So you want filtered leadership, right until you need unfiltered leadership. That’s the wrinkle: Leadership doesn’t matter much, until the rare moment comes when it’s the most important thing. Then Churchill chose to keep fighting, which Halifax wouldn’t have done. But Halifax turned the job down, and Churchill was the only other candidate. And in Britain in May 1940, when the German offensive had begun and the Chamberlain government fell, nearly everyone wanted Lord Halifax-the quintessential insider-to be prime minister. People didn’t consciously elect an outsider in anticipation of civil war. I think if anyone other than Lincoln had been president, the North would have lost the war-if there even was a war.īut that was an accident of history. Only Lincoln had the capacity to say “We won’t give up Fort Sumter without a fight,” to come up with a strategy that forced the South to fire the first shot, and to unite the North behind him. Most other Republican leaders thought the South was bluffing about secession and would have let them go peacefully, expecting them to return soon enough. Two-time loser in Senate races, and so outside the system that he wasn’t even listed in the top 10 Republican presidential candidates in some newspapers in 1860. Lincoln is the ultimate example of the unfiltered leader. The very best leader is one who makes decisions no one else could, and those decisions work out. Madison or Adams would have done a good job, too. He did a great job as president he just didn’t matter that much. You can be a great manager, but you won’t have impact if there are 100 other great managers who would do the same thing you would.ĭid you really just dis Thomas Jefferson? Jefferson wasn’t bad, but he was not impactful. Jefferson did, and it delayed the purchase so much it might have fallen apart, but Madison (among others) convinced him to forget about it and let the purchase move forward. In fact, Madison wouldn’t have tried to get a constitutional amendment giving the federal government the explicit power to add territory. But the other filtered leaders who could have been president at that moment, Madison and Adams, would have done the same thing. He doubled the size of the country peacefully. Why is he ranked so high? He completed the Louisiana Purchase. This is why I used him as a counterfactual test of my theory. And he is.īut he’s consistently ranked as one of the top presidents. According to my theory, he’s definitely filtered, so he should be in the middle of the pack in terms of his impact as a president. Even if they’re good decisions, their leadership doesn’t have impact. Filtered leaders will usually make basically the same decisions. How can experience and knowledge be a drawback for a leader facing change?īecause they’re precisely what prevent you from approaching situations any differently than other experienced people would. But they often can’t adapt to extreme, sudden change or are unable to disrupt the status quo, which an outsider feels freer to do. Filtered leaders-like Tim Cook and Neville Chamberlain-have deep knowledge and can be very effective in a stable situation. Unfiltered leaders are high risk, high reward. Though the best leaders-Steve Jobs, Abraham Lincoln-were unfiltered, the things that made them so effective, such as their ability to think differently and not feel beholden to a certain way of doing things, often lead to terrible results. No, because those people are also more likely to crash and burn. HBR: So should firms always hire outsiders without experience? It’s the unfiltered leaders, the outsiders without lots of experience, who perform the very best. Such insiders-I call them “filtered leaders”-might be good, but they probably won’t be brilliant. Mukunda: I was surprised by how unambiguous the data were, but they confirmed what I suspected: If you choose an insider who you know can do the job well, most of the time that person won’t perform any differently from any other top candidate with lots of experience.
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