Few subjects have attracted more attention yet generated more confusion than leadership. As James McGregor Burns put it in his 1978 classic Leadership: “Leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth.”¹

Misunderstandings of leadership abound. Just take one example: leadership is often regarded as heroic; therefore turnaround leaders such as Lee Iacocca at Chrysler, Lou Gerstner at IBM, and Carlos Ghosn at Nissan are highly admired. It is no wonder that many people view a post-crisis era, such as the period of the 2008-09 financial meltdown, as the greatest leadership challenge.

Yet heroic leadership could be a myth. Let me invite Bian Que, a legendary Chinese physician who lived in the Warring States Period, more than 2,300 years ago, to unveil this idea for us.

Just as the people of the Warring States Period idolized the heroic doctor, we tend to favor heroic leaders; but, as Bian Que explained, they are not necessarily the best ones. Or are they?

Leadership would no doubt benefit from more discussions similar to the dialog between the inquisitive king and the master doctor. For this reason, I asked 13 contemporary masters of leadership to talk to me in an attempt to present the best understandings of leadership in a vivid format. This group is a veritable leadership “Dream Team,” which boasts the following unparalleled characteristics:

Jim Kouzes says that leadership is not reserved for the people at the top:

Unlike managers, Kouzes says, leaders often don’t have a title:

Peter Senge brings us back to the origin of the word “lead” to illuminate that leadership is an activity rather than a position:

John Kotter is instrumental in replacing the term “change management” with “change leadership.” He has found that a successful change initiative relies 70-90 percent on leadership, and only 10-30 percent on management. Jim Kouzes puts it this way:

I choose the word “discipline” particularly to address another misunderstanding of leadership—that it can be taught and learned in classrooms, in seminars, and/or by self-help books. Leadership cannot be taught in a leadership course or seminar. However, it can be learned, but not in classrooms or from reading self-help books. Learning is reflecting on your experience and practicing. It requires daily practice and continuing hard work. While some skills useful for leadership, such as how to make a presentation, can be taught in a workshop, I would argue, and the Masters would agree, that the foundation of leadership lies in these eight disciplines.

Leadership is a relationship between leaders and followers as well as an activity. Leaders must connect with followers to foster the relationship. Warren Bennis calls the relationship “a transaction between leaders and followers. Neither could exist without the other. There has to be resonance, a connection between them. So what we discovered is that leaders also pay attention as well as catch it.”²

Developing trust is essential in this relationship, a point underscored by Jim Kouzes:

Leaders must pay attention to the dynamics of the relationship. Howard Gardner summarizes four factors crucial to the practice of effective leadership, the first one of which he calls a tie to the community (or audience). “What needs emphasis,” he says, “is that the relationship is typically ongoing, active, and dynamic.”⁴ So leaders must take the changing features into account.

Leaders must create a shared vision to focus this relationship. After Warren Bennis and his co-author, Burt Nanus, first published Leaders in 1985, the idea that leaders use a clearly articulated vision to focus people’s attention has been widely embraced. However, the leader alone having the vision, and even having it shared, is not enough. Peter Senge emphasizes the idea of a shared vision, which is not the leader’s vision shared by others, but a combined individual vision of all involved:

Warren Bennis, delighted to accept and apply the idea of shared vision, attributed Larry Summers’ blunder during his tenure as president of Harvard University to his failure to create a shared vision among Harvard’s professors and staffers although he had his personal vision. Once a university president himself, Bennis had actually made the same mistake before.

There are many reasons why a leader imposes his vision on others, and one of them might be cultural. Cho-yun Hsu, a Chinese historian, reminds us of the difference between two Golden Rules. The Western version, which was from Jesus Christ, is “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” while the Chinese version, from the Analects of Confucius, is “Don’t impose on others what you don’t want others to impose on you.” When a vision is imposed on people, particularly those who believe in the Confucian type of Golden Rule, the leadership cannot be executed effectively.

The cultural difference probably shouldn’t be exaggerated here, since the importance of shared vision has been highlighted in the West too. For example, James MacGregor Burns used three quotations in the front page of Leadership. The first two were from Machiavelli and Franklin D. Roosevelt; the third was the following from Mao Tse-tung:

This is a more specific version of the Confucian Golden Rule. Mao Tse-tung also offered himself as a lively example. He succeeded as a party leader and a leader of the nation when he followed the rule and failed when, later on, he betrayed it.

