Introduction

This is a story about leadership: leadership in teams, businesses, and communities. It is also a story about personal growth and how good leaders become great leaders through their willingness to face and be changed by the greatest challenges of their lives.

The story comes out of our friendship with Mike Wilson. Mike is a man we both know well. He shows up everywhere in the businesses and neighborhoods we serve. The circumstances of place and vocation vary, but Mike is always there. As a leader, he’s professionally talented and highly motivated to successfully reach his business and financial goals.

But Mike wants his life to be about more than success. He’s searching for the deeper significance of his leadership and for the satisfaction of living a life of real purpose. In this deeper search, however, Mike often feels very unsuccessful; sometimes, he feels completely lost.

As we’ve shared this story with our friends, these questions usually arise: “Is Mike’s story real? And if it is, where can I find him?” Here’s the best answer we have: Mike’s story is real. And the chances are reasonable that you’ll find someone like him occupying the office next to yours. She rides on the train with you each morning. You pass him in the hallway every day. Glance up from your reading and look around; she might be sitting right there in the room with you now.

Perhaps it would be helpful to say a brief word here about the friendship out of which this story was born. We two at first glance appear to have little in common. Ken is a business consultant who resides in the flight matrix that connects the great urban centers of America, Europe, and Asia. John is a community leader who resides and works in one great city. By strategic design, he leaves that city and his citywide colleagues as infrequently as possible. Ken works with bottom-line business leaders, John with frontline community leaders. Ken’s work focuses on the corporate sector, John’s on the faith-based sector. In terms of space and time, Ken’s work is space expansive and more time limited; John’s is the other way around.

These differences aside, our lives are much the same. We both work with men and women like Mike Wilson every day. In whatever airport Ken lands and on whatever street John walks, Mike is there, trying to close the painful gap between his hardworking day and his persistent sense of unfulfilled purpose.

Since we’re making introductions here, we may as well go one step further. We, too, are Mike Wilson. While the details may be fictional, at its deepest level Mike’s story is real—and very true.

Perhaps you will recognize yourself in parts of this story, too. If so, then you are already on your way. We hope these pages will offer you some guidance as well as encouragement as you continue on the journey of both professional and personal growth that great leadership requires.