Donald G Doty

Million Follower Leadership Donald G Doty

Many retailing "household name" companies like J. C. Penney, Montgomery Ward, and Sears are failing. And only one of the companies originally listed on the Dow Jones Industrials is still in existence, General Electric. As a recent example, while Google's 2012 Oxygen project assessed the relationship between leadership attributes and employee satisfaction measures, effects of leadership on more mission centric measures such as sales and productivity were not substantiated (See "How Google sold its engineers on management," by David A. Garvin, HBR December 2013) . According recent Small Business Administration statistics, the rate of small business failure has not changed for the past 25 years! About 50% of business fail every 5 years as shown in the Figure below, no better than chance. The percentage of businesses that fail, despite the best leadership paradigms and principles, has not budged, not moved for over 25 years, not one iota, zero. So if current "how to succeed in leadership" principles are so good, home come this trend has not improved? This prompted the question, "Was there a different paradigm? Was there a time tested leadership paradigm that we have missed?" In order to ask this question of today I looked to the past, and discovered time tested ancient paradigms that offered incredible promise- million follower leadership. Learn the ancient paradigms that Gandhi, Muhammed, Christ, Genghis Khan, the Dalai Lama, Lenin and others used to create movements with millions and millions of followers that persisted years after their death. Now that's Sustainability!