Until recently, I thought books about leadership or how to become a leader should be equipped with those little paint bombs, like the ones bank clerks drop in the money bag during a bank robbery so everybody can identify the bad guys easily. You know, people who want to be our leaders would be marked with a leadership stain to warn the rest of us that we are about to be asked to train our replacement, sell a bad product, vote against our interests or bankroll and fight an unnecessary war.
Nobody has given us more guilty laughter warning us about leadership than Dilbert creator Scott Adams, who summed up my own experience with leadership in a May 2000 interview in The Door: "As I've often pointed out, the whole process of leadership is making people do things that are bad for the people that are doing them... When you need someone to say, 'Run up the hill and go down with a machine gun,' and it's not going to be good for these people ó it'll be good for other people ó you need leadership. You need to convince people to do things that are clearly in their short-term worst interest, and in some case, long-term worst interest.
Recent corporate fads have further reinforced my deep distrust of leaders and leadership. Teamwork gives way to cutthroat scapegoating when so-called leaders try to turn the workplace into a reality show through "forced ranking." And then there's "project management