This closing chapter brings together the primary ideas explored in the three main sections of the book. Our organizing theme is the idea introduced in chapter 2 that the goal of business leadership is to create wealth – financial and material, human and social – in the face of external developments that are never entirely foreseeable. With this in mind, we have explored the tasks that comprise purposeful contribution by members of the top executive team, the CXOs.

A key challenge for the company's top leader, the CEO, is to create a CXO team that can successfully carry out this wealth-creating mission. Actually, this challenge is repeated at all levels of leadership in the company: leaders must nurture teams that must produce results – on the basis of which further wealth-creating goals can be pursued.

We now revisit the three main sections of the book: The business imperatives, the functions of the CXOs and the CEO's view. For companies to prosper, facing as they do non-predictable shifts in their environments, their CXOs must:

• Strongly influence the actions of people working around them to put their energies in the pursuit of the firm's economic and other goals. This can be achieved by an ongoing campaign that employs the methods of mission, process, structure and culture. Essential components of these campaign methods are: nurturing and managing talented people; putting into practice the lessons of experience; and instilling the ethos of quality-mindedness.

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