This is not a book about charismatic visionary leaders. It is not about visionary product concepts or visionary market insights. Nor even is it about having a corporate vision. This is a book about something far more important, enduring, and substantial. This is a book about visionary companies. What is a visionary company? Visionary companies are premier institutions — the crown jewels — in their industries, widely admired by their peers and having a long track record of making a significant impact on the world around them. The key point is that a visionary company is an organization — an institution. All individual leaders, no matter how charismatic or visionary, eventually die; and all visionary products and services — all "great ideas" — eventually become obsolete. Indeed, entire markets can become obsolete and disappear. Yet visionary companies prosper over long periods of time, through multiple product life cycles and multiple generations of active leaders.
A visionary leader seeks to empower others. They continue to search for truth while maintaining their principle-centered focus. Visionary leaders have a good balance between right-brain and leftbrain thinking. The right brain is more feminine, nurturing, intuitive and creative; the left-brain is more masculine and physical,” interested more in results. Visionary leaders often produce a host of solutions for social, economic and other types of problems.
If we want visionary leaders, we must, of course, learn to recognize them and support them. Visionary leaders have great qualities, which they develop through their interest in values, intuition and partnership with others. They can bring spiritual culture to our religious and political lives. Mahatma Gandhi once said, I must first be the change I want to see in my world.”
Use your weaknesses and fears. Embrace them. Then nobody will be able to use them against you.
He is a visionary leader who has built a tremendously successful business over the decades by hiring talented people, developing a shared plan, and then unleashing them to carry it out. That’s what real leaders do, and I believe that he will do the same thing as president.
[Even if established procedures exist for replacing leaders, ] they are relatively harmless to the entrenched leaders (because functionless) so long as the ranks fear the consequences of using them
However great a man’s fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance—so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.
And fighting the battle of life is fighting against fearful odds, too. There are giants and dragons in this nineteenth century, and the golden casket that they guard is not so easy to win as it appears in the story-books.
This is not a book about charismatic visionary leaders. It is not about visionary product concepts or visionary market insights. Nor even is it about having a corporate vision. This is a book about something far more important, enduring, and substantial. This is a book about visionary companies.
Odd, how different different men’s fears could be.
It's not the gods
But our own hearts
We need to fear.
The evil starts
Against all odds
Not there but here.