conductors, mostly told by orchestra players.

And one of my favorites is the one about Toscanini, who was a

very great conductor, who had the ability to galvanize

people to great passion and intensity and expression, and

he also had a temper, famous temper.

Apparently, when he did one of these temper tantrums, he took

his watch and smashed it on the floor.

I heard recently he bought them wholesale.

Anyway, the story goes that in the middle of the rehearsal he

saw that one of the players in the double bass section wasn't

playing very well, and he shouted at him, "You're

fired!" This was in the days before the union.

We can't do that now.

But in those days, you could fire a musician without any

explanation or recourse.

That would be the end of his career.

So this poor man had to go home, tell his wife he didn't

have a job.

As he left the room for the last time, he turned around

and shouted at Toscanini, "You're a no good son of a

bitch." And Toscanini shouted back, "It's too late to

apologize."

[LAUGHTER]

That's the old style of leadership.

It's top-down, hierarchical, right-thinking, and male.

And it served humanity for about 75,000 years.

Now, I used to be that kind of a leader.

Not quite as extreme, but I was successful as a conductor.

But I paid a high price in terms of the energy,

well-being, and self-expression of the

people around me.

And then I had a quite extraordinary event that

happened in my life.

It was almost like a road to Damascus event for me.

I was 45 years old, and I'd be conducting for 20 years or

more, and suddenly I had a realization, for the first

time, that the conductor of an orchestra

doesn't make a sound.

Now, my picture appears on the front of the CD.

But the conductor doesn't actually make a sound.

He depends, for his power, on his ability to make other

people powerful.

And when that occurred to me, it was so profound, had such

an effect, that people in my orchestra said, Ben, what

happened to you?

And that's what happened.

I realized that my job was to awaken

possibility in other people.

Now, it became from there a real question whether I was

doing that.

And the way you find out whether you're doing that is

to look at their eyes.

If their eyes are shining, you know you're doing it.

And if the eyes are not shining, you

get to ask a question.

And this is the question: who am I being that my players'

eyes are not shining?

We can do that with our children.

Who am I being that my childrens'

eyes are not shining.

Now, from this moment and from this discovery, Roz and I

started exploring together a new kind of leadership.

Now, we distinguished two worlds--

two worlds.

One world we called the downward spiral.

The world of the downward spiral, in which Toscanini was

conducting his orchestra.

The world of the downward spiral is the world of

competition, competition in which you might be energized,

but you might also be demoralized.

The world of fear and pressure, in which you might

be galvanized to great things, and at the same time, you

might be paralyzed.

So the lines come down and they also go up.

It is the world in which we live normal life.

Most conversations take place in the downward spiral.

Gossip and all the magazines that depend on it take place

in the downward spiral.

TV shows that we're used to.

The Apprentice, a perfect example of

the downward spiral.

How To Be A Survivor.

We have another program, How To Be A Millionaire.

And I learned about another one today called

Million Pound Drop.

Those are all downward spiral conversations and games.

The stock market is a perfect image for the downward spiral.

Sometimes it goes up and sometimes it goes down.

And we have to constantly observe to see whether it's up

or whether it's down, which gives us much excitement and

also much dis-ease as it goes down.

That's the world.

Sports, of course, full of downward spiral, but in sports

it doesn't matter because we all go out for a beer

afterwards.

But our educational system is based on a downward spiral,

because there's nowhere to go from an A but down.

And so we shouldn't be surprised if our

children look anxious.

Right now, many of you have young children who are worried

about whether they're going to get into college and accepted

or rejected.

We have a 4-year-old who's worried that he may not get

into preschool.

So this is a world of measurement and a world of

comparisons.

Sometimes it seems as though it's the only world, which is

not the case, which is why I asked for another flip chart.

This world is called the world of radiating possibility, and

it has a completely different shape, going out like this.

This is a world of shared commitments, shared

involvements, of open-heartedness, of

open-mindedness, of

contribution, of love, of health--

both personal and

international and for the world--

collaboration, curiosity, and grandchildren.

Those of you when you get to my age will have this

experience of having grandchildren.

One of mine, who's six, doesn't walk, she skips

everywhere she goes, like this.

Now, you don't see this much on Wall Street.

They don't do that on Wall Street.

If somebody did that on Wall Street, they'd come along in a

white van and take them away.

But all my grandchild is saying is I'm happy to be here

and I'm happy you are here, too.

