I'll Lean Out. Thanks Anyway.

Okay, I already had enough of Sheryl Sandberg. It's been less than the appointed 15 minutes of fame and she's wearing her welcome out. Not that very many of the "ain't I wonderful and here is what you can learn from me" books have a shelf half-life of more than six months before they hit remainders.

Her message: confidence is everything and maybe luck and collaboration have a little something to do with it. At least the case made in her appearance on "60 Minutes" was that women, who often attribute their success to hard work, luck and contributions by others, get overmatched in the competition for the top jobs by men who attribute their successes to their own superior skills.

Alas, it is probably true and the corollary to "nice guys finish last." Confidence and scotomas about one's own flaws trump honesty about team efforts and good luck or good timing. I have worked with a few people, at least one a woman, by the way, whose greatest asset was the ability to talk a good game and to commit to and pursue a course of action by generating press rather than making a considered analysis. One of these people hired a succession of competent number twos that were promptly deskilled and made miserable. Another has run up a career of ever increasingly impressive jobs, each held for something like one to two years, and if you read their LinkedIn profile is apparently god's very own gift to the enterprises the person has graced for those brief tenures. Worth noting is that their LinkedIn profile should be put up for a Pulitzer for fiction writing.

There is a lot of evidence that arrogant self-promotion and absolute lack of self-awareness is found in abundance in the C suites, along with some pretty egregious behavior. Case in point, Jack Welch's affair with one of his biggest promoters who lionized Welch in the pages of the Harvard Business Review. The behavior of some of our most lauded male political figures is yet more evidence. The affair de Petreus, another. The anointed ones are exempt from the moral strictures the rest of us accept. "The rules don't apply to us," is what they seem to be saying. Implied is the "so screw the rest of you." Which some of them do in fact. Lest an old friend take this personally, I am not talking about out of the norm relationships that don't have to do with power and arrogance.

Now I suppose you could just attribute this to the rants of a less than wildly successful old fart, but I think it is worth musing on a couple of additional thoughts. First, that Ms. Sandberg is probably right that a little less deference and a little more assertive self-promotion would not hurt women aiming to crack through the glass ceilings, even at the risk of being labeled with the "B" word. Think about that moment in the long battle for the nomination in 2008 when the eventual winner asserted that Hilary "was likeable enough." Would the comment reversed have had anything like the same edge?

But second and certainly more important, can we continue to afford a world which privileges arrogant self-confidence over quiet collaborative competence? It's a crowded place. Three or four times more crowded than it was only fifty years ago. Free booting pioneers and unfettered adversarial market competition probably made some sense when exploration and discovery were the order of the day. Now the stakes are higher and combination and consolidation makes a mockery of market competition as a governing force—dominant enterprises and coalitions can skew the rules in their own favor—and arrogant, confident, and amoral leaders have a tendency to exploit rather than serve.

Stepping from the shade of the forest into the harsh light of the savannah may have imposed one set of biological imperatives, but a world prone to catastrophic breakdowns and ill-understood complex system interactions that make it hard for us to see when we are fouling our own nest would suggest a change of those imperatives is in order.

So Sheryl, by all means promote the success of your gender, but wouldn't it be a shame if the female leaders ended up being no different that the men who preceded them?