Leaders are like pieces of cork, floating on the tide
Leaders are like pieces of cork, floating on the tide. Sometimes the tide lifts them up, and sometimes the tide drops them low. Some great figures stay through a whole cycle: Napoleon was one of the first leaders to capture the energy unleashed by modern nationalism, which briefly lifted up France, and him too. But after 20 years there were nationalist sentiments motivating multiple movements all over Europe, and Napoleon was undone by the same force that initially lifted him up.
Chris Dixon seems to think leaders have a decisive effect on the corporations that they run, though he confines his actual examples to entrepreneurs, and he doesn’t seem aware of what he is doing. His anecdotes about Microsoft and Apple could be re-written into an interesting article about how difficult it is for a company to remain successful after the founding entrepreneur has left. Of course, there are many such companies, and if he was serious about his thesis, he would have written about them, since they offer the strongest case against his idea. AT&T and GE and IBM and Sears are all companies that had remarkable runs of success that lasted 50 to 75 years – runs too long to be attributed to any one particular leader. (If someone would like to reply that all of these companies have hit stumbles, I’d say that is irreverent to the point about leadership – such a point merely establishes that, given a long enough time frame, all things stumble, which is about as insightful as saying that the sky is blue.)