Welcome to the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast. A conversation designed to help leaders

go further faster. On today's podcast, we'll conclude a conversation around the building

blocks of a compelling vision. Andy, we kicked off this conversation last month and it's

based on your amazing book, Visionary, that has just been re-released. What led you to

write this book?

Well, as I mentioned in the last month, our organization had just begun and as a leader,

I felt like I needed to teach leadership and one of the big parts of leadership is vision.

And I just begun reading this fantastic story of Nehemiah, a Jewish leader back in the

fifth century BC, who had this extraordinary challenge to go back to the city of Jerusalem

and rebuild walls around a city that no one wanted walls built around, not even the people

who lived there. So he has to show up and cast a compelling vision to the people who lived

in this broken down city. And the story is so extraordinary and I just found principle

after principle, after principle in that story that I integrated into my own personal

leadership, then I began to teach that and then eventually published the book Visionary.

And the book has continued to sell for the 17 or 18 years, however long it's been. And

so the publisher came back and said, hey, can we update some of this? In the book, your

kids are five and seven years old and now they're graduating from college. So I had the

stink privilege working with Susie Gray to go back and look at some of the content,

I could date some of it. And the interesting thing was as I began to read back through

my own book and the sounds of strange, I found myself thinking, this is great stuff and

I need to reread this book. And really it's not because I wrote it. It's because the

content that comes straight out of this extraordinary leader's experience is so rich and it, you

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