Farewell Lone Warrior Redux

Way back in 1998, the late Pearl Rock Kane, then Klingenstein Family Chair Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, wrote a landmark paper on the changing nature of school leadership entitled, "Farewell Lone Warrior." Kane's thesis was that schools, and headship in particular, had become so complex that a single person could no longer be the sole locus of leadership. Her call for a more team-based, distributed form of leadership is something we reference often in our work with heads and boards.This week, the Harvard Business Review caught up to Kane with a piece by Mary Johnstone-Louis and Charmian Love, "The Myth of the CEO Hero." Johnstone-Louis and Love give us this memorable quote:

"In the quest to design a corporate ecosystem that reliably — and profitably — meets the needs of people and the planet, there can be leaders. There can be luminaries. There can be innovators and iconoclasts. But there can be no singular heroes. Addressing the interconnected emergencies facing our societies and planet will require systems change, and transformations of that scale are a team sport."

True when Kane said much the same in 1998 and even truer today.