218 50 TOPEXECUTIVECOACHES

• Are they able to take advantage of change more easily?


• Are the people in the business using their full talents?


• Are they doing, to quote Tom Peters, “cool stuff ”?
  •Have they broken the code?


• Is there plenty of passion to go around—enough that good people want
  to work there?

Along the way, I want people to:

• Read the world,including the mess, the opportunities, the politics, or
  the fray, the beauty of the situation, the humor, the opportunities, and
  what it means for them.


• Define the identitythey personally want to hold in the world and the
  identity their organization wants to have (and how the two are linked!).
  Identit y is the heart of branding.


• Decide on the highest leverage actionsit will take to get there in the
  most elegant fashion—what I mean by “breaking the code” (sorry, too
  many spy mov ies in my childhood and a worship of the Emma Peel
  character).


• Pull in the talentthey have to help them take the actions and break the
  code as quickly as possible. I find there is a layer of subtle malaise and
  uncertainty hanging over many organizations like a cloud cover. We
  could use a corporate weather channel some days just to break through.
  Pulling a team of passionate people together to work a key project is
  one of the best antidotes to that malaise.