An Engineer’s Analogy for Understanding the Role of Leaders

Businesses are computer systems in disguise. Both exist to process work, generate value, and keep running without crashing. And just as no computer system can run efficiently without a scheduler, no business can operate effectively without leaders. Strip away the scheduler, and processes collide, starve each other of resources, or freeze in deadlock. Strip away leadership, and the same chaos unfolds inside companies.

Think of employees as processes. Each one has a job to do—some short-lived like scripts, others long-running like background services. Processes don’t manage themselves. Left unchecked, they compete for CPU cycles, hog memory, or lock one another out. Without orchestration, the system eventually slows to a crawl. Likewise, employees may be talented and hardworking, but without leadership, they end up working at cross-purposes, duplicating effort, or stalling in dependency loops.

Leaders are the supervisor processes… They’re not running the programs, but they are the reason the programs run coherently.

Leaders are the supervisor processes—systemd, init, the schedulers. They don’t directly do the work of the user processes, but they decide when and how the work gets done. They allocate resources, prioritize workloads, and restart services when they fail. They keep communication channels open and reliable, ensuring interprocess chatter doesn’t degrade into bottlenecks and timeouts. They’re not running the programs, but they are the reason the programs run coherently.

Leadership is also monitoring and logging. A healthy system isn’t just executing—it’s self-aware. Leaders track the metrics, spot the memory leaks, and act before the CPU overheats. They know when to kill a rogue process, when to refactor a bloated service, and when to scale out resources. Without that oversight, a business doesn’t fail instantly—it degrades quietly, until the inevitable crash.

Remove leaders from the picture and you still have individual contributors, still have “processes” running. But what you don’t have is coordination. Some people spin endlessly on high priority threads while others starve in the background. One crash cascades into others, bringing down the whole system. Nobody notices the slow leak until the machine is too hot to touch.

The analogy is simple but unforgiving: leaders are schedulers. Without them, the business halts—not because the people aren’t working, but because the system isn’t working. And in business, as in computing, a system that doesn’t produce stable, reliable output isn’t doing its job.