Crazy is a Compliment The Power of Zigging When Everyone Else Zags by Linda Rottenberg

Author:Linda Rottenberg
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Leadership 3.0

About four years after cofounding Endeavor, I was fired by my assistant. I was on a trip to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I was addressing the first-year class of Harvard Business School. The occasion was the unveiling of the first business case study about Endeavor. (It was the same day I was introduced as the stalker.) Afterward I was feeling pretty high. The day felt like a milestone in my own entrepreneurial journey, and I was pumped. Then my assistant, Belle, called.

“Linda, did you remember to authorize this month’s payroll?” she asked.

“No, but I’m sure someone else did,” I said. “Now can I tell you what happened today?”

“Someone else!” she said. “You’re the CEO. No one else is authorized to pay everybody.” Belle paused. “That’s it.” She continued. “You’re fired. You’re no longer in control of payroll. You may not realize this, but your employees need to pay rent.”

“Employees?” I thought. “I don’t have employees.” In my mind, the eight people who then worked in Endeavor’s New York office were my teammates. I wasn’t their boss; I was their partner. There were no hierarchies, no bureaucracies, no processes. We were a start-up, and we were all in this together.

It took Belle, one of the youngest employees in my organization, to teach me one of my most grown-up lessons. I wasn’t just a founder, a teammate, and an entrepreneur. I was a leader, too. And I had better start learning to lead or I wasn’t going to have a team to rely on.

In the years since that blunt awakening, I’ve seen many entrepreneurs falter on the same terrain in the course of going big. Having gotten their start-ups up and running, founders sometimes forget they actually have to run them. Whereas once they worked in their pajamas, tinkered in their garages, or sent e-mails in the middle of the night, now they have proper offices, proper employees, and proper meetings, and they continue to operate in crazed start-up mode because they don’t know how else to lead.

But while seat-of-the-pants is no way to lead, high-and-mighty doesn’t work either. Most leadership books bulge with research drawn from august generals, Olympic champions, and corporate titans, most of which is incompatible with running a lightning-fast, hyperwired organization. Jack Welch has about as much in common with the modern everyday entrepreneur as an aircraft carrier has with a surfboard.

I wanted to identify the “Goldilocks rules” for leading like an entrepreneur—not so “hard” that they apply only to button-downed organizations; not so “soft” that they apply only to T-shirted start-ups. Leadership 3.0 is what I call these new skills. They’re a blueprint for remaining nimble in the midst of growth, navigating the rush of social media, and taking the measured risk of exposing yourself to your team.

Everyone I meet is searching for these rules. High-jumping gazelles certainly need them. Leadership development comes up constantly when we ask the Endeavor entrepreneurs what they need most in order to take their businesses to scale. Mission-driven dolphins and lifestyle-focused butterflies are equally baffled.

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