Explore the ideas
The six lenses
Leadership looks different depending on where you stand in relation to it. These six lenses are the directions the book approaches it from — each finds something the others cannot.
How persuasion builds the thing it appears merely to describe
02CharacterCultivated over a career; occupied as a role in a story
03NamingWhat the word leader does before anyone has spoken
04Figure-GroundWhat has to exist before leadership is possible at all
05MethodStudying narrative requires methods that can see structure
06ApplicationThree positions: telling, replotting, reading
Why six, and not one
The book opens with Isaiah Berlin's distinction between the hedgehog who knows one big thing and the fox who ranges across many. Its one big thing is that leadership and strategy are narrative in character. But that claim does not collapse into a single account, because if leadership is constituted differently depending on where you stand, a one-lens treatment would be incoherent. The fox's ranging is what the hedgehog's claim requires.
Two distinctions are worth holding onto as you read. The first is constitutive rather than instrumental: narrative is not a technique applied to a strategy that already exists, it is part of the medium in which strategy becomes shared and change becomes intelligible. The second is structure over content: what a story does depends at least as much on how it is built as on what it says.