Saturday, February 27, 2016

Leadership Is About Process

From The New Yorker this week by Joshua Rothman - Shut Up and Sit Down: Why the leadership industry rules:

"Last year, Danny Boyle and Aaron Sorkin's film "Steve Jobs" relied almost exclusively on the trait model of leadership: it suggested that Jobs succeeded because of his powerful personality.  Watching the film, though, you couldn't figure out what Jobs actually did.  By contrast, if you read a detailed, process-oriented account of Job's career ("Becoming Steve Jobs," by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, is particularly good), it's clear that Jobs was a master of the leadership process.  Time and time again, he gathered intelligence about the future of technology; surveyed the competition and refined his taste; set goals and assembled teams; tracked projects, intervening into even apparently trivial decision; and followed through, considering the minute details of marketing and retail. Although Jobs had considerable charisma, his real edge was his thoughtful involvement in every step of an unusually expansive leadership process.  In an almost quantitative sense, he simply led more than others did.  (It helped, of course, that he had the right traits: Job's intervention worked becasue he was a genius.)

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.