Humble Leadership, Second Edition summary

Apollo 13 was 200,000 miles from Earth when an explosion damaged the spacecraft’s service module. In response, the crew moved into the lunar module, a makeshift lifeboat, but its carbon-dioxide scrubbers couldn’t support all three astronauts. They had spare scrubbers, but they were square and the lunar module’s fittings were round. NASA scrambled for a solution. In the end it didn’t come from on high: a team of ground engineers found it after dumping identical cabin equipment onto a table and jerry-rigging an adapter using plastic bags, cardboard, and duct tape.

The operation was a model of organizational functionality. There were no clueless bigwigs or strategic experts getting in the way and the engineers weren’t mavericks bending the rules to get the job done. Mission leaders managed the crisis without pretending to possess all the answers. Those below them contributed their specialized knowledge and the astronauts implemented the solution under extraordinary constraints. Everyone played their part. The crew splashed down safely in the Pacific on April 17.

The lesson Apollo 13 holds for large organizations is obvious in theory, but often forgotten in practice: it’s that leaders don’t possess all the facts needed to make sound decisions in complex environments. Information is dispersed across roles, shifts, and hierarchies. But leaders don’t need to know everything – that’s not the job. Their role is to facilitate the work of people who possess the information to solve problems and defuse crises.

The stakes are higher in deep space, of course, but the principle holds in the everyday life of organizations. Strategy, like production, requires a division of labour. The big picture painted by revenue streams, margins, market share, and competitors’ movements is vital. So is the junior salesperson’s gut feeling that her company’s biggest customer is about to switch to a rival.

Alas, the latter kind of information often fails to travel up the chain of command. That’s a cultural problem; the corporate world has long idealised the heroic leader – the all-seeing, all-knowing genius on their solitary perch at the top of the company. It was always a myth, but in an increasingly volatile and complex world, it’s dangerous as well as unrealistic. Leaders who act like they know it all build cultures of silence. When bosses fail to listen or, worse, shoot messengers, subordinates soft-pedal bad news and withhold solutions. Rather than working together to solve critical problems, people weaponise information in interdepartmental wars. You’ve probably worked for a company that operated that way. It’s the kind of organization in which small problems have a way of becoming systemic crises.