THE VISIONARY’S

HANDBOOK
Nine Paradoxes That Will Shape
the Future of Your Business
WATTS WACKER & JIM TAYLOR

WATTS WACKER is the founder of the consulting firm FirstMatter LLC and a futurist at one of the nation’s
foremost think tanks. He is a graduate of Tulane University and The University of Texas in Austin. He has
lectured at many colleges and universities, most recently including Dartmouth, Columbia, USC and
BA/Norway.
JIM TAYLOR is a lecturer and consultant to cutting-edge companies.

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 The Visionary’s Handbook - Page 1

MAIN IDEA
The nine paradoxes are all about being a success -- both in business and personal life areas. The paradoxes describe the future
in the terminology of the present tense -- illustrating that how a person or organization reacts to the challenges of the present will
have a large part in shaping the possibilities available in the future.
Specifically, the future is constantly being rewritten by the events of today. Savvy people and smart organizations recognize that
and use it to their advantage to create a future environment of success in an era of turbulence and uncertainty. By managing the
contradictions of the present, they are then well positioned and prepared for whatever does ultimately come.
Visionaries may not be able to accurately forecast precisely what the future holds, but the techniques used by visionaries will enable
any person or any organization to write their own story. The answers to the paradoxes provide the tools that will enable anyone to
become what they want to be.

The Paradox of the Visionary

The Paradox of Value

The Paradox of Size
Everyday
The Paradox of Time
Paradoxes
of The Paradox of Competition
Business
The Paradox of Action
The Paradox of Leadership
The Paradox of Leisure

The Paradox of Reality

1. The Paradox of the Visionary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 2

The closer your vision gets to a provable truth, the more likely you are simply describing the present. In
the same way, the more certain you are of any future outcome, the more likely you’ll be wrong.
2. The Paradox of Value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 4
The value of any product is inseparable from the buyer’s perception of worth. Instead of intrinsic value,
everything has relative value only. Most often, value is inversely proportional to physical content.
3. The Paradox of Size . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 4
The bigger you are, the smaller you need to be. And the smaller you are in reality, the bigger you need
to appear to be.
4. The Paradox of Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 5
To succeed in the short term, you need to think long term. Yet the greater your vision and the longer your
time frame, the greater the risk that you will be unable to take the necessary near-term steps to achieve
long-term goals. The tension between short- and long-term planning has never been greater.
5. The Paradox of Competition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 5
Your biggest competitor is your own view of the future. Competition comes from everywhere and nowhere
at the same time.
6. The Paradox of Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 6
Nothing ever turns out quite the way you expect it to. Therefore, act intuitively but be ready to act
counterintuitively if required.
7. The Paradox of Leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 6
To lead from the front, you have to stay inside the story. In an inherently inconsistent world, consistency
is not the virtue it once was -- especially in leaders.
8. The Paradox of Leisure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 7
Play is hard work. In fact, play and work are blending together and becoming virtually indistinguishable.
9. The Paradox of Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 7
Every person on the planet has the potential to be connected to every other person. Therefore, everyone
inhabits a world of their own and represents a niche market of one. As our ability to link grows, our
individuality becomes stronger.

