David Epstein’s interview with Jeff Eggers on leadership in context at https://lnkd.in/gi4GxGrS was interesting to me, particularly this line on the tension between the inspiring visionary and the institutional process manager necessary to bring that vision into sustainable reality.
“on the one hand, you have to play the role of the unconstrained visionary who is breaking boundaries and taking that kind of maximalist position; on the other hand, you have to kind of dial it way back into the here-and-now. Finding individuals who can manage that tension in one person is really, really hard. Walt found it in the pairing with his brother. If you’re lucky, you get it right. But very often it crashes in one direction or the other. And that’s why I think it’s so hard to manage. Because it’s asking a lot for one human brain to hold that tension with any sort of stability.”
Since I just read Claire Hughes Johnson’s Scaling People, that feels like a positive example of a collaboration between the Collison brothers’ vision and Johnson’s process building. Or Zuckerberg’s vision with Sandberg’s process.
As an aside, it’s interesting that both those examples are male founders with unrealistic ambitious vision, supported by women doing COO roles, while I can’t think of a woman leader who is allowed to have that sort of unconstrained vision. Women leaders are always told they have to keep it practical and realistic, meaning they are asked to hold that tension in a way that male leaders often are not (*cough*Musk*).
#leadership #ambition #collaboration