characteristics for coping with change, forging a new future,
and creating learning organizations.
1.Leaders manage the dream. All leaders have the capacity to
create a compelling vision, one that takes people to a new
place, and then to translate that vision into reality. Not every
leader I spoke with had all ten of the characteristics I’m about
to describe, but they all had this one. Peter Drucker said that
the first task of the leader is to define the mission. Max De
Pree, in Leadership Is an Art, wrote, “The first responsibility of
a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In be-
tween, the leader is a servant.”
Managing the dream can be broken down into five parts.
The first part is communicating the vision. Jung said, “A dream
that is not understood remains a mere occurrence. Under-
stood, it becomes a living experience.” As CEO, Jim Burke
spent 40 percent of his time communicating the Johnson &
Johnson credo. There, managers still attend J&J challenge
meetings, where they go through General Johnson’s credo line
by line to see what changes need to be made. Over the years
some of those changes have been fundamental. And, like the
United States Constitution, the credo itself endures.
The other basic parts of managing the dream are recruiting
meticulously, rewarding, retraining, and reorganizing. All five
parts are exemplified by Jan Carlzon, former CEO of SAS.
Carlzon’s vision was to make SAS one of the five or six re-
maining international carriers (he thought many international
airlines would go under, as they did, although he hadn’t antici-
pated the rise, in recent years, of small, cut-rate carriers that
now crisscross unified Europe). To accomplish this, he devel-
oped two goals. The first was to make SAS 1 percent better in a
hundred different ways than its competitors. The second was
On Becoming a Leader