You can hand someone the title. You can’t hand them the reason the thing exists.
A founder steps back and hands her company to a CEO who is plainly better at running things: hiring, budgets, process. A year later the company is drifting. Meetings turn into turf fights, the roadmap swells with projects nobody can say no to, and the new CEO, for all her competence, feels strangely powerless. Nobody did anything obviously wrong. So what went missing?
The usual view is that leadership is a skill, and any competent person given the authority can lead any initiative. Tom Nixon’s Work With Source argues that one thing doesn’t move with the authority. Every initiative begins with a single person, the source, who takes the first risk to realize an idea. Who that is depends not on title or investment but on who invested themselves first. The source keeps a felt sense of what is right for the initiative, which no org chart can reassign.
What the source knows
The source knows what is in scope, often without being able to say why, and alone knows when the need that started the initiative has been met. None of that is written down.
So the founder’s absence showed up as drift rather than collapse. The new CEO had the authority to decide but no compass for which decisions fit. Every proposal looked defensible, so the roadmap swelled, and people who sensed that nobody held the vision moved into the vacuum.
Helpers widen the gap. They bring real ideas and effort, but they are mostly motivated by realizing their own vision through the opportunity of helping. A present source corrects that drift almost invisibly; without one, it surfaces as tension that looks like interpersonal conflict but is really misalignment with a vision no one is holding.
Nixon’s claim is that this pull operates whether or not it is acknowledged: a source who is pushed out or promoted away still shapes the initiative, if only by their absence. Put plainly, the source connection is real, non-transferable by default, and exerts force whether or not it is formally recognized.
Handing it over
“By default” matters, because Nixon holds that the role can be passed on, though only through a deliberate, collaborative act. The old source hands it over in front of witnesses, and the successor receives the role rather than learning it. When the handover is incomplete, you get the drifting company: a new leader who feels disconnected, visionless and powerless, power struggles in the vacuum, and an old source who can’t let go. When succession is fully transferred, the organization senses it. The center of gravity moves, and the old source detaches.
The model has limits: “the organization senses it” is an observation from practice, not a measured result, and the idea can slide into treating founders as irreplaceable. Nixon’s framework pushes against that. A helper becomes a source in their own right by taking genuine initiative on part of the vision and the original source should then step back and check only that the new initiative fits the larger one. A source who can’t allow this becomes the bottleneck of their own initiative.
So when an initiative is struggling and nobody can explain why, ask where its source went. In the drifting company, the founder stepped back but never handed the role over, and no process improvement will supply what she took with her. Most organizations never ask the broader question: if you mapped who actually took the first risk on each initiative, how closely would that map match the org chart?
References:
- Tom Nixon, Work With Source