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The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make The Impossible Happen
How leaders can achieve something meaningful—transform a brand, a workplace, a technology, themselves—beyond holding an influential position.
Do you want to do work that is worthy of your time and talent? Do you want to make your mark on your industry, company, or within your community? Are you satisfied with the fact that reengineering, quality improvements, and other changes never really make a lasting impact? Then you need to go beyond the techniques of improvement and learn the skills that it takes to be extraordinary. The power to be extraordinary is not one we are born with. Rather, it is a power that one can learn, and Tracy Goss helps executives realize this power. Here in this book for the first time, Goss makes her coursework available to the general reader.
Goss’s unique methodology shows how you how you can “put at risk the success you’ve become for the power of making the impossible happen.” She positions executives to take on the future that they dream about. She teaches how to behave differently so that you are free of past constraints. She shows how you can be at home in the environment in which you are constantly surrounded by threats, and how to transcend the ordinary to make the impossible happen. Her work has resulted in many important life changes and organizational reinventions worldwide.
Do you want to do work that is worthy of your time and talent? Do you want to make your mark on your industry, company, or within your community? Are you satisfied with the fact that reengineering, quality improvements, and other changes never really make a lasting impact? Then you need to go beyond the techniques of improvement and learn the skills that it takes to be extraordinary. The power to be extraordinary is not one we are born with. Rather, it is a power that one can learn, and Tracy Goss helps executives realize this power. Here in this book for the first time, Goss makes her coursework available to the general reader.
Goss’s unique methodology shows how you how you can “put at risk the success you’ve become for the power of making the impossible happen.” She positions executives to take on the future that they dream about. She teaches how to behave differently so that you are free of past constraints. She shows how you can be at home in the environment in which you are constantly surrounded by threats, and how to transcend the ordinary to make the impossible happen. Her work has resulted in many important life changes and organizational reinventions worldwide.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 1995
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537 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
November 2, 2017
This book contains a handful of very useful nuggets (see below) wrapped entirely in a nonsensical and obtuse presentation which uses worthlessly broad examples and made up terminology to obfuscate its core value. It may have been effective if the author had cut 90% of this unnecessary repetition and presented the concepts using plain English, but that might have revealed that many of them fail to stand up to even a modicum of normal scrutiny. I imagine that it's easier to get people to buy into something if it doesn't make sense.
Let's try to pull out some of the value from the rest of the steaming pile because there ARE very powerful ideas lurking amidst the rest.
The core concept is that you can make the impossible happen by completely reframing your perspective on life and how that informs your journey through it.
We have been successful in life so far by deploying a "Winning Strategy" which uses our best attributes to carve through the path of least resistance to 'success' but has also firmly wedged us in a narrow canyon of defining what is "possible" and "impossible" as a result. Clinging to that same strategy, once you've hit a point of impossibility, is more harmful than good and will prevent you from achieving the impossibility.
Your Winning Strategy typically involves implicitly asking a question of the world and then performing an action based on the answer you've heard. Your first step to addressing it is to identify the question you're implicitly asking and the action you take as a result.
We frame everything in life as a reaction to what "should" and "should not" be, which naturally puts us in the frame of subjective reasoning and excuses. Instead, we should just casually examine the facts in a sort of Zen way -- they are just stones in the river that happened and we will keep flowing as needed.
One of the best references was to the Samurai 'dying before going into battle', an exercise in which they fully and completely accept all of the emotional pain associated with their death prior to engaging in battle so they have fully accepted the worst possible case into their hearts. That allows them to have exceptional power to take risks. The corollary to your own life should be obvious.
Clinging to hope for the future is the worst thing you can do… you must own the worst possible case fully and then you are freed to act without consequence. Not only that, you must literally own that you will die and they will throw dirt on your face regardless of how your life goes. You must accept a certain meaninglessness in life to be truly free to live it however you wish.
As part of your path toward fulfilling the impossible, you must declare that it is possible, that you ARE exactly whatever it is that you must be in order to manifest it, and that nothing that occurs along the way will stop the inevitability of this occurring.