Paradox #1
The Paradox of the Visionary
The Paradox
The closer your vision gets to a provable truth, the more likely
you are simply describing the present. In the same way, the more
certain you are of any future outcome, the more likely you’ll be
wrong.
Supporting Ideas
For the first time in history, the majority of businesses and
individuals on the planet have the tools available to write their
own futures rather than have their futures dictated by some ‘‘big
brother’’ type of central planning department.
Therefore, since everyone and every organization can shape
their own future, it’s important to understand the paradoxical
nature of the world. Without that understanding, nobody truly
controls their own destiny.
Business paradoxes deal with the space between the present
and the future. Some examples of business paradoxes:
Organic is one of the largest and most successful online
business development companies. The company has grown
into a multi-billion dollar operation by developing Web sites
for major clients -- that causes Organic to throw its resources
into supporting its present success. Yet the more Organic
focuses on the present, the less it focuses on incubating new
Internet based businesses -- where the opportunities of the
future reside. Thus the company faces a paradox -- its present
success poisons the future possibilities while at the same time
the future poisons its present success.
Boeing aspires to dominate the motion of human beings
across the planet. To achieve that vision, it will have to
dominate the Chinese marketplace -- since China is such a
large proportion of the world’s total population. Yet if Boeing
commits resources to the Chinese market right now, it
jeopardizes its present financial performance. The paradox is
if Boeing compromises its current share value by investing in
China now, it will be unable to attract the investment capital
required in the future.
Kodak has built its business around 35-mm film. What should
it do if it believes that by the year 2010, the vast majority of
image capture, reproduction and storage will be done
digitally? Should Kodak immediately shift all its resources
from 35-mm film to digital imaging immediately, abandoning
its traditional markets? Or should it systematically downgrade
its 35-mm operations while building the digital side of the
business? And if it does that, should the management input
from people skilled in the 35-mm technology be replaced by
management decisions from people who only have
experience on the digital side of the business? And, how can
those transitions be explained to the investment community
at large and the company’s own stockholders?
In short, how do you bet on your vision of the future while still
surviving (and hopefully flourishing) in the present?
At the heart of this and other paradoxes lies the fact nobody can
really describe the future of anything with any certainty. In fact,
the greater the accuracy of any prediction about the future, the
greater the likelihood you’re describing an extrapolation of the
present trends into the future rather than something that can be
independently determined.
The Visionary’s Handbook - Page 2
The paradox of the visionary has several corollaries, including:
1. The more certain anyone is of the future, the more likely they
are going to be wrong.
2. Whatever anyone expects to be in the future, they must also
anticipate what they won’t be.
3. The more a person or organization understands its future,
the more it becomes alienated from the present and those
who live in the present.
Contradictions like these have always existed in business and
society at large. In the past, however, changes evolved slowly
and there was always time for resolution. Today, the rate of
change is so rapid it creates conditions where paradox is
seemingly a permanent state. Additionally, the Internet now
makes a vast amount of information available on which decisions
can be made.
To address these and other paradoxes that exist, forget about
trying to control outcomes and concentrate more on absorbing
the paradoxes and becoming prepared to deal with whatever the
future brings.
The best way to do this is to form a literal or figurative ‘‘Future
Council’’ which deals with the paradoxes head on by following
these steps:
1. Define and articulate your values -- because while everything
else may change, these won’t.
2. Change your planning cycle away from the normal routines
of life or business. Instead of meeting every month, make it
every five weeks. That introduces a disruptive element which
stimulates creativity. Free yourself from the rituals of the past.
Have the attitude of an insurgent.
3. Identify all the ‘‘seminal moments’’ that have occurred since
the last meeting of the future council -- events that have
changed your perception of the future. Analyze how these
seminal moments impact on the decisions of the present and
the potential destinations of the future.
4. Consider how your internal and external cultures -- the way
you or your organization act -- need to change to respond to
the newly visible possibilities of the future.
5. Take some action that reflects your new allocation of
priorities. The action doesn’t need to be huge, just visible.
That signals your intention to succeed whatever is required.
6. Get a fresh perspective. Drop members from the Council
when they become locked into one way of thinking. Add new
members, and let them work through all the paradoxes. They
may add new insights.
7. Keep thinking not in terms of definitive answers but in terms
of questions about the future. Let questions drive decision
making -- because that’s the only way to accurately describe
the future.
The Future Council will develop a succession of problems and
proposed solutions which reflect your personal or your
company’s vision of the future. To be of any use, that vision must
be changing constantly. At times, then, the Future Council will
come up with problems for which you have no solutions or
possibly solutions in search of problems.
The key issue at this point isn’t what you know or don’t know.
Instead, the more important issue is how you should be applying
your personal or your organization’s resources to building and
clarifying your vision of the future.

