The Idolatry of Leadership

There is a particular kind of organization that has become so common we have stopped seeing it as strange. At its center is one person — the founder, the CEO, the visionary — and around that person, in concentric rings of decreasing autonomy, everyone else. The single person is the source of decisions, the source of culture, the source of meaning. The other people are limbs.

This arrangement is treated, in most contemporary business writing, as a feature. It is praised as founder mode, as strong leadership, as the willingness to be the bottleneck on the theory that the bottleneck is also the genius. The arrangement has a name, but the name is rarely applied to it.

The claim of this essay is that the arrangement is a structural mistake — one with a long history, and a name. The name is idolatry.

I do not mean idolatry in the loose, modern sense, where we say don’t make a god of your career. I mean it in the older, technical sense: the substitution of a created thing for the uncreated source of reality. An idol is a representation that becomes confused with the thing it represents. The idolatry of leadership is the substitution of a person for the network of relationships that actually generates value.1

The founder is not a god. The founder is a node in a network. The error is to treat the founder as the network — to design the rest of the organization as if the founder’s intentions are sufficient to make the network behave correctly.

The founder is not a god. The founder is a node in a network. The error is to treat the founder as the network.

The predictions this makes

If the idolatry-of-leadership frame is correct, it should make specific, falsifiable predictions about organizations. Three to start.

1. Organizations that scale around a single leader will show structural fragility at the points the leader does not personally attend to. The fragility will not feel like fragility from the inside; it will feel like things keep needing my attention.
2. Decisions made far from the leader will tend either toward over-deference (waiting for the leader to weigh in) or toward over-improvisation (acting without the leader, and against the implicit grain of the leader’s intent). Both failures degrade quality.
3. Cultural language inside the organization will increasingly refer to the leader as a proxy for the organization itself. What would X do? will become a planning question. This is the linguistic fingerprint of the idolatry.2

What in-sync looks like

The opposite of idolatry is not democracy. The opposite of one person standing in for a network is a network that knows it is a network — and is structured accordingly.

A network that knows it is a network distributes decision rights, but more importantly, it distributes the information and the context required to use those decision rights well. The classical mistake of “flat” organizations is to distribute the decision rights without the context, which produces noise. The classical mistake of “founder-led” organizations is to distribute neither, which produces deference and stagnation. A blueprint is the document that makes the distribution possible.

This essay is a stake in the ground. The fuller argument — the philosophical machinery, the cases, the applied tests against organizations operating in public — will be developed across the body of work this publication is organizing. For now: notice it. Notice when an organization, including yours, is operating as if a person were a network. The noticing is the first move.