Learning Leadership

Chapter 10Challenge Is Your Leadership Training Ground

My absolute favorite thing about human beings, said Kaily Adair, an honors business student and Phi Mu at the University of Alabama, “is that we're never satisfied with our condition—in the sense that we are constantly questioning, exploring, and innovating in order to better our situation as a whole.” Kaily's observation expresses one of the most important truths about leadership—the truth that challenge is the crucible for greatness.¹ We said this in Chapter 1, and we're going to say more about it here. No leader ever made anything extraordinary happen by keeping things the same.

Kaily also added that:

If we were just content with the way things were, we might not have ever gotten past the Stone Age, we might never have discovered a way to harness electricity, and we may never have created the Internet enabling people around the world to connect. We are now researching ways to cure cancer, put people on Mars, and perfect alternative energy technologies—each day getting one step closer to what was considered science fiction less than a century ago. Better yet, once we achieve this, we will be searching for the next area for growth. We are constantly looking to challenge the process.

Ginni Rometty, IBM's chair, president, and chief executive officer (CEO), would likely agree with Kaily. At the 2015 Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, she offered this advice: “Think of when did you ever learn the most in your life? What ...