So the antiheroic leader begins by taking stock -- by understanding his or her own dreams and imagining the kind of company that can help realize them, by assessing and accepting his or her own strengths and weaknesses, by respecting his or her own needs. Note how little this sounds like the charismatic leaders described by the sociologist Max Weber, people "endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least exceptional powers ... [people] regarded as divine." The antiheroic stance, far from the one that the Jan Pringles of the entrepreneurial world thought they had to maintain, has nothing to do with being infallible or superhuman or invulnerable or dauntless. It has to do with being true, the root of trust.
Antihero's Rule No. 2:
Don't ask "How?" Ask "Who?" Assume you're not the answer.
Once visited by an idea, what most of us do next is ask "How?" How can I (or we) get this thing done? We begin assessing what it would take to turn the idea into something real. We refer to the informal stage of that process as thinking and to the formal stage as planning. Many times we get overwhelmed. (All those details to handle! All that know-how required!) And we conclude, not unreasonably, that our idea can't be done. Or if it can be done, then usually the personal price paid by the leader -- the knower of the answers -- will be high.
But what if, instead, the leader presumes he or she can't do anything, at least not as well as someone else, and definitely not on one's own. The antiheroic leader, instead of considering for a moment that he or she might be the person to execute the plans or projects that arise in the course of business, always assumes there's a better option. Instead of asking, "How can I do that?" the antiheroic leader asks "Who can do that?" "Who knows how to do that?" "Who can help me get that done?"
Management analyst Jim Collins (author of Built to Last and Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... and Others Don't) approaches the idea slightly differently. Likening the leader of an organization to the driver of a bus, Collins says that the bus driver's job is not to decide where the bus should go or how to drive it there, but to get the right people on the bus in the first place -- as well as to get the wrong people off the bus, and ultimately to get the right people into the right seats. The right people then will help the leader figure out where to drive and how to drive there. What's more, the right people will attract other right people and inspire them to stick around, diminishing the burden and anxiety felt by leaders who are in the position of having to beguile their flock by themselves.
By observing the who-not-how rule, the antiheroic leader is liberated to imagine. Since you don't assume you're the one who's going to have to do things -- or even that you're the one who has to know how to do things -- you're not limited to considering only the things you know you can do. Start thinking Who?, and the results are exponentially reinforcing: Once you find you can make things happen that you couldn't dream of doing yourself, you believe you can do anything.
And so does everyone in or involved with your company, each of them able to see that the possibilities aren't bounded by their own know-how or even their leader's. In the late '90s, a custom software/rent-a-programmer company called PRT accomplished the astonishing feat of inventing the perfect "near-shore" programming nation. Like the rest of the U.S. custom software industry, PRT was handicapped by a severe programmer shortage; there were too few engineers to handle the contracts it was getting. There was no way to bring enough engineers to the States or to outflank the problem by outsourcing to places such as India (though PRT tried), which turned out to be too far away to do collaborative work effectively. So Doug Mellinger, the company's 30-year-old CEO, dreamed up the idea of building PRT's own ideal programming community outside the country but nearby (same time zone, manageable plane trip). Which is what Manhattan-based PRT did on the Caribbean island of Barbados.
There, PRT imported hundreds of programmers from 19 nations. It brought customers from Manhattan and elsewhere. It imported capital and built infrastructure. It established a partnership with the island itself that ultimately suggested how a tiny developing nation could leapfrog right over the industrial stage of economic evolution into a global, technology-based, knowledge-driven future. The company exploded with life, staged a successful IPO, and grew. Later it would trip by mishandling the pressures of the public markets (antiheroic leadership is complicated by public ownership because of the primacy of shareholder interests), but what it accomplished before that is astounding. And most astounding is that Mellinger, the founder, knew how to accomplish none of it. Mellinger couldn't even write code. He didn't know how to build digital communications lines or construct a 21st-century company town or personally select top engineers from across the globe and persuade them to transplant their lives. It didn't matter. What he did was ceaselessly seek out people who did know how to do these things -- whether they were inside PRT or outside. And the right people wound up on the bus.
The moral? Sometimes -- often -- an antiheroic leader gets to be carried along for the ride. And as a result, the ride can visit places the leader wasn't even capable of picturing.
Antihero's Rule No. 3:
Embrace the difference between "I am my company" and "I have a company."
What this rule amounts to is: Make room. In order for the who-not-how discipline to work, and for the earned authenticity of Rule No. 1 to have its effect, an organization has to have space for others. Even though a company must first satisfy the needs of its owner, an antiheroic leader never behaves as though he or she is the company's face, voice, or embodiment.
