Nearly twenty years ago, when I was writing my book PEAK, I became fascinated with a CEO named Bill George.
Bill had led Medtronic for a decade, during which the company’s market capitalization grew from $1.1 billion to $60 billion—an average growth rate of roughly 35% per year. At one point during his tenure, Medtronic’s stock price increased 1,800% in just seven years.
By almost any conventional measure of ROI—Return on Investment—Bill had been a phenomenal leader.
And then he did something interesting. He left.
Not because he had failed, but because he had succeeded. And he began asking a different question: What do I do with everything I’ve learned?
Bill moved into what David Brooks calls his second mountain. He started teaching leadership at Harvard Business School and writing books, including the classic True North. Instead of measuring his life primarily by ROI—Return on Investment—his focus increasingly became what I like to call another kind of ROI: Ripple of Impact.
How many leaders could he help become better leaders? And how many people might those leaders positively affect?
That’s one of the great reframes of the second half of life. Our scorecard can shift from accumulation to multiplication.
Bill has now taught leadership at Harvard for more a long time as he’s in his mid-80s. His work on authentic leadership begins with a deceptively simple premise: you can’t become a great leader by imitating somebody else. You have to understand your own life story, values, crucibles, motivations, and purpose—your True North.
And that feels particularly relevant right now. We live in an era when leadership is too often confused with visibility. Or charisma. Or certainty. Or power.
But the leaders I most admire tend to possess something quieter: self-awareness.
They know who they are. They know what they stand for. They can listen without immediately needing to be right. And, increasingly, they understand that leadership isn’t about getting people to follow you. It’s about helping other people become leaders themselves.
Which is why I’m particularly excited that Bill and I will be teaching together at MEA in Santa Fe November 8-12, Your Next Chapter of Leadership: Purpose, Courage, and Conviction. Here’s my podcast with Bill from earlier this summer.
Between the two of us, we’ve spent nearly a century leading organizations, making mistakes, mentoring younger leaders, navigating our own crucibles, and trying to understand what leadership looks like as we grow older.
This won’t be a workshop about how to climb the corporate ladder faster.
It will be about something more fundamental:
Who are you becoming as a leader?
What is your True North now?
What parts of your leadership style were useful earlier in your career but no longer serve you?
And perhaps most importantly, how do you move from measuring your Return on Investment to considering your Ripple of Impact?
Because eventually the measure of a leader isn’t how much power they accumulated. It’s how much possibility they created in others.
Maybe the ultimate ROI of leadership is the ripple that continues long after you’ve left the room.
You just helped me reframe how I will look at ROI
Namaste
"Ripple of Impact" is the ROI that survives the quarterly report. The best hospitality leaders I know leave behind people who notice more, care more and can lead without them in the room. Harder to graph, much easier to feel.