The Greatest Leaders Rarely Write a Playbook

When people think of leadership, they picture many different traits: charisma, vision, confident execution, effective communication, inspiration, etc. All those qualities matter, and many leaders sustain long and impactful careers because of them. But what we often overlook is that, for some leaders, these visible strengths and traits rest on something much deeper—a life full of experience and reflection that drives deeply ingrained autonomous habits and decisions. Beneath every expression of confidence or decisive strategy lies a foundation of discipline, mindset, self-understanding, and a unique perspective. For other leaders, it is built on modeling other leaders around them.

I learned this lesson early in my own leadership journey. Like many new managers, I began by modeling what I saw in others. If a credible leader used a certain verbiage—like using the word “cadence” to describe how often recurring meetings should be scheduled instead of just saying “How often should we meet?”—I would try out these words and phrases myself. At times, I modeled other leaders’ tone and phrasing, assuming that if I looked and sounded like the leaders around me, I would naturally grow into the role—or at least be seen as credible. Eventually, I asked myself: “Why do I want to be like the leaders around me?” “Why do I want to be a leader at all?”

In a sense, this is how many of us start. When we’re looking at other leaders, it’s analogous to the ten percent of the iceberg above the surface, and there’s no guarantee that the ten percent we see is anything more than effective impersonation. This isn’t to say it’s a bad thing. In fact, in his book Peak (2016), Anders Ericsson explains that imitation is a great place to start learning something, and it is effective up to the level of basic competence—and the world truly needs competent leaders. Psychologist Albert Bandura explained why so many of us begin our leadership journey by mimicking others. His Social Learning Theory showed that much of human behavior is learned not through trial and error, but through observation. We notice how someone carries themselves, the words they use, or the way they respond under pressure. We remember those details, try them ourselves, and if the response is positive, we keep repeating the behavior. It’s a natural process—attention, retention, reproduction, and motivation—that helps us take our first steps as leaders.

The problem is when we stop there. Mimicry may help us get started, but if all we ever do is model others, then we’re only building behaviors based on the surface we see—traits and practices that may themselves be borrowed from someone else. Many leaders have read the same books, followed the same frameworks, and worked through the same skill lists. These tools are useful, but without digging deeper, leadership becomes generational imitation—layers of borrowed traits stacked one on top of another.

When it comes to leadership, one thing that’s always intrigued me is the question: “Who defines what leadership is, and who leaders are?” For those who write books on leadership, what have they truly figured out that others haven’t? Are they just recycling what they’ve heard, or are they pulling from something deeper? What was their journey? Who are they?

I like to relate this reflection to the inventors of calculus. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz are credited as the co-founders of calculus. They independently developed the fundamental concepts and notation, although their approaches differed. They discovered calculus through a deep understanding of the laws and principles of mathematics. Who are the Newtons and Leibnizs of leadership in our time—those who deeply understand the laws and principles of leadership? Newton did not discover calculus in isolation; his work was built upon centuries of mathematical development well before his time. While he is recognized for independently developing infinitesimal calculus and its application to physics, other mathematicians had already laid groundwork in areas like tangents, infinite series, and the foundations of integration. Newton’s contribution was that he combined these ideas into a cohesive system, demonstrating its effectiveness in the world of physics. He essentially figured out how to use the laws and principles of math to create a new language of physics—one that helped us better understand our physical world. What resources can we leverage to understand the groundwork of leadership? What are the laws and principles of leadership? If you Google “foundations of leadership,” you’ll get countless different results, depending on the source. Instead of relying on these arbitrary lists, the question I’ve asked myself to truly understand leadership is: “What purpose do I serve as a leader?” and “Why am I doing this?”

To me, one of the most fascinating things about any field of expertise is that those who master it rarely write the playbook. Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, whose life’s work focused on expert performance, often pointed out that true masters operate from a place of intuition and deeply ingrained patterns. Their skill is so embedded that they don’t consciously think in steps—it flows from years of deliberate practice and deep understanding. Because we can never understand firsthand, coaches, researchers, or observers can only watch these great leaders and synthesize lessons from what they see.

Philosopher Michael Polanyi captured this in a simple line: “We know more than we can tell.” He argued that much of human knowledge is tacit—understood in practice, but nearly impossible to fully articulate. That’s why you can watch a brilliant leader or craftsman at work, but when you ask them how they do it, they often struggle to explain simply—or at all. Their genius is lived and experienced, not packaged into easy steps.

Jim Collins’ Good to Great is one of the most influential leadership books of the last few decades—and for good reason. It gave us the idea of “Level 5 Leadership” and offered powerful insights drawn from a rigorous study of companies that achieved extraordinary success. For many, it was the first time leadership was framed not just as charisma or vision, but as humility combined with fierce resolve.

But here’s the challenge: books like Good to Great still only describe what successful leaders look like from the outside. They observed and recorded patterns and behaviors, but they don’t always explain how a person actually becomes that kind of leader. If you aspire to be a Level 5 leader, the book will show you what that looks like—but it won’t walk you through the inner transformation it takes to get there. And in fact, many of the leaders Collins identified were strikingly different from one another. Their personalities, styles, and approaches varied widely, which further shows there is no single template for great leadership. They all had their own discovery journey.

So what are you supposed to do to learn how to be a better leader? None of the Level 5 leaders from Good to Great wrote books about how to become leaders like themselves—which is no surprise, given that one of their defining traits was humility, along with their focus on results over personal fame. Einstein himself, one of the greatest visionary leaders of all time, said: “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” We don’t have a book on how to be like him. Einstein’s genius wasn’t born in a single moment, but through a lifetime of inner shifts—from the awe of a child staring at a compass, to the defiance of a student rejecting rigid schooling, to his years in a patent office wrestling with ideas in solitude. Beneath the image of the wild-haired physicist was a man shaped by setbacks, reflection, and a humble search for truth, each challenge deepening the unseen layers of who he became that none of us will ever be able to see.

The purpose of The Bottom 90™ is to help people uncover their own path to leadership—not by handing them another playbook, but by guiding them deeper. It exists to explore the laws and principles of human nature, human behavior, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, mindset, perspective, and discipline that make leadership real, and to help you discover who you are beyond simply modeling even the best leaders you see around you. Because you don’t become extraordinary by memorizing someone else’s formula. You become extraordinary by doing the internal work—work that is hard to articulate, but foundational. I don’t claim to be an expert, but I believe every great leader shares one thing: humility, and the recognition that there is always more to learn. That’s the journey this platform is built to support—the journey of looking below the surface to understand yourself as a leader, and in turn, to lead with greater clarity and depth.

References:

Ericsson, K. A., et al. (2007). The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance.

Polanyi, M. (1966). The Tacit Dimension.

Alvesson, M., & Sveningsson, S. (2003). The Great Disappearing Act: Difficulties in Doing Leadership.

Ericsson, K. A., & Pool, R. (2016). Peak: Secrets from the new science of expertise. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Prentice-Hall.