As One: Individual Action, Collective Power, released earlier this month by Portfolio/Penguin, offers eight models, or "archetypes," for successful leadership scenarios. Jim Quigley, CEO of Deloitte, and Mehrdad Baghai, founder of Alchemy Growth Partners, spent months analyzing case studies of successful companies, from Linux to Cirque du Soleil. Their research pointed them to archetypes of effective leadership, from "Landlord and Tenants" to "Architect and Builders." According to Baghai, the book gives readers a new "way of understanding the dynamic of leadership that previously defied words." Quigley and Baghai recently spoke with Inc.com's Eric Markowitz.
What was the inspiration behind As One? JQ: I've been fascinated by leadership for a long period of time, and I've had the privilege to be in a leadership position throughout my career. I provided an event in Australia, and Mehrdad was in the room, and after the conversation we sat down and worked out our views of leadership on a whiteboard. We discovered that we view leadership in very similar ways, coming at them from slightly different perspectives. So I began the process of every time I was with a CEO or CFO, having a conversation with them about leadership, and what I discovered was, this is where executives live. People are fundamentally challenged by leadership and the advantages and opportunities it provides. That spawned the project. This message is timeless, and the way I like to describe it is that leadership needs a very simple idea in order to have it resonate and be something than can be easily absorbed. We found that as one was an effective way of distilling leadership down to two simple words. MB: People tend to talk about leadership as though it's one set thing—"here's the three things you need to do." What we knew was that there was no robust way of thinking about this. What we wanted to do was come at this thing in a much more analytically rigorous way and ask, What are the different types of leader-follower behaviors that are effective, and when did they work?
Many companies benefit from a collaborative environment, but perhaps some don’t. What determines if your employees are working well together? MB: Imagine if you took the entire organization you're thinking about, whether it's a start-up with 20 people or a large organization with several hundred thousand people. Imagine if you could do an MRI of every one of their brains and see how each of these people think about how they're working with the others. What you want to do is add up all those MRIs and see if they're consistent or if people have really different views. What we're beginning to notice is that consistency is important—as long as there's reasonable consistency among the people in the organization, it seems to work well.
The book presents examples of leadership from people outside the traditional business community, such as Gandhi and Jerry Bruckheimer. Why?
JQ: When you think about that ambition to bring together diverse individuals and behave as one, I think we're thinking way too narrowly if we're just looking for the business examples. So in the research we looked at examples in science, the military, and historical examples, and it helped to inform our thinking. I think there's learning from the Mandela example, just like there's great learning from Gandhi. For example, the symbolism of Gandhi when he steps off the boat in the traditional Indian attire, even though he was trained as a British barrister. He didn't come off that boat in a business suit—people connected with him and were ready to follow him.
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