There’s an old Chinese saying that when you’ve made it 90 percent down the path, you’re halfway to your destination. It’s a frustrating logic, yes, the kind that reflects the frustration inherent in completing any major project: the last little bit is always the most difficult. The last few steps are where our faith may falter, and we may lose what we set out to do in the first place, like Orpheus of Greek legend losing his love for lack of trust. With full appreciation of the gorgeous difficulty of completion, let us set out to complete the last act of our odyssey.

In Part I we sketched out the landscape we now find ourselves in: stormy waters, strong tides, and stronger winds. But that elemental energy can be harnessed if we establish productive, sustainable, and positive relationships with our own interior working lives and then allow that to extend into the way we interact with the people with whom we work. We call this holistic business. Part of that is recognizing how damn long it takes to do anything worthwhile, and so we need to build our organizations in such a way that they can be sustainably innovative, consistently new.

In Part II we explored the ins and outs of what such a place might look like and how you’d act when you got there. We discovered that much of the product you make is predicted by the structure that created it, and we discovered that the traditional structures won’t always match well with our insistently fluid present. We also realized that the ways we interacted with one another could predict creativity, innovation, and resilience, and so we sought to act congruently with that understanding. Taking those points together, we described what a leader of such an organic, rigorous system might look like and how we can embody that ideal.

Now we enter into the last phase, where we will be unpacking the doing of work in an unpredictable world. In Chapter 8 we investigate the mysterious process of ideation: the way in which we can be constantly finding new ideas, which themselves may become strategy. Then, in Chapter 9, we will use a process we call blueprinting to get explicit about finding the strategies that work. In the tenth and final chapter we will uncover the tangible and intangible qualities of creating value over the long term, then see how that understanding can be embodied in our daily working lives.

It’s time to complete the journey.