HOW is more than a book. HOW is a philosophical leadership framework for a reshaped world. Technological advancements, social shifts, and rapid economic developments are reshaping the world faster than we have yet been able reshape ourselves, our leadership and institutions.
Our world has gone from connected to interconnected to globally interdependent. Today, a single banker can cause the market to lose billions from his desk in minutes. A vegetable vendor and a cell phone can spark a revolution towards freedom. Mobile apps are disrupting entire industries and bringing strangers into intimate proximity. Companies — once fortresses protecting our privacy and their secrets can now be exposed by one hacker anywhere in the world enabling people to see deep into organizations and into the attitudes of the people who run them. So few can now so easily and so profoundly affect so many so far away.
At the same time, machines are quickly gaining the ability to out-think, out-process, and out-perform us. Yet, the things machines cannot do, the things that come from the heart — character, creativity, compassion, humility — are all uniquely human and uniquely valuable and cannot be automated or commoditized. But it is one thing to proclaim the primacy of human values and moral decision making, it is yet another to scale them and again make them central to daily life. That is the work that urgently remains to be done.
More than ever, we rise and fall together and the implications for leaders, organizations and society are profound. We are facing a public crisis of truth and trust. Our common imperative must be to put humanity, shared values, and purpose-inspired missions at the core of how we lead, how we shape culture, how we govern and how we relate to each other and to society. Because of our interdependence, this all matters more than ever and in ways it never has before.
