Why Leadership Is The Most Dangerous Idea in American Business

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In organizations and institutions of a different type -- a national government, say, or a large corporation beholden to shareholders, or a social movement -- the charismatic/heroic design may be what's called for. Maybe their leaders are wise to sometimes adopt the charismatic role. But company owners are different. They created their organizations. They chose to be where they are for different reasons. They hope to stay there longer. Their well-being -- psychic and physical -- is more indispensable to their organizations' health.

In the great debate about leadership, though, the world hardly cares about such differences. An entrepreneur could be pardoned for thinking the charismatic/heroic style is the only model. Pretty much the whole of Western culture tells him so. There is, however, another way to lead, one that's perfectly suited to the challenges and opportunities confronting the creators of private companies. Call it "antiheroic" leadership.

What's good for the leader?

Most public discussions about leadership are launched by the wrong question: What kind of leadership, ask the thinkers and observers, works best for the organization (or institution, or government)? Meaning, what kind of leadership produces the best results? What kind of leadership is good for the business? But the question that a business founder should ask is: What kind of leadership is good for the leader?

The question is different because, in the case of a private company, the needs and aims of the leader are different, as are the requirements made of him or her. For one thing, the point of most new businesses is to foster the life the founder wants. (Think how different this is from the situation in which the President of the United States finds himself, or for that matter the CEO of GE.) While nothing has reshaped corporate leadership in the past two decades more than the ascendance of shareholder value as the driving force in business, in a closely held private company the leader is the shareholder. This has the twin consequences of both relegating concerns about financial performance to one person and at the same time offering that person the chance to disregard those concerns almost entirely. If you start a business to be happy (by whatever definition), then finding a way to run it that makes you happy is the point. That means finding a way of leading it that doesn't demand more than it gives back in return, that doesn't lead to burnout, or unfulfillment, or alienation, or drift.

For another thing, it can be argued that in a private company what's best for the founder/leader turns out to be what's best for the organization as a whole. In such companies the founder, after all, is almost always the organization's key asset and contributor, the most indispensable piece of the puzzle; why wouldn't an organization want to do everything it could to nurture, protect, and maintain its most valuable asset? Plus, unlike elected leaders with their circumscribed terms and Fortune 500 CEOs with their ever-shrinking job tenures, entrepreneurs typically hope to stick around. They hope to achieve and enjoy the imagined life they set out to make real and to reap the recurring rewards (psychic, material, logistical, social) they set out to earn. Entrepreneurs hope to last, and they need a leadership style that enables them to do so. They need a leadership style that feeds them. And their organizations need a style that feeds them, too.

The idea of "antiheroic" leadership has emerged in parts, by accretion, over recent years -- each aspect the product of some entrepreneur's or theorist's small response to requirements and desires that charismatic leadership didn't meet. As a whole the idea is still taking form. For now, though, the best way to describe what antiheroic leadership is -- and how to practice it -- is to describe the four rules that guide leaders putting it to use:

Antihero's Rule No. 1:
Ask why you're here. Know what you want. Don't apologize.

The antiheroic organization isn't about you, its leader (see Rule No. 3, below). But it is for you, and you should act on the distinction. "The sole reason for your company to exist is to meet your needs," says Lanny Goodman, the country's best thinker on this aspect of leadership.

Goodman, a serial entrepreneur who for two decades has headed Management Technologies Inc., an Albuquerque-based consultancy to private business owners, argues that nothing nourishes a company as much as aligning its business aims with its owner's personal aims. But his more profound point is that nourishing the company is the wrong primary goal in the first place. "The founder's first obligation is to himself or herself," Goodman says. "Part of what people don't get is that if that obligation isn't satisfied, none of the others [to customers, employees, and so on] can be satisfied, either. Not really. Not over time."

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