goal. Today’s leaders often reinvent themselves periodically in
order to scale new mountains.
We sometimes feel that we are at least halfway through the
looking glass, on our way to utter chaos. And though the
context is highly volatile, it’s not apt to change in any funda-
mental way as long as the principal players are driven by it, are
swimming through it like fish blind to the water. To put it an-
other way, the current climate is self-perpetuating because it
has created an entire generation of managers in its own image.
As we have discovered recently, too many CEOs became
bosses, not leaders, and it is the bosses who have gotten
America into its current fix. Ironically, they are as much prod-
ucts of the context as today’s corporate scandals are. They are
perfect expressions of the context, driven, driving, but going
nowhere.
The first step in becoming a leader, then, is to recognize the
context for what it is—a breaker, not a maker; a trap, not a
launching pad; an end, not a beginning—and declare your in-
dependence.
SURRENDERING TO THE CONTEXT
Having described the context, I’m tempted to skip a step and go
right to the people who beat it. Success is more fun than fail-
ure—to write about as well as to live. Besides, everyone knows
people who didn’t get what they wanted out of life. But learning
from failure is one of the most important themes in this book,
one that we’ll return to again and again, so I think we need to
look at one case, one individual who didn’t make it out of the
quagmire, and some of the reasons why. I’ll call him Ed.
On Becoming a Leader