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The Apprentice (BBC TV) which showcases the management style of Alan Sugar, founder and chairman of Amstrad, implies that aggressive leadership is the real secret of business success. However Sally Bibb, author of The Stone Age Company, contends that much of the success achieved by such leaders is in spite of rather than a result of their ‘no-prisoners’ style.

Bibb argues that were they to adopt more collaborative styles they would be even more successful.

For example research in JIm Collins book Good to Great of what differentiated companies who achieved 7 times the stock returns of the pack showed that a major factor was leaders who demonstrated “extreme personal humility and intense professional goodwill”.

One of the main characteristics of a bioteam is rings of empowered distributed leadership rather than points of single command and control (eg Bioteam Rule 1: Stop Controlling).

If fact we may be doing our ancestors a great disservice in labelling a leadership style as "Stone Age" as Virtual team anthropology shows Palaeolithic societies had the practice of pooling their human capital simply to survive with leadership rotates according to the task at hand.

To read Sally's full article see Tough at the top.

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Bioteams Books Reviews

The Organizational Zoo

August 16, 2006 | article by Ken Thompson in Book Reviews (37)

I was introduced to an interesting book and web site, The Organizational Zoo, by Arthur Shelley which offers humorous observations of the characteristics and behaviours of the other creatures in your "organizational Zoo".

Buy it now from:
Amazon.Com
Amazon.Co.UK

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