I’ve had the joy and privilege to observe closely the trajectory of one of the most inspired entrepreneurs and company builders in the world, Brazilian Jorge Paulo Lemann. Lemann and his two partners, Marcel Herrmann Telles and Carlos Alberto Sicupira, started with a tiny brokerage firm and from there built one of the most successful investment banks in Latin America. And while the partners were smart and accomplished at managing money, they discovered they had a peculiar genius for building a culture filled with hungry, fanatic people who thrived on meritocracy. They became so good at building culture that they eventually began to consider buying entire companies outright and then running them based on their cultural operating system with the goal to build and grow them forever. “If we believe in our culture,” they said to themselves, “why not bet big on it?

The strong instinct of most corporate leaders, faced with the teeming diversity not just of gender, race, and age but of thought, drive, and relationship inside their organizations, is to look for some way to exert control—to rein it all in, to impose conformity on the chaos, and thence to be able to understand what’s going on, and to shape what will happen next. And so companies have spent, and continue to spend, large quantities of time and money trying to work around each person’s uniqueness—and this is where these models bubble up from.

Learning came naturally for Sherry Lansing, seventy-three, the most powerful female movie mogul of all time and the first to head a major studio. But first, she was a schoolteacher, actress, and film executive, before becoming chairman of Paramount Pictures for twelve years. While the overall movie biz may have been more gender diverse, the corridors of power were exclusively male until Sherry came along; perhaps it was a result of her unique perspective that her whole career, as she tells it, was often mentoring or being mentored without even knowing it. Like me, she loved what she was doing until her calling turned into a job and it was then she knew it was time to get curious.

In recent years, large corporate business has focused its marketing and promotion efforts on collecting “vanity metrics”—like social media followers, subscribers, or clicks. But those metrics don’t always correlate with sales, profit, or reputation. That is, they don’t measure engagement or trust—they simply show how many people took some form of marketing bait. By considering “collecting” over “connecting” (with customers), these companies are becoming too caught up in collecting page likers and followers and have forgotten to build relationships with those individual customers who are already listening, following, or buying. Having 100 passionate fans of your business who are eager to buy anything you release is exponentially more effective than having 100,000 followers who simply follow your business to win something like a free iPad.

There is no evidence that there was anyone (other than perhaps Carroll Rosenbloom) who imagined that Frontiere— a former Las Vegas chorus girl and lounge singer who’d been married five times by her early 30s— would one day become known as Madame Ram, appear in an American Express commercial as a savvy business icon, oversee the “Greatest Show on Turf,” and win a Super Bowl ring. Neither Graham nor Frontiere fully clicked into frame as business leaders until after age 50, and they flourished in line with their encodings well into their 60s and 70s.