What We Can Learn From Bill Gore about Emergent Leadership

In an emergent organization, you become a leader by attracting followers

In The short life of enlightened leadership (and how to extend it), James O’Toole distills five decades of research on ‘enlightened leadership’. First of all, there are very few examples of companies founded ‘with unusually admirable organizational practices benefiting both their shareholders and society’, and secondly, they seldom continue on with their experiment:

Yet these virtuous practices seldom survived through one, or at most two, successions of company leadership. At some point — often just after a socially pioneering CEO retired, died, or was forced out of office, or the company was acquired — the CEO’s successors abandoned the very practices that had made the company both financially successful and publicly admired. In particular, investors at publicly traded companies have looked askance at such practices whenever earnings have dipped.

O’Toole mentions high-flying exemplars — Herman Miller, Hershey, J.C. Penney, and Marks & Spencer — whose earlier attempts to improve society through business practices, not philanthropy, have degraded into just another batch of Anglo-American capitalist businesses, devoted to making money for shareholders.