The Game Has Changed, So Must We

The daytime sky in the Spanish town of Burlada featured low-slung clouds and a greying landscape as the cheering crowd supported their favorite cross-country runners, including Olympic bronze medalist Abel Mutai from Kenya and Ivan Fernandez Anaya from Spain.

As the two contenders neared the finish line that cool early December day in 2012, Mutai stopped, thinking he had won the race. Confused by the signage, he only had a few feet left to go. Fernandez Anaya saw that Mutai had made an error, shouting to him in Spanish to keep going, but Mutai didn’t understand. So Fernandez, knowing Mutai had clearly won, pushed him across the finish line. When a reporter asked him why he chose not to beat Mutai, Fernandez Anaya’s answer was clear:

“I didn't deserve to win it,” said the then 24-year-old Fernández Anaya. "I did what I had to do.”[1] He made a generous choice and became a champion in his own right by doing the right thing. He understood that winning fairly meant we all win in the long run. It was a sign of a new kind of leadership in which people do not exploit others’ weaknesses, but rather choose to celebrate their strengths. His decision signaled the dawning of a new age, a new generation that realizes everyone can be a leader. In fact, everyone is.

“Once you scratch at the surface of what leadership truly means, particularly in today’s world, that exploration could go on forever,” admitted Henry De Sio in a recent phone interview. His new release, Changemaker Playbook: The New Physics of Leadership in a World of Explosive Change, recounts the stories of multiple leaders from across various industries and walks of life who have adapted to the new playing field in which true collaboration replaces toxic competition, compassion replaces cold-heartedness and empathy is the fundamental backbone for decision-making.

De Sio has had first-hand experience in the shift the leadership landscape has taken. Moving to Chicago with his wife who was pregnant with their first child in 2007, De Sio worked as the Chief Operating Officer for the Obama campaign. At first, the organization was structured in silos with typical top-down decision-making.

As the dawn of social media took on a momentum of its own, however, the organization needed to pivot to address fast-changing scenarios. De Sio came to realize that the shift from a silo-hierarchical, one-leader-at-a-time architecture to an “everyone-leading-in-every-moment” system created polar opposite leadership dynamics. In this new way of working, everyone had to see the big picture and advance solutions in a fast-changing environment—no one could be passive.

The team would need tools that supported transparency and access to information for everyone. In order to respond more nimbly to the change forces pressing all around the organization, he saw the power in giving every team member agency over their own decisions. His 21-month stint on the 2008 Obama campaign taught him that tearing down walls and democratizing leadership would soon alter his paradigm forever.

And so it was. Still compelled by his new leadership discoveries from his days in the campaign, De Sio decided to leave the White House bubble after two-and-one-half years of working as Deputy Assistant to the President. It wasn’t a safe choice, but he knew he had a calling that was greater than his comfort.

A powerful conversation with Bill Clinton at a charity event in the spring of 2012 to honor the passengers from United Airlines flight #93, who made the decision to take that plane down on September 11th in lieu of hitting a government building, helped him see how those passengers had enlisted in a moment in the nation’s defense. Clinton insisted that the passengers were heroes, not victims, offering their lives in a split-second decision of service to greater humanity.

De Sio realized that this was now a world where we act on our leadership in ways like never before. It used to be you put a dime in the payphone and waited for help to arrive, but today, we have the tools at our fingertips that enable us to be part of the first-responder equation. With a tap on our phone, we can give to those in need or rally others to a neighbors’ cause. And we all may one day be faced with that dreadful decision to enlist in the nation’s security in a moment. In this new world, empathy is the new premium.

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This reinforced De Sio’s belief that his life’s work would focus on change outside the White House. He also took a long look in the mirror and asked himself in earnest: “How am I preparing my children for this new world?” He had gotten a glimpse of it during his Obama years. He knew it was just the beginning.

His book is chock full of stories of changemakers from around the world, but perhaps the most moving story involved his then five-year-old son, Dante. Noticing that his father was packing his bag, Dante asked where he was going. De Sio, an introvert, was uneasy about an upcoming meeting with author Seth Godin in New York City later that day, and in that moment, recognized an opportunity to cultivate empathy by sharing authentically with his son. He knew that Dante would relate to his feelings, as he noticed that he too sometimes experienced discomfort in new situations.

“Ask him three questions,” Dante wisely advised. “What’s your favorite tall building? What’s your favorite food? And, how are you doing today?” And that is exactly what De Sio did when he met Godin the next day in a busy Midtown restaurant. His vulnerability and openness, two key characteristics of any leader, were the themes of Godin’s blog post the next day. “The connected person is no different from you,” Godin wrote, speaking directly to shyness and the worry that comes with meeting strangers. “They’ve merely made a generous choice. When we weave together strangers and turn them into a tribe, we create real value, value that lasts.”

De Sio talks about the value of creating a team of teams to address our omnidirectional world in which so many issues are coming at us at once. New skillsets are arising in the workplace, including a need for innovative thinking, a service-based heart, an entrepreneurial spirit and a collaborative outlook. What was once considered a soft skill — empathy — has become a hard skill.

According to De Sio, changemakers have the ability to tear down walls between two or more sides that would otherwise not connect. “That’s when innovation happens. This is about different points of view coming around the possibilities, challenges and opportunities. As change accelerates, we need people forming into fluid, integrated teams of teams to meet these challenges.”

The pandemic has shown us how this thinking through unprecedented collaboration among various pharmaceutical companies in an industry historically known for intense competitiveness, has once again altered the game.

If we are to thrive, we must come together to figure out the issues facing us all. His closing thought as we wrapped up our interview drives home what we can all learn in a world shaken by fear.

“I put a premium on empathy-based leadership and ethics,” he stated. “It’s the foundational changemaker capacity and skill. Once you have the ability to see the world outside of your own experience, you have the ability to tear down those walls to come together around these challenges and opportunities.”

If life were a race, wouldn’t we, like Fernandez Anaya, want us all to win? De Sio offers us a new playbook to make sure we do.