Antiochreview 73 2 0364

Managing the Dream: Leadership in the 21st Century
Author(s): Warren Bennis

Source: The Antioch Review, Vol. 73, No. 2, Kipling (Spring 2015), pp. 364-370
Published by: Antioch Review Inc.
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VOLUME 49 • NUMBER 1 • WINTER 1991
Managing the Dream:
Leadership in the
21st Century
BY WARREN BENNIS
P ick up any business magazine or newspaper and the story is the

same: pessimism about America’s capacity to compete successfully in
the new, spirited global economy. “The sudden emergence of Ameri-
ca as the world’s largest debtor, Japan as the globe’s richest creditor,
and the Soviet Union as its most ardent preacher of pacifism seems,
to many Americans, to have turned the world upside down, raising
doubts about whether America can or should lead,” laments the Wall
Street Journal. The Washington Post kicks in with, “Kiss Number One
Goodbye, Folks.” And “America, Europe Is Coming,” screams the
headline in the International Herald Tribune.
There’s no question that the world has changed. When foreign ex-
change rates hit $200 billion a day and the international capital flows
at fifty times the volume of world trade, you don’t have to be a genius
to recognize the measure of the new global economy.
If there is reason to despair and join the handwringing and head-
shaking of doomsayers, it’s undoubtedly because traditional American
managers have been brought up in a different time, a time when they
figured that all they had to do was build the greatest mousetraps, and
the world would beat a path to their doors. “Leadership in a traditional
United States company,” argues R. B. Horton, CEO of BP America,
“consisted of creating a management able to cope with competitors
who all played with basically the same deck of economic cards.” And
it was an American game. The competition was fierce but knowable.
Managing the Dream: Leadership in the 21st Century 365
Play your cards right and you could win.

