Jon Sampson

This is a great article about moving from charismatic leadership to a leader who builds systems that last longer than himself or herself. I think all leaders need some kind of charisma, but if we’re just relying on that charisma to give the organization momentum, the movement won’t last beyond that one person. Leaders should be architects, building something that goes beyond themselves and their abilities to inspire and bring change…

“So the charismatic-leader model has to die. What do you replace it with? The task that the CEO is uniquely positioned to do: designing the mechanisms that reinforce and give life to the company’s core purpose and stimulate the company to change.

“Building mechanisms is one of the CEO’s most powerful but least understood and most rarely employed tools. Along with figuring out what the company stands for and pushing it to understand what it’s really good at, building mechanisms is the CEO’s role—the leader as architect.”