True North

To become authentic leaders, we must discard the myth that leadership means having legions of supporters following our direction as we ascend to the pinnacles of power. Only then can we realize that authentic leadership is about empowering others on their journeys.

This shift is the transformation from “I” to “We.” It is the most important process leaders go through in becoming authentic. How else can they unleash the power of their organizations unless they motivate people to reach their full potential? If our supporters are merely following our lead, then their efforts are limited to our vision and our directions about what needs to be done.

Jaime Irick, a graduate of West Point and rising star at General Electric, offered an insight into this process. “You have to realize that it’s not about you,” he explained.

We spend our early years trying to be the best. To get into West Point or General Electric, you have to be the best. That is defined by what you can do on your own—your ability to be a phenomenal analyst or consultant or do well on a standardized test. When you become a leader, your challenge is to inspire others, develop them, and create change through them. If you want to be a leader, you’ve got to flip that switch and understand that it’s about serving the folks on your team. This is a very simple concept, but one many people overlook. The sooner people realize it, the faster they will become leaders.

Figure 3.1 The Transformation from “I” to “We”

Only when leaders stop focusing on their personal ego needs are they able to develop other leaders. They feel less competitive with talented peers and subordinates and are more open to other points of view, enabling them to make better decisions. As they overcome their need to control everything, they learn that people are more interested in working with them. A lightbulb goes on as they recognize the unlimited potential of empowered leaders working together toward a shared purpose.

A transformative experience may come at any point in your life. It could result from the positive experience of having a wise mentor or having a unique opportunity at a young age. But as much as we all want positive experiences like these, transformations for many leaders result from going through a crucible.

In Geeks and Geezers, Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas describe the concept of the crucible as an experience that tests leaders to their limits. A crucible can be triggered by events such as confronting a difficult situation at work, receiving critical feedback, or losing your job. Or it may result from a painful personal experience such as divorce, illness, or the death of a loved one.

Dan Vasella: The Long Journey to Transformation. Novartis Chairman and CEO Daniel Vasella followed a path to leadership that was one of the most difficult and unusual of all our interviewees. Vasella’s emergence from extreme challenges in his youth to reach the pinnacle of the global pharmaceutical industry illustrates the transformation many leaders go through on their journeys.

Vasella was born in 1953 in a modest family in Fribourg, Switzerland. His early years were filled with medical problems that stoked his passion to become a physician. His first recollections of a hospital date from age four when he had food poisoning. Since his family had no car, the physician came to his home, packed him in a blanket, and drove him to the hospital, leaving him with positive memories.

Suffering from asthma at age five, he was sent alone to the mountains of eastern Switzerland for two summers. There he lived on a farm with three brothers and their niece. Everyone in the area spoke Romanisch, a language young Dan could not understand. He found the four-month separations from his parents especially difficult because the niece had an alcohol problem and was insensitive to him. One day the niece caught him with coins stolen from the Postal Service office. The shame of having to give the coins back had a strong impact on Dan, as did the kindness of one of the brothers who felt sorry for him and put one coin in his empty purse.

At age eight, he had tuberculosis followed by meningitis and was sent for a year to a sanatorium. He suffered a great deal that year from being lonely and homesick, as his parents very rarely visited him. He still remembers the pain and fear of the lumbar punctures as the nurses held him down so that he would not move.

One day a new physician arrived and took time to explain each step of the procedure. Vasella asked the physician if he could hold the nurse’s hand rather than being held down. “The amazing thing is that this time the procedure didn’t hurt. Afterward, he asked me, ‘How was that?’ I reached up and gave him a big hug.” Vasella recalled, “These very human gestures of forgiveness, caring, and compassion made a deep impression on me and on the kind of person I wanted to become.”

