From today's Knowledge@wharton update

Leading from Within Means Learning to Manage Your Ego and Emotions

“It is not essential to have a big ego to be a successful CEO,” says Deepak Chopra, a physician who has helped make alternative healing respectable in the U.S. He laments that American society has been trained to measure business success solely by the calculation of shareholder value. That, in turn, has bred a generation of top executives who have “bought into the idea of ego, power, extravagance, arrogance and total disregard for other people’s feelings,” says Chopra, who will be speaking at an April 9 Wharton Leadership Ventures conference in Philadelphia titled Leading from Within.  
 
Long-lasting businesses aim to serve needs, not just sell products, he says. “If you start with the premise of increased income for me and my shareholders, you get the big scandals you have had recently.” For the individual business leader, success should be much more, he suggests – “having meaning in your life, having love and compassion, self-esteem and a sense of connection with your own creativity.” Absent that, “egocentric leaders become most insecure, anchoring their self esteem in external things such as money and power.”

...According to Chopra, the ultimate test of business leadership is what happens to a company after the CEO leaves. By that criterion, even the hallowed Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, does not make his first team, Chopra says, suggesting that GE hasn’t done as well in the immediate aftermath of Welch’s departure. Indeed, Chopra asserts that a roster of top performing corporations would put Wells Fargo and Philip Morris ahead of GE, yet “you don’t know their CEOs’ names.” He asks why, and answers his own question: “Because these people were not into themselves; their goal was not adulation or power for themselves but to create a great company.”
 
After five and a half years of running her family business – a company founded nearly 80 years ago by her grandfather and run for 50 years by her father – Lynda Barness, president of The Barness Organization, home builders based in Bucks County, Pa., has distilled similar insights about the essence of leadership. “I have learned that it is necessary to navigate rather than rule,” she says....

I like Lynda already.

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