Further, you need to create your own version of the Jobsian "Reality Distortion Field" whereby you ARE the symbol of your new movement and the key player in the game of reality which you have redefined to be whatever it takes to realize your impossibility. This also allows you to build a strong enough frame to draw others into the game with you because the rules are clear (and you are clearly committed to making it happen). It also allows you to view your whole life through this frame, processing information, relationships and action through a lens you never otherwise could have. Finally, this game takes place in the frame that your impossible future is the starting point and you simply need to work backwards from it rather than moving incrementally forward from the present as we typically do. All of these things make you act bigger and more creatively.
The only game worth playing is one where you are 100% committed and where you have 100% accepted that it will certainly not work out like it should but that's okay because it's worth playing anyway. This bears repeating -- it's only worth pursuing this audacious impossibility if the 'failure' case you have accepted is still a success to you. That's the best way to guarantee commitment.
As a process, you need to get comfortable making tons of requests of other people and leaning into the results (whether positive or negative). This is just Hustle 101, but if your frame is sufficiently strong then this is really the only option anyway, so it all comes back to fully embracing who you need to BE and what your reality needs to look like to make this happen.
Finally, spend lots of time practicing these concepts on a small level to build awareness of them. For instance, look for multiple times a day when you deploy your "winning strategy" and think about what impossibility you are trying to avoid. Think about how your past is really just a narrative and you are always thinking in terms of how things "should" and "shouldn't" be instead of properly stepping above.
--
Hopefully that's a roughly useful accounting of some core concepts. Many of them seem powerful to put in practice, if not quite in the exact framework presented. Again, I can't get over the poor style of this book, which presented a significant barrier towards the concepts within (and much frustrated gesticulation along the way). The examples are very broad and not well supported but seem designed, like a good horoscope, to give everyone something to see themselves in. Many of the theories don't hold up to any kind of reasonable analysis or are essentially platitudes wrapped up in false dichotomies and straw man arguments. The terminology used to describe the concepts is incredibly obtuse and seems designed to confuse rather than educate. Lots of time is spent unpacking totally inane concepts (like enumerating the dozens of ways you can make a request of someone) that really takes away from the core messages.
But… well, hopefully you can find a better summary than this to unpack the ideas without having to suffer through the path to them so you can achieve your impossible dream.
Let's try to pull out some of the value from the rest of the steaming pile because there ARE very powerful ideas lurking amidst the rest.
The core concept is that you can make the impossible happen by completely reframing your perspective on life and how that informs your journey through it.
We have been successful in life so far by deploying a "Winning Strategy" which uses our best attributes to carve through the path of least resistance to 'success' but has also firmly wedged us in a narrow canyon of defining what is "possible" and "impossible" as a result. Clinging to that same strategy, once you've hit a point of impossibility, is more harmful than good and will prevent you from achieving the impossibility.
Your Winning Strategy typically involves implicitly asking a question of the world and then performing an action based on the answer you've heard. Your first step to addressing it is to identify the question you're implicitly asking and the action you take as a result.
We frame everything in life as a reaction to what "should" and "should not" be, which naturally puts us in the frame of subjective reasoning and excuses. Instead, we should just casually examine the facts in a sort of Zen way -- they are just stones in the river that happened and we will keep flowing as needed.
One of the best references was to the Samurai 'dying before going into battle', an exercise in which they fully and completely accept all of the emotional pain associated with their death prior to engaging in battle so they have fully accepted the worst possible case into their hearts. That allows them to have exceptional power to take risks. The corollary to your own life should be obvious.
Clinging to hope for the future is the worst thing you can do… you must own the worst possible case fully and then you are freed to act without consequence. Not only that, you must literally own that you will die and they will throw dirt on your face regardless of how your life goes. You must accept a certain meaninglessness in life to be truly free to live it however you wish.
As part of your path toward fulfilling the impossible, you must declare that it is possible, that you ARE exactly whatever it is that you must be in order to manifest it, and that nothing that occurs along the way will stop the inevitability of this occurring.
Further, you need to create your own version of the Jobsian "Reality Distortion Field" whereby you ARE the symbol of your new movement and the key player in the game of reality which you have redefined to be whatever it takes to realize your impossibility. This also allows you to build a strong enough frame to draw others into the game with you because the rules are clear (and you are clearly committed to making it happen). It also allows you to view your whole life through this frame, processing information, relationships and action through a lens you never otherwise could have. Finally, this game takes place in the frame that your impossible future is the starting point and you simply need to work backwards from it rather than moving incrementally forward from the present as we typically do. All of these things make you act bigger and more creatively.
