She instinctively shifted from being a problem solver to being a tool builder— don’t just solve the problem, use the problem to build a tool!

Combat aviator in the Pacific, jet fighter pilot in Korea, test pilot in the supersonic age, Project Bullet— each iteration, each step, Glenn just kept volunteering himself into the future.

At age 28, she took a big step when she helped architect a suffrage parade the day before Woodrow Wilson’s first presidential inauguration, a seminal moment that revealed her encodings for quiet, fearless leadership and a penchant for crafting spectacles of protest. She also began to show what would be one of her most distinctive leadership encodings: strategic insight. Paul had an impressive ability to see with piercing clarity the grand strategies that would lead to victory. In particular, she saw that the best strategy lay in pursuit of a constitutional amendment, rather than seeking suffrage state by state, and she co-founded with Lucy Burns the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage dedicated to that strategy.

I felt miscast inside a large company working on software for personal computers. I knew early that while I respected HP and felt grateful for the opportunity, I’d never flourish there. So, at the suggestion of Rochelle Myers, who’d co-created the creativity course at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, I decided to use working at HP as a personal laboratory to study myself, or more precisely, to study myself like a bug.

Nigel Wilcockson, my longtime publishing partner in the U.K., proved himself yet again to be a writer’s editor with whom I can engage intellectually and philosophically. Early in our working friendship, Nigel grasped that my work was never fundamentally about business and leadership, but about the study of people and exceptional human endeavor, and he encouraged me to boldly break out of the limiting circle of being defined as a business and leadership author.