Venkatesh RaoOne such pattern I strongly recommend you understand and cultivate in your org if you don’t already is the BDFx, or Benevolent Dictator for x, pattern, where x is a time period between an hour or a year or so. The limits vary by context. In various orgs I’m in, it tends to be days to months.
Source: BDFxing, Or Post-Charismatic Distributed Leadership by Venkatesh Rao
It stands for Benevolent Dictator for _x,_ where _x_ is a time period between an hour (a meeting) to about a year. Happily it could also stand for _eXecution_, since usually it is execution needs that create leadership needs.
Source: Four Modes of BDFxing by Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao unpacks the idea of BDFx style leadership. For Rao, most leaders are engaged in ‘leadering’, rather than actual leadership.
You see, actual leadership is a thankless job even when you’re motivated by, and being rewarded with, great wealth (stock etc), power, and fame (being US President, a Hollywood producer, etc). As I’ve argued before (in a 2015 post) most leaders motivated by those things don’t actually lead. Instead they indulge in a theatrical grifter activity I call leadering, which delivers the rewards without requiring them to deal with the responsibilities.
Source: BDFxing, Or Post-Charismatic Distributed Leadership by Venkatesh Rao
Continuing with the critique of traditional leadership, Rao explains that the most problematic style is Charismatic leadership.
It’s not that charismatic leadership used to work and has now stopped working. It’s basically never worked, but it was possible to hide the fact near-perfectly in a broadcast world, got harder in a social media age, and is now basically impossible in an AI/decentralization age. The myth-making narrative apparatus that charismatic leadership relied on now produces threadbare plots with cartoon characters only cartoon people can believe in, at best. At worst it falls apart completely, often revealing pits of depravity beneath the myths.
Source: BDFxing, Or Post-Charismatic Distributed Leadership by Venkatesh Rao
He explains how as a model, BDFxing is time-boxed distributed leadership, which helps foster leaders-in-waiting.
BDFxing is a leadership model that is self-consciously time-boxed to be within the limits of human endurance, morality, decency, and fallibility. I previously argued that CEOs don’t steer, but provide high-momentum, orientation-locked dead reckoning in a stable direction. That when a leader turns out to be wrong, the right move is usually not for them to steer and course correct, but to step back and yield to someone else whose sense of direction seems better for the changed circumstances. Which means the culture has to foster lots of leaders-in-waiting at all levels, ready to step up. BDFxing turns this idea into a high-frequency design pattern.
Source: BDFxing, Or Post-Charismatic Distributed Leadership by Venkatesh Rao
In a follow post, Rao unpacks four flavours of BDFxing:
- Launch Boss – high-stakes, high-energy
- Lightning Conductor – high-stakes, low-energy
- Landscaper – low-stakes, low-energy
- Ringleader – low-stakes, high-energy
He suggestions that everybody should try the different modes and find what is right for them.
Everybody should try their hand at all four kinds of BDFxing, and figure out what they’re best at. And then do it for the things they are involved in to the degree it is fun. If nobody has enough fun doing the BDFxing to supply the leadership of the activity, the activity should probably just be abandoned. A leadership deficit that’s fixed by coercive force and misery poisons the activity and the outcome.
Source: Four Modes of BDFxing by Venkatesh Rao