The process of nurturing and strengthening your current vision
of the future revolves around this matrix:
Solution
Know the Don’t know
solution the solution
Don’t know 1. 4.
the Listen Question
problem
Problem
Know 2. 3.
the Attack Leverage
problem
In Quadrant 1, the Future Council has identified a solution to a
problem it can’t yet define accurately. You have an answer for
the present day wrapped in the language of the future. The best
course here is to bring in an outside guru and listen while the
guru tells you which problem you’ve developed a solution for.
In Quadrant 2, both the problem and its solution are known. In
that case, no further thought is required, just action. Assemble
a team and attack the problem. This is progress.
In Quadrant 3, the Future Council has raised an important issue
but doesn’t know how to go about solving the problem. In other
words, this is a problem awaiting a future solution. The best
course is to seek leverage -- by outsourcing with people or
organizations that have the skills required to solve the problem.
You can even outsource to multiple service providers and
choose whichever potential solution looks best.
In Quadrant 4, there are no answers, only more and more
questions. This is where paradox comes into its own. Quadrant
4 represents the destabilizing factor -- the little voice that
suggests that maybe the future won’t pan out precisely the way
it has been planned. In Quadrant 4, all those nagging little issues
that get ignored come to the fore.
Strong and vibrant organizations and individuals ensure their
Future Councils have at least some members that habitually
reside in Quadrant 4. These people are commonly called
‘‘Visionaries’’ or even ‘‘Fools’’ in the medieval context where the
designated Fool was not one of the King’s ‘‘yes-men’’ who
automatically agreed with whatever the current sentiment was.
In short, the only way to deal with paradox is to embed it within
the organization or within your own personal life. That’s how you
can live in the present and in the future simultaneously. That’s
how an organization can balance the demands and imperatives
of the present with the priorities of the future. Without a degree
of ambiguity and a little thinking outside-the-box, the likelihood
of being able to successfully create a compelling future becomes
impaired.
Key Thoughts
‘‘Every life, individual and corporate, is also a constant collision
between present and future, and how you choose to live in the
space between the two tenses makes all the difference.’’
-- Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor
‘‘When change is constant, it’s hard to know you are constantly
changing. So, too, when contradiction is constant, it’s hard to
The Visionary’s Handbook - Page 3
know you exist in a state of constant paradox. And so it is today
with all of us. We live today inside a continuous collision of
opportunities, and those collisions change us and the terms of
our business and personal lives every moment we are alive.’’
-- Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor
‘‘No one can predict the future, but no one can afford to be
unprepared to meet whatever does arrive.’’
-- Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor
‘‘The future is never what we think it will be; something always
intervenes. The more we measure our progress through life as
a series of approaches to a constant future, the more dissatisfied
we are when the real future intrudes into the present. Instead of
looking to the same fixed point on the horizon, we need to rewrite
the future serially as events change the likelihood of any
particular future arriving.’’
-- Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor
‘‘What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters
compared to what lies within us.’’
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
‘‘Today, creativity still counts, in critical ways more than ever.
Unless we want to live by someone else’s story, we all must
become the authors of our own individual futures. To write that
story, we need to gather our own trends, identify where we want
to go, establish the path we are on and figure out what course
corrections are required and what it will mean if we arrive at the
destination we’ve set out for.’’
-- Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor
‘‘Emancipated from group-think and collective fate, people have
the capacity today as never before to claim their own futures and
to shape those futures to suit completely idiosyncratic wants and
needs. You really are free, and as all truly free people are, you
really are responsible. Fail to build your own future, and
someone is going to build one for you, whether you want it or
not. Fail to bind all the disparately emerging futures within your
organization -- be it company, school, government or family -- to
a shared set of goals, and its future will be forfeit, too.’’
-- Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor
‘‘While intuition has grown as the means by which decision
models are silently resolved, the sciences themselves have
become equally obscure and unexplainable: the physics of
subquarkian particles, the cosmology of the big bang and
theoretical mechanics that require no reference to objective
reality have proliferated. The decoupling of human intelligence
from the quantifiable rigors of reason have liberated science to
go where no mind has ever gone before. The more we know, the
less we rely on empirical knowledge.’’
-- Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor
‘‘Every moment of every life -- individual and corporate -- is lived
in a tension between past, present and future, and the variables
between and among the three tenses are always changing.
Thus, being a visionary means that you have to reinvent your
vision time and time and time again, and that you have to accept
the near certainty that every one of your visions will ultimately
be proved wrong.’’
-- Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor
‘‘Remember: Your reality is yours alone.’’
-- Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor

