The Myth of Leadership: Creating Leaderless Organizations

I predict that before long everyone will be talking about organizational management and design in terms of rank and peer. The book does a wonderful job comparing and contrasting these two basic types of thinking and relating. It reminds me of the pioneering work of Douglas McGregor and theory x and y, but this book goes deeper into the very nature of leadership as inherently rank-based. Excellent!

This book presents some profound ideas with world changing implications, and does it in an easy to read style that completely moved me! I will never view "leaders" or "leadership" as I once did. After reading this book, I have found myself suddenly challenging anyone who glibly used the word "leadership" to promote their agendas. The author's argument that we create a dualistic and unhealthy world whenever we uncritically accept our own leadership over others or their own over us, has completely changed my approach to organizational consulting. His suggestion as well that we do less soft skills training and more hard skills like decision-making and strategic thinking makes sense. I also appreciated his advice to trust more in the tacit wisdom of our own employees over the expertise of outside consultants.

I found that the book's portrayal of most business organizations as rank-based resonated with my own experience. The author's careful analysis of our assumptions regarding leaders and followers - that he calls the myth of leadership - was truly profound. Other writers have challenged hierarchy and command and control leadership, but no one has struck at the root of the problem as deftly and provocatively as this book does. I liked the three parts of the book, discussing first the context of leadership, second the history of organizational types, and then the strategies for creating peer-based organizations. I found the idea of organizational attractors - modeled on chaos theory - very interesting. I wish the author had said even more about the parallels of attractors in natural systems, like strange attractors, and organizational attractors like the Big Chief and Hierarchical organization. All in all, one of the most insightful books I've read in a long time.

This book sets out the wonderful possibility of truly meaningful organizational life. As the direct report of a die-hard rank-based leader, I can relate to the author's portrayal of rank-based thinking. At every page, I found myself shaking my head in agreement to the book's description of the waste of human potential in rank-based, big chief and hierarchical companies. I loved the model of peer councils as a new management model for leaderless organizations. The ideas in this book are very timely!

I found the comparison of rank and peer assumptions, logic, and practices to be quite eye-opening. The examples and illustrations the author gives are very helpful. The writing style was very readable and engaging. I would highly recommend this book.