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Why Leadership Is The Most Dangerous Idea in American Business

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.

In an antiheroic organization, the company can be about something more than the charismatic hero, more even than the hero's "vision" for it. The leader and the company aren't one and the same. The antiheroic leader -- who is guided by who-not-how and is always inviting others to take their turns leading -- makes room for others to feel proprietary about what the company is. That encourages people to imagine meaningful ways they can help form the vision and make it real. They see an unusual chance to have an impact.

An antiheroic organization, as a result, is able to enlist contributions from people who would never involve themselves with charismatic organizations because they would never be interested in an enterprise whose direction they couldn't affect. By making room for them, you attract people who aren't followers, who aren't looking for the kind of leader who will save them from the anxiety of responsibility.

Instead of the parent-child relationship that exists between charismatic leaders and their followers, the antiheroic leader ends up with an organization of adults.

Antihero's Rule No. 4:
Forget superman. Be a part of something.

And finally, here's the command to resist emotional temptation -- because the adulation that comes with leading charismatically is seductive. And when you stop building a charismatic/heroic organization, what you will lose is easy to see: You don't get to be a hero anymore. You'll lose something else, too, though. You'll lose your isolation.

Doug Mellinger, the PRT founder, in telling the story of his conversion epiphany, describes how he's come to wonder why anybody would want it the charismatic hero way. "I've had that feeling -- of being the guy whose desk everything ends up on," he said. "It was horrible. Every morning I'd wake up and pray that somebody out there would save my ass. And I said to myself, 'I can't live like this.' And then I realized" -- he slowed down his narration here, lowered his voice for emphasis -- "I don't have to.