Data such as these have as much to teach corporations as they have to teach the rest of us.

Like most other herd animals, humans are hard-wired to seek out and to follow leaders. For millions of years this was a very successful evolutionary strategy…the herd with the smartest, most successful leader tended to thrive. And in keeping with survival of the fittest, the successful leader claimed the choicest cuts of the mastodon, the most reproductively fit women, the best shelter. It all made perfect biological sense.

But that was then, and this is now. Back in prehistory life and its problems were comparatively simple, so one guy with marginally better ideas could make a huge difference in the life of the herd. Not so today, where the problems are infinitely more complex than those which we evolved to deal with. Today, a solitary leader can, at best, make no difference, and at worst can lead us all to our deaths. We need to re-think ‘leadership.’

The graph above reminds me of the evolutionary excesses of ‘sexual selection,’ the phenomenon which yields absurdities such as the peacock’s outlandish impractical tail feathers, the horns of the moose, and other good ideas taken to absurd and crippling extremes. Giant corporations which have no freaking idea what to do next continue to search for non-existent supermen (or women) to lead them, throwing ever more money at each. It never works. Just look at HP, today’s poster child for dysfunctional corporations constantly searching for superman leaders, with each such ‘superman’ simply making the company ever less successful (and further impoverishing it through their absurdly inflated salaries, stock grants, perks, and severance packages. Each new HP CEO proves to be dumber, more avaricious, and more destructive than the last. This is what a corporate peacock looks like.

Corporations need to re-think what leadership looks like in this complex world. The ‘big-man’ strategy is a million year-old solution to a set of circumstances which no longer exist. Throwing more money at the problem only makes it worse.

Well said, Bill. Perhaps corporate boards should not be looking for supermen, but I just read that Eli Manning signed a six year 97 million dollar extension with the NY Giants. Why are all these sports teams paying so much for talent? One QB can’t possibly be worth that much to them. Or can he? I doubt that this is just an evolutionary atavism — seems to me that every team still needs a quarterback. So it goes, I think, for any business.

There’s a quite famous book, revered by many in the management advice world, titled “Good To Great“. The author, James Collins, purports to have ‘studied’ over 1,400 companies, identified 11 with outsized financial performance over extended periods, and summarized characteristics common to all of these corporate success stories. I was forced to read it a few years ago for a mandatory leadership training program for execs of the Fortune 500 corporation at which I was then serving hard time. The book is at one and the same time annoying, painfully obvious, full of BS, and just plain tiresome…perfect executive reading.

One of the shocking characteristics Collins identified was good management…or, as he buzzed it up, “Level 5 Leadership.” The CEO of our company parachuted into our course via the corporate jet to lead our discussion of this characteristic…I had to sit and watch my colleagues, one by one, stand up and extoll the stellar Level 5 leadership of our CEO to his face, fawning all over his $25 million per year performance. It was like a frigging Red Chinese re-education camp. And I kept thinking “if this guy was really a great leader he’d tell these clowns in no uncertain terms to stop kissing his @ss and start thinking for themselves.” But no. He just lapped it up. Meanwhile, our stock was in the middle of an extended multi-year slide into the basement, due mostly to senior management incompetence.

It’s worth noting that several of the companies in Collins “great” list are today either history, disgraced, or else mere shadows of their former selves, including Circuit City (bankrupt), Fannie Mae (a complete disgrace), Wells Fargo (needed a $25 billion bailout from the rest of us), and Pitney Bowes (stock price down about 75% since the 2001 publication of Good To Great, and still falling). All the CEOs who took over these once stellar companies only to lead them into a swamp thought they were doing great jobs, and so did their Boards. Hubris is a mortal sin for a reason.

I keep waiting for Collins to publish another volume, titled “Good To Great To Gone.” Now that would be a fun read.