In his early years, Vasella’s life never settled. When he was ten, his eighteen-year-old sister passed away after suffering from cancer for two years. Three years later, his father died in surgery. To support the family, his mother went to work in a distant town and came home only once every three weeks. Left to himself, he and his friends had beer parties and got into frequent fights. This lasted for three years until he met his first girlfriend, whose affection changed his attitude.

At twenty Vasella entered medical school at the University of Fribourg. “I decided to become a physician so I could understand health, and gain more control over my own life after disease had impacted my family so much,” he explained. “Memories of the compassionate doctor at the sanatorium and others who helped me became role models for the kind of physician I wanted to be.”

During medical school, Vasella sought out psychoanalysis so he could come to terms with his early experiences. “I wanted to understand myself and not feel like a victim,” he said. “I learned eventually that I did not have to be in control all the time.” Through analysis, he reframed his life story and realized he did not want to be just an individual practitioner but wanted to have an impact on the lives of many more people by running an organization that helped restore people to fuller health. Graduating with honors from medical school, Vasella did his residency at the Universities of Bern and Zurich, eventually becoming chief resident. Upon completion, he applied to become chief physician at the University of Zurich hospital; however, the search committee considered him too young for the position.

Disappointed but not surprised, Vasella decided he wanted to use his leadership to broaden his impact on medicine. At that time, he had a growing fascination with finance and business. He talked to his wife’s uncle, Marc Moret, who was CEO of Sandoz, one of Switzerland’s leading chemical companies, about his interest in getting into business. Moret advised him, “Believe me, I know how unpleasant it can be leading a firm. You don’t want to go into business.”

Moret’s discouraging words only piqued Vasella’s interest. Eventually he met with the head of the pharmaceutical division, who offered him the opportunity to join Sandoz’s U.S. affiliate as a sales representative and later a product manager. Vasella hesitated, but his wife, Anne-Laurence, told him, “Daniel, do it; otherwise, you will turn fifty, look back in regret, and be unhappy.” In his five years in the United States, he flourished in the stimulating environment and advanced rapidly through the Sandoz marketing organization.

Returning to Switzerland as assistant to the chief operating officer of Sandoz’s pharmaceutical business, Vasella was forced to take a step back. As he languished without responsibilities in a cubicle outside his boss’s office, he became frustrated in his new role. “My pay was cut by 40 percent, and I wrote minutes and did my boss’s mail.”

Soon he was asked to lead a team to redesign the R&D process, giving him intimate knowledge of drug discovery and development. His next steps led him to head of marketing and then global drug development. When both his bosses left in a political battle, he became CEO of the pharmaceutical division. Vasella loved his new position because he now had full responsibility for moving the pharmaceutical business forward.

Within two years negotiations began to merge Sandoz with Ciba-Geigy, its crosstown rival in Basel. It was a natural fit, facilitated because neither company had a successor to its powerful CEO. In spite of Vasella’s youth and limited experience, Moret nominated him to be CEO of the merged companies. Ciba-Geigy leadership agreed, as their CEO became chairman of the board of the new company: Novartis.

Once in the CEO’s role, Vasella blossomed as a leader. He envisioned the opportunity to build a great global health care company that could help people through lifesaving new drugs. Drawing on the physician role models of his youth, he created an entirely new Novartis culture built around compassion, competence, and competition. He went beyond integrating the two organizations by empowering new leaders throughout the new organization.

One of these new drugs was Gleevec, which Vasella found languishing in the Novartis research labs. Stunned by positive results in preliminary clinical trials for patients with chronic myelogenous leukemia, Vasella was upset to learn that the drug was being given low priority due to modest market projections. He convinced his team that the drug had to get to market within two years, breaking all records for FDA approvals. Characteristic of his passion for helping patients, Vasella had personal contact with many Gleevec users.

Gleevec is just one of a continuing stream of lifesaving drugs emerging from Novartis research labs as Vasella dramatically expanded the company’s research budget and moved its research headquarters to Massachusetts. These moves established Novartis as one of the global health care giants and Vasella as a compassionate leader in the industry.

