THERE ARE THOUSANDS OF BOOKS DEFINING LEADERSHIP as planning, organizing, motivating, and controlling. Here we offer you a nontraditional perspective that you are unlikely to find elsewhere. We do not intend it to replace whatever works for you. Rather we see these eight skills as additive. They upend conventional practices, giving you leadership options you may not know you have. We will show you how to achieve superior results while reducing your need to control. Paradoxically, you may gain more control than before. Whether you work in business, government, education, or social services, you can add these leadership skills to your repertoire. We believe that self-control is the most reliable kind. The more you find it in yourself, the easier it is to get others to exercise it. You can enhance your freedom of action, self-confidence, and authority with those who depend on you. They in turn will produce superior results.

Our Goal Is Helping You Gain More Control by Controlling Less

We did not grow up thinking this way, nor did we learn it in school. We picked up these lessons while managing strategic planning with communities, business firms, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and United Nations agencies in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, India, New Zealand, and the Americas. We learned to set up structures that help people motivate themselves. We now have led thousands of people to do things that they and we had once believed impossible. They differed in ethnicity, culture, age, jobs, titles, social classes, religions, world-views, and gender. Put in charge of their work, people found they could implement plans with longer-lasting impact than those designed by expert planners.

In this book several top executives report similar results. Drawing on their work and our own, we devised three simple principles:

Let people build on their personal experiences rather than impose yours.

Set things up so that people coordinate and control their work rather than your doing it for them.

Change the conditions under which people interact rather than try to change their behavior.

To apply these principles, we offer eight skills for leading others and managing yourself in an uncertain world. We found that they require inordinate self-discipline while we are learning. And we are always learning. How about you? You cannot internalize advanced skills from lectures or books. You need real-time practice. If you are a leader, we imagine that you operate in the unknown on many days. You will cope more easily with unfamiliar situations as you apply these skills. We invite you to practice self-control, expect the same of others, and create conditions under which people discover how to do their best.