Genius and Delusion
A take on the difference between setting a vision and following one
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about why it’s such an intellectually exhausting challenge to set and maintain a vision for a new product or service, and I’m starting to get a grasp on theory. The seed of the idea came a few weeks ago.
Let’s try and explore it.
First, there’s something inherently different from setting a vision to following one. When you’re the leader and the last line of defense, the core responsibility is to determine the right things to do. When you’re following a leader, it’s about executing those things efficiently.
It’s leadership vs management, and the clearest picture of this that I know of is painted by Stephen Covey in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People:
In the words of both Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis, “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” Management is efficient in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.
You can quickly grasp the important difference between the two if you envision a group of producers cutting their way through the jungle with machetes. They’re the producers, the problem solvers. They’re cutting through the undergrowth, clearing it out. The managers are behind them, sharpening their machetes, writing policy and procedure manuals, holding muscle development programs, bringing in improved technologies, and setting up working schedules and compensation programs for machete wielders.
The leader is the one who climbs the tallest tree, surveys the entire situation, and yells, “Wrong jungle!”
Making that call to pull operations out of the jungle and in a different direction is what takes courage, as Covey continues:
But how do the busy, efficient producers and managers often respond? “Shut up! We’re making progress.”
Because how does the leader really know that this is the wrong jungle? She has to ask herself if she’s right or wrong on every call, and constantly access whether her motives and assumptions are rational, and I think that constantly sanity checking yourself, is the mentally exhausting bit.
It seems like in many situations where someone makes a real dent in this world, they do so by going against the consensus to do something different and maybe that’s just the name of the game? Maybe it simply requires a certain degree of delusional genius to have the courage to lead?
If I’m not completely in the delusional camp here, this might help explain part of the value of a company board; a set of separate minds to challenge your rationale and keep you from delusion.
Maybe that’s also why there seems to be a wide consensus that solo founders are at odds. That they’re so likely to spin into delusion because there’s no one to challenge their assumptions.