maneuvers that are always executed in the same way. But with
something like leadership, just as with art, you reinvent the
wheel every single time you apply the principle.”
Robert Dockson agreed: “Leaders aren’t technicians.”
Creativity is required, then, for the banker as well as the mo-
tion picture director. The creative process that underlies strate-
gic thinking is infinitely complex, and as unexplainable finally as
its inner mechanism, but there are basic steps in the process that
can be identified. When you reduce something to its most ele-
mental state, its nuclear core, you can generalize from there.
First, whether you’re planning a novel or a corporate reor-
ganization, you have to know where you’re going to end up.
Mountain climbers don’t start climbing from the bottom of the
mountain. They look at where they want to go, and work back-
ward to where they’re starting from. Like a mountain climber,
once you have the summit in view, you figure out all the ways
you might get there. Then you play with those—altering, con-
necting, comparing, reversing, and imagining—finally choos-
ing one or two routes.
Second, you flesh out those routes, elaborate them, revise
them, make a kind of map of them, complete with possible pit-
falls and traps as well as rewards.
Third, you examine this map objectively, as if you were not
its maker, locate all its soft spots, and eliminate them or change
them.
Finally, when you have finished all that, you set out to climb
your mountain.
Frances Hesselbein and her husband and their families were
part of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, for four generations. They had
a communications business, and she worked as a Girl Scout vol-
unteer there, but she also did management training for Girl
On Becoming a Leader