Greater Than Yourself, Business Leadership Book
Steve Farber, Author of the Radical Leap and the Radical Edge
Apr 2, 2009
Steve Farber's Greater than Yourself: The Ultimate Lesson of True Leadership (Doubleday, 2009) provides a new challenge for leadership: the responsibility of helping people become better than the boss, essentially, the boss grooming her own boss.
Management theories have evolved over the years from the autocratic boss–telling them what to do and making sure they do it–to the democratic–enlisting their involvement in solutions–and from being responsible for knowing all the answers to being a facilitator drawing out the best answers from group wisdom. During this time, assigning work to employees has grown from breaking jobs into simple, repeatable steps anyone can do to flexible jobs arranged around employee strengths.
"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader." ~John Quincy Adams
Greater Than Yourself
Using a parable format, part fiction, part fact, Farber describes a journey beginning with curiosity and leading him to discover first-hand the leadership principle of Greater Than Yourself (GTY). Farber, an avid amateur guitarist, is drawn to a vintage guitar and finally succumbs to purchasing it. He subsequently finds a note partially hidden in the case lining. The note piques his curiosity, intriguing him enough that he decides to locate the person to whom the note was intended.
As he succeeds in meeting someone who apparently knows the people in the captivating note, he is mysteriously drawn along a path of learning about GTY as a prerequisite to being introduced to the note's intended recipient.
He learns that the concept of Greater Than Yourself involves three components:
- Expand Yourself
- Give Yourself
- Replicate Yourself
Expand Yourself is the principle of growing one's own competency so there is much to give to others.
Give Yourself is the stage where the leader decides to give to another everything that the leader knows, including his or her resources and network of connections. This stage is one of utter generosity, holding nothing back as an advantage. A more normal relationship of boss to employee is characterized by a scene from a movie of many years ago in which a man who excels at playing billiards is in a match with a younger man, perhaps his son. The elder man wins the match, explaining, "I taught you everything that you know, but not everything that I know."
"I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers." ~Ralph Nader
The third component, Replicate Yourself, is the act of a leader helping another person become even more competent than the leader. When Farber questions the realism of this component, he is reminded of parenting. With the exception of dysfunctional families, most parents desire that their children achieve more in life than they were able to achieve, and unselfishly help them to accomplish that success. Farber is advised that the great leader will do just as a good parent will do for a child.
In the course of the story, Farber learns the concepts of GTY and eventually meets the note's original intended recipient, who has become an accomplished GTY leader.
Who Is Steve Farber?
Steve Farber is a management consultant, the head of Extreme Leadership, and the author of best selling The Radical Leap, judged one of the one hundred best business books of all time.
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