Dan Vasella says his greatest satisfaction comes when his organization is fulfilling its mission. “My childhood illnesses, the deaths of my father and my sister, and the experience of patients’ dying all had a very powerful impact on my life.”

As CEO, I have the leverage to impact the lives of many more people. I can do what I believe is right, based on my moral compass. At the end of the day the only thing that matters is what we do or omit to do for other people.

Vasella is a rare leader who can address the most difficult business challenges in an engaged and thoughtful manner yet maintain his deep compassion for the patients Novartis serves. By increasing his self-awareness and reframing his life story through psychoanalysis, Vasella accelerated his transformation from “I” to “We,” recognizing he wanted to go beyond being a compassionate physician and instead use his leadership to help millions of people suffering from life-threatening disease.

Oprah Winfrey: Reframing Her Story at Thirty-Six. Often it takes a triggering experience before you can realize the essential purpose of your leadership. Oprah Winfrey was in the middle of an interview on her show with a woman named Trudy Chase who had been sexually abused as a child. Hearing Chase’s story, Oprah was overcome with emotion. “I thought I was going to have a breakdown on television. I said, ‘Stop! Stop! You’ve got to stop the cameras!’ ” But the cameras kept rolling as feelings roiled inside her. Chase’s story triggered many traumatic memories from her own childhood. “That was the first day I recognized that I was not to blame,” she said.

Her demons had haunted her without explanation until that day. “I became sexually promiscuous as a teenager and got myself into a lot of trouble. I believed I was responsible for it. It wasn’t until I was thirty-six years old that I realized, ‘Oh that’s why I was that way.’ I always blamed myself.”

Born out of wedlock, Winfrey grew up in poverty in rural Mississippi. When she was very young, her mother moved north to find work. “I was left with my grandmother. It probably saved my life. It is the reason why I am where I am today.” Yet even as a young child, she had a vision that she could make something of her life. She recalled standing outside on the back porch when she was four, watching her grandmother boiling the laundry in a large cauldron. “I remember thinking, ‘My life won’t be like this. It will be better,’ ” she said. “It wasn’t from a place of arrogance; it was just a place of knowing that things could be different for me somehow.”

Winfrey credits her illiterate grandmother for teaching her to read. “Reading opened the door to all kinds of possibilities for me. I loved books so much as a child, as they were my outlet to the world.” She recited biblical verses in church from the age of three, which endowed her with a reservoir of self-confidence. “All the sisters sitting in the front row would fan themselves and turn to my grandmother and say, ‘Ida Mae, this child is gifted.’ I heard that enough that I started to believe it. I didn’t even know what ‘gifted’ meant. I just thought it meant I was special.”

Relocating to Milwaukee to be with her mother when she was nine, Oprah recalled the trauma of being raped by her cousin. She was molested several more times by family members or friends of the family during the five years she lived with her mother. “It was an ongoing, continuous thing, so much so that I started to think, ‘This is the way life is.’ ” At age fourteen, she gave premature birth to a child who lived only two weeks.

Like most of us, Winfrey started out trying to make it in the world as an individual contributor. She went to college, and while there she had her first opportunity in broadcasting. “It was very uncomfortable for me at first,” she explained. “I was pretending to be Barbara Walters, looking nothing like her. I had to take the heat from my college classmates calling me a token. I used to say, ‘Yeah, but I’m a paid token.’ ”

Today Winfrey has built a media empire that is one of the most respected in the world that includes her own production company, named Harpo (Oprah spelled backwards). But it was not until the Trudy Chase interview that she realized her broader mission. Ever since the traumatic experiences of her youth, she had felt the need to please people and could never say no. That day she finally understood why. Since then, her mission has gone far beyond pursuing personal success to empowering people all around the world, especially young women.