The only game worth playing is one where you are 100% committed and where you have 100% accepted that it will certainly not work out like it should but that's okay because it's worth playing anyway. This bears repeating -- it's only worth pursuing this audacious impossibility if the 'failure' case you have accepted is still a success to you. That's the best way to guarantee commitment.
As a process, you need to get comfortable making tons of requests of other people and leaning into the results (whether positive or negative). This is just Hustle 101, but if your frame is sufficiently strong then this is really the only option anyway, so it all comes back to fully embracing who you need to BE and what your reality needs to look like to make this happen.
Finally, spend lots of time practicing these concepts on a small level to build awareness of them. For instance, look for multiple times a day when you deploy your "winning strategy" and think about what impossibility you are trying to avoid. Think about how your past is really just a narrative and you are always thinking in terms of how things "should" and "shouldn't" be instead of properly stepping above.
--
Hopefully that's a roughly useful accounting of some core concepts. Many of them seem powerful to put in practice, if not quite in the exact framework presented. Again, I can't get over the poor style of this book, which presented a significant barrier towards the concepts within (and much frustrated gesticulation along the way). The examples are very broad and not well supported but seem designed, like a good horoscope, to give everyone something to see themselves in. Many of the theories don't hold up to any kind of reasonable analysis or are essentially platitudes wrapped up in false dichotomies and straw man arguments. The terminology used to describe the concepts is incredibly obtuse and seems designed to confuse rather than educate. Lots of time is spent unpacking totally inane concepts (like enumerating the dozens of ways you can make a request of someone) that really takes away from the core messages.
But… well, hopefully you can find a better summary than this to unpack the ideas without having to suffer through the path to them so you can achieve your impossible dream.
December 31, 2018
My sister gave me this book! What a gift! I have not stopped talking about it yet or thinking about the concepts.
It's about executive re-invention. I am not an executive but my goal is to lead an organization and this lays the framework. It also allows one to accomplish something so extraordinary that is impossible to actually making it possible.
There are two concepts that are freeing! Dying before going into battle - Freeing yourself from the illusions that you can control life so that it turns out the way it "should"
and learning what my winning strategy has been all these years - this winning strategy will not propel into my new future...it's self limiting. Identifying my strategy has been key and now I can recognize it and move away from it.
This book is a slow read. i encourage everyone to read this book once a year to remind themselves how far they can go.
It's about executive re-invention. I am not an executive but my goal is to lead an organization and this lays the framework. It also allows one to accomplish something so extraordinary that is impossible to actually making it possible.
There are two concepts that are freeing! Dying before going into battle - Freeing yourself from the illusions that you can control life so that it turns out the way it "should"
and learning what my winning strategy has been all these years - this winning strategy will not propel into my new future...it's self limiting. Identifying my strategy has been key and now I can recognize it and move away from it.
This book is a slow read. i encourage everyone to read this book once a year to remind themselves how far they can go.
Read
January 22, 2016This book is from the performance coaching paradigm. The book has many practical tools and some really good inspiration. There is something about the language the author uses that feels a bit odd to me the terms "est-y" or new age come to mind. I will need to translate several of the concepts using language with which I feel more comfortable e.g. Universal Human Paradigm, Declaring an impossible future, referring to this as a game (although it does have an intriguing eastern "die before going into battle" type theme), Reinvention paradigm, etc.
It clearly inspires breakthrough thinking and action vs. predictable results. The author calls it creating an impossible future. The author also makes a case for moving beyond our winning strategy i.e., the things that have made us successful in the past can also be limiting as we move into the future. It definitely sends consistent messages to be extraordinary. She encourages readers to develop life long practices of being extraordinary practices with had me reflecting on connections between this and the Hudson Maps
It clearly inspires breakthrough thinking and action vs. predictable results. The author calls it creating an impossible future. The author also makes a case for moving beyond our winning strategy i.e., the things that have made us successful in the past can also be limiting as we move into the future. It definitely sends consistent messages to be extraordinary. She encourages readers to develop life long practices of being extraordinary practices with had me reflecting on connections between this and the Hudson Maps
November 21, 2017
This is a book for people who are already successful and want to expand that success. It illustrate the very fact that our biggest strengths can also contribute at limiting ourselves.
