AUA: Are Ego-Driven Leaders The Only Kind That Succeed?

**Sam Spurlin** (0:03)
Hey, everyone, welcome back to At Work with The Ready. I'm Sam Spurlin and I'm joined as always by Rodney Evans.

**Rodney Evans** (0:10)
Hey, Sam.

**Sam Spurlin** (0:11)
Every other week, we're tackling one tough, thought-provoking listener question and sharing a few ideas we think might help.
Let's dive in. Rodney, what have you got for us this week?

**Rodney Evans** (0:22)
I recently read the article in The New Yorker about Sam Altman. I guess I am right that he's exactly the kind of leader that's doing the opposite of what you would advise him to. And yet he created one of the most valuable companies in the world. The same thing is probably true for someone like Elon Musk. So maybe his way of doing things is more successful than going for trust and participation, etc.
Or do the companies that you work with get another kind of success? Also, in my organization and environment, I see people getting quote unquote to the top that act from a position of ego and power and still look successful. What does success look like in an organization that's worked with you for a while, and how might that be different to the results someone like Altman and Musk get?
Okay. What do you got, Sam?

**Sam Spurlin** (1:10)
So I mean, this is going to be a philosophical answer, I think, or heavy on the philosophy.
One thought, just real quick, anytime we are holding up exemplars of leadership or organizations that are doing things in a kind of iconoclastic way, is you have to be very conscious of just the insane survivorship bias that is inherent in that. So there could be so many companies that are run in the same way with the same sort of practices and the same sort of principles, and 99% of them die on the vine along the way. But you have a very small minority that do succeed for various reasons outside of kind of the culture or how they're actually run. And we hold them up as like, oh, shouldn't we all be this way? It's the classic like, you know, Steve Jobs was an asshole, so why can't I be an asshole?

**Rodney Evans** (2:04)
Sure.

**Sam Spurlin** (2:04)
It's that whole realm of things. I'm guessing always incredibly skeptical or somewhat hesitant to hold up any organization as what we should all be striving for. Just so, setting that aside, the philosophical thing that I just want to throw into the mix, and this is something that I've been, I think, wrestling with a lot more in kind of how I think about the work and how I help other people do this work is that I think there's a definition question about what does success mean.
And I think we've always, or I'll speak for myself, I have tried to have a definition of success that is more than just, we made a lot of money, or we have the biggest organization, or the greatest sort of impact. And I think there is something around the experience of people in your organization, non-monetary things related to the meaning and the value that you place on the work that is important. And I don't want to hold up a company as like ultra successful because they made the most money as the paradigm here. So that's where my head goes at first on something like this.

**Rodney Evans** (3:18)
Yeah. I mean, I think to your first point, I was going to talk about another bias that is adjacent and related. So there's the survivorship bit, which is, for every Sam Altman, there are 9,000.

**Sam Spurlin** (3:34)
9,000 poor and out of business Sam Altmans.

**Rodney Evans** (3:38)
9,000 single shingle consultants who are like, I'll advise you on startups.
The bias I was going to talk about is actually that I think that the archetypal leader that is very colorful and ego driven and very public, gets a lot of ink and gets a lot of eyeballs. There are a lot of very successful companies that you've never heard of, because there is no Elon Musk posting pictures of him on ketamine. There are wonderful, thriving, scaled organizations, many of which didn't IPO, many of which don't have a founder billionaire at their helm, many of which have been in business for a century, that are not as exciting to read about and to profile, because they don't have a little baby psycho founder. I just want to say out loud, when I come across those companies, I'm always like, it's so interesting to me that I've never heard of you. And then when I read their Wikipedia, I'm like, holy shit, you make so much money and you've been in business for such a long time. And there's literally nothing written about you in Forbes because there's nothing interesting about you because you're not bad.