“I was always searching for love, affection, and attention, and somebody to say, ‘Yes, you are worthy.’ The greatest lesson of my life has been to recognize that I am solely responsible for my life—not living to please other people, but doing what my heart says.” Asked about her show’s theme, Winfrey replies, “The message has always been the same: you are responsible for your own life. I hope the work I do on the show and in speaking around the country can help young people get the lesson sooner than I did.”

Winfrey’s story illustrates the kind of transformative events most authentic leaders experience in their lives. It is naive to think that you can go through life without difficulties, or spend your entire life trying to avoid them. Life is not always fair. It is often during the hard times in your life that you realize that authentic leadership is not about advancing yourself and your personal interests. Rather, it is the capacity to inspire others to bring out their best.

Like many others, I saw Oprah as a celebrity and missed the real impact of her leadership and its effect on the lives of her viewers. When I talked with her for three hours at the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize dinner in Oslo, Norway, I heard firsthand just how passionate she is to influence millions of people and embolden them to take responsibility for their lives. From Oslo, Winfrey was on her way to Africa with a planeload of books and supplies to help people and to launch a new school to empower young women, where she has personally invested $30 million.

Given the abuse and poverty she experienced earlier in her life, it would have been easy for Winfrey to get caught up in feelings of victimhood. Yet she rose above them by reframing her story in positive terms: first about taking responsibility for her life and then in recognizing her mission to empower others to take responsibility for theirs. Her transformation did not occur until her mid-thirties. Often the gestation takes that long because we need real experiences to see where we fit in the world and help us understand the meaning of those difficult experiences for our personal missions.

Jim Thompson: The Power of a Mentor. When people find a mentor they deeply respect, the relationship can have a transformative effect and open up their vision of what they can become as leaders. Jim Thompson, executive director of the Positive Coaching Alliance, struggled for many years to find his True North until he met John Gardner, who served in President Lyndon Johnson’s cabinet.

Growing up in South Dakota, Thompson was a good athlete and student but never saw himself as a leader who could have a national impact. In his early years, he tried teaching and government service but struggled to find his place. After attending Stanford’s business school, he returned to run its public-management program. It was there that he met Gardner, who helped him see himself as someone with a larger role to play. From their first conversation, Gardner treated Thompson as an equal and told him it had taken him many years to find his own calling.

Through coaching his son, Thompson decided that the “win at all costs” mentality of youth sports was destroying kids’ fun and learning. Gardner encouraged him to pursue his passion with vigor. He helped him get appointed to a national task force on building character through sports and supported him in writing a book. Thompson’s Positive Coaching outlined the ways coaches could teach kids lessons about character, team building, and life. Sharing his experience in building Common Cause into a national organization, Gardner prodded Thompson to launch a national movement to transform the culture of youth sports.

Thompson credits Gardner’s influence with helping him transform his view of himself, his capabilities, and his purpose so that he could help others. In 1998 Thompson founded the Positive Coaching Alliance, building it into a national organization that has run youth coaching workshops for more than 100,000 coaches across the United States, in large part due to John Gardner’s encouragement and mentoring.

Doug Baker: Getting Tough Feedback. One of the hardest things to do is to see ourselves as others see us. When we receive unexpected critical feedback, we tend initially to be defensive—to challenge the validity of the criticism or the critics themselves. If we can get past those feelings and process the criticism objectively, however, constructive feedback can trigger a fundamental reappraisal of our leadership.

That’s what Doug Baker Jr. learned when he was rising through the ranks of Minnesota-based Ecolab. After working in marketing in Germany for three years, Baker moved to North Carolina as deputy head of a newly acquired company. To integrate his team, Baker hired a coach to conduct 360-degree assessments and facilitate group sessions. “I elected to be first to go through the high-impact leadership program.”

At thirty-four, Baker saw himself as a fast-rising star, moving rapidly from one leadership role to the next. “I had become, frankly, fairly arrogant and was pushing my own agenda.” Then he got the results from the 360-degree process, in which his colleagues told him all this and more. “It was a cathartic experience. I got a major dose of criticism I didn’t expect,” he said.

