Women are canaries in the coal mine of power. They fall over dead whenever work gets stifling. They groove wherever new models of business behavior are emerging: consensual management, flextime, the belief that work should have meaning. Women are early adopters of technology: They enthusiastically took to the skies right after Kitty Hawk, and they brought appliances into the home and typewriters into the office. If you want to know what’s new in the world of business, look to women.
For that reason, we won’t see great leaders until we see great women leaders. As role models, men are going flat, and men themselves are beginning to realize that. Lew Platt, former CEO and president of Hewlett-Packard, added Carly Fiorina’s name to the list of candidates for presidency during a painful time: His wife was dying, and he was beginning to see just how strong a force she had been in holding their family together. So he hatched the notion that a woman would be a stronger leader than he had been.
Named president and CEO of Hewlett-Packard last year, Fiorina has a tremendous opportunity ahead of her — one that she’ll grasp neither by caring strictly about reputation nor by focusing on the creation of her personal brand.
To realize the call of leadership, she must heed the call of legend. Legend is the missing ingredient in leadership — although you often see it in women. All attention today goes to the Brand Called You.
The action and the meaning of legend are unknown.
How is a legend different from a brand? An alternative spelling of “legend” is g-u-t-s. A legend is someone who not only attains the heights but also does something to expand the envelope. Legends are people who act so daringly that they become bigger than life. In legend, there is an element of the inexplicable, the irrational.
Why is a legend a good thing? Because beyond all of the honing of reputations and the building of brands, what ultimately matters is stretching the container of leadership. Do the unusual, the unexpected, and you give yourself a wider platform on which to operate: Others expect you to be comfortable with risk, and they trust you with risk. Just as important, you give others permission to think outside the box. Legend involves a leadership feedback loop that people don’t like to talk about, because it’s trouble.
As women reach higher into the leadership stratosphere, they are doing all of the right things — but none of the “wrong” ones. Doing the wrong things means committing rough, difficult actions. You see this kind of behavior in bad-boy leaders. Larry Ellison does something wild, and his legend grows. Stories about Steve Jobs’ bad-boy reputation are rife. Even today, Jobs dresses in his signature black; it’s a sign that he’s still the pirate, the outlaw, the misfit.
Read about the greatest founders of all — the founding fathers of this country — and you’ll see that using the action language of legend is not a bad thing. George Washington and Benjamin Franklin consistently used that language: They did the outrageous; they put themselves in danger.
Franklin used to chase storms to learn more about them; Washington once had several horses shot out from under him — and survived.
Look at the great female leadership legends: Benazir Bhutto, Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir. It doesn’t matter if you disagree with their politics, or deplore their triumphs or their losses. What matters is that they walked on the wild side. They burned, baby; they burned. They were bad girls. They weren’t afraid to risk their reputation, and they didn’t give a whit about brand. Start to build your legend, and you stop worrying about criticism. You begin to do something that fits into no known category. You give yourself latitude. You start to play on a bigger playing field. And then you begin to think that you can triumph. You begin to experience the kind of leadership that turns people at the top into heroes.
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Next week in Part 2: As part of Rubin’s ongoing education in how leadership works, she chose to go to the Flea theater where a women’s circus called “Volcano Love” was holding court, rather than listen to speeches from a sampling of Fortune’s “50 Most Powerful Women in American Business.”
