Leaders, Entrepreneurs, and CEOs — Oh My!

Does everyone have to be one?

“I raised my kids to be leaders,” the executive director of a California nonprofit told me as he drove me home from Sacramento in his Tesla.

We’d had a long day, waiting with a roomful of activists so we could speak for two minutes each at a state senate hearing on clean energy. The session ran so long that I missed the train I’d planned to take, so I was relieved and grateful when he offered me a ride home.

Till he started going on about leadership.

The executive director was a perfectly nice guy. And based on what he told me about how he ran his organization — he took direction from his communications director! he set up the organization so it could keep running without him! — he was probably a good leader, too. Still, my hackles were raised.

I was too tired to dig into what Mr. Executive Director meant, but now I wonder. What does it mean to raise your kids to be leaders? And why does everyone need to be one?

Leaders of our lives

I was recently served up a LinkedIn post (thanks, algorithm!) that suggested we are all leaders, with a capital L — if not at work, then at least in our own lives. Not only that, but we should therefore do what leaders at companies do and create strategies, roadmaps, and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators, for those not in the corporate world) for our lives.

Gag me with a spoon!

I admit it — I don’t even like doing those things at work. Of course, companies need strategies, but I’d rather wash toilets than set or track KPIs. That’s bad enough at work; imagine doing it in the rest of life!

Sure, set goals and work toward them. Figure out the steps you need to take to achieve your goals. But roadmaps? They’re tenuous suggestions at best even in companies; they don’t really work in life, which has a way of steering you off any charted path. KPIs? I don’t think you can quantify your life performance. How do you evaluate a life?

Not that people don’t try. A former co-worker told me that her father, who worked in Human Resources, would give her and her siblings annual performance reviews. It scarred her for life. Even in the corporate setting, performance reviews aren’t usually that helpful; they’re disliked enough that some companies, like my former employer Adobe, have done away with them. Imagine being subjected to them outside of work.

Those ubiquitous serial entrepreneurs

My nonno was a born entrepreneur. As a young man in Trieste, he started several businesses, including a small radio factory and a hat shop. He met my nonna when she worked at his hat shop; after they got married and moved to Milan, he opened a store that sold women’s clothing and hats; after the war, he started an import company. He then moved the family to Argentina when my father finished high school, pursuing an idea of starting another business there importing Chilean lumber. When that didn’t pan out, he opened a series of hotels in Argentina and Uruguay.

I didn’t get those genes.

That makes me feel like I don’t fit into today’s world, where everyone wants to be an entrepreneur — preferably, a serial one. I’m not just imagining that; according to this article in Vox, “When Brooke Erin Duffy, communications professor at Cornell University, asks her students ‘Who wants to be an entrepreneur?’ they all raise their hands.”

I’m so over everyone needing to be an entrepreneur. I’m so over hearing people describe themselves as serial entrepreneurs. The internet is saturated with articles telling you how to become one, what it takes to succeed as one, and what it’s like to be one.

But does everyone have to be an entrepreneur?

The drive to be a CEO

When I made a career transition into clean energy over a decade ago, I worked in a solar startup incubator. So I was surrounded by startup founders.

Startups can’t start up without founders. And they can’t keep going without employees who aren’t founders. But everyone seemed to be vying to be a founder. If not a founder, they at least had to be a CEO.

Although being a CEO has never been my dream, I get that it’s a goal for some people. What really struck me, though, was how many people I met who seemed to think CEO should be one of their first job titles right out of college. What would they have thought about my first clerk-typist job, or my next couple of “pay your dues” positions?

Though I could have done without those early jobs, they gave me a greater appreciation of the more satisfying work I subsequently landed. But that wouldn’t have been enough for the aspiring CEOs I was meeting a decade ago. It wasn’t enough to do satisfying, engaging work that paid decently. Everyone had to go straight to the “top.”

Being yourself

What would the world look like if everyone were leading? If everyone were a CEO or a founder? How would that even work? Who would be left to follow, to do the work?

You can see where I’m going. It wouldn’t work.

We need all kinds of people not only to keep the world interesting but also to keep it functioning. Not everyone has to — or should — be an entrepreneur or a CEO. Not everyone has to — or should — be a leader.

But our modern American society doesn’t allow for that. We elevate certain types of people and life situations: extroverts, leaders, CEOs … billionaires. The rest are strung along with the promise that they too could become these things. Even extroversion, a somewhat innate though perhaps fluid quality, is something to be strived for.

The management training I was forced to take when I worked at Adobe was mostly a waste of time. But one little nugget stuck with me. It was more effective, we were told, to nurture our staff’s strengths than to make a big effort to improve their areas of weakness.

Take that in context. If an editor reporting to you can’t edit, you either need to improve their editing or help them move on to another job.

But if they excel at editing, why try to make them a public speaker? If they excel at public speaking, why try to make them an editor? If they excel at doing the work, why insist that they move up the ladder to a place where they can no longer do it?

We need to start looking at our own lives that way. I’m not a natural leader, entrepreneur, or CEO. Maybe you aren’t, either. Can’t we still lead (oops!) valuable, enjoyable lives? Can’t we be ourselves?

I think you know how I’d answer those questions.

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A Worker Reads History
By Bertolt Brecht

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed.
Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima's houses,
That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?
In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished
Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome
Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song.
Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the legend
The night the seas rushed in,
The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.

Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in his army?
Phillip of Spain wept as his fleet
was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears?
Frederick the Great triumphed in the Seven Years War.
Who triumphed with him?

Each page a victory
At whose expense the victory ball?
Every ten years a great man,
Who paid the piper?

So many particulars.
So many questions.