An entrepreneur is a person who takes responsibility for his or her economic well-being; a leader is a person who takes responsibility for the impact he or she makes on the world. However, that impact, whatever it may be, is in fact made up of myriad causes and conditions. The wise leader, then, is forever a student of the causality that makes up her endeavor. It’s about knowing all those layers of the matryoshka doll: If you’re trying to create an app that will change peoples’ lives, what are the elements of that change? And which people? And how will you test that? And who could build such a thing? And what mental state would that person have to have to build at his best ability?

The questions will keep unspooling; the matryoshka seems like it’s infinite. (Maybe it is!) The role of the leader, as we’ll discuss at length throughout this book, is to provide alignment. Why? Because alignment allows people to make decisions and act faster, which propels the velocity of an organization, allowing it to get feedback and grow more quickly. But what is alignment, and where does it come from? It’s about context.

Why were ancient mariners able to sail without modern equipment? They, of course, were able to read the stars—without all our modern light pollution. What the stars gave them was context, a signal from which to plan and act. And a clear night, of course, would provide greater resolution for the stars, making the signal stronger and the decision more clear. The leader is also searching for richer and richer constellations, examining the intersections of the enterprise in question. As we will emphasize throughout this book, this is not merely a matter of analysis but also of understanding—if we are trying to get humans to do something together, we need to understand our and their humanity. Such is the nature of holistic business.

THE JOURNEY TO COME

To borrow a line from Phil Libin, the highly quotable CEO of Evernote, we find that humanizing our working lives is a “sufficiently epic quest” to dedicate our lives to.¹ As we’ll discuss in a minute, that humanization will yield more positive experiences of work, more creativity and innovation within our organizations, greater interpersonal bonds between the people we work with, and, as the research plays out, the best shot we can give ourselves at creating value for the long term—resulting in initial public offerings for start-ups and diversified financial rewards for mature companies. Over three sections, we will show how being prosocial— that is, oriented toward others rather than yourself—is one of the most probusiness things you can do. How being holistic and humanistic is key to doing great work.

As these things tend to arrange themselves, this endless (and endlessly rewarding) journey will take place over three acts. In the first, we will address our own mental experiences, our social interactions, and the mindset we can take to orient ourselves to this holistic, long-term view. Then, in the middle section, we will explore the structures that lead to long-term innovation, the way to act in a manner that promotes mutual flourishing, and how, crucially, a leader can urge us along this process. In the third section we’ll see how to arrange our lives and our organizations in a way that leads to long-term value creation: surveying the subtle and not so subtle arts of idea generation, decision making, and creating continuous value.

We recognize that this might be a lot of new vocabulary. But don’t take our word for it: the things we’re about to describe will be familiar to you, though recontextualized; we’ve made a concerted effort to show how our individual, interpersonal, and organizational working lives all interconnect. By examining these connections, we’ll learn new ways to create, innovate, adapt, and lead. That said, we invite you onto this path of meeting work—again.