Leaders, it is assumed, are visionaries who have the unique ability to see past the horizon, to see the future coming before anyone else and prepare the organization to meet that challenge. That is surely a valuable ability. But leadership vision is often more about seeing clearly what is even more than what will be. As the former CEO and leadership author Max De Pree has famously written, “the first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.”1 And perhaps one of the most important pieces of reality that must be first defined is the reality that every organization, indeed every organism,
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