Jack Burton and the Myth of the Protagonist

Jack Burton is the kind of hero who could lose a fistfight to gravity. In Big Trouble in Little China, there’s a scene where he charges into a brawl, fires his gun into the ceiling to psych himself up, and immediately knocks loose a chunk of plaster that lands on his own head. He’s out cold before he can throw a punch. By the time he stumbles back into consciousness, the fight is basically over, but Jack still swaggers forward like he was critical to the victory. 

That’s Jack in a nutshell—blustery, enthusiastic, narrating his own greatness into the CB radio of life. He’s not a fraud, exactly. He’s not trying to dodge responsibility or mooch off the work of others. He really wants to help. He just…isn’t very good at it. If anything, he’s a parody of every action hero we grew up being told was the centerpiece of the story. He looks like the protagonist, he acts like the protagonist, and yet the movie makes it clear that he’s not actually the one driving the events. 

At the gaming table, Jack is that paladin with a +3 Charisma bonus who assumes leadership is part of the class features, right up there alongside Divine Smite. Or the fighter who thinks “plate armor and the biggest sword” automatically comes with the title of party spokesperson. They’re not necessarily arrogant—they just figure, well, my guy looks like the cover art, so obviously I’m in charge. So they stride into danger with full confidence, roll the dice like destiny’s on their side, and then promptly botch the saving throw that mattered most, stumbling face-first into the gelatinous cube. It’s maddening sometimes, sure, but it’s also weirdly endearing. They genuinely want to be the hero; they just don’t have the skills, the plot armor, or—as Jack himself once put it—the crackerjack timing. 

And we’ve all met the Jack Burton of the workplace, too. They’re the coworker who volunteers first, dives into projects with gusto, and then spends two weeks making a hand-puppet mascot named Forklift Freddy for the warehouse safety program when all you needed was a three slide presentation on proper weight distribution. Or they burn through the team’s budget on branded stress balls shaped like goblins because “our Q2 targets are about slaying obstacles.” You can’t even be mad, because their enthusiasm is real. They just don’t have the timing to match it. And yet—here’s the kicker—they still often get mistaken for the leader, simply because they look and sound like the main character in the movie that is your workplace. 

That’s the uncomfortable brilliance of Big Trouble in Little China: it reminds us that the loudest voice in the room isn’t always the one leading the story. Sometimes it’s just the guy firing bullets into the ceiling and hoping nobody noticed the concussion

The Myth of the Protagonist

On paper, Jack Burton checks every box for “main character.” He’s the truck-driving tough guy with the gravely voice, the one-liners, and the movie-star charisma. He narrates his own story into a CB radio like he’s dictating his memoir. He’s white, American, played by Kurt Russell at the height of his action-hero swagger. If you freeze-frame the movie poster, you’d swear this guy must be carrying the plot on his shoulders. 

Except…he isn’t. The movie goes out of its way to show that Wang Chi is the actual hero. Wang is the one with the skill, the drive, and the personal stakes. Jack blusters into the middle of someone else's story and assumes it’s his own. That’s not an accident. John Carpenter said in interviews that the whole point was to subvert the typical Hollywood action formula—the white lead actor looks like the hero, but functionally he’s the sidekick. Carpenter gives us a parody of what audiences are conditioned to expect, and half the comedy comes from watching Jack think he’s running the show while the real story unfolds without him. 

This is where leadership research throws us a nasty mirror. Around the same time Big Trouble in Little China was in production, James Meindl and his colleagues were publishing work on something called “the romance of leadership.”1 The idea was simple: humans are wired to assume that whoever is visible, vocal, or standing closest to the action must be the one in charge. It’s hard not to picture Meindl hunched over his draft at the exact moment Carpenter’s team was writing a scene where Jack Burton struts into frame, narrates his own importance, and proceeds to do absolutely nothing useful. Different disciplines, same punchline: people will happily confuse proximity and noise for authority. 

It happens in real life all the time. Gallup found that companies often promote people into management roles not because they have proven leadership skills, but because they’ve been around the longest or simply look like the “safer bet” for leadership.² Their research estimated that companies pick the wrong person for a manager role 82% of the time (Gallup, 2015). That’s not a typo—eighty-two percent. It’s basically the corporate version of assuming Jack Burton is the guy who’s going to save the day. 

Think about it: the loud guy in the meeting, the one confidently explaining things he only half-understands, often gets deferred to simply because he sounds authoritative. Meanwhile, the person actually holding the project together stays quiet, delivers results, and ends up looking like the sidekick. The myth of the protagonist doesn’t just play out on the movie screen; it shapes promotions, careers, and entire organizational cultures. 

Why Ineffective Leaders Still Look Like Heroes

Barbara Kellerman, one of the sharper knives in the leadership theory drawer, created a whole taxonomy of bad leadership: incompetent, rigid, intemperate, callous, corrupt, insular, and evil.³ Jack Burton doesn’t check all those boxes—he’s not malicious, he’s not trying to exploit anyone—but if “incompetent” had a patron saint, it would have Jack’s smirking face on the shrine. He has the confidence of a man who’s never been told “no” and the track record of a guy who should probably stop carrying firearms indoors. 

Jack’s problem is what Bernard Bass and Ronald Riggio would call pseudo-transformational leadership.⁴ It’s when someone has the charisma and swagger of a transformational leader—the inspiring speeches, the sense of destiny—but without the competence or vision to back it up. They look and sound like a hero, so people project leadership qualities onto them that aren’t actually there. Jack talks like John Wayne reincarnated, but his impact is closer to the guy who drives the getaway truck in circles because he can