Page 8 - The New Articulate Executive_ Look, Act and Sound Like a Leader

INTRODUCTION vii

the salesperson who keeps raising the bar year after year
the coach who breaks through mental barriers to forge a cham-
pionship team from mediocrity

You may remember the Yankelovich survey that found if you
compare two similar companies in the same industry—one with a
CEO who is little seen or heard, and the other with a dynamic leader
who has the power to command important audiences—the com-
pany with the dynamic leader will typically have a market value as
much as double the market value of the company with the silent,
unseen CEO.
No one can achieve this kind of dramatic contrast remotely.
Twitter can’t do it. Facebook can’t do it. LinkedIn can’t do it. You-
Tube can’t do it. Even blogs and the Buzz—the word on the Internet
“street”—can’t do it. Until clones and robots replace us all, only
people can do this.
Social media is in The Cloud. It is electronic, abstract, and digital
and usually revolves around small images you can hold in your hand.
It is a good thing and a useful thing, but it is only a tool. You, by con-
trast, are not a tool. You are the authentic article, large as life, and you
must be seen and heard. You may not see yourself as an Abraham
Lincoln or Daniel Webster. But you have—as did they—unlimited
potential to lead and go far. As you will see in these chapters, the wider
the spread of social media, the greater your opportunities to position
yourself in the world around you, both professionally and personally.

The greatest opportunity of all is to use what you find here to
not only position yourself in the twenty-first century, but also
to shape it, to become a transformational leader, and ultimately to
become what I call a threshold leader. If the transformational leader
can enlist others to rally around a cause and accomplish great things,
the threshold leader, often alone, is forever out ahead of the fulcrum
of change and is in fact the agent of change itself, clearing a path for
transformational leaders (enlightened business leaders) to follow.
If you feel yourself drawn to this far frontier—or to wherever
your journey may take you—this book should be in your survival
pack when you arrive.