The Myth of Leadership: Creating Leaderless Organizations

By: Jeffrey S. Nielsen

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Synopsis: When we join an organization, we're immediately slotted into a hierarchy based on a rank-based system of "leaders" and "followers." We then make false assumptions about our place in these hierarchies that divide our efforts, limit our growth opportunities and rob us of meaningful, dignified work. These assumptions are what Jeffrey Nielsen calls the "myth of leadership." In this unconventional book, Nielsen calls for an end to "rank-based" organizational structures, which foster secrecy and miscommunication and steal the joy from work, while breeding corruption and abuse of power. Nielsen's new model is the "peer-based" organization, which uses rotating peer leadership councils and crossfunctional task forces to manage the organization's work. These new entities are better suited to making decisions based on the organization's competencies and customer needs, rather than on static functional groups or other artificial divisions. Nielsen's experience with dozens of organizations showed that while workers were universally motivated to make their organizations profitable, artificial barriers consistently prevented them from reaching their potential. Real-world examples from contemporary peerbased organizations help make his point for creating leaderless organizations.