AI Wizard Sam Altman Shows What Real Leadership Is. His Bosses Were Clueless

A lot happened to artificial intelligence pioneer wizard Sam Altman, recently. But for me mostly it demonstrated how his bosses knew little about leadership.

First let’s recap the basics of what happened over the past few days.

• First, Altman was a cofounder of OpenAI, a leading company in the development of advanced artificial intelligence.
• Next, the board of directors fired him on November 17, according to Vox.
• On November 20, Reuters reported that hundreds of OpenAI’s staff would quit if the board didn’t reinstate him.
• Then on November 22, the day before Thanksgiving, Altman was rehired and much of the board that hired him would be walking the plank, again according to Vox.

Forget trying to figure out why Altman was fired. We may never know and in any case it’s not the point in this botched job of efforts to oust him.

The real issue is that the OpenAI board didn’t realize that leaders are not appointed. Put another way, you don’t become a leader when someone else says you are.

Leaders Are Not Appointed

It’s one of those things that many students mistakenly believe. They think that once they make it to VP level they are a leader. Some are leaders at that point. Some aren’t. A funky title and a boost to your base pay don’t make you a leader.

The matter is further confused by the wavering definitions that corporations use to describe what leadership is. When I was just out of business school, with a newly minted MBA “entrepreneurial” was the key word. Of course, the bosses had no clue what that meant, and any efforts to do anything remotely entrepreneurial would quickly lead to dismissal.

I would guess that holding a degree would be part of some corporate leadership definitions now, which isn’t a bad thing, more like a good thing. But a degree doesn’t on its own make someone a leader. It is probably a nice to have but a not-sufficient attribute.

No doubt that new definitions will get created over the ensuing decades. They often don’t make any sense when defined by corporate bosses and are often influenced by fashion.

OpenAI’s Board Tripped Up

And here’s where the OpenAI board really fell down. There is but one definition of leadership and it is really simple.

A leader has followers.

No matter what their nominal title, if they have followers they are leaders.

In Altman’s case, he had plenty of followers as the threatened resignation of hundreds of OpenAI employees shows. They were seemingly quite willing to follow him out of the door.

Prerequisite = Followers

If this is confusing, don’t let it be. There are leaders of all types. Some are genial and easy to work with. Some are inspiring. Some are tyrants. Some are genocidal maniacs. You get the picture. But they all have followers.

Altman has followers. He is a leader and the board should have known that.

The board’s failure was in thinking that because they were on the board of directors that they were greater leaders than Altman was, particularly in the role of running OpenAI.

It will likely have come as a shock to those former board members that Altman was the leader of that enterprise whether they liked it or not. Even when he was out of a job for two days he was still the leader.

Now he’s back, but he never stopped being the leader.