Not anymore. The sort of leader required by this economy lives one life, and shows the same face to everyone—and the pleasant surprise, here, is that the person you are required to be is also the person you will want to be. The simple way to put it is that in order to be an effective leader, you have to learn to simply be your most authentic self, in all situations, with all people. The new economic world offers you, essentially, the opportunity to quit acting a role in favor of being true to yourself. You can now be one person, everywhere, in all things. The family man and enlightened leader gain strength from the same set of values now.

Business easily takes on the ethos of a sport where winning is everything. And sports, as we saw earlier, taps into the most atavistic survival instincts, equating winning with survival—where, down through history, survival has meant defeating something or someone else. In sports, by definition, somebody has to win and somebody has to lose. This isn't true in business. It isn't a zero-sum game. You don't kill or vanquish your competitors. You co-exist with them, each of you focusing on what you do best. You get desired results by striving for excellence, as much as by blocking your opponent's best shots. In the game of business, you win the customer's satisfaction, not your competitor's defeat. Your competitor may fall, but that isn't the point. Focus on that fight, against others in the market, and you lose the relationship with your customers, your profit, and your success. There's a different culture you set up in an organization which is more sustainable. In the long term, it will continue to produce better results and is essential for building the relationships of trust and loyalty with employees and customers required by the new economy.

The Moment of Truth
In 1982, Johnson & Johnson was a client of Young & Rubicam, so I found myself in the privileged position of seeing a classic business story unfold, from the inside, when Johnson & Johnson recalled more than 250,000 bottles of Tylenol after seven Chicagoans were killed by cyanide-laced capsules of the pain reliever. Jim Burke, then CEO of Johnson & Johnson, the makers of Tylenol, found himself in a situation where he and his company had everything to lose by being open about the facts—and he chose to be guided by honesty and trust. The Tylenol poisonings case is one of the best known, most dramatic, and most revealing case histories of how to do things the right way when everything seems to be falling apart—when fear is at its most extreme.

At the time, Burke had been CEO for six years. So he bore the responsibility of shepherding the brand, and the company, through one of the most profound crises in corporate history. For several weeks, Burke and his team had to manage amid an atmosphere of near-hysteria. Millions of Americans were terrified, not only of taking Tylenol, but of other pain remedies, fearing that a madman intent on random killing was at large. Rumors abounded, and any death that occurred in proximity to a Tylenol capsule set off alarms. Separating fact from fiction was remarkably difficult. One truck driver was found dead alongside the road with an opened Tylenol bottle nearby. His body tested positive for cyanide. It took a while for doctors to realize that the driver was a heavy smoker, and that smoker's bodies are often "cyanotic." He'd died of a heart attack—the presence of Tylenol was a mere coincidence. Under the circumstances, many observers doubted that the faith of the public in Tylenol, and perhaps in any over-the-counter medication, could ever be restored.

Burke and his team at Johnson & Johnson proved them wrong.

First, they responded with total candor, openness, and willingness to tell the truth, beginning with the very first reports of poisonings. It helped that they had nothing to hide, but Jim believed the public had the right to know everything the company knew. Second—and this was the toughest part—they made every decision with one over-riding goal in mind: public safety. For example, both FBI director William Webster and FDA head Arthur Hayes urged J&J not to withdraw Tylenol from the market, fearing a national panic and worried that it might encourage copycat attacks. But Jim considered the risk of more poisonings simply too great.

It must have been immensely tempting to do what they'd suggested—to take the easy route and save large sums of money. If someone else were poisoned, one could point the finger at the federal government. But Burke insisted on pulling the product from the shelves. It was, he realized, the only way to completely guarantee the safety of those who used Tylenol.

J&J spent over $100 million recalling, testing, and destroying millions of bottles of capsules, and then spent millions more on replacing the capsules with less tamper-prone tablets. Then the company took the lead in developing new standards and procedures for making tamper-resistant packaging for over-the-counter medications, which the FDA quickly adopted. These were decisions with large short-term costs—and gigantic long term benefits. Defying the odds, Tylenol regained eighty-five percent of its prior market share within a year and soon regained its position as the country's leading analgesic. Before long, sales were greater than ever.

Contrast the Tylenol story to the Firestone tire episode, in which deaths attributed to faulty tires have brought a great company to the brink of financial disaster. From the start, Firestone responded to the first reports with a defensive stance—denying its own responsibility. There was no problem with the tires, only a problem with the design of the cars using them. That statement sums up the moral and professional failure—the lack of willingness to take responsibility. Trying to pin the blame on someone else was wrong. It was bad business, in every sense of the term, to conceal the data for years without bringing it to Ford and to the public. Firestone had made the tires, they had the data.

Firestone lost sight of the enormous difference between legal culpability—what you can get away with—and moral responsibility. In that gray area thrives most of the bad faith that eventually brings a company down. Being able to get away with something doesn't make it good business. When Firestone celebrated its one hundredth anniversary in 2000, who was going to light a firecracker? It's a tragic failure of stewardship and the corruption of a brand name that took a century to build. What the company lacked were the fundamental cornerstones: honesty and trust and a willingness to take a short-term hit, financially, out of concern for customer safety. Their action denied alignment and denied customer focus.

By contrast, Burke and the J&J team were well aware of their responsibility to conserve the heritage of trust and integrity J&J had spent a hundred years building. From the moment the Tylenol crisis exploded, they were focused on that legacy of trust and everything was directed toward the welfare of millions of their customers, as well as the confidence health care professionals had placed in J&J products for decades.