Connecting with people, or linking with the masses, is so essential that I list it as the first leadership discipline. It requires such skills and practices as delegation, listening, management by walking around, being generous and respectful (as Warren Bennis stresses), or even being popular (which Jim Kouzes would argue is necessary). Yet in the heart of this discipline is humanness. When Cho-yun Hsu recommends the Analects as reading material for Barack Obama and other leaders, and Debashis Chatterjee shares with us the story of J.R.D. Tata, their message is profoundly significant: we connect with people not only for the purpose of achieving an organizational goal, but also because they are human.

Bennis and, later, Bill George refer to negatives as a crucible—a life experience that transforms a person. Essential in the development of a leader, it doesn’t have to be a struggle, a torture, a test, or a failure, but it is often so. And people who aspire to be leaders must have the ability to use such negatives as a transformational crucible. Since leadership is about change, or adaptive challenges that are uncertain and tough, leaders must prepare themselves for such challenges by learning from failure.

It’s not enough for organizational leaders to learn from failure themselves. They must develop such a culture in their organizations. Jerry Porras quotes 3M as such an organization (you’ll notice that such an example is, unfortunately, unusual):

Cho-yun Hsu comments that we tend to learn from success when we research historical cases, and that, as an example, Harvard’s case-studies method is biased toward success. He talks about learning from failure from another perspective:

Zizhi Tongjian (“Comprehensive Mirror in Aid for Government”) is a history book from the Song Dynasty through which the writer Sima Guang and his colleagues tried to tell current leaders how past emperors and ministers succeeded or failed. The most important phrase in the book is “Guang remarks”—the author’s own comments. We see more “Guang remarks” on the cases of failure than on the successes. So to me studying history is a way we learn from other people’s blunders, failures, and fumbles, and try to avoid them.

Although Bennis names many ways of reflecting—including looking back, dreaming, journaling, talking it out, watching last week’s game, asking for critiques, going on retreats, even telling jokes—he emphasizes one: “Having a Socratic dialog with yourself, asking the right questions at the right time, in order to discover the truth of yourself and your life. What really happened? Why did it happen? What did it do to me? What did it mean to me?”⁸

This kind of dialog with oneself is deeply rooted in Confucian traditions. The Analects recorded that Zengzi (or Tseng-tsu), one of the greatest disciples of Confucius, examined himself many times a day by asking such questions: “When doing things for others, have I put in my best efforts? In intercourse with friends, am I always true to my word? Have I failed to practice what I teach?”

Howard Gardner gives this discipline a special name—“getting to the mountaintop”—which underlines the importance he ascribes to reflection. It can both be literal, as in the case of Moses, and metaphorical. Gardner writes, “Periods of isolation—some daily, some extending for months or even years—are as crucial in the lives of leaders as are immersions in a crowd.”⁹

Joseph Badaracco Jr. emphasizes two types of reflection:

Badaracco also says that it is hard for people to practice the “looking backward” type of reflection alone: “You often need somebody else to say, ‘You know, you think you are this, but you are also like that too.’ Sometimes you can look back and say, ‘Well, you know, that is true. I just behave that way.’ So you can get a kind of self-knowledge.” This “somebody” can be a leadership coach, or, as Cho-yun Hsu points out, a friend such as Franklin Roosevelt had in Colonel Howe. Or, as both Manfred Kets de Vries and Cho-yun Hsu highlight, it may be a jester (fool) as in Shakespeare’s King Lear.

Peter Senge advocates “systems thinking” in addition to personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, and team learning, which he recommends for learning organizations. A key to systems thinking is distinguishing between symptomatic solutions and fundamental solutions. A symptomatic solution that only lessens the symptoms is often preferred since it quickly achieves apparent improvements. However, since it fails to address the underlying cause, the problem may worsen. A fundamental solution often takes more time to effect, demands greater efforts, and needs people to change their behaviors and value systems, and is thus often overlooked. While it is enticing to prescribe symptomatic solutions, a leader must think deeply to discover the fundamental solution and try his best to apply it.

