Why Leadership Is The Most Dangerous Idea in American Business
Published June 2003
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COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLE 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."
Goodman recommends that business owners ask -- and act on the answers to -- four basic questions: What do I need and want out of life? How can my company help me accomplish that? What would such a company look like? And how do we get it to look like that?
But aren't company owners already better than most of us at taking care of their own interests? "Absolutely not," Goodman says. "They're horrible at it. Listen to what they say even if they do think they have conscious plans and goals: 'I want to grow 10% a year.' 'I want to take the company to the next level.' By the time a company establishes it can survive, most founders are so used to being reactive that it doesn't occur to them to reflect on their own. Plus, we're taught the company has a life of its own and we're all there to serve it. We're taught to be good soldiers -- to sacrifice ourselves.
"When your company doesn't fulfill your needs first, everything unravels. Either the business will just fall apart or you'll wind up with this sick, co-dependent, very toxic environment. The company won't support your life on any level. And if it's not life-supporting, why bother? There are so many other ways to make a living in this world."
The antiheroic way of leading has nothing to do with being infallible or superhuman or invulnerable or dauntless. It has to do with being true, the root of trust.
Unembarrassed honesty about one's own personal needs, wants, and -- as we'll see -- capabilities is the bedrock that antiheroic leadership is built on. It promotes in its practitioner three surprising and powerful qualities: authenticity, generosity, and a nascent potential for creating a sense of meaning.
"The opportunity that exists for entrepreneurs more than anything else is to create really human environments," Goodman explains. "Because a sense of meaning is so much more important than money. Ultimately, it puts us in a position where we are better able to serve. Because when we're emotionally bankrupt by virtue of having burned ourselves out, then we have nothing to give. On the other hand, when our hearts are full, and our lives are full, and we've learned to exercise our own highest capabilities, then we give at such bigger, more powerful levels."
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?"