As we all know, the game changed and grew strange new rules.
The deck was shuffled and jokers added. Never before has American
business faced so many challenges, and never before have there been
so many choices in how to face those challenges. Uncertainties and
complexities abound. The only thing truly predictable is unpredict-
ability. The new chic is chaos chic. As Yogi Berra put it, “The future
ain’t what it used to be.”
Constant change disturbs some managers—it always has, and it
always will. As Machiavelli said, “Change has no constituency.” Well,
it better have one. And none too soon. With only a single, short decade
remaining before the twenty-first century is upon us, we must look
now at what it’s going to take not even to regain global leadership,
but simply to stay a player in the game. We can do that because the
twenty-first century is with us now. Cultures don’t turn sharply with
the pages of the calendar—they evolve. By paying attention to what is
changing today, we know what we must do better tomorrow.
Leaders, Not Managers
Given the nature and constancy of change and the transnational chal-
lenges facing American business leadership, the key to making the
right choices will come from understanding and embodying the lead-
ership qualities necessary to succeed in the volatile and mercurial
global economy. To survive in the twenty-first century, we’re going to
need a new generation of leaders—leaders, not managers. The distinc-
tion is an important one. Leaders conquer the context—the volatile,
turbulent, ambiguous surroundings that sometimes seem to conspire
against us and will surely suffocate us if we let them—while manag-
ers surrender to it. There are other differences, as well, and they are
enormous and crucial:
• The manager administers; the leader innovates.
• The manager is a copy; the leader is an original.
• The manager maintains; the leader develops.
• The manager focuses on systems and structure; the leader fo-
cuses on people.
• The manager relies on control; the leader inspires trust.
• The manager has a short-range view; the leader has a long-range
perspective.
366 The Antioch Review
• The manager asks how and when; the leader asks what and
why.
• The manager has his eye on the bottom line; the leader has his
eye on the horizon.
• The manager imitates; the leader originates.
• The manager accepts the status quo; the leader challenges it.
• The manager is the classic good soldier; the leader is his own
person.
• The manager does things right; the leader does the right thing.
Field Marshall Sir William Slim, who led the 14th British Army
from 1943 to 1945 in the reconquest of Burma from the Japanese—
one of the epic campaigns of World War II—recognized this dis-
tinction when he said, “Managers are necessary; leaders are essential.
. . . Leadership is of the spirit, compounded of personality and
vision. . . . Management is of the mind, more a matter of accurate
calculation, statistics, methods, timetables, and routine.”
I’ve spent the last ten years talking with leaders, including Jim
Burke at Johnson & Johnson, John Scully at Apple, television pro-
ducer Norman Lear, and close to a hundred other men and women,
some famous and some not. In the course of my research, I’ve learned
something about the current crop of leaders, and something about the
kind of leadership that will be necessary to forge the future. While
leaders come in every size, shape, and disposition—short, tall, neat,
sloppy, young, old, male, and female—there is at least one ingredient
that every leader I talked with shared: a concern with a guiding pur-
pose, an overarching vision. They were more than goal-directed. As
Karl Wallenda said, “Walking the tightwire is living; everything else
is waiting.”
Leaders have a clear idea of what they want to do—personally
and professionally—and the strength to persist in the face of setbacks,
even failures. They know where they are going, and why. Senator
Howard Baker said of President Reagan, whom he served as Chief
of Staff, “He knew who he was, what he believed in, and where he
wanted to go.”
Managing the Dream
Many leaders find a metaphor that embodies and implements their vi-
sion. For Darwin, the fecund metaphor was a branching tree of evolu-
tion on which he could trace the rise and fate of various species. Wil-
liam James viewed mental processes as a stream, or river. John Locke
focused on the falconer, whose release of a bird symbolized his “own
emerging view of the creative process”—that is, the quest for human
knowledge.
I think of it this way: Leaders manage the dream. All leaders have
the capacity to create a compelling vision, one that takes people to a
new place, and then to translate that vision into reality. Peter Druck-
er said that the first task of the leader is to define the mission. Max
DePree, CEO of Herman Miller, wrote in Leadership Is an Art, “The
first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say
thank you. In between, the leader is a servant.”
Managing the dream can be broken down into five parts. The first
part is communicating the vision. Jung said, “A dream that is not un-
derstood remains a mere occurrence. Understood, it becomes a living
experience.” Jim Burke spends 40 percent of his time communicating
the Johnson & Johnson credo. More than 800 managers have attended
J & J challenge meetings, where they go through General Johnson’s
credo line by line to see what changes need to be made. Over the years
some of those changes have been fundamental. And, like the United
States Constitution, the credo itself endures.
The other basic parts of managing the dream are recruiting me-
ticulously, rewarding, retraining, and reorganizing. All five parts are
exemplified by Jan Carlzon, CEO of Scandinavian Airlines (SAS).
Carlzon’s vision was to make SAS one of the five or six remaining
international carriers by the year 1995—he thinks that only five or six
will be left by that time, and I think he’s probably right. To accomplish
this, he developed two goals. The first was to make SAS one percent
better in a hundred different ways from its competitors. The second
was to create a market niche. Carlzon chose the business traveler, be-
cause he believed that this was the most profitable niche—rather than
college students, or travel agent deals, or any of the other choices. In
order to attract business travelers, Carlzon had to make their every
interaction with every SAS employee rewarding. He had to endow
with purpose and relevance, courtesy and caring, every single interac-
tion—and he estimated that there were 63,000 of these interactions per
day between SAS employees and current or potential customers. He
called these interactions “moments of truth.”
Carlzon developed a marvelous cartoon book, The Little Red Book,
to communicate the new SAS vision to employees. And he set up a
corporate college in Copenhagen to train them. Just as important, he

has debureaucratized the whole organization. The organization chart
no longer looks like a pyramid—it looks like a set of circles, a galaxy.
In fact, Carlzon’s book, which is called Moments of Truth in English,
is titled Destroying the Pyramids in its original Swedish.
One of those circles, one organizational segment, is the Copen-
hagen-New York route. All the pilots, the navigators, the engineers,
the flight attendants, the baggage handlers, the reservations agents—
everybody who has to do with the Copenhagen-New York route—are
involved in a self-managed, autonomous work group with a gain-shar-
ing plan so that they all participate in whatever increment of profits
that particular route brings in. There’s also a Copenhagen-Frankfurt
organizational segment, and so on. The whole corporation is struc-
tured in terms of these small, egalitarian groups.
General Electric CEO Jack Welch said, “Yesterday’s idea of the
boss, who became the boss because he or she knew one more fact than
the person working for them, is yesterday’s manager. Tomorrow’s per-
son leads through a vision, a shared set of values, a shared objective.”
The single defining quality of leaders is the capacity to create and
realize a vision. Yeats said, “In dreams begins responsibility.” Vision
is a waking dream. For leaders, the responsibility is to transform the
vision into reality. In doing so, they transform their dominion, whether
an airline, a motion picture, the computer industry, or America itself.
Thoreau put it this way: “If one advances confidently in the direction
of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will
meet with a success in common hours. . . . If you have built castles in
the air, your work need not be lost. It is where they should be. Now put
the foundation under them.”
The New Global Alliances
Jan Carlzon also illustrates one ingredient of what I believe will dis-
tinguish the vision of twenty-first-century leaders from the current
model: his is a global vision, an awareness of the need for transna-
tional networking and alliances. And he is not alone in this vision. The
recent URC/Harris survey of 150 CEOs from the Forbes 500 found
that they saw the greatest opportunity and challenge for the future in
the global market. In the same vein, senior-level managers polled in a
Carnegie Mellon University survey of business school alumni named
competing effectively on a global basis as the most difficult manage-

