Inspired Leadership

Chapter 4Make the Impossible Possible

I believe many limitations that people think they face in life are self-imposed. But how do you break through those limitations?

So far, we have discussed how to dream, and how to connect that dream to the aspirations of your team. But to many of them, especially if the business has struggled, those dreams will seem impossible.

In this chapter, I'm taking apart one of my charity walks to show that something that seemed impossible at first sight wasn't, and that teamwork, at its best, can achieve remarkable, apparently impossible, success. Another quote from Muhammad Ali sums it up: “Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential.”

Realizing that potential, however, does not happen by chance.

Walking to the North Pole

I walked to the North Pole because my sister died of cancer in 2004.

Jayne was 44 years old. After she died, I asked the consultant who had treated her for myeloid leukaemia for five years whether anything would have helped, or if there was a tool that the hospital didn't have that it needed.

“We could do with a monoclonal antibody unit,” she said. I asked her to explain, and she told me it was a hospital ward where they treat patients in a specific way, using particular antibodies. I asked why they didn't have one, and then she told me the price of building ...