As part of this process, I went away for five days with a dozen strangers from different companies and shared my feedback with them. Since I had been so understanding in this session, I expected people to say, “How could your team possibly give you that feedback?” Instead, I got the same critical feedback from this new group.

It was as if someone flashed a mirror in front of me at my absolute worst. What I saw was horrifying, but it was also a great lesson. After that, I did a lot of soul-searching about what kind of leader I was going to be. I talked to everyone on my Ecolab team about what I had learned, telling them, “Let’s have a conversation. I need your help.”

Meanwhile, Baker’s division was challenged by a larger competitor who threatened to take away its business with McDonald’s, which accounted for the bulk of its revenues. When he forecast a significant shortfall from his financial plan, the corporate CEO traveled to North Carolina to find out what was going on. Asked by the CEO to commit to saving the McDonald’s business and getting back on plan, Baker refused to give him any assurances. This raised the CEO’s ire, but Baker held his ground. Reflecting on his candor in confronting his powerful leader, Baker commented, “I’d rather have a bad meeting than a bad life.”

If we had lost McDonald’s, it would be embarrassing for me, but it was all these folks in the plant who were really going to be hurt. There was unemployment all over North Carolina as many factories were shutting down. If they don’t have a job here, they don’t have a job, period. Suddenly, you find the cause is a call to the heart. Saving the McDonald’s account created a lot of energy and fortunately, we retained the business. It was a traumatic time, but ultimately a great learning experience for me.

Doug Baker’s critical feedback came at just the right time. On the verge of becoming overly self-confident and thinking that leadership was about his success, the criticism brought him back to earth. It enabled him to realize that his role as a leader was to unite the people in his organization around a common purpose, and the challenge of saving the McDonald’s account provided a rallying point for that unity. Under pressure from the CEO to deliver short-term numbers, Baker kept his organization focused on the long-term objective of building the business. This experience paved the way for him to become CEO of Ecolab.

Gail McGovern: “It’s Not Fair.” Gail McGovern, a former telecommunications executive who is currently a business school professor, told of struggling with her own leadership. “Within one month I went from being the best programmer to the worst supervisor that Bell of Pennsylvania had,” she said.

It’s unbelievable how bad I was. I didn’t know how to delegate. When somebody would have a question about something they were working on, I’d pick it up and do it. My group was not accomplishing anything because I was on the critical path of everything. My boss and mentor saw that we were imploding and did an amazing thing. He gave me every new project that came in. It was unreal. At 4:30 my team would leave, and I’d be working day and night trying to dig through this stuff.

Finally, I couldn’t take it any longer. I went into his office and stamped my foot like a five-year-old. “It’s not fair. I have the work of ten people.”

He said calmly, “Look out there. You’ve got ten people. Put them to work.” It was such a startling revelation. I said sheepishly, “I get it.”

Have you ever had a difficult time absorbing constructive criticism? Hard as it is to take in, feedback provides the opportunity to make the transformation from focusing on ourselves to understanding how we can be effective motivators and leaders of others, just as Baker and McGovern did. This requires letting go and trusting others.

Steve Rothschild: Finding His Calling. Steve Rothschild had been on the move at General Mills. He created the Yoplait yogurt business in the United States and put it on course to become a $1 billion business. Promoted to executive vice president while still in his thirties, he faced many new challenges, but after eight years in this role he became restless. He felt like a man in the middle, missing the satisfaction of leading his own team. He also disagreed with the company’s direction, judging it had to become more global. His frustration came to a head when he was asked to present the company’s international business strategy to its board of directors. “My conclusion was that we ought to be doing more internationally, because we couldn’t rely on domestic growth forever,” he explained.

