Leaders are initiators who are concerned more with ideas than facts, strategy rather than tactics, risk rather than rules. They favor imagination over common sense and life over work. What we do not hear enough about is the value of leadership with a small "I," provided by the team leader, the project leader, the group leader, the leader of one's own self — the kinds of leaders production-oriented organizations favor and produce. Leaders do not always lead by virtue, bravery or authority. They lead by example. They lead because they practice values that motivate others. They lead because of who they are and how they act.

Small, close-knit organizations-of-doing expose us to the way people act. They produce leaders, large and small, whose products are a reflection of both their talent and their "selves." This expression of self is particularly crucial to those who work in a caring organization, because how people are doing is one of the things these organizations are supposed to be caring about. Organizations that are driven by people, as opposed to mission statements or policies, gain energy, impact and heart.

Early in my career I worked in a San Francisco advertising agency for a man named Hal Riney, the agency's Creative Director. Since then he has become the hand, and occasionally the voice, behind some of product advertising's most distinctive work, not to mention some very successful presidential campaigns. Every morning I walked down Clay Street to Kearney and up to the eleventh floor of the San Francisco office of Batten, Barton, Durstein & Osborn. There I toiled on the dull and boring Chevron Gasoline advertising account ("Chevron with F-310. It works."). This was not an invigorating assignment. But down the hall from me in the creative director's large corner office was Hal Riney, soft spoken and mysterious and immersed in overseeing concepts, strategies and production on other accounts, many of which produced the most captivating advertising in the country.

Hal Riney, already a mini-myth as a creative force in the advertising world, was much in demand in 1972, and very expensive. He lived in a little red house that stuck out alone over the Saulsolito side of San Francisco Bay. Everyone going over the Golden Gate Bridge had to wonder who lived there. Since I worked down the hall from him, I saw him every day. He wore suspenders, which were out of vogue at the time, and he was either just getting married or just getting divorced — no one knew for sure. He worked at an old 1940's typewriter, and looked like Ernest Hemingway. His entire being was gruff, warm, reserved and just a little bit odd. The advertising campaigns he later produced were like that too. His work for Gallo Wine had two folksy wine makers rocking back and forth on the porch talking about Bartles and James. He helped Ronald Reagan win the Presidency by portraying him as a regular guy, a cowboy-type hero. And more recently he made Saturn automobile advertising successful by giving it the face of the people who work in the Saturn factory in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

Hal Riney was a leader because of both what he did and the way he was. So was Mel Figgs. Mel worked down the hall from me in the other direction. He was the production artist for both the Gallo Wine and Chevron accounts, as well as everything else in the agency that had a difficult client and an impossible deadline. Mel was a recovering bedraggled mess. He was always running ragged, smoking up a storm, his hair in disarray. When I arrived in the morning, I would often find him curled up under his production desk in a wrinkled T-shirt after having worked all night. Mel was who you went to when you had to get it done. He did each project with excitement, attention to detail and a focused passion on getting it right, even when the project was Chevron with F-310. I have been inspired ever since by both his example of hard work and by Hal Riney's demonstration of mythic reserve. Both were valuable leaders because their work was an expression of who they were.

And the adverting agency was a good place to work because it encouraged and rewarded that sort of self-expression. And it was an environment in which people were always bumping into one kind of leader or another, lubricating the gears of work with the clamor of production and each other's leadership style.