"Followers move more from Spirit than from strategy and structure. If we have learned anything while under the lash of the leadership literature, it's that the more you spit into the wind, the more spit gets blown back in your face.
First followers don't begin with an end in mind so much as they begin with a horizon in view. This is not easy to understand—or to do, as horizons are ever vanishing and then reassembling. But tell the astronauts in Apollo 13 that they should have stuck to the plan
and kept the end in view. After an onboard explosion in 1970, the
three astronauts saved the mission and themselves not by undeviating
attention to the original plan but by improvising and by keeping the
horizon in view.
Such improvisational living tends to cut against our Gutenberg
grain. Francis Fukuyama, in The Great Disruption, argues that
"human beings by nature like to organize themselves hierarchically.""
Even democracy is a form of hierarchy—a hierarchy of the majority.
We don't dislike hierarchy in principle, only "hierarchies in which
[we] end up on the bottom.""
(I Am A Follower. Leonard Sweet. Pg 228)
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