Leadership Sans Ego: How to Stop Managing and Start Leading

If you take a chain, pile it up and then push it, what direction will it go? Nowhere you can predict and not very far. If you take it by the end and pull it, which way will it go? It will follow you.

Leadership is not about what sets you apart from those you lead―it’s about what binds you together. It is not about controlling others―it’s about trusting others. It’s not about your achievements―it’s about unleashing your team’s greatness.

In short, leadership really isn’t about you―it’s about your people.  

Take Bob Davids, co-author of this book and successful leader of six businesses in fields as diverse as engineering and winemaking. His achievements often came thanks to being able to refrain from acting when others might have found intervening irresistible. By trusting his employees to be better than him in their area of responsibility and letting them act, Bob unleashed the human greatness that no one else―including employees themselves―suspected.

Yet to lead without acting does not mean doing nothing. It means creating conditions in which things happen by themselves.

Leadership Without Ego is about a transformation of the concept of leadership in the past two decades: a change of beliefs about how best to lead, along with radically different leadership practices. The ideas in this book have already changed the fortunes of hundreds of businesses and the lives of tens of thousands of employees. They can do the same for your business, your people―and you.

Bob Davids started his first business at the age of 12. At 20, he entered the highly prestigious Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Bob has headed six successful companies and is now building a high-end resort in Indonesia. In ten years he built Radica Games from nothing to the third most profitable toy maker globally. Starting with land that was horse pasture, Bob built Sea Smoke Cellars into “America’s best new winery” (Food & Wine) in just five years.

Brian M. Carney is Senior Vice President for Corporate Communications of Rivada Networks, an American wireless-technology start up. Brian was a member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board from 2004-2014 and editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe’s editorial page from 2004-2005 (in Brussels) and 2009-2014 (in London). He received the Gerald R. Loeb award for Commentary in 2009 for his coverage of the financial crisis.

Isaac Getz is Professor atthe top-ranked ESCP Europe Business School. He was also Visiting Professor at Cornell and Stanford Universities. Isaac has studied over 300 companies in 30 countries and published research on diverse topics related to innovation, leadership, and freedom and responsibility culture. He co-authored with Brian Carney the award-winning international best-seller Freedom, Inc. translated into a dozen languages.