the next half decade. As you ponder the enormity of leading 4,000 others on such a trek—physically moving them from here to there—you wonder how you will keep everyone motivated and aligned, leaving the familiar for the unknown, losing some people and gaining others, for five years. Sound obscure? Well, not so much.

This is the essence of leadership, of being a CEO: emotionally and sometimes literally transporting people on a journey from one place to another, and inspiring them to believe in what they can achieve—that they can, indeed, reach a faraway destination.

In the flurry of leadership books, from the theoretical to the inspirational, it's easy to overlook the profoundly simple: The first word in leadership is, literally, lead. But in order to lead others, you must, first, lead yourself. The change you wish to see in others begins with the person you see in the mirror; it is virtually impossible to improve an organization unless you improve yourself.

People always ask me, “Are leaders born or made?” I have found that it's a little of the former and a lot of the latter. So much has been written about the left-brain side of leadership—the frameworks, theories, decision-making models; these are non-negotiable. What separates great from good, however, is found in the right hemisphere: a leader's ability to inspire others to the point they wake up at 4:30 AM without an alarm clock, excited to keep moving forward.

Effective leaders do the left-brain technical stuff that identifies opportunities and challenges—finding “the opening in the sky.” But they don't stop there. They are equally capable of using their right brain to empower others to believe they will make it through that opening in the clouds. Importantly, these multidimensional leaders are also humble, acutely self-aware, insatiably curious, always authentic, and quite courageous.

Adventurous leaders know the topography—the map of the leadership world and the human brain. They understand that throughout the day—from dawn to dark, and often well into the night—they must continuously address four crucial aspects of leadership: