The Last Word on Power

Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen

Tracy Goss

• Publisher: RosettaBooks
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780795308383
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

How leaders can achieve something meaningful—transform a brand, a workplace, a technology, themselves—beyond holding an influential position. Do you want to do work that is worthy of your time and talent? Do you want to make your mark on your industry, company, or within your community? Are you satisfied with the fact that reengineering, quality improvements, and other changes never really make a lasting impact? Then you need to go beyond the techniques of improvement and learn the skills that it takes to be extraordinary. The power to be extraordinary is not one we are born with. Rather, it is a power that one can learn, and Tracy Goss helps executives realize this power. Here in this book for the first time, Goss makes her coursework available to the general reader. Goss's unique methodology shows how you how you can "put at risk the success you've become for the power of making the impossible happen." She positions executives to take on the future that they dream about. She teaches how to behave differently so that you are free of past constraints. She shows how you can be at home in the environment in which you are constantly surrounded by threats, and how to transcend the ordinary to make the impossible happen. Her work has resulted in many important life changes and organizational reinventions worldwide. "Goss offers powerful information, far above the glib self-help mush that already lines the shelves. She answers the fundamental question of why management fads do not work: the personal work has not yet been done." — Library Journal

THE POWER that brought you to your current position of prominence and responsibility as a leader—the power that is the source of your success in the past—is now preventing you from making the impossible happen in your life and in your work.

If you are an executive or manager who is charged with leading a re-invention effort, before you can successfully re-invent your organization, institution, community, or country, you must first acquire a new kind of power: the power to consistently make the impossible happen. The absence of this power is what has made an ever-growing number of organizational re-invention efforts fail.

The pathway to this new power is to completely and intentionally “re-invent” yourself: to put at risk the success you’ve become for the power of making the impossible happen.

There are millions of people who genuinely want to make something happen that they, and frequently everyone else, consider impossible. But they feel powerless to do so. It’s not that they’re incapable. Most of them have already won at the traditional games of life, or feel they’re on their way to winning. They have leadership positions in large organizations or responsible professional posts. They have comfortable, rewarding, and fulfilling lives. They are influential members of business, government, or nonprofit communities. If they were ever psychologically troubled, they have learned to transcend those troubles or to apply them as a springboard for success. They have developed fruitful strategies all through their lives for achieving what they want and what they think is right.

But now they want much more. They want to achieve something meaningful, beyond merely holding an influential position—to start a new sort of organization, redefine the nature of their industry, make government work effectively, right a deeply inbred and prevalent abuse, reshape their workplace, bring a new technology into the world, or simply to be great at what they do. In some cases, their goals led them to seek their positions and challenges in the first place, as if they were compelled by a calling to make a better world. In other cases, external events have led them to doing battle with the impossible.

Once upon a time, there was an executive who realized his life’s ambition. At age fifty-five, he had reached the top position, the post of chairman and CEO of a high-technology company so prominent that it was known throughout the world simply by its initials. During the course of his fast-track career, this man, known for his unique and innovative solutions, encountered many difficult challenges. In each case he triumphed. As CEO, his actions, his strategies, his ideas, and his power would finally have a chance to influence the whole world, at a scale beyond any he had known. In fact, the board had made him CEO expecting he would do just that. But within a few years, all his old skills and powers, which had brought him to the opportunity of a lifetime, seemed to get in the way of his ability to deliver. His understanding of the business turned sour. Allies turned on him. Amid several embarrassing legal battles and market losses, the company’s stock price plunged. After demonstrations by shareholders, the board told him to step down.

There was once a young woman who inherited a small manufacturing business from her father and built it up into a leader in its market. While in college, she had worked in the plant or the offices every summer, learning the operation from the ground up. After graduating first in her MBA class at one of the highest ranked business schools, she joined the firm and took over the presidency ten years later, becoming one of the first women entrepreneurs to lead a manufacturing company. By the time she was forty-five, she had moved the company from $5 million to $50 million in annual revenues—a goal that, back in college, had seemed like it might take a lifetime. But by this time she had decided to make it a $1-billion company before she retired. Five years into this project, however, having tried every growth strategy she could think of, she was ready to throw in the towel. “It’s impossible to build a billion-dollar company in this market,” she concluded, and prepared to spend the rest of her professional life merely improving what she had already achieved, instead of trying to accomplish anything else spectacular with her life.

At the same time there lived a young man who wanted more than anything else to be president of his country. He knew that if he could be elected, he would be able to finally solve the problems that nobody else had been able to tackle: growing the country out of its economic doldrums, investing in its future, and cleaning up the environment. With his unusual ability to appeal to the ideals of a wide range of people, galvanize and inspire them to action, and lead them to embrace a common ground, he would redefine not only the nature of the presidency but also the purpose of his country’s government: to make it a government of service. From his college days, he devoted himself almost obsessively to becoming the sort of man who could become president, learning how to navigate through the political barriers and competitions effectively. And it worked—he was chosen for his country’s highest political office, amid a melee of celebration and high hopes. But he had hardly moved into the president’s house before he became mired in the sort of partisan politics he had hoped to transcend. For reasons he couldn’t fathom, he found it impossible to rise above a contemptuous, cynical climate, which he knew he was contributing to, though he couldn’t see how. Unknown to him, everything he had learned along the road to becoming president was preventing him from doing the things that had made him want to become his country’s leader in the first place. The very power that got him elected prevented him from being the great public servant he wanted to be.

