solve at the same level at which we created them.” Or, as a
friend of mine put it, “Sometimes the only way to make the
Coke machine work is to give it a good kick.”
We’ve talked about people who followed failures with suc-
cess because they got kicked around a little. Being kicked
around can be a real eye opener. When I was a graduate stu-
dent at MIT, I was required for a course in clinical psychology
to go to a Boston psychiatric hospital and find a patient whom
I would see once a week, under supervision. The first time I
went there, I extended my hand, and the patient proceeded to
kick me in the shins. As a result, I had to examine everything I
had assumed about social etiquette from a new and different
level. In the same way, organizations now need a good kick to
get them started again, to upend their assumptions.
Gandhi said, “We must be the change we wish to see in the
world.” As organizations transform themselves, they will trans-
form the world. To date, organizations have done far more to
stifle leadership than to encourage it.
I think we’ve covered all the modes of discouragement,
along with their effects. So how do organizations encourage
leadership? As we have seen, the basis for leadership is learn-
ing, and principally learning from experience. In their book
Lessons of Experience, Morgan W. McCall, Jr., Michael M. Lom-
bardo, and Ann M. Morrison report that when they asked top
executives what advice they would give to younger executives,
there were three basic themes:
- Take advantage of every opportunity.
- Aggressively search for meaning.
- Know yourself.
On Becoming a Leader