While in Spain on business, he got a frantic phone call from the company president, who told him the CEO wanted to change the recommendation to expand internationally. Rothschild replied, “I can’t do that because I don’t believe it.” He explained, “The CEO wanted me to heel, but never talked to me directly.” Shortly after that incident, Rothschild faced up to the reality that he was marching to a different drummer and wasn’t enjoying his work. After some reflection, he decided it was time to leave General Mills. “I was stuck in a job I no longer enjoyed. I needed to feel alive again,” he said.

After a year of spending more time with his working wife and one of their three children still at home, Rothschild decided against rejoining the corporate world. He realized his passions were in helping poor, underprivileged people become financially self-sufficient and develop stronger families. Using his own money, he founded Twin Cities RISE! Its mission is to provide employers with skilled workers by training unemployed and underemployed adults, especially African American men, for skilled jobs that pay a wage of at least $20,000 per year with benefits.

Leaving General Mills was a godsend for me. It allowed me to explore things that were underneath my skin and in my soul and gave me the opportunity to refocus on my marriage and family. Since leaving, my relationships with my family have become much closer and deeper. Making this move has made me a more complete person, more fulfilled and happier.

Leaders react to “hitting the wall” in one of two ways. The experience can be sobering—as it was for Jeff Immelt—when they realize they are not superhuman and have to face difficult trials like everyone else. This enables them to be more empathic and empowering to the people around them. Or they may decide, as Steve Rothschild did, that fundamental changes are required in their lives and wind up pursuing different career directions. In either case, such a crucible provides the basis for the transformation from “I” to “We.”

Mike Sweeney: Dealing with Personal Illness. Mike Sweeney, CEO of the private equity firm of Goldner Hawn, was only twenty-eight when he discovered he had testicular cancer. “That was the first time I realized I wasn’t immortal,” he said.

In some ways I’d recommend it to everyone. If you’re going to get cancer, testicular cancer is the one to get because it is curable in most cases. Cancer caused me to think very differently about my life.

I woke up one morning and literally couldn’t get up off the sofa. I got hit by a wave of depression that I had never experienced before. It wasn’t a matter of will. I just could not get up. While I was fighting cancer, my work was to heal. When that stopped, the room got really quiet, and all of a sudden I realized, holy cow, I could die. At that age the thought of death never occurs to you.

The shock of not being able to get up off the sofa scared me. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I want to do, what is meaningful in my life, and who do I want to do it with. I saw a psychiatrist and talked about having cancer not as a physical matter, but an emotional one. Cancer gave me clarity about those things.

His father told him that now his cancer problem was solved, he should shake it off and get back to work. “I thought there was more involved than that,” Sweeney says.

I started asking myself what is important to me in business and in life. I wouldn’t say I was less ambitious. I just wanted different kinds of things out of life. I wanted to create and build businesses where everyone involved did as well as I did.

When you face your own mortality, as Mike Sweeney did, your priorities and your True North become crystal clear. The same is true when someone close to you passes away.

Losing a Loved One. When you meet Carlson Companies’ CEO Marilyn Carlson Nelson for the first time, you are struck by her warmth, her zest for life, and her optimism that any problem can be solved by inspiring people to step up and lead. Yet hers is a more complex story. As if it were yesterday, she vividly recalls learning the news of her daughter’s death. “My husband and I heard one morning that our beautiful nineteen-year-old Juliet had been killed in an automobile accident.”

That’s the most profound test we’ve ever had, a test of our faith and our personal relationship. I lost my faith at the time and felt angry with God. But God didn’t abandon me and didn’t let me go. I discovered how valuable every day is and how valuable each person is. I decided to make whatever time I had left meaningful so that the time that Juliet didn’t have would be well spent. My husband and I vowed to use every tool at hand as an opportunity to give back or a way to make life better for people. They are all human beings with one short time on Earth.

Soon after her daughter’s death, Nelson joined Carlson Companies full time, where she has devoted herself to empowering the organization’s 150,000 employees to serve its customers in a highly personalized manner. Twenty years later she remains dedicated to the vow she made to make life better for people. In 2006 she was named one of “America’s Best Leaders” by US News & World Report.