Howard Gardner urges leaders to think in an integrative way. He identifies four models of thinking: First, the “rigid duality” model which sees the world in terms of two opposing forces or individuals, the good and the evil; second, the “fair to a fault” model in which an individual, in considering two characters, embraces the possibility that each harbors facets of both goodness and evil; third, the “revel in relativism” model where the individual is skeptical of any perspectives; and fourth, the “personal integration” model which enables an individual to “synthesize two apparently warring sentiments: on the one hand, an awareness of the relativity of values and, on the other hand, the need to take a stance and to declare a specific position as more appropriate, at least in a given context.”¹⁰ Personal integration is the most sophisticated way of thinking, which a leader should master, but he should also be aware of and sensitive to the model of his community (audience) and address it accordingly.

Warren Bennis also discerns the value of integrative thinking, which he calls “applied creativity.” This is the ability to look at a problem or crisis and see an array of unconventional solutions, or “negative capability”—the quality Keats found essential to the genius of Shakespeare:

He observes that with this applied creativity, leaders can not only tolerate uncertainty and have the requisite hungry patience to see untested paths; but they also have the discipline necessary to achieve a desired goal.

John Kotter has practiced this craft by co-authoring a leadership fable whose characters are a group of penguins. He believes that the human brain is not built for PowerPoint slides, but for stories, and that storytelling is “a very powerful way to grab people’s attention, give them an idea or two, and leave it in the brain so that it might affect their behavior . . . If it is not the most powerful tool to change behavior that can create better performance, it is certainly close.”

Noel Tichy states that “the ability to create and tell certain kinds of dramatic stories is not only a useful tool, but also an essential prerequisite to being a first-class winning leader.”¹² Influenced by Howard Gardner, he advocates three basic types of leadership stories. The first is the “who I am” story. Leaders use these stories to describe their fundamental views about the world and how they developed those views. The second type is the “who we are” story about the joint experiences and attitudes of the people within the organization and their shared beliefs. The third is the “where we are going” story about the future of the organization and how they are going to get there.

Gardner bases his entire thoughts of leadership on the “leaders tell stories” theme:

In our conversation, Gardner stresses that leaders have two challenges:

Manfred Kets de Vries is in agreement with Howard Gardner’s sentiments when he writes:

Let me add to this a little. When a leader embodies the story consistently and sometimes dramatically, he then turns himself into a story, both metaphorically and literally. John Kotter is fond of telling the following story about Lou Gerstner: When Gerstner became CEO at IBM, the company was bureaucratic and inwardly focused. At a first divisional meeting, where managers were accustomed to presenting overhead projections, Gerstner turned off the projector and asked the managers to just talk instead. People started to tell this story at IBM, and stopped measuring success by who had the best slides. This example evidences two lessons: First, deeds speak louder than words. Second, a leadership story is most effective when it is told not by the leaders, but by people in the community where the leader tries to motivate change.

This is the old-fashioned but perennially effective “leading by example”—but in a dramatic way. The dramatization, however, whether it is deliberate or not, must be authentic. When that happens, as Howard Gardner notes, stories and embodiments can reinforce each other:

Noel Tichy would agree. While Peter Senge thinks that being a teacher is one of the leader’s three roles, Tichy sees a leader’s primary role as that of teacher: if you are not teaching, you are not leading. In a teaching organization, everyone teaches, everyone learns, and everyone gets smarter every day. Having worked closely with Jack Welch at GE for two years, he attributes Welch’s success to being the head teacher and building GE into a teaching organization.

Being a teacher also means being a learner. It isn’t only that you learn first and then teach, but that you learn through teaching. Jim Kouzes told this story from Peter Drucker:

James March, a master teacher, doesn’t think that a teacher’s task is to provide answers, or even advice. In the course of our conversation, he elaborates his views on the role of teacher:

Peter Senge argues that the first discipline of learning organizations is personal mastery. A key to personal mastery is the consciousness of personal vision, asking yourself: What do I really care about? What really matters? Leadership starts with the commitment to personal mastery.

Bill George highlights the significance of knowing yourself, or self-awareness, in True North: “When the 75 members of the Stanford Graduate School of Business Advisory Council were asked to recommend the most important capability for leaders to develop, their answer was nearly unanimous: self-awareness.”¹⁸ As an advocate of “Authentic Leadership,” George points out that “Becoming an authentic leader is not easy. First, you have to understand yourself, because the hardest person you will ever have to lead is yourself. Once you have an understanding of your authentic self, you will find that leading others is much easier.”¹⁹

Bill Clinton, recognized as one of the most intelligent US presidents, was not one of the most effective. A major obstacle in his way was that he didn’t know himself very well. David Gergen, who worked closely with four US presidents, including Clinton, put it this way: “[M]y sense is that Clinton’s central problem has been the lack of an inner compass. He has 360-degree vision but no true north. He isn’t fully grounded within . . . [He] isn’t exactly sure who he is yet and tries to define himself by how well others like him.”²⁰ Howard Gardner would make a similar comment in our conversation: “Clinton is a great storyteller. He has wonderful stories. But he tells way too many, and it’s not clear which one he deeply believes.”

