To master the competitive environment, the leader must first
understand the challenges of the twenty-first century. Common
Cause founder John Gardner once said that leaders are people
who understand the prevailing culture, even though much of
the culture is latent, existing only in people’s minds and dreams,
or in their unconscious. But understanding is only the first step.
The leaders of the future will be those who take the next step—
to change the culture. To reprise Kurt Lewin, it is through
changing something that one truly comes to understand it.
Here and now, we need such leaders. We have lost our com-
petitive edge. Adjusted for inflation, average American salaries
have grown only 10 percent over the last 30 years. Our inven-
tive genius remains peerless, but we’ve lost our ability to manu-
facture and, to a lesser extent, to successfully market new
products. What we invent, China makes and sells—to us.
There are continuing crises in public education, health care,
and government. Wall Street and Washington seem sometimes
to have been overtaken by outlaws. Once an industrial giant,
America’s principal business now is service, but service has
never been worse. Increasing numbers of homeless people
wander the streets of this land of plenty, and no one seems to
know what to do about them. Gangs blight neighborhoods in
many of our cities. And the threat of international terrorism is
now part of our reality.
If America is to regain its edge, and face and solve its myriad
problems, leaders—the real thing, not copies—must show the
way. Donald Alstadt, former CEO of the Lord Corporation,
has said that the philosopher, not the tycoon or the mandarin,
is king, because history proves that sooner or later ideas take
root. Plato’s republic is in existence, according to Alstadt, if not
in the form Plato had imagined. Ideas, of course, are a leader’s
strong suit—the way the leader draws forth vision from chaos.
On Becoming a Leader