FOLLOW THE LEADERfinal analysis the best leaders are people who keep on keeping
on. They never stop dreaming, changing, growing, thinking,
and leading. They know if they do, they’re dead in the water.
They know that progress stops when the leader stops. There are
at least three areas where leaders need to keep on keeping on:ο They need to keep open to progress;
ο They need to keep dreaming of the future;
ο They need to keep growing in their abilities.^29
- Change has always been and will always be a part of life...
The fact is, the only people who won’t change are dead people.
And the only people who have no problems with change are in
the cemetery. But progress is impossible without it. And those
who cannot change their mind will never be able to change
anything...Change is inevitable, but progress is not. The best
leaders are those who anticipate and initiate change rather
than react to it, and thus they guarantee progress.^30 - WALK THE TALK, OR LEAD BY EXAMPLE
Often the most powerful way to communicate a new direction
is through behavior. When the top five or fifty people all live
the change vision, employees will usually grasp it better than
if there had been a hundred stories in the in-house newsletter.
When they see top management acting out the vision, a whole set
of troublesome questions about credibility and game playing
tends to evaporate ...^31 - THE POWER OF A PARADIGM SHIFT...The
term paradigm shift was introduced by Thomas Kuhn in
his highly influential landmark book, The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn shows how almost every
significant breakthrough in the field of scientific endeavor is
first a break with tradition, with old ways of thinking, with
old paradigms...if we want to make significant, quantum
change, we need to work on our basic paradigms. In the words
of Thoreau, “For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil,
there is one striking at the root.” We can only achieve quantum
improvements in our lives as we quit hacking at the leaves of
attitude and behavior and get to work on the root, the paradigms
from which our attitudes and behaviors flow...Remember that