You want change. What kind of leader can actually deliver it?
This is a perennial question for the boards of corporations and other organizations in need of a turnaround. In the U.S. and other places where people are dissatisfied with the direction their nation is headed, it’s now also become a pressing matter for voters.
What should those who want change look for in a potential leader?
Insiders are usually better. One of the most striking findings of Jim Collins’ famous research on companies that went from “good to great” was that hardly any of them had brought in outsiders as CEOs.
There are varying degrees of insiderness. In “Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter,” Gautam Mukunda of Harvard Business School looked at U.S. presidents and divided them into “filtered” leaders who had risen through the political ranks and “unfiltered” ones with relatively little political experience. He found that the presidents with the biggest positive impact tended to fit the unfiltered profile, as did the biggest flops.
You need the right kind of risk-taker. In his new book “Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World,” Adam Grant of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania presents evidence that successful entrepreneurs are more risk-averse and no less desirous of social approval than the population at large. In Grant’s telling, entrepreneurs and others who “move the world” think different, as it were, and they do take risks – but they’re seldom wild-eyed rebels, either.
Along with big ideas, they have patience, the skills to get things accomplished and often a back-up plan.
Combine these three broad observations about leadership and you get … Abraham Lincoln. No joke: Collins, Mukunda and Grant each cite the 16th president as the epitome (or at least an epitome) of what they’re talking about.
If you throw Collins’ and Grant’s observations into the mix with Mukunda’s, it gets at least a little harder to make the case an outsider rebel is most likely to fix whatever you think ails the country. •
Justin Fox is a Bloomberg View columnist.
