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homes and townhouses—and I told the executives to take a good look inside each one. They were homes decorated with care, down to the accent cushions bought at the local big-box store . The restaurants in the neighbourhood served good solid family fare, and, on a big celebration night, people went to Milestones, not the local bistro. We glimpsed the world of people living their best lives while shopping at Costco and ripping recipes out of magazines they picked up in the supermarket checkout line. And my reasons for giving us all a peek into those lives were straightforward: We had to get out of our little urban bubble. We had to recognize that people, their choices and their aspirations, were different everywhere, and those differences mattered.
    It turned out to be a trip worth taking. Not only did we bond as a team, the shows they pitched after that fact-finding mission had a whole different feel. We went from gourmet fare and unpronounceable ingredients to shows such as Licence to Grill, from Dream Castles to Property Virgins , programs that invited everyone to explore exciting but accessible possibilities on the home front. Sure, it was still worth seeking to inspire and elevate viewers, but if you make them feel like they don’t belong in the tent, they’ll never enter it, and you’ll never reach them at all.
    The experience of that field trip to the suburbs came back to me in those early months at the CBC. In many ways, it looked like the public broadcaster was losing touch with the peopleit was serving, and the distance was costing them dearly by every measure that mattered. CBC’s staffers were committed to producing high-quality, critically acclaimed programming, but making shows that would also reach the wide audience of taxpayers who supported the broadcaster seemed less their focus. They had also lost faith in their own abilities to create hits. Of course I couldn’t put the staff of the CBC on a train anywhere to help connect them with viewers, but I could go to them to talk about why we had to think beyond the white walls of our headquarters on Front Street. It would also give me the chance to hear from them directly how they felt about the network, what mattered to them, and whether, together, we could reach that common ground.
    If the first step in leading is to know yourself, discovering what matters to those around you lands right behind. You have to understand a corporate culture before you can hope to change it. And in these times, when technology is forcing all enterprise to adapt to the rapidly changing market, that’s a principle with broad applications.
    I knew it wouldn’t be easy. Of all the challenges I faced when I arrived at the CBC, getting the team to embrace a new culture of possibilities was the most daunting, as it tends to be in any organization. New leaders can be tempted to simply clean house, sweep out the personnel of past regimes and surround themselves with a new guard. I could tell I had surprised a lot of them by not firing them all and starting from scratch. But coming into a workplace as storied, and complicated, as the CBC, I knew I needed the help of people with a history at the organization who understood how things work, and what didn’t work. I had to depend on their experience toeven get a footing in the place. Digging deep to find out what people know, what they value and what their goals actually are is key to having influence—and influence, not control, is the new power, a concept I’ll tackle in a later chapter. It comes down to emotional intelligence. Exercising that kind of smarts was never thought to be a necessity in the corner office, but today it’s indispensable. I don’t think you can ever truly change someone’s internal value structure. But by learning what they value most and what they want to achieve, you can work out where their ideas intersect with and support your overall vision. You can’t get