You were dangerous once.
Leaders get domesticated by the organisations they lead. Wild Leadership is the work of becoming dangerous again. Not reckless. Grounded. Dangerous.
Still in the Big Job
I am successful, but something about this position is diminishing me.
The Apex. You reached the top. Nobody told you what staying there costs, or that eventually everyone leaves. For using your power on things that matter, while you still hold it.
Enter The Apex
What’s next after 50
The thing I thought would carry me through the rest of my working life has stopped working.
You ran something. Now you don’t. You’ve lost the life that went with it. Take stock of what you need now, and see the principles I live by.
Enter What’s next after 50
I have been where you are.
I was born on the edge of Generation X. Three times at the top of a business. Left three times, not always when I chose. I did not just watch domestication happen to other people. It happened to me.
Early on I sat silent in a meeting while a senior colleague tore into my team over things I knew were untrue. I lost the team that day, and I deserved to. It did not feel like surrender. It felt like being sensible.
I watched the same logic run through businesses I was responsible for, under investor and board pressure that did not let up. Good people went quiet. The whole place slowly organised itself around what was safe to say. I did not have a name for it then. I do now.
Wild Leadership exists because I needed it and it did not exist. Everything here came from that.
“Clear, elegant writing about the need for leadership to be organic instead of mechanical.”
You know the position is conditional.
One day, you make it to the top. The Apex. Nobody has told you it exists, or what staying there costs. You may have nobody to say that to. Eventually everyone leaves. Whether they want to or not.
It started long before. When you set out on your career you are most your original self. Your dangerous self. Because you haven’t been domesticated yet. But day by day this happens. The put-down in a meeting. Learning when not to speak your mind. The true sentence softened before it leaves your mouth, ten thousand times over. The name for it is Domestication, and what you have been doing is Editing: what you say, how you show up, who you are.
No one forced this. They rewarded it.
I have done this. I told myself I lacked the political capital to speak. It is Editing, and at the time I would have called it judgement.
What The Apex is, and what it costs to stay in it. How domestication works, in full.
Thirty minutes, off the record
Free, on a Friday morning. Tell me where you are and what you are trying to work out. You get an independent view and a few ideas.
A Field Note every week.
Experiences and ideas, every week. A round-up every month of thoughts, observations and things that might be useful.