And there's a piece of music which goes with that, which is

the Beethoven's "7th Symphony," which some of you

know it goes like [SINGING RHYTHM].

That's actually a very hard rhythm to keep.

That rhythm tends to fall into [SINGING RHYTHM].

If you're a little lazy, [UNINTELLIGIBLE]

[SINGING RHYTHM],

which is a march.

You can do that for hours.

This rhythm is [SINGING RHYTHM].

That's the rhythm of skipping.

When I did the recording of it-- which, incidentally, you

can get at amazon.com--

the orchestra, which was a wonderful orchestra, the

Philharmonia Orchestra, played, [SINGING RHYTHM].

After a while, they got a bit tired and played,

[SINGING RHYTHM].

I said no, no, the rhythm is [SINGING RHYTHM].

Oh yes, [SINGING RHYTHM].

It kept on falling back.

My job is to remind the players what the rhythm of

transformation is, because transformation lives here, and

the rhythm of transformation is lighter and brighter and

faster and more buoyant than the rhythm of

exhortation and blame.

You should, you would, you must, you need.

So what we know about this world over there is that life

unfolds in the story we tell.

It's, in other words, an invented world.

Now, you probably know the story of the two show salesmen

who were sent to Africa in the 1900s from Manchester in order

to find out if they could sell shoes in Africa.

And they wrote telegrams back to base in Manchester.

And one of them wrote, "Situation hopeless.

Stop.

They don't wear shoes." The other one wrote, "Glorious

opportunity, they don't have any shoes yet."

Now those two stories are told about

circumstances that are identical.

The circumstances hadn't changed, only what changes is

what we say about it.

And you notice that even the music of that statement,

"Situation hopeless, they don't wear shoes," and

"Glorious opportunity, they don't have any shoes yet,"

along with the hand motion, is a totally different world and

we get to choose at every moment of every single day

which place we're standing in.

Now, it may seem to some of you that this sounds like

positive thinking.

It is not positive thinking.

Positive thinking is saying something is great when you

know it's shitty.

[LAUGHTER]

And it's stupid, and it belongs in

the downward spiral.

Possibility is something quite different, and I'm going to

tell you a story.

My father who, as he told you, he was quite a remarkable man.

He had an amazing ability to turn things upside-down.

He used to say, there's no such thing as bad weather,

only inappropriate clothing.

That was his way.

And he was a survivor from the Holocaust. He lost his mother

in Auschwitz, and he lost eight brothers--

members of his family.

And he lost everything.

He lost his home, his belongings, his money, his

profession.

And he came to England with four children to

support and a wife.

And then he was interned.

They had internment camps in those days for Germans, and

they put them all in these camps.

There were 2,000 men living in tents.

And the state of fear and anxiety under which these

people lived must have been virtually unbearable.

Some of them were so stressed that they sat, my father told

me, against the barbed wire fence for the

entire time of the day.

Now, he looked around and said, there are a lot of

intelligent people here.

We should have a university.

And so they started a university in that camp, with

40 classes running regularly.

No paper, no pencils, no books, no blackboard, nothing.

Just people talking to each other.

That is possibility.

He didn't say this situation is great and pretend that it

was positive.

He simply made up his mind to create something out of

circumstances that seemed to have no hope and no

possibility in them.

That is the secret of possibility.

The art of possibility, which is the name of a book, is the

art of moving from here to there.

And leadership is taking people with you.

That's simply what it is, this new view.

Now, central to this is the notion of vision.

In the middle of this circle I'm going to put the word

vision, because that is crucial.

Now, there's a great deal of misunderstanding about vision.

If you go to the London Business School--

many of you have been there-- in the hallway of the London

Business School there is a very large stone plaque, which

says, "Our vision is to be the preeminent business school in

the world." I went to the director and I said, you know

that's not really a vision.

She said, I know, but it's written in stone.

[LAUGHTER]

Now, a vision, to be a vision, has to be for everybody.

There must be nobody who's left out.

The Boston Philharmonic has a vision.

Our orchestra is called-- our vision is "Passionate

music-making without boundaries." And that's the

thing that leads our organization.

Our orchestra's not run by a person, it's run by a vision.

And every conversation we have and every discussion is led by

that vision.

So we had a discussion recently about ticket prices

for next year.

They have to go up, yes, by all means, they will go up,