Become a Transcendent Leader

Fred Kofman's new book, The Meaning Revolution

In 2012, after LinkedIn went public and the size of our global workforce was growing rapidly, our CEO Jeff Weiner convinced Fred Kofman to join our team as Vice President of Leadership and Organizational Development.

Jeff and Fred had been working together since the mid-2000s — when Jeff was a senior executive at Yahoo and Fred was an MIT management professor turned consultant.

At LinkedIn, Fred's job was to help our employees develop into transcendent leaders who integrate their own personal pursuit of meaning into LinkedIn's larger organizational mission to create economic opportunity for every individual in the world. 

While business is often considered a domain where anything goes in pursuit of profits, Fred has long recognized that productive work is how we achieve our sense of self, how we organize our lives, and one of the many ways we attempt to achieve impact.

For this, I call Fred the "high priest of capitalism" and consider him to be the most effective leadership coach I've worked with. He systematically studies how individuals derive a sense of purpose from work and how, consequently, corporations and other organizations should incorporate such values as benevolence, service, and even love into their missions. Because these values help foster the kind of purposeful commitment that leads to greater productivity, they're key components of long-term economic value creation.

While Fred recently completed a very successful tour of duty at LinkedIn, the ideas and principles he developed and advocated for during his time here are now available in his new book, The Meaning Revolution: The Power of Transcendent Leadership.

In Fred's estimation, "capitalism is the alchemical crucible in which humanity transforms its base instincts into gold." In this belief he echoes 18th century economist Adam Smith, who famously opined in The Wealth of Nations that even when a businessman “intends only his own gain,” he is “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”

To succeed over the long term, companies must offer customers real value, and deliver real value to their employees, business partners, shareholders, and other stakeholders as well. Recognizing this concept of service that lies at the heart of capitalism, Fred views the workplace as a supremely humanized place — where the pursuit of meaning and impact do more to determine a company's long-term success than key performance indicators and profit and loss statements.

In light of this dynamic, Fred emphasizes leadership over management, and paradoxically asserts that "a transcendent leader has no followers." Instead, "he or she must be self-effacing to let people connect directly to the mission and the values."

Here's how Fred put it at the Wisdom 2.0 Conference in 2015, describing Jeff Weiner's leadership style at LinkedIn: "There are a lot of leaders that I see as rowing a boat. They're bringing everyone along with them, and saying, 'Come follow me.' But the way I've seen Jeff and other great leaders do it, they'll go and get on a surfboard… They don't say, 'Follow me.' They say, 'Come on this huge wave.'"

In the former vision, everyone's literally in the same boat, doing only what their leader allows them to do. In the latter, everyone's on the same wave and moving in the same direction, but they also have the freedom to improvise and set their own course of action.

Note too that it's a "huge wave."

As I've explored in my podcast Masters of Scale and in my forthcoming book, Blitzscaling, companies that define their corporate missions in big, noble, and extremely ambitious terms tend to be the ones that grow fastest, execute most consistently, and become the dominant players in their industries.

Microsoft wants to make people and organizations more productive. Google wants to organize all the world's information. Facebook wants to connect the world. LinkedIn wants to create economic opportunity for every individual in the world. Airbnb wants to help its customers belong anywhere.

When companies commit to service on a global scale, their ambitious and clearly defined missions help attract talented professionals seeking personal fulfillment through work that has real meaning and impact.

Now, of course, we're in the midst of an ongoing dialogue where people are concerned that some tech companies have grown too big, too fast, without sufficiently assuming the obligations that come with their increasing importance in how society functions.

As Mark Zuckerberg showed in his recent two days of testimony before Congress, he clearly recognizes that the great power Facebook now possesses means it must also improve the ways in which it enhances and ensures the wellbeing of its billion-plus users. "We have a responsibility to not just build tools," Zuckerberg said, "But to make sure those tools are used for good."

The dialogue on exactly how to ensure the tech industry assumes responsibilities commensurate with its growing power is only just beginning. In times of great innovation and change, a natural instinct is to try to halt progress through regulation; to urge or even force companies and entrepreneurs to think smaller; to prevent the future by enshrining the past.

Against this backdrop, the approach to business that Fred advocates for in The Meaning Revolution is especially relevant.

While the tech industry must actively engage with elected officials, consumers, and other stakeholders to craft solutions that ensure its products and services have a net positive impact on the world, we must also try to preserve, as much as is practical, the free and open conditions that have made the tech industry so generative over the last several decades.

To this end, the tech industry must exhibit high levels of transparency and integrity. And that's why our industry needs more transcendent leaders — leaders who embody trust and integrity in a way that gives employees an inspiring example to model and also leaves space for them to make these values their own.

In the face of greater scrutiny, we also need entrepreneurs and companies who continue to pursue incredibly ambitious goals. While quests to connect the world or organize all the world's information can lead to unanticipated problems, they also create the greatest returns for society. As Fred suggests, such "immortality projects" are what create purpose and commitment, and purpose and commitment are what leads to great productivity.

Fred's new book is his own effort to produce transformation at scale — by sharing many of the ideas and techniques he developed while coaching LinkedIn's executives with a much broader audience.

And while a great leader has no followers, a great book does have readers. In the spirit of capitalism, The Meaning Revolution is now on sale at Amazon. I strongly encourage you to read this timely and profound book. Find inspiration in Fred's insights and actions, then seek out your own sense of purpose and great wave to surf.

For a quick and enlightening introduction to Fred's work and way of thinking, enjoy this slide show.