Virgin Mobile USA CEO Dan Schulman described how his sister’s death transformed his attitudes toward leadership. “Before my sister died, I was focused on moving up in AT&T,” he said. “I was upwardly oriented and insecure. Often I took credit that wasn’t mine to claim.”

My sister’s death was the first time I had been dealt a giant blow. I loved her immensely. When death happens so young and cuts a life short, a lot of things you thought were important aren’t important at all. When she died, I decided, “I am going to be who I am.” I wanted to spend more time with my folks and my brother, rather than moving up the corporate ladder.

At that point I didn’t care if I got credit for anything and became quick to credit everyone else. As team leader, I focused only on getting the job done in the best way. As a result, our teams became much more functional than they were before. All of a sudden, my career started to shoot up.

Both Nelson and Schulman used the trauma of the death of their loved ones to rethink what their lives and leadership were about. With a newfound sense of mission, they transformed their leadership into focusing on others.

My Life as a Series of Crucibles. In my case, I experienced a series of crucibles that ultimately transformed my approach to leadership. From my earliest days my father encouraged me to become a leader, in part to make up for his perceived failures. Hard as I tried, however, none of my peers wanted to follow me. When I wasn’t chosen for high school leadership roles, I ran for elected office and was disappointed not to win.

Discouraged, I went off to Georgia Tech so I could have a fresh start where no one knew me. As mindfulness meditation expert Jon Kabat Zinn has written, “Wherever you go, there you are.” I learned the hard way that I couldn’t escape my past unless I changed myself in the present. I ran for office in my college fraternity six times and lost every time. Clearly, I had not learned why others did not want to follow me.

At this point a group of seniors took me under their wing and gave me some sound advice. “Bill, you have a lot of ability, but you come across as more interested in getting ahead than you are in helping other people. No wonder no one wants to follow your lead.” Although devastated by this feedback, I took their advice to heart. I talked to my peers about what I was doing wrong and how I could change. Eventually, the changes took hold, and I was chosen for more leadership positions than I could take on. Most rewarding of all was being selected as fraternity president by the same people who had rejected me earlier.

In my mid-twenties I experienced the most significant crucibles of my life. An only child, I was extremely close to my mother, who gave me unconditional love. When she died suddenly of cancer and a heart attack, I went into a period of deep reflection about the purpose of my life. Eighteen months later, as I was only three weeks away from being married, my fiancée died suddenly from a malignant brain tumor. Her death came as an incredible shock. Once again, I felt all alone in the world. Had it not been for the power of prayer and the support of my friends, I might not have recovered.

Not long after that, I had the blessing of meeting my future wife, Penny. She was very empathetic about my experiences, and a year later we were married. I can honestly say that she has been the best thing that ever happened to me. In addition to being a great wife and mother, Penny is an outstanding counselor to me.

Even so, I still wasn’t out of the woods. I saw myself on an unbroken sprint to the top of a major corporation. By age thirty, I was president of Litton Microwave, the pioneer and leader in the emerging U.S. consumer microwave oven industry. For the next five years I led our team in creating the field of consumer microwave cooking. Toward the end of that time, the board of directors of our parent company, Litton Industries, visited our rapidly growing division. I was proud to explain how we had grown at 55 percent per year and had become the largest profit contributor in the corporation.

Sailing high, I was pulled aside after the meeting by the corporate CEO, who offered some stern advice. “Young man, you’re still in the honeymoon phase here. You don’t have a clue what business is all about. Wait until you have to turn around failing businesses.”

His advice really angered me. I thought he was the one who didn’t have a clue about how to create growth businesses. Was I ever wrong. A year later I left Litton and joined Honeywell, with the opportunity to lead a global corporation. As I was asked to turn around one business after another, I recognized that Litton’s CEO had been absolutely right. During my fourth major turnaround, I finally looked at myself in the mirror and admitted this was not how I wanted to spend my life.

