11. Leadership

This story ends where it begins.... Real leadership is not coming up with great business strategies, or making all the tough business decisions. Everybody in the organization should think about strategy, and everybody should make decisions about their own businesses within a business.

In a well-designed organization, empowered entrepreneurs who make independent decisions are automatically coordinated and aligned with corporate strategies by the very nature of the environment, by the consistent signals they get.

Not only does this eliminate the need for expensive, restrictive bureaucracy and controls. It unleashes everybody's creativity, and fills the organization with energy and commitment.

Meanwhile, executives can focus on leadership, not doing their managers' jobs for them.

In short, true leaders rally staff around a compelling vision of the ideal organization -- the BWB paradigm.

Then, they implement that vision by deliberately adjusting the signals that guide people, using science to design each of the five organizational systems.

In doing so, leaders develop organizations in which everyone can succeed, with or without them -- organizations in which every small group is managed as its own independent, yet interdependent, business within a business.