Paradox #2
The Paradox of Value
The Paradox
The value of any product is inseparable from the buyer’s
perception of worth. Instead of intrinsic value, everything has
relative value only. Most often, value is inversely proportional to
physical content.
Supporting Ideas
Historically, the market value of a product could be determined
to a large degree by its cost of manufacture. Today, that
relationship has vanished entirely -- with the products and
services having the greatest market value often having a cost of
virtually nil to manufacture.
More and more, relative value -- the price the consumer is willing
to pay -- is replacing intrinsic value in product pricing practices.
And interestingly, the price the consumer is willing to pay varies
from moment to moment in response to the circumstances and
immediate future of the consumer at the precise second the
transaction takes place.
The value of any product has become inseparable from the
buyers perception of value simply because the world is awash
in products. Everything can be brought through multiple
channels, with the expectation that someone somewhere
sometime is going to try and discount the product to steal
business away from competitors. Therefore, consumers control
the sales equation.
So how should a product be priced? Sellers can use this paradox
constructively these ways:
By building a strong brand name for a consistently good
product, sellers can maximize the price margin -- especially
in unstable markets for products like hot dogs or soft drinks.
By embedding services in with their products, sellers can
create a package deal that generates substantial margins.
By spot-pricing their products to take advantage of the spikes
in demand created by external factors, sellers can maximize
revenues.
By involving the customer in the transaction in some way that
makes sense to the buyer -- perhaps by posting an online
review or by participating in a win-win referral program.
By adding more information to their products. By managing
the flow of information through a product, the process of
creating value is maximized. In fact, information alone creates
and sustains value for any product or service.
Key Thoughts
‘‘Let the drones who know both the problem and the solution
worry about average margins and average costs. Both are
important, and they’ll keep the drones occupied. But put the
people in Quadrant 4 to work on the information because that’s
where the value really lies. It’s not just that the value of the
information of the transaction is worth more than the value of the
goods and services being transacted, although that’s important
in itself. It’s also that the specific point at which the customer
interacts with the product and with the product environment
produces the greatest understanding of the net margin
possibilities of the organization. That’s the final paradox of
value.’’
-- Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor
The Visionary’s Handbook - Page 4
Paradox #3
The Paradox of Size
The Paradox
The bigger you are, the smaller you need to be. And the smaller
you are in reality, the bigger you need to appear to be.
Supporting Ideas
Big organizations must break themselves down into small units
that are perceived as being highly responsive to the needs of the
customer or they will struggle to generate business. At the same
time, small organizations, to gain credibility, need to project
themselves as being large and substantial or customers will feel
anxious about their ability to deliver.
Large organizations have to bring in small, independent and
free-thinking people from outside to fill the Quadrant 4 role or
they risk becoming prisoners of their own momentum. The
Paradox of Size is a very fine balancing act that extends right
across the entire business spectrum. Unless there is a small
degree of insurgency and creative thinking at the fringes of the
organization, the power of the center will become dulled and
misdirected.
The Paradox of Size also applies to an organization’s survival
skills. Nothing lasts forever -- no core competency will be
relevant to the market indefinitely. Long-term survival demands
adaptation. And the essence of successfully adapting to new
circumstances is to weed out old skills or competencies and
replace them with new ones. Invariably, new skills will start at
the fringes as small experiments which gradually become more
and more mainstream over time.
When considering size, always keep in mind it’s a relative rather
than an absolute term. For example, Coca-Cola is by financial
standards a large operation which dominates 50-percent of its
market. Internally, however, the company views itself not as
having 50-percent of the global cola market but only 2-percent
of the global market for consumable beverages. That keeps the
company focused on expanding its business rather than
protecting what it already has.
Key Thoughts
‘‘To succeed as a global player today, you need to couple the
predatory practices of a nineteenth-century robber baron with
the anything-for-the-customer attitude of a corner grocer.’’
-- Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor
‘‘The more you atomize and thus the smaller you make yourself,
the bigger your brand has to be. The more successfully you
break your organization up into tiny self-contained cells, the
more you are dependent on your brand and its promise to
provide the underlying aesthetic for all that simultaneous and
disparate microactivity.’’
-- Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor
‘‘We don’t know if we are right about the future -- how can we
until it happens? -- but we do know that none of us is allowed to
drift through life without paying a price. Take control of what lies
ahead and it belongs to you; let what lies ahead take control of
you and you will always be fate’s pawn. That’s our argument and
our justification. Enjoy.’’
-- Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor
‘‘The future is a tale that needs constant retelling.’’
-- Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor

Paradox #4
The Paradox of Time
The Paradox
To succeed in the short term, you need to think long term. Yet
the greater your vision and the longer your time frame, the
greater the risk that you will be unable to take the necessary
short-term steps to achieve long-term goals. The tension
between short- and long-term planning has never been greater.
Supporting Ideas
To survive and prosper in the current business environment, you
need duality -- the ability to generate immediate success and to
take the steps necessary to succeed in the future. If you
understand this paradox well, the tension between what you do
to generate short-term results and the actions taken to secure
your long-term success will energize your organization rather
than confuse it.
Smart companies even manage to turn their short-term
problems into long-term solutions. For example, Arthur
Andersen Consulting loses a number of its people to full-time
employment by its clients. The company anticipates that and
trains its people so they form career-long associations between
Andersen and the companies they go to work for. Thus
Andersen’s short-term loss of trained people becomes an
opportunity to build long-term client relationships.
The Paradox of Time requires that everyone lives in two tenses
simultaneously -- the present and the future. The ideal is to make
the present live in the future and make the future a reality in the
present.
Whenever an individual or an organization manages to take this
paradox in their stride, they become liberated. They will then
simultaneously be doing those things that generate immediate
results and taking actions that are aligned with what will be
needed over the longer term.
Key Thoughts
‘‘It isn’t just that the future destabilizes the present; the present
destabilizes the future as well. To succeed in the long term today,
you need to micromanage every passing minute. Change is
constant, and constantly accelerating. Yet the more you
micromanage, the greater the chance you and your company
will simply cease to be. Concentrate solely on today, and you will
never see what lies around the curve tomorrow. And there’s
always a truck passing just around the curve, and it’s always in
your lane. That is the corollary of the duality of time: The future
and present of any business or career are different, but they are
always on a collision course.’’
-- Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor
‘‘Never before in history has time been so finely calibrated, and
never before have the calibrations of time been so commercially
meaningful. The old saw is right: Time is money. But time is more
than money. Money can be made in the stock market in a few
ticks. Time, though, is scarce and irrecoverable. Unlike salary,
it can’t be deferred. Unlike assets, you can’t invest time and
make it grow. More and more, too, it is time, not money, that is
the deal breaker in the marketplace. Busy people are busy
absolutely. The more of the clock they fill, the more of the rest of
the clock they need. And the more unsettled the clock, the more
they suffer.’’
-- Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor
The Visionary’s Handbook - Page 5
Paradox #5
The Paradox of Competition
The Paradox
Your biggest competitor is always your own view of the future.
Competition comes from everywhere and nowhere at the same
time.
Supporting Ideas
To be useful, the Paradox of Competition must be viewed in both
external and internal terms.
Externally, direct competitors are generally assumed to be
companies offering similar products or services. That view,
however, ignores the possibility that in the future, you may end
up competing against companies that are now in entirely
different fields altogether. From that perspective, it’s entirely
accurate to say competition can come from everywhere and
nowhere at the same time.
The internal concept of competition provides a second viewpoint.
Life is a journey. Therefore, at any time, what you are at present
is in competition with what you will be in the future. Your own
self-image in both dimensions is constantly doing battle to decide
how you should act.
So how does one succeed against internal and external
competitors? There’s only one sure way -- know your own story
and follow it into the future. That means measuring progress by
your own rate of change rather than by other benchmarks. That
way, whether the external competition or conditions change or
stay consistent or cease to exist, you still continue to forge
steadily ahead.
That’s why giving away information about yourself creates value.
Whether or not that information creates value for a competitor is
irrelevant. The more complete your own disclosure is, the more
you’ve created value for yourself in moving towards your
objectives and targets.
There is, in the final analysis, just one thing that’s certain about
the future -- when you get there, the field of battle won’t look like
it does now.
Key Thoughts
‘‘It’s all in how you look at competition, of course: as the battle
for market share or the battle for market access to the economic
value of your own product, as rivalry between collaborators or
rivalry with self and with your own self-promise, as the battle for
sales or the battle for awareness, as the struggle with the
company that is producing today the product you are selling
today or as the struggle with the company that will be producing
tomorrow the product you will sell tomorrow. But how you look
at the competition changes everything.’’
-- Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor
‘‘The law of the jungle says that competition is lateral and
horizontal: Eat or be eaten. The paradox of competition says
something different: Whether we are an individual or a
corporation, or even a society, the battles that count most are
often the battles against ourselves: ourselves in the present and
ourselves in the future, and ourselves in both dimensions doing
battle against one another.’’
-- Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor

Paradox #6
The Paradox of Action
The Paradox
Nothing ever turns out quite the way you expect it to. Therefore,
act intuitively but be ready to act counterintuitively if required.
Supporting Ideas
This paradox suggests that whatever destination you start
heading for today will probably be quite different by the time you
actually get there. Therefore, you’ve got to go for what you can’t
reasonably expect to achieve.
The Paradox of Action charts a middle course between two
extremes:
1. If you simply wait for the future to arrive, you’ll have no
meaningful stake in anything when it does.
2. Any action you take to prepare for the future automatically
changes the future imperceptibly.
The lesson of the Paradox of Action may be stated this way --
Be as prepared not to achieve your goals as you are to achieve
them. At the very least, you’ll be in a position to influence the
results better than if you take no action whatsoever.
Life, and business, is always a balancing act between actions
that perform well in the present and those that are oriented
towards the future.
So how can a business be run in the present and the future
tenses simultaneously? Some ideas:
Instead of making ‘‘To Do’’ lists, have everyone make ‘‘Why
To Do’’ lists. That forces everyone to connect their actions
with their intended destinations more directly.
Find your own or your organization’s comfort zones and
attack them. Ask the provocative questions most people
brush over.
Try compartmentalizing. That means segmenting things
between those focused on the present and those focused on
the future. Decide what the balance should be between the
two, and achieve that.
Break the old paradigms and change the way things get done.
There may be a treasure trove of ideas buried below the
surface of conventionality.
Try outsourcing your present work or outsourcing your future
work to a third party.
Get alongside an academic institution and let them help you
invent the future. Let them inside the outer curtain and
analyze exactly how you work today. They may be able to
come up with some great ideas on what you’ll ultimately end
up doing in the future.
Key Thoughts
‘‘Every business wants to own the future because every business
knows that if it can be waiting there with a product or service
when the future arrives, commerce will beat a path to its door,
but publicly traded businesses want to own the future for a more
practical purpose that plays out in the present every day: The
future is what the market values. Market capitalization is in the
present-future tense: It’s what the business is worth today based
on the expectation of where it will be tomorrow, next month, next
year or next decade.’’
-- Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor
The Visionary’s Handbook - Page 6
Paradox #7
The Paradox of Leadership
The Paradox
To lead from the front, you have to stay inside the story. In an
inherently inconsistent world, consistency is not the virtue it once
was -- especially in leaders.
Supporting Ideas
What makes a leader world-class?
He or she must have the ability to be many things to many
different people, all at the same time. (Think Nelson Mandela
-- who is simultaneously a revolutionary in a suit, a symbol of
suffering, a symbol of reconciliation and equally comfortable
with political leaders, business leaders and the man on the
street).
He or she must be comfortable with inconsistency, and be
prepared to inhabit multiple realities simultaneously. (Think
Bill Gates who is prepared to crush competitors aggressively
while at the same time reaching out to new consumers).
He or she must make day-to-day decisions based on facts
while at the same time acting consistent with a vision based
not on fact but an ideal. (Think Pierre Omidyar who turned a
Web site selling Pez dispensers into eBay, the Internet’s
largest auction house).
He or she must be able to separate short- and long-term
value, and make both live in each other. (Think Ted Turner
who harnessed the synergy created by merging a sports team
with a TV station together to create the leverage necessary
to build a global powerhouse in news).
He or she must be able to build other leaders within the
organization. (Think General Colin Powell and General
Norman Schwartzkopf).
He or she must have an engrossing story to tell. The key
elements of a good story are:
• It must be in the future tense.
• It must involve a rags-to-riches mythical figure.
• It must be summed up in one word or idea.
• It must be anecdotal and consistent.
• There has to be a hero and a villain.
• It has to come from the heart, not the PR department.
Good leaders intuitively understand that while they may be
judged by the numbers in the short-term, over the long haul
the quality of their story and their ability to make others live
that story will make all the difference. (Think Roy Vagelos,
CEO of Merck & Company who committed $200 million to the
manufacture and distribution of Mectizan to people who could
not afford the treatment -- only to have the company’s stock
rise 41-percent in 1998 as a result).
Key Thoughts
‘‘The more our leaders manifest the absorption of the paradox in
both the ways they conduct their business life and the ways they
work and live as human beings, the higher our own comfort level
with them grows and the more we are willing to listen to and
follow them as better examples of the selves we know we must
become. The more they lead in the service not of facts but of
ideals, the more we are likely to see, applaud and revere them
as people who can provide us with guidance and direction.’’
-- Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor

