7
Moving Through Chaos
If you want to truly understand something, try to change it.
—Kurt LewinLeaders are, by definition, innovators. They do things other
people have not done or dare not do. They do things in ad-
vance of other people. They make new things. They make old
things new. Having learned from the past, they live in the
present, with one eye on the future. And each leader puts it all
together in a different way. To do that, as I noted earlier, lead-
ers must be right-brain, as well as left-brain, thinkers. They
must be intuitive, conceptual, synthesizing, and artistic. They
must—like Wallace Stevens—wear sombreros.
Robert Abboud was once fired from the top slot in a
Chicago bank. He went to work for Armand Hammer and was
fired again. Then he moved to Texas and became CEO of the
First National Bankcorp. When asked how he could account
for his success, after all that failure, he cited an exchange on
“The Andy Griffith Show” that summed it up: Barney, Andy’s