The leader…is rarely the brightest person in the group. Rather they have extraordinary taste, which makes them more curators than creators. They are appreciators of talent and nurturers of talent and they have the ability to recognize valuable ideas.
People in great groups have blinders on. Their work is all they see. They value failures as learning opportunities. They are optimistic, not realistic, as they proceed from one challenge and crisis to the next.
At the time, Sculley was destined to be the head of Pepsico. The clincher came when Jobs asked him, “How many more years of your life do you want to spend making colored water when you can have an opportunity to come here and change the world?”
If great teams don’t have an “enemy,” they create one for themselves because, as former Coca-Cola CEO Roberto Goizueta pointed out, “you can’t have a war without one.”
Power is the basic energy needed to initiate and sustain action or, to put it another way, the capacity to translate intention into reality and sustain it. Leadership is the wise use of this power: Transformative leadership.