Paradox #8
The Paradox of Leisure
The Paradox
Play is hard work. In fact, play and work are blending together
and becoming virtually indistinguishable.
Supporting Ideas
In previous times, work and play were entirely separate. Today,
they have converged together so completely it’s hard to tell which
is which. For example:
Is taking a client for a game of golf where a deal is discussed
between holes work or play?
Is answering an e-mail about an important project while at
home baby-sitting the kids productive?
Is working out at the corporate health facility play or asset
maintenance?
In today’s business world, getting the balance right between
work and play can be the make or break point for a convention
or corporate retreat. Smart companies build a play ethic into the
fabric of their culture -- thus enabling workers to stay at work
longer and think more creatively.
The importance of encouraging corporate playfulness is:
It’s both a measure and a demonstration of the company’s
corporate culture and value system.
It enables new ideas and new directions to be explored in a
non-threatening situation.
If aligned with the business of the company, it will energize
everything the company does.
You can create a whole new way to reward exceptional
performance that won’t impact on the financial bottom line but
will deliver huge dividends in morale and corporate esprit de
corps.
Key Thoughts
‘‘Even away from the workplace, we take our leisure in activities
that resemble work, and the more they resemble it -- stock
reports, book reports, investment decisions, the search for
subterranean meaning -- the more we flock to them. Leisure isn’t
just leisure anymore. Leisure is work and play, but it’s also
identification and communication. Like everything else, our
leisure-wear logos are made to do double-duty. They speak of
us and for us. They introduce us and identify us. They tribalize
us and they tell us what tribes others belong to.’’
-- Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor
‘‘Get the sense of play right, align it with the business you are in
and with the promise of that business, and you energize not just
your business and your product but the workers who must deliver
on it. Get the sense of play wrong and you enervate promise,
business, worker, product and mission.’’
-- Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor
‘‘IBM so encourages Internet playfulness that its thirty thousand
scientists have created something in the order of two million Web
sites. Thus, Big Blue slakes the thirst for play, and thus, we would
bet, will IBM discover, way out on the fringes of its playfulness,
the next business it will be in.’’
-- Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor
The Visionary’s Handbook - Page 7
Paradox #9
The Paradox of Reality
The Paradox
Every person on the planet has the potential to be connected to
everyone else. Therefore, everyone inhabits a world of their own
and represents a niche market of one. As our ability to link grows,
our individuality becomes stronger.
Supporting Ideas
The Paradox of Reality, in essence, says there is no such thing
as reality -- just a pool of everyone’s individual interpretation of
reality. Therefore, since everyone is going to interpret everything
around them by the light of their unique experience, an activity
like marketing cannot effectively be carried out to the masses --
it has to focus on a niche of one.
How’s that achieved in practice? You can’t vary your product,
but what you can do is let the product be defined in different ways
that will make sense to different consumers.
Take, for example, a Zip drive. This product:
To a mother means a great way to store valuable images of
the family while they were growing up.
To the kids means a convenient way to store their progress
on their favorite games.
To a commercial artists means an effective way to transfer
large files from one computer to another.
Doing business in a world of human beings requires that you
have a high tolerance for ambiguity and irrationality. That means
two incompatible outcomes can and often are true
simultaneously -- each being partly true and partly wrong.
Since the future is a reflection and result of the actions of the
present, there are several things you can be doing to create a
satisfactory future:
1. Become a great story teller. The dominant character of the
future will be the person who knows what their ambition is,
who knows their core belief system and then who can take
those elements and spin a compelling story around them.
Become a storyteller and you’ll find all sorts of people will be
keen to align their individual realities with your future.
2. Be decisive. Decide what you believe on the big issues and
the small ones. You’ll always achieve more with a little
decisiveness than you will by vacillating between two
extremes. You’ll also find it will be easier to enlist allies and
collaborators when they know exactly where you’re aiming.
3. Tell yourself the story of what you’re going to become again
and again until you believe it absolutely. By doing that, you’ll
fuse the present and the future together. Failures along the
way will be temporary setbacks, not the end of the road.
You’ll be comfortable living in the present tense but have a
keen awareness of the future possibilities as well.
4. Be patient. Recognition is a paradox as well. You’re less
likely to get recognized for what you do deserve than for what
you don’t. If you’re truly world-class at whatever you’re doing,
you will become famous for it. And if you’re famous, you’re
well positioned to become rich as well.
The future is in a constant state of flux -- because it is constantly
being reshaped and reinvented by the decisions people and
organizations are making in the present. Therefore, the work of
the visionary never finishes because every time a vision of the
future has been developed, the actions of the present will