I was in the midst of a severe crucible but had been too busy to recognize it. I finally faced the reality that my unhappiness at work was harming my marriage, my relationship to our sons, and my close friendships. Maybe my destiny was not to be CEO of Honeywell after all, or maybe I would not enjoy the job if I got it.

At that point I talked with my wife, my best friend, and a group of men I met with each week and asked them all for candid feedback. They had seen what was happening and were pleased I was finally facing it. I was so focused on becoming CEO that I had lost sight of the purpose of my leadership—to benefit the lives of others. For all my earlier work, I had not fully made the transition from “I” to “We.”

Three times I had turned down the opportunity to become president and COO of Medtronic, the creator of the pacemaker, because I did not believe the company suited my ambition to lead a large company. Back then, it was only one-third the size of the sector I was leading at Honeywell. Facing up to my need for a renewed sense of purpose, I called Medtronic back to find out if the position was still open.

Several months later, after conversations about the Medtronic mission with founder Earl Bakken, I joined Medtronic as president. My thirteen years there became the best professional experience of my life. By embracing the Medtronic mission of restoring people to full life and health, and discovering the purpose of my leadership in serving patients and empowering 30,000 employees, I was finally on the right side of the transformation from “I” to “We.”

Nelson Mandela: Seeking Reconciliation, not Retribution. Have you ever felt unfairly treated? How about the time you missed an important promotion, or someone less capable got a larger bonus than you did or was recognized for contributions you made? The next time you feel sorry for yourself, think of the example of Nelson Mandela, who led protests against the unjust apartheid policies of his South African government. Of all the leaders I have met, his journey of transformation is the most dramatic.

In his younger years, Mandela organized boycotts and demonstrations against the apartheid government that often erupted in violence. In 1956 his government arrested him for high treason in causing violence. He endured a four-year-long trial and was eventually declared not guilty. Not satisfied, the government had him arrested for political crimes. A magistrate sentenced him to five years in prison without possibility of parole.

Mandela spent the next twenty-seven years of his life in prison, doing hard labor in spite of his advancing age. As global pressure mounted on his government and many global companies boycotted his country, Mandela was finally released from prison in 1990 at the age of seventy-one.

If ever a person had a right to be bitter toward his captors and the injustice done to him, it was Mandela. How then could he find it in his heart to honor the prison guards who looked after him and to forgive the judge who had sentenced him many years before? How was he able to negotiate with the leader of a minority government that repeatedly ordered his people beaten and killed to keep itself in power? When Mandela was elected president four years later, how was he able to cast aside calls for revenge and instead offer reconciliation to his oppressors?

To know the real answers to these questions, one would have to walk in Mandela’s shoes or look into his soul. Here was a person who rose above discrimination, injustice, and hatred. Through his years in prison, Mandela realized that his greater purpose was to save his nation from civil war and to reunite the people of his country. The day of his release, he told the massive crowds who greeted his freedom:

I stand here before you not as a prophet but as a humble servant of you, the people. Your tireless and heroic sacrifices have made it possible for me to be here today. I therefore place the remaining years of my life in your hands.

During those long years in prison, Nelson Mandela realized that his leadership was not about the “I” of getting people to follow him but the “We” of reconciliation. He saw his role as bringing people from diverse backgrounds together around a common vision for the new South Africa, centered on the values of social justice and opportunity for all.

• He inspires people around the cause of restoring South Africa for all its people.

• He makes decisions based on who he is, not what has happened to him.

• He credits his people for freeing him.

• He is driven to make life better for all people.

His leadership transformation inspires us to abandon our image as heroes of our own journey in order to lead others in a greater calling. Not many of us can be liberators of an oppressed people, but all of us can make a difference in the world around us.

Transformation: The Vital Step on Your Journey