On April 27, The Wall Street Journal debuted a new column by Sam Walker called “Captain Class: Lessons and Strategies of Leadership.” For his first article, Mr. Walker chose to profile the plight of Boeing as it fell from grace in 2005 due to a number of missteps, and then recovered under the leadership of a new CEO, Jim McNerney. As I read the article, I couldn’t get the image out of my head of how Lloyd (Jim Carrey) would try to explain leadership to Harry (Jeff Daniels) in the classic 1994 movie, “Dumb and Dumber.” While I love to see a column dedicated to leadership, I hope the next articles are better than this one.

The thesis proposed by Mr. Walker is that an organization can’t be on the top forever because failure is inevitable. He states, “No empire rises forever.” He implies that a successful company will falter at some point and it will take a “wrecking ball” to lead it back to glory. And, Jim McNerney fulfilled that role at Boeing. He was a “disruptive leader” – someone “who bursts through the door swinging a 7-iron.”

Apparently, it took Mr. McNerney and his 7-iron eleven years on the job to transform Boeing’s culture, hitting slices and hooks, and chipping and putting the company back to glory. Really? Does anyone believe that a golf analogy adequately reflects the key drivers of Boeing’s success in becoming the largest aerospace company on the planet during Mr. McNerney’s tenure, with a share price increasing by 200% and outperforming the S&P 500 by over 100%, and all of that accomplished during the deepest recession since the Great Depression?

The next part of Mr. Walker’s thesis is that a “disruptive leader” must be followed by one with a more “muted” style who cleans up the skirmishes and stabilizes the culture. He states, “The turbulent stretch of the journey doesn’t define the flight … the climactic event is picking the next pilot.” He offers that Mr. McNerney’s replacement in 2016, Dennis Muilenburg, who has been very successful so far, was the muted pilot, a low-keyed engineer who is/was more conciliatory and made fewer cultural adjustments. Is leadership at the top really that simple, i.e., have a never-ending series of “disruptive CEOs” followed by “muted pilots?” If so, when my co-author and I revise our leadership textbook, we’re going to add a chapter titled “Low-Keyed and Muted.” I do wonder how Dennis feels about the way he is described.

As a representative of the gender characterized by a Y chromosome, I find Mr. Walker’s thesis embarrassing. The days of testosterone-charged machismo and the “great man” theory have passed and a more enlightened view of leadership has emerged. We now know that leadership has nothing to do with carrying a 7-iron or a 6-shooter to clean up the mess left by a predecessor.

First of all, leadership is about never allowing a mess to occur. Great leaders build and sustain a viable future for an organization – the job is to do both: build and sustain. The belief that success is the inevitable breeding ground of failure is nonsense. Just because something has happened in the past does not mean it must happen in the future. Moreover, all we know about history is what’s recorded or talked about. Sure, successful companies have failed and we know their names. But do we know the names of all the companies that have quietly gone from success to success? Stories of failure capture media attention much more powerfully than those laced with “boring” and perennial success.

And, let’s be clear, companies don’t fail – their executives do – which causes the company to fail. These executives stop being leaders. Otto Scharmer’s research about corporate failure is compelling. When a successful company fails it’s because the executives became ignorant of the environmental forces affecting the company, or were blinded by their arrogance in a position of market and/or technological power, or were absent from emerging realities by being trapped in their well-developed and unyielding mental models, or all of the above.
The smartest statement in Mr. Walker’s article is from McNerney when he says, “The act of leadership is not always comfortable.” The fact is it’s never comfortable. Being a leader is hard work, and it’s even harder to sustain once it is achieved. Why, you might ask? Well, here are some reasons:

Everything is constantly changing.

The world is dynamic – nothing is fixed and certain. Potential is captured in each fleeting moment. Leaders need to be able to set a direction for an organization while knowing the highest likelihood is that they got it wrong because they either had a blurred perception of reality or the reality shifted on them. Being aware of that vulnerability is essential for enduring success. Leaders must constantly interrogate their version of reality by maintaining challenging relationships with their internal and external environments. The most successful leaders don’t react to changes in their environments; they cause them through the power of their relationships.

Great teams don’t just happen.

A leader constructs a team with the balance of skills required for the situation – but the real impact comes from the day-to-day effort of nurturing the team to a high potential. They’re always growing that potential inside of people, capturing the power of diversity, nurturing constructive behaviors, and creating a congruence of enabling messages in the organization.

There are no ready-made geniuses – the potential in people is created.

Leaders define success by others’ successes. Their influence occurs in groups and they model the way for others. They meet others’ needs and carry the burden of maintaining relationships inside and outside the organization. Leaders change the way people think about what is possible. The key ingredient is conversation. Leadership is in fact largely defined by conversations, be they about performance, setting direction, confronting issues, coaching, sharing context, or building relationships. Moreover, a high degree of empathy and compassion is required to be fully present in these conversations.

Leaders need to be managers too.

Having a challenging vision that will inspire people is critical for leaders. The focus on developing the future is essential, but so is delivering in the moment. Leadership without management can result in poor performance and misdirected change.

Finally, the secret for enduring leadership success in any aspect of life – organizational and personal – is to never become ignorant, arrogant, and absent. The image of cutting through the rough with a 7-iron or carrying a 6-shooter and declaring that, “a new sheriff is in town” is as inappropriate and dumb as it is outdated.