irrevocably alter it again. In other words, almost everything a
visionary produces will ultimately end up being wrong.
Therefore, to create a compelling vision of the future, try these
two exercises:
Exercise #1
Create a Serial Future
A serial future suggests that when change is constant, an
approach to the future and an understanding of what the future
holds must be adjusted constantly. Therefore, you can attempt
to project into the future based on how things developed in the
past, so long as you remain willing to change your forecast
whenever new and better information becomes available.
Note that the serial future concept means working forward from
the past, not backwards from the assumptions of today.
In human history, there have been five macro-cultures:
1. Hunter-Gatherers -- the dawn of mankind
Nomadic existence focused on the cultivation of crops for
personal use and domestication of animals.
2. Agricultural -- up to about 1850 A.D.
People learned to use tools to cultivate crops in large
quantities which could be sold.
3. Consumer -- mid-1800s -- World War II
Factories became the workhorse of civilization and people
learned how to merchandise and trade.
4. Knowledge -- World War I -- Mid-1990s
A college degree became the dividing factor between the
haves and have-nots.
5. The Age of Uncertainty -- Mid-1990s onwards
The World Wide Web achieved critical mass and billions of
realities became co-joined.
In each of these macro-cultures, there are at least 17 key
micro-issues:
• Philosophy -- basic belief about the nature of man.
• Mission -- the object of life.
• Preoccupation -- what people are most concerned about.
• Work -- the basic staple of economic survival.
• Ritual -- the activity that honors a superior power.
• Travel -- the predominant means of transportation.
• Weapons -- the tools used in wars.
• Status Symbols -- the outward signs of success.
• Defining Activity -- what the most distinguished people do.
• Recreation -- the activity most opposite to being at work.
• Membership -- the defining group of the society.
• Physical Structure -- the defining building of the society.
• Dominant Resource -- the resource of most value.
• Dominant Person -- the individual held in highest esteem.
• Learning -- how education is delivered.
• Intelligence -- the quality of mind most celebrated.
• Visionary -- the person who predicts the future.
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The Visionary’s Handbook - Page 8
For each of these micro-issues, you can then develop a tracking
chart that runs across the five macro-cultures:
Macro-Issue: ____________________
1.
Hunter-Gatherer
2.
Agricultural
3.
Consumer
4.
Knowledge
5.
Uncertainty
As you do this for all of the macro-issues individually, you begin
to piece together a serial view of how reality may continue to
unfold in the uncertainty era. Keep in mind this is, first and
foremost, a way to structure and organize your thoughts rather
than a definitive history of the development of society at large.
As you track movements that affect your own career, you’ll
become more keenly aware of fringe issues. These have a way
of showing up in a secondary context in the previous
macro-culture before moving to prominence in subsequent eras.
If this pattern holds into the future, those fringe elements may
contain important clues to the way your own personal or
organizational future is developing.
Exercise #2
Answer the Four Key Questions
Answer these questions as truthfully and in as much detail as
you possibly can to create a 500-year plan for your organization,
or a lifetime plan for yourself:
1. Do you know where you are?
The Identify the core values that lie at the heart
Four of your belief system and character.
Key
Questions 2. Do you know where you want to go?
How will those core values be projected
into the future and what will be achieved.
3. Do you recognize your seminal moments?
These are the turning points when something
that will be important in future first appears.
4. Do you have the attitude of the insurgent?
Insurgents are prepared to invent new
doctrines and coin new tactics.