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Rost found that writers on leadership had defined it in more than two hundred ways. Often, they glided between incompatible definitions within the same book: they argued that leaders should be simultaneously decisive and flexible, or visionary and open-minded. The closest they came to a consensus definition of leadership was the idea that it was “good management.” In practice, Rost wrote, “leadership is a word that has come to mean all things to all people.”

“The End of Leadership,” from 2012, Barbara Kellerman, a founding director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership, wrote that “we don’t have much better an idea of how to grow good leaders, or of how to stop or at least slow bad leaders, than we did a hundred or even a thousand years ago.” She points out that, historically, the “trajectory” of leadership has been “about the devolution of power,” from the king to the voters, say, or the boss to the shareholders. In recent years, technological and economic changes like social media and globalization have made leaders less powerful.

Max Weber distinguished between the “charismatic” leadership of traditional societies and the “bureaucratic” leadership on offer in the industrialized world.

Khurana found that many companies passed over good internal candidates for C.E.O. in favor of “messiah” figures with exceptional charisma.

Charismatic C.E.O.s are often famous, and they make good copy;

y the mid-twentieth century

“process-based” approach. T

if you read a detailed, process-oriented account of Jobs’s career (“Becoming Steve Jobs,” by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, is particularly good), it’s clear that Jobs was a master of the leadership process. Time and time again, he gathered intelligence about the future of technology; surveyed the competition and refined his taste; set goals and assembled teams; tracked projects, intervening into even apparently trivial decisions; and followed through, considering the minute details of marketing and retail. Although Jobs had considerable charisma, his real edge was his thoughtful involvement in every step of an unusually expansive leadership process.

some organizations the candidate pool is heavily filtered: in the military, for example, everyone who aspires to command must jump through the same set of hoops. In Congress, though, you can vault in as a businessperson, or a veteran, or the scion of a political family.

whether times are bad enough to justify gambling on a dark-horse candidate.

Leadership BS

five virtues that are almost universally praised by popular leadership writers—modesty, authenticity, truthfulness, trustworthiness,

and selflessness—and argues that most real-world leaders ignore these virtues. (If anything, they tend to be narcissistic, back-stabbing, self-promoting shape-shifters.) To Pfeffer, the leadership industry is Orwellian.

Reading Samet’s anthology, one sees how starkly perspectival leadership is. From the inside, it often feels like a poorly improvised performance; leading is like starring in a lip-synched music video. The trick is to make it look convincing from the outside. And so the anthology takes pains to show how leaders react to the ambiguities of their roles. In one excerpt, from the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, Samet finds him marching toward an enemy camp. Grant, a newly minted colonel who has never commanded in combat, is terrified: “My heart kept getting higher and higher, until it felt to me as though it was in my throat.” When the camp comes into view, however, it’s deserted—the other commander, Grant surmises, “had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him.” Leaders, he realizes, are imagined to be fearless but aren’t; ideally, one might hide one’s fear while finding in it clues about what the enemy will do.

32KeyFindings•About26%oftheoverallNTENCommunityconsiderstheirorganizationstobeatthe“Leading”levelontheTechnologyAdoptionSpectrum.Thisisaslightincreasecomparedtolastyear’ssurveyinwhich23%reportedthattheirorganizationswereatthetopendofthespectrum.•Aswe’veseeninpastyears,NTENMemberstendtoratetheirorganization’sapproachtotechnologydecisionshigheralongthespectrum:over82%ofcurrentNTENMembersindicatethattheirorganizationsareatthe“Operating”levelorabove,comparedto59%ofNon-members.•WhileLeadingorganizationsdotendtohavelargerannualoperatingbudgets—aswe’veseeninpreviousyears—wealsocontinuetofindLeadersacrossallbudgetsizes,including20%whocomefromorganizationswithbudgetslessthan$250K.•Weseeasignificantincreaseinthepercentageofrespondentswhoseorganizationshavetechnology-relatedtrainingandprofessionaldevelopmentallocationsintheirbudgets:71%thisyear,comparedto49%previously.•WhilethereisclearcorrelationamongNTENMembersbetweenTechnologyAdoption(TA)levelandhavingtechnology-relatedtrainingbudget–withnearly90%ofLeadingrespondentsindicatingtheyhavetechnology-trainingbudgets–wedon’tseecorrelationbetweenTAandtrainingbudgetsamongNon-members.ThismightsuggestthatthereismorevaluetoNTENMembership,intermsofTAlevel,thantrainingalone.•“Tobepartofthecommunityofnonprofitleaders”istheprimaryreasonrespondentsbecomeMembersofNTEN,followedcloselyby“generalprofessionaldevelopmentandtraining.”•Anewquestiononthisyear’ssurveyasksrespondentsabouttheirkeyprojectsandprioritiesoverthecomingtwelvemonths.Respondentsindicatedtheyweremostlikelytobe“Expandingexistingprogramorservices”inthecomingyear.•The“timeliness”ofNTENresourcesandinformationwasrankedhighestbyrespondentsintermsofNTENMembersatisfaction.•WecontinuetoseeExecutiveDirectors/CEOsasagrowingconstituencyamongtheCommunity,especiallyamongNon-members,andseemoreFundraising/DevelopmentprofessionalsparticipatingintheCommunityasMembersthisyear.•