ment issue for the next decade.
Global interdependence is one of six pivotal forces working on
the world today. (The others are technology, mergers and acquisitions,
deregulation and reregulation, demographics and values, and the envi-
ronment. Leadership is necessary for coping with each of these forces,
but they are subjects for another time.) One of the first things the as-
tute businessperson checks daily now is the yen-dollar ratio. Fifty per-
cent of downtown Los Angeles is owned by the Japanese, and so is a
large hunk of the popular Riviera Country Club. Foreign investment in
America—in real estate, finance, and business—continues to escalate.
But the changes aren’t simply on our shores. In 1992, when Europe
becomes truly a Common Market, it will contain 330 million consum-
ers, as compared with 240 million in this country.
American leaders who want to be a part of that new market are
planning now. Michael Eisner of Disney has sent Robert Fitzpatrick to
France to head up the new EuroDisney project. CalFed, which already
has a bank in England, is preparing for the future with plans for banks
in Brussels, Barcelona, Paris, and Vienna. In Spain, AT&T has spent
$220 million for a semiconductor plant, and GE has budgeted $1.7
billion for a plastics facility. Ford, Nissan, Sony, and Matsushita have
opened factories in or near Barcelona in the last two years.
In most cases, however, buying into Europe is prohibitively expen-
sive. The shrewd leaders of the future are recognizing the wisdom of
creating alliances with other organizations whose fates are correlated
with their own. The Norwegian counterpart of Federal Express—with
3500 employees, one of the largest companies in Norway—is setting
up a partnership with Federal Express. First Boston has linked up with
Credit Suisse, forming FBCS. GE has recently set up a number of
joint ventures with GE of Great Britain, meshing four product divi-
sions. Despite the names, the companies hadn’t been related. GE had
considered buying its British namesake, but ultimately chose alliance
rather than acquisition.
Buying in is not even the choice of the Europeans themselves:
Glaxco, a British pharmaceutical firm, made a deal with Hoffman-
LaRoche for the distribution of Zantac, a stomach tranquilizer, and
knocked SmithKline Beckman’s Tagamet out of the game. Kabi Vir-
tum, a Swedish pharmaceutical, is looking for a partner in Japan to
build a joint laboratory, in exchange for which the Japanese would
have assistance in licensing drugs in Sweden.
And getting back to Jan Carlzon: he tried to buy Sabena, and when
he couldn’t, he established an alliance with the rival airline. SAS also
works with an Argentine airline and with Eastern Airlines, sharing
gates and connecting routes.
The global strategy is firmly rooted in Carlzon’s vision for SAS.
With all leaders, the guiding vision provides a roadmap for the organi-
zation, clearly marked with a windrose, so that every member can see
in which direction the corporation is going. The communication of the
vision generates excitement about the trip. The plans for the journey
create order out of chaos, instill confidence and trust, and finally, offer
criteria for success. The group knows when it has arrived.
The critical factor for success in global joint ventures is a shared
vision between the two companies. If you’re not sure of the vision of
your company, how can you tell what the synergy of an alliance would
be? You must be certain you have the right map before embarking on
the journey. If you think your company’s vision lacks definition, here
are some questions that may help give it color and dimension:
• What is unique about us?
• What values are true priorities for the next year?
• What would make me professionally commit my mind and heart
to this vision over the next five to ten years?
• What does the world really need that our company can and
should provide?
• What do I want our company to accomplish so that I will be
committed, aligned, and proud of my association with the institution?
Ask yourself those questions today. Your answers will be the fire
that heats the forge of your company’s future.
from the original Contributors Notes:

Warren Bennis is professor of business administration at the University of Southern
California and was graduated from Antioch College in 1951. An essay of his appeared
in these pages in the spring/summer issue of ’77. The article in this issue was origi-
nally commissioned by the United Research Company.

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Managing the Dream: Leadership in the 21st Century

Author(s): Warren Bennis

P ick up any business magazine or newspaper and the story is the

Play your cards right and you could win.

Leaders, Not Managers

Managing the Dream

corporate college in Copenhagen to train them. Just as important, he

The New Global Alliances

competing effectively on a global basis as the most difficult manage-

from the original Contributors Notes:

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