James March used to teach leadership at Stanford with Don Quixote as one of the teaching materials. He believes that “In some way the most important sentence in that novel is ‘yo sé quien soy,’ I know who I am.” Knowing yourself is a means; becoming yourself is the purpose. Bill Clinton didn’t know himself well; consequently he didn’t become himself well. Don Quixote, on the other hand, knows who he is; thus he becomes himself very well. Which leads us to the last leadership discipline—becoming yourself.

First, it means to pursue your purpose and passion. As Bennis would put it to participants in his leadership course at the University of Southern California:

Purpose and passion journey together, as do being passionate and being inspirational, as Jim Kouzes has observed:

Second, it means becoming your authentic self, rather than simply imitating others. Peter Drucker, in his classic book The Effective Executive, noted that the effective executives he’d met didn’t share any common traits. Bill George has found the same about leaders and says that “They are very, very different. Some leaders are very aggressive, and some leaders are very humble. Some leaders are brilliant, and some leaders have only average intelligence.” Don’t try to become Jack Welch or your boss. Become yourself and develop your unique style!

The third is the trickiest one: it means to become your “identity,” or to act according to your identity. This is one of the major leadership lessons from Don Quixote. James March reminds us that we are living now in a world where a consequential logic dominates, where action is motivated mainly by favorable consequences, and that is exactly why the lesson from Quixote is relevant:

James March sees scandals like those of Enron and Worldcom as a consequence of what happens when accountants fail to act according to the logic of identity. While he doesn’t believe that Quixote would make a good leader, Quixote illustrates “an attitude that says you don’t justify great actions by expecting great things. You justify great actions because that is what is appropriate for the kind of person you are. That is a vision that has its limitations, but it is a very important thing for great leaders.” March is an example himself when he says, “I think of myself as a teacher. I try to be a teacher in a Quixote sense. I try to imagine what is appropriate for a teacher and I do that.”

Dialog is the oldest and the most effective way of learning from a master. It is no coincidence that many ancient classics, such as the Analects in China, the Bhagavad Gita in India, and the works of Plato, are of a conversational format. Therefore I have tried my best to sit down with each of the Masters to have a face-to-face conversation (making three trips to the United States to meet many and meeting some in China), and to recreate our discussions as far as possible in their original form.

There were many unforgettable moments during those conversations. One took place at Harvard Graduate School of Education in October 2008, when I was able to talk with both Howard Gardner and Peter Senge. (Senge requested to join us when he heard that I would interview Gardner, whom he admires.) On a list of influential business thinkers, published in the Wall Street Journal earlier that year, Gardner was ranked # 5 and Senge # 11. The conversation was truly exciting.

Gardner was excited about the news he’d read earlier that the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao was reading Marcus Aurelius, commenting “It is a name probably not many people in this building would know. It is like George Bush saying he was reading the Analects of Confucius.”

I pointed out that Meditations by Marcus Aurelius had sold very well in China since Wen Jiabao revealed that he had read the book more than a hundred times. “But you know,” I added, “it has probably still sold less than The Fifth Discipline, which has sold about one million copies in China.”

Senge, the author of The Fifth Discipline, responded: “The success of the book was a mixed blessing. There has been a big problem in China: the book is meant to help people do things, but there is a huge gap between superficial awareness and practical experience.”

Wen Jiabao didn’t make his message clear, which I suppose is: Don’t just read Meditations—Meditate! Yet Peter Senge’s message is clear: Don’t read The Fifth Discipline—Practice it!

While I’m determined to present this book in a conversational format, I don’t only want to invite you to join in these dialogs. More importantly, I would like you to use them as an instrument for reflection and action. Let me make my invitation clear: Don’t just read. For the purpose of becoming a leader—and becoming a human being first—join in these conversations, reflect upon your experience, and act on these disciplines!