Why Leadership Is The Most Dangerous Idea in American Business
If you're an entrepreneur, almost everything about "leadership" as we know it is bad for you. But there's another way to lead. Here are the rules. Maybe you've noticed: Never in the history of management science has leadership been more studied, worried over, theorized about, and debated than right now -- not least because for two years the world has supplied leaders-in-training with a (mostly unhappy) curriculum. The stock bubble collapsed. The economy soured. September 11 came and begat whole new anxieties that prompted unprecedented questioning about vocational life and leadership in communities of every kind. Corporate scandals and greed brought CEO reputations low and raised ethics concerns high. And nowIraq.
Throughout the contentious diplomatic run-up and then during the conflict itself, leaders were dissected everywhere. You'll recall the stories. Bush the autocratic unilateralist vs. Blair the participative consensualist. Rumsfeld vs. the generals. Churchill circa 1942 vs. all of the above (an op-ed smackdown that somehow Winny always wins). By the time this is published, there will have been more stories: How to lead. How we're being led. How we want to be led. The world's curriculum, like it or not, is rich with object lessons.
The problem is that, for entrepreneurs, those lessons are all wrong. Not because they're necessarily bad in themselves, but because they're all to do with the wrong kind of leadership. Almost the entire fevered leadership discussion of the moment is focused on one broad category of the art. Call it "charismatic" leadership, the label most often used by academics and experts (you'll hear it called "heroic" or "inspirational" leadership too). Please note that the practitioners of charismatic leadership don't actually have to be charismatic themselves. In fact, plenty