funding”and“budget”—inotherwords,money—isakeyissueforrespondents.Likelastyear,weseethattheword“integration”appearsfrequently,especiallyamongresponsesbycurrentNTENMembers.ForNon-members,theword“management”showedupoften

struggling:“Wearestruggling;wehaveafailinginfrastructure,andourtechnologytimeandbudgetgenerallygotowardscreatingworkarounds,repairingoldequipment,andduplicatingtasks.”Functioning:“Wekeepthelightson;wehavebasicsystemsinplacetomeetimmediateneeds.Leadershipmakestechnologydecisionsbasedonefficiencies,withlittle-to-noinputfromstaff/consultant.”Operating:“Wekeepup;wehavestableinfrastructureandasetoftechnologypoliciesandpractices.Leadershipmakestechnologydecisionsbasedonstandardlevelsaccordingtoindustry/sectorinformationandgathersinputfromtechnologystaff/consultantbeforemakingfinaldecision.”Leading:“We’reinnovators;werecognizethattechnologyisaninvestmentinourmission,andleadershipintegratestechnologydecisionswithorganizationalstrategy.Technology-responsiblestaffareinvolvedinoverallstrategicplanning

3. People are managing their careers as entrepreneurs

4. The traditional resume is now virtual and easy to build

5. Job seeker passion has become the deciding factor in employment

This shift to changemaking leadership may, in truth, be more the result of the rapid growth of the popular desire for self-expression and self-determination, charted in rigorous detail by Ronald Inglehart

Liberal arts education and the humanities will remain important. They’re still underrated. People get their own liberal arts education on the Internet; it may be weird, low-status stuff that a lot of us have never heard of, like computer games, or celebrities or sports analytics.

Education occurs in many forms; it’s not the same as schooling. We always need to keep that in mind”.

Amazon Web Services (A.W.S.)

“But now, every start-up is A.W.S. only, so there are no servers to kick, no fabs to be near. You can work anywhere. The idea that all you need is your laptop and Wi-Fi, and you can be doing anything — that’s an A.W.S.-driven invention.” This same freedom from a physical location or, for that matter, physical products has led to new work structures.

Despite its breathtaking arrogance, the question resonates; it articulates concerns about tech being, if not ageist, then at least increasingly youth-fetishizing. “People have always recruited on the basis of ‘Not your dad’s company,’ ” Biswas said.

On a certain level, the old-guard-new-guard divide is both natural and inevitable. Young people like to be among young people; they like to work on products (consumer brands) that their friends use and in environments where they feel acutely the side effects of growth. Lisa and Jim’s responses to the question “Would you work for an old-guard company?” are studiously diplomatic — “Absolutely,” they say — but the fact remains that they chose, from a buffet of job options, fledgling companies in San Francisco.

Cool exists at the ineffable confluence of smart people, big money and compelling product.

Older engineers form a smaller percentage of employees at top new-guard companies, not because they don’t have the skills, but because they simply don’t want to. “Let’s face it,” Karl said, “for a 50-something to show up at a start-up where the average age is 29, there is a basic cultural disconnect that’s going on. I know people, mostly those who have stayed on the technical side, who’ve popped back into an 11-person company. But there’s a hesitation there.”

Getting these job offers depends almost exclusively on the candidate’s performance in a series of technical interviews, where you are asked, in front of frowning hiring managers, to whip up correct and efficient code. Moreover, a majority of questions seem to be pulled from undergraduate algorithms and data-structures textbooks,

“People want the enterprise tools they use at work to look and feel like the web apps they use at home.”

Some of us will continue to make the web products that have generated such vast wealth and changed the way we think, interact, protest. But hopefully, others among us will go to work on tech’s infrastructure, bringing the spirit of the new guard into the old.

someone has ever given up a prepaid wireless phone number. Where housing is often uncertain, those numbers are a more reliable way to find you than addresses; giving one up may indicate you are willing (or have been forced) to disappear from family or potential employers. That is a bad sign.

Character (though it is usually called something more neutral-sounding) is now judged by many other algorithms. Workday, a company offering cloud-based personnel software, has released a product that looks at 45 employee performance factors, including how long a person has held a position and how well the person has done. It predicts whether a person is likely to quit and suggests appropriate things, like a new job or a transfer, that could make this kind of person stay.

characterize managers as “rainmakers” or “terminators,”

“Algorithms aren’t subjective,” he said. “Bias comes from people.”

Algorithms are written by human beings. Even if the facts aren’t biased, design can be, and we could end up with a flawed belief that math is always truth.