In an interview with The McKinsey Quarterly, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said: “in a corporation the role of a leader is often not to force the outcome, but to force execution.” 

This got me thinking: has the role of the leader changed forever? I mean fundamentally. With our new, flatter organizations, crowd-sourcing and open innovation, has the requirement for brave men and women – those bombastic few, first over the top, whose stamp you’ll find on everything their companies do – been quietly dropped. Have the Brian Blessed’s of the boardroom been silenced? 

Or has the role of the leader only changed in Northern California.

Nigel Dessau of AMD says in his interview on this very website that on a personal level, as a leader, he ‘only’ does three things:  “I’ll make you think more broadly than you might have thought before. Then I’ll ask you to move more quickly than you want to move. And then I’ll help move obstacles out of the way.” Or to put it another way: I don’t focus on outcome, either. But I sure do focus on execution.

Very collegial. Very empowering. Still NoCal. 

For my question to warrant an answer with any weight at all – and it is still in the sperm meet egg stage of the process, hence the blog – I needed an example from a different country. A different culture. And a completely different industry sector. 

I found it in Billund, Denmark, at a 78-year old toy manufacturer. 

Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, chief executive of Lego Group is an ex-McKinsey consultant who either saw the light or turned to the dark side, depending on your point-of-view. When Lego was down and (very) nearly out, the founding family turned to Jørgen Vig for help, and he delivered. Boy, did he.  

Jørgen Vig says he did it with “a super-generic plan” straight from the front pages of any management consultant’s handbook. “We’ll spend a couple of years to stabilize the business and restore execution ... and then eventually we’re gonna get back to organic growth.”

What set him apart is an absolute focus on execution.

“Leadership is not about conceptual ideas. The difference between good and bad leadership that you actually do it. It’s like your New Year’s resolutions, right? Everybody says: I need to eat more healthily, I need to get some exercise, but that’s not the inside. Too many leaders think, ‘Oh, I must lose weight’ ... The inside is actually making it happen through 8,000 people.”

I’m still not sure of the role of the business leader has changed, or by how much if it has. I do believe that the brightest of our current crop have rediscovered a valuable lesson: team beats individual. Somebody go tell the Cleveland Cavaliers.