Be a Better Leader

Create a Better Workplace Build a Brand With Purpose

In this 20-page special section, learn how great leaders respond to crisis, how Inc.’s Best Workplaces are thriving without a “place,” and how you can make your brand not just good, but essential.

Question: Why did you become an entrepreneur? Answer: I wanted to gain control over my life. [Cue the laugh track.]

Starting a business is an act of agency. Growing one, founders soon learn, is like juggling wet soap. (Antibacterial, of course.) If any CEOs still believed that their titles gave them power over events, the past few months have disabused them. Orders canceled. Offices emptied. Employees (friends) laid off.

Yet from chaos emerges clarity. When the Covid-19 crisis abates, business leaders at companies small and large, local and national, will have to grapple with tough questions about remote work and diversified supply chains, and whether to trawl in the newly deep talent pool or keep their organizational BMIs as low as possible. But they will see those issues—and many others— with the fresh if pained perspective of survivors. The “why” of business, which in the daily grind we tend to forget, will stand out in greater relief. And all those dichotomies—Do we value employees more or customers? Innovation or execution? Principles or profit?—will lapse into irrelevance. Great companies value all those things. Always.

This issue of Inc. is dedicated to great companies and the people who run them. Despite all the verbiage spilled about leadership, only two things really matter: that it be effective and that it be kind. True leaders attract talented, dedicated people. They provide workplaces—physical or virtual—where those people feel stimulated, safe, rewarded. And they inspire them with purpose: that foundational “why” where every decision, no matter who makes it, begins and ends.

In the following pages you will find practical advice for managing teams, motivating performance, and leading with integrity—in good times and bad. You will also find, we hope, a reminder of why doing those things mattered in the first place, and why it matters now more than ever. Most likely, you are still fighting fires. But think about how, when it is time, you will light fires instead.

The new normal can be better than the old normal. Start here.