The most effective leader has no followers.
Benevolence, service, and love are the ultimate sources of economic value.
If you treat your employees as resources to optimize, you will never ascend from manager to leader. To make that leap, you must recognize your employees as conscious beings who yearn to transcend their limited existence through noble immortality projects.
Welcome to the rigorously reasoned, deeply heartfelt, and always enlightening mind of Fred Kofman.
Trained as an economist, with stops along the way as a management professor and consultant, Fred’s official title at LinkedIn, where he has worked since 2012, is vice president of Executive Development. But I have a shorter name for what he does. I call him the High Priest of Capitalism.
In the tradition of Adam Smith, Fred recognizes capitalism as a kind of spiritual pursuit with alchemical moral power. To achieve long-term success in a free market, where individuals engage in voluntary exchange according to their own preferences, businesses and entrepreneurs must truly understand their customers’ needs and desires. Then they must serve these customers in a useful and equitable way.
Capitalism, then, can be a crucible for empathy, compassion, and fairness. And the domain in which this takes place is the workplace.
But while many people ponder the meaning of life, fewer tend to think deeply about the meaning of work. In addition, capitalism is often portrayed as a domain where ethics and values can be put on hold in the expedient pursuit of profits. “It’s just business” people often say when they want to rationalize ethical corner-cutting or outright sociopathic behavior.
That, however, is a short-sighted mind-set and a toxic one. Recognizing the concept of service that lies at the heart of capitalism, Fred encourages us to see the workplace not as an abstract realm of key performance indicators and profit-and-loss statements, but rather as a supremely humanized place, a place around which most people organize their lives, achieve their sense of self, and pursue meaning and impact.
Once we begin to embrace this key truth more consciously, we can begin to move from an “It’s just (simply) business” mind-set to a “just (justice) business” mind-set, wherein we fully recognize how compassion, integrity, responsiveness, and service lie at the heart of any high-functioning organization.
This “just business” mind-set applies not just to how a company serves its customers but also to how it serves its employees. As Fred explains in these pages, great leaders define and articulate an organization’s noble purpose and its values. Then they put those values into action in pursuit of that purpose, and inspire everyone else who works at the organization to do the same.
Here’s how Fred put it at the Wisdom 2.0 Conference in 2015, describing Jeff Weiner’s leadership style at LinkedIn: “A lot of leaders are rowing a boat. They’re bringing everyone along with them, and saying, ‘Come follow me.’ But the way I’ve seen Jeff and other great leaders do it, they’ll go and get on a surfboard. They don’t say, ‘Follow me.’ They say, ‘Come join us on this huge wave.’ ”
In the former vision, everyone’s literally in the same boat, doing only what their leader allows them to do. In the latter, everyone’s on the same wave and moving in the same direction, but they have much more freedom to improvise, to act boldly and creatively and set their own course of action.
Note, too, that it’s a “huge wave.”
What we see time and time again in Silicon Valley is how the companies that grow fastest, execute most consistently, and become the dominant players in their industries—the companies that do what I call “blitzscaling” or growing at lightning speed—are the ones that define their corporate missions in big, noble, and incredibly ambitious terms.
Google wants to organize all the world’s information. Facebook wants to connect the world. Microsoft wants to make people and organizations more productive. Airbnb wants to help its customers belong anywhere. LinkedIn wants to enable everyone to have their best economic opportunities.
These companies commit to service on a global scale, and their big, clearly defined missions attract talented professionals seeking personal fulfillment through work that has real meaning and impact.
But a big, noble goal is not enough. You also need the right kind of culture in place.
Entrepreneurship, I often say, is like jumping off a cliff and building a plane on the way down. You have a plan, but your resources are limited and time is running out. In the first chaotic months of starting a new venture, your default state is that you’re dead. To escape this fate, you have to reverse the downward course of your trajectory, and fast.
But here’s the thing. Success—and especially blockbuster success—doesn’t eliminate the danger of a fiery crash. When a start-up shifts from death plummet into blitzscaling mode, adding customers, increasing revenues, and growing the size of its workforce at dizzying speeds, a founder’s job gets even harder and more complex.
In this phase of a company’s development, an entrepreneur with a breakthrough idea must also become an inspirational leader. Micromanagement, after all, is not a mechanism for rapid growth. To scale quickly, an organization must give its employees the freedom to execute with speed, creativity, and risk.
Which ultimately means that the most productive organizations—the ones that create the greatest returns for society along with the greatest returns for investors—are the ones built on foundations of trust and integrity.
So read this profound book—but don’t stop there. Just as the best leaders have no followers, and the best teachers have no pupils, the best books aren’t just read. They’re acted upon.
In these pages, you can find great inspiration in Fred’s insights and actions. But it is in your own values, your own call to service, that you will ultimately find the sense of purpose that will compel you to work—and live—more consciously and productively, with the greatest possible impact.
The Meaning Revolution is a call not for followers but for fellow surfers.
Are you ready to catch that wave?