November 2, 2019
I am a coach--my job is to help people cast off their shackles and make a difference in the world. This book has been my most effective guide in unleashing others. That said, it is obtuse. I've read it cover to cover three times and random chapters countless more and only by using its concepts with some extraordinary clients do I now have a reasonable sense of what Tracy Goss is offering us. Her offering is extraordinary and so foreign to our everyday understanding of the world, it takes some serious mindbending to embrace it.
Which is to say: if you want to cut loose your own shackles, this book is the best path forward--but understand that it'll take some work.
Which is to say: if you want to cut loose your own shackles, this book is the best path forward--but understand that it'll take some work.
January 5, 2023
I loved this book! It's a little bit obscure. It was published in the 90s. But I love how she focuses on really up-leveling your business by completely changing the way you approach challenges.
She has this way of teaching you how to break down your defenses so that rather than bringing a lot of stories and expectations to your work, you’re simply (radically) accountable for everything that you want to create and accomplish. And she has lots of tools and ideas for how to do that.
I highly recommend this book to any business owner who's feeling stifled by their success and wants to break out to their own next level but doesn't know how.
She has this way of teaching you how to break down your defenses so that rather than bringing a lot of stories and expectations to your work, you’re simply (radically) accountable for everything that you want to create and accomplish. And she has lots of tools and ideas for how to do that.
I highly recommend this book to any business owner who's feeling stifled by their success and wants to break out to their own next level but doesn't know how.
July 27, 2018
Death before battle. This book has challenged me to go past what I currently do today. The questions asked have impacted how I view what I once saw as impossible. The impossible is truly possible!!! I read this book. Loved it. Now I am ready to go back thru and practice each step. Practice practice practice. Read this book if you want to explore and identify what is keeping you where you are at. Discover what is possible!!
May 30, 2024
How to employ your mind to create what looks impossible to you. Somewhere deep in your unconscious mind are an abundance of solutions.
A study manual to defining deep desirable goals and manifesting them for real in your life. Even if it looks or sounds impossible. You can create it and make it possible.
A study manual to defining deep desirable goals and manifesting them for real in your life. Even if it looks or sounds impossible. You can create it and make it possible.
June 15, 2019
only to be read if you are looking for deep change that will mean letting go of old identities you are very comfortable in/like very much. without that lens, this book will annoying, obtuse, and unhelpful.
August 4, 2025
This book has been cited by one of my favorite leaders several times. Not a bad read, I’m about to check it out for the second time and see how I feel about it because the first time around it was one of many books that got me out of an emotional hole.
Read
August 9, 2019Read with a bookclub at work.
January 4, 2020
Never read anything like this before. Change how you are 'being' to change your results. Easy to read, challenging to implement. Enjoyed this book!
November 9, 2020
This is a great book for anyone serious for their lives. I've put my learning in this post: https://medium.com/@luanjunyi/reinven...
January 1, 2021
Lots of insights but the concept of Winning strategy was super interesting to learn about.
January 3, 2021
Outstanding! Eye opening! Freeing and powerful!
October 18, 2021
Required reading from my life coach training program syllabus. Very useful!
May 25, 2022
Too difficult read for me …. Great ideas but too many invented words.
June 13, 2007
A non-fiction read that makes you think about power, and how we can command our futures by controlling and understanding the power we have. Made me think, and think about how we use language, which controls thinking - it's all about power.
December 30, 2009
While I'm slightly averse to anything that has "Executive Re-Invention" in the sub-title, there is a deep ontological journey embedded within. Great with a smoke, a scotch and a buttery leather chair (for all you closeted indie execs).
December 29, 2015
Powerful book on how to reinvent yourself and your company. It is a difficult read because there is much self-reflection that needs to be done but well worth reading over a few times!
January 24, 2014
Very interesting read with a lot of takeaways. Requires a lot of deep thinking, and some concepts were over my head
December 26, 2024
This is a great book to assist you in claiming your power. Great tips to take action.
Read
August 24, 2018gr3-5
I have browsed this book and think it would be a neat title to share with kids, especially for kids who like non-fiction and quirky things.
I have browsed this book and think it would be a neat title to share with kids, especially for kids who like non-fiction and quirky things.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews