Brian M. Carney

If you take a chain, pile it up and then push it, what direction will it go? Nowhere you can predict and not very far. If you take it by the end and pull it, which way will it go? It will follow you. Leadership is not about what sets you apart from those you lead—it’s about what binds you together. It is not about controlling others—it’s about trusting others. It’s not about your achievements—it’s about unleashing your team’s greatness. In short, leadership really isn’t about you—it’s about your people. Take Bob Davids, co-author of this book and successful leader of six businesses in fields as diverse as engineering and winemaking. His achievements often came thanks to being able to refrain from acting when others might have found intervening irresistible. By trusting his employees to be better than him in their area of responsibility and letting them act, Bob unleashed the human greatness that no one else—including employees themselves—suspected. Yet to lead without acting does not mean doing nothing. It means creating conditions in which things happen by themselves. Leadership Without Ego is about a transformation of the concept of leadership in the past two decades: a change of beliefs about how best to lead, along with radically different leadership practices. The ideas in this book have already changed the fortunes of hundreds of businesses and the lives of tens of thousands of employees. They can do the same for your business, your people—and you.

Corporate liberation is not a strategy. It is a business philosophy that leaders around the world are using to radically transform their organizations. Liberating leaders believe that a workplace based on respect and freedom is a more natural environment than one based on mistrust and control. So they acted to align their organizations with these beliefs: They liberated people's initiative and potential and with it, unshackled their companies' performance. A lot has happened since Freedom, Inc. first appeared in 2009. The book itself has been translated to six other languages. In France, it won the best business book award and was the No.1 business/management bestseller on Amazon.fr seven months in a row. More importantly, it has inspired hundreds of leaders to launch their own corporate liberation. The French daily Le Monde has heralded the start of a corporate liberation movement in France. Since then, the phenomenon has made the cover of leading periodicals, been shown on the evening news of major European TV chains, and been the subject of a 90-minute TV documentary that broke all the records for popularity. Most liberated companies have been small and medium size-though some have grown tremendously since. Yet increasingly, multinationals such as Michelin or Decathlon-operating in Europe, America and Asia-are joining the corporate liberation movement that pioneers such as W.L. Gore and USAA began. Corporate liberation has no frontiers, geographical or industrial. Vineet Nayar has liberated an Indian high-tech giant and David Marquet, a U.S. nuclear submarine. Leaders of organizations of all sizes and types are shedding their hierarchies and bureaucracies and transforming them into respect- and freedom-based workplaces. Every morning their employees go to work, but many prefer to say they go to have fun-pursuing a common dream using their own initiative.