to. And voice matters more than ever because modern media
broadcast it everywhere.
The third quality that all true leaders have is integrity. Recently,
we have been reminded how important integrity is because we
have perceived its lack in so many corporate leaders—the corpo-
rate weasels, as they have been called. One component of integrity
is a strong moral compass. It need not be religious faith, but it is a
powerful belief in something outside one’s self. Ralph Nader’s
commitment to consumerism is a good example. Leadership is al-
ways about character. One of my favorite observations about the
centrality of character to leadership is something David McCul-
lough said about Harry Truman, in an essay collected in the book
Character Above All. “Character counts in the presidency more
than any other single quality,” McCullough writes. “It is more im-
portant than how much the President knows of foreign policy or
economics, or even of politics. When the chips are down—and
the chips are almost always down in the presidency—how do you
decide? Which way do you go? What kind of courage is called
upon? Talking of his hero Andrew Jackson, Truman once said, ‘It
takes one kind of courage to face a duelist, but it’s nothing like the
courage it takes to tell a friend, No.’”
But the one competence that I now realize is absolutely es-
sential for leaders—the key competence—is adaptive capacity.
Adaptive capacity is what allows leaders to respond quickly
and intelligently to relentless change. A whole new decision-
making process has evolved in the last thirteen years in re-
sponse to a changed context. As psychologist Karl Weick so
eloquently writes, leaders of the old school could rely on maps.
The leaders of today’s digital age, whose world is never still or
quite in focus, must depend on compasses. Weick explains:
“Maps, by definition, can help only in known worlds—worldsOn Becoming a Leaderxxvi0465014088_fm.qxd:0738208175_fm.qxd 12/2/08 2:52 PM Page xxvi