Preface

The journey to write this book started as I completed work on a major merger project assignment at one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. After going through phases of personal leadership and experiencing the continued futility of trying to fit our existing leadership theories, models, and language into a new world reality, it became clear to me what people mean when they say insanity is doing the same things over and over and expecting different results. This became clear in three phases of my learning curve about leadership: invisible leadership, leadership theory shopping, and bold, new ways of thinking about leadership and organization design—leadership through community.

The invisible leadership phase started with my first experience as a new manager and leader. I recognized that as a newly minted PhD I had a lot of theoretical knowledge, but little practical knowledge and experience. I wanted to apply the knowledge I had learned in graduate school, but I also wanted to experiment with and test new ideas. I wanted to let others learn how to achieve results and personal success on their own. There were many people I worked with who were more experienced than I was, and while I wanted to learn from them, I didn’t necessarily want to follow exactly in their footsteps.

I focused on asking others what they thought before I expressed my point of view or perspective. I quickly learned that some individuals who reported to me were uncomfortable with being asked their thoughts. They were confused, looked for me to provide more direction, and perceived their jobs as solely following orders and doing what the manager wanted them to do. Others expressed different points of view, and I was tentative and unclear in my response. It was not until months later that one person on my staff told me how uncomfortable everyone was with being asked their thoughts; no manager had ever asked them what they thought, and they were intimidated when asked to share their thoughts because they were afraid they would not say what I wanted.

At the same time, my manager did not think I was taking control as a manager and thought that I relied too heavily on consensus of the group. He wanted me to be direct and tell those working for me what he wanted and what he had directed us to do. Demonstrating through my actions how I expected my reports to behave and make decisions turned out to be too subtle an approach and did not provide enough guidance and direction. It did not take long to realize that invisible and silent leadership translated as no leadership to many.

From the invisible leadership phase, I moved to a phase of leadership theory shopping—a phase where I tried on different leadership styles to see what seemed to work best in different contexts or situations. As an academic, I was well versed in all the current theories and regularly tried most of them to see how others would respond. I tried to absorb and use not only the leadership theories I had been introduced to as a doctoral student, but also all the new theories that arrived on bookshelves daily. Keeping up with new trends and practices felt like taking an intense crash course every few months. Every conference, seminar, and expert lecture I attended added more material to an already overloaded brain repository of leadership information.

I quickly learned that some theories were considerably better than others, but while each approach yielded some success, there was always some aspect that resulted in unintended consequences (or completely failed to deliver the expected results). After many interventions and attempts to apply theoretical approaches, it was clear that adding yet another new approach to the existing toolbox was not the answer.

Soon after I completed work on the major merger assignment at one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, I realized it had been a tremendous two-year learning experience. It opened my eyes to the strength and importance of change, transformation, and leadership. It also humbled me. For the first time, I was acutely aware of how important a leader’s work can be for the lives and livelihood of many people, let alone an organization as a whole. Going forward, I felt it my professional duty, moral obligation, and ethical responsibility to do whatever I could to ensure the organizations with which I worked had the guidance, advice, and support needed to ensure more positive outcomes that would enhance organizational performance as well as the quality of life for all those along the chain of command. I realized I was beginning to make the transition from scholar-practitioner to practitioner-scholar. This was an important distinction for me, and helped me realize that my practice—my daily work—would be more formative than what I read in new books and journal articles. I realized that the act of doing the work was very powerful and significantly influenced my thinking about the work. I was beginning to form my interpretation of what leadership should be.

A brief period of reflection followed my work on the pharmaceutical companies’ merger. This pause allowed me to recognize that something else was needed, not only in the way I worked, but also in the way I helped others. The status quo was no longer sufficient, and neither were the theoretical models currently in use. In one sense, it was somewhat disturbing that I had not appreciated the value of deep reflection before, since that is a core of the work of a practitioner and scholar of strategic change and leadership. But I was gratified and energized that I was now embarking on a period of reflection that would lead to a new level of thought and introspection on the work I was so passionate about. I felt confident that it would inform and direct me going forward—that it would become the footprint for the next phase of my professional life.

Fueled by the merger experience (and a re-reading of Meg Wheatley’s bestselling book, Leadership and the New Science), I began a journey to explore a bold, new paradigm for leadership and organizational design. I never thought that the theories in use were useless and should be discarded. On the contrary, I thought about them in terms of the fairy tale of the emperor and his clothes. In this instance, it was not that the emperor was not wearing any clothes so much as that he had an outdated wardrobe—a somewhat restrictive wardrobe not suited for the conditions of the twenty-first century.

Seeing the emperor dressed so poorly, I saw the need to figure out what type of wardrobe best suits leaders and organizations in the twenty-first century. Rather than construct new architectural forms and structures, my approach was to look for ways to create form and structure from natural order—similar to Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural approach. I wanted to explore ways consistent with natural order and chaos. I did not want to impress one more theory upon the natural order of the time, but hoped to harness some of the power inherent in that order. For our time, that order is the architecture of the peer-to-peer network.