You may have guessed who some of these people are. And you’re right—whomever you’ve guessed. All three of them are legion. The CEO could be almost any chief executive of a large mainstream corporation—and certainly any chief executive of a company engaged in a wholesale overhaul of the organization, such as a reengineering or restructuring. The entrepreneur could stand in for most professionals of either gender—not just entrepreneurs, but health care officials, educators, and managers of enterprises large and small. And the president’s story could be told about nearly every elected official, of any party, in any country.

For many executives, from the vantage point of their hard-won position, their most desired goals seem more unrealizable than ever. The resistance that blocks them is intangible yet impenetrable; obvious and yet almost impossible to describe. The more successful they have been in the past, the more they understand how impossible the impossible can be. Often the only sensible option is to settle instead for short-term success, produced by continuous improvement, leading in surprisingly many cases to long, slow decline.

This book is written for those people—people who want much more. Don’t even read it unless you can authentically say something like the following: “There’s something I desire to accomplish, in my life, or in my work, or in the world, that is currently not possible. The more experience I’ve gained in the world, the more I’ve learned exactly how impossible it is to achieve what I really want to accomplish. I know that it can’t be done, or can’t be done by me at this time, but if it could, I would invest myself in attaining it, with all my heart.”

You are right that you can’t do it—at least not from the power available to you as a leader today. But if you are serious about acquiring the power to accomplish the impossible, then I invite you to embark on Executive Re-Invention and transform yourself as a leader, right down to the core of your identity.

Executive Re-Invention is an invitation to successful people who want to play the most challenging game of all—the game of making the impossible happen. These are usually people who are pursuing something beyond success—who are engaged in making an impact on the world—whether that’s the world of their specific organization or industry, or the world of business, education, government, health care, the military, the arts, or anything else. They want to leave a legacy that continues after them. I think no one has expressed this commitment more passionately than George Bernard Shaw:

This is the true joy in life, the being recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

The outcome of Executive Re-Invention, for those who take it on, is an entirely different relationship with reality, not only with the future but also with the past and the present. Lawrence of Arabia described that relationship this way:

Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous people, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible.

MOVING BEYOND “POWER 101”

Power to make something impossible happen is a very sophisticated form of power. It is completely different from the forms of power that most people, even successful people, have learned during the course of their lives. It bears no relation to authority (the ability to compel things to happen by virtue of your position). It has nothing to do with competence (the ability to fix problems and perform effectively). And it does not require influence (the ability to get people to do what you want through such “soft” power methods as nurturing, decentralizing, and mentoring).

I think of those types of power as the kind that someone might teach in an introductory course—valid and worthwhile to learn, but representing only the beginning stages of mastery. At an advanced level, you discover a form of power as different, in its methods and forms, as calculus is from arithmetic. Just like calculus, it feels a bit alien and counterintuitive to learn, and yet no one who seeks to be an effective leader can do without it. Like most advanced subjects, it takes you beyond the precepts that seemed so valuable during the introductory stages. It brings you face-to-face with a whole new set of precepts and practices.

I define this advanced level of power as the ability to take something that you believe could never come to pass, declare it possible, and then move that possibility into a tangible reality. Mastering this power gives you the capacity to act without being constrained by the habitual ways of thinking from the past—your own past, the history of your organization, and even the heritage of your culture. It allows you to act without feeling dependent on circumstances—without having to wait, in other words, for events to align in your favor.

Power to make the impossible happen is the only lasting type of power. Authority is bestowed upon you by others. It can be taken away or lost. Competence is earned by producing results, and it is lost when you stop producing. In a turbulent world, no one’s competence continues indefinitely. Even influence is limited by your relationships to individuals. When your relationships change, your ability to persuade and inspire people dwindles.

Once you acquire the capacity to generate the power to make the impossible happen, it cannot be taken away from you. In fact, it increases over time. That is why executives and leaders must re-invent themselves before they can re-invent an organization, institution, or country effectively. Without the capacity to generate the power to make the impossible happen, how can they possibly succeed?

Fortunately, this power can be acquired by anyone—anyone who is committed to something in his or her life that is currently not possible and who is willing to “re-invent” himself or herself to accomplish it. When you acquire this power, you can operate with a quality and integrity that frees you to take the risks and actions necessary to change the world.

A TASTE OF POWER

Everyone has had a taste of this freedom sometime in his or her life. Think, for a moment, of an area where you have a great deal of skill and mastery—something you can do better than almost anyone you know. This area might be hunting, cooking, making speeches, handling finance, teaching, writing, decorating, traveling, guiding, being a parent. Whatever it is, it is a unique arena for you: The kind of power you have in that arena is different from your power in other parts of your life.

In that arena, you look forward to tough challenges. “Send me your worst,” you tell the Fates, because you want to find out what will happen when you are tested. You kno...