There are exactly 2 types of leaders to be found in business today:
The Visionary
This is typically the leader you will see in a start-up. They are the brain that started this thing in the first place, saw a gap in the industry and decided to fill it. They aren’t necessarily a founder of the company, but it is more common due to the vested interest in success. It’s this attachment and knowing the business at it’s core that allows them to be creative and come up with ideas.
The Cruise Controller
This is typically the leader with a business background that knows how to run any business. They can do everything necessary to run the day to day, from mergers and acquisitions to globalization, but they are not visionaries, at least not so far as we are concerned.
As an exercise, let’s look and see if we can figure what kind of leaders are driving companies.
Take the recently ousted CEO at Yahoo! Carol Bartz, who was very much a cruise controller. She made no revolutionary ideas or offerings at Yahoo!, simply shuffled things around and continued with business as usual. While she did run a global company, this alone does not allow a company to stay competitive, and as a result they dropped in user base and relevance.
To continue with Yahoo!, consider their founders. They were visionaries to the core, seeing opportunity and seizing it. The problem is that visionaries alone can’t cut it either. Visionaries often lack the discipline or patience required to run a business day to day. To complicate things, most visionaries are driven by a hunger that is usually satisfied when a company reaches some level of success, thus are typically short lived.
HP, Kodak, and Microsoft are some more examples of companies being run by cruise controllers. In their day, they were leading the pack and arguably changed the world. Today they focus on mergers and acquisitions, shuffling around resources and changing for the sake of change.
For all of these companies you can almost visibly see what kind of leadership they had throughout their history. Did they grow and offer new products, or did they just rename what they had and change some pricing? Are they leading the pack or following what everyone else does?
This isn’t to say these companies don’t have any visionaries. Ultimately some entity decides what direction a company goes, and possibly that entity could undervalue or underestimate the value of either side. They are competing forces in a way, risk vs stability, thinking vs doing, new vs refine.
I challenge you to look at any company and see if you can figure out what kind of leadership it is influenced by. Then, go back in that company’s history and see if you spot the shifts in leadership. Ultimately, I believe you need both in balance in order to exist and be relevant in the long run, and that without both you either can’t grow or lose relevance.
One avenue I would like to research more is a possible connection between this visionary / cruise controller concept and the notion in software development that suggests a developer is typically more proficient as either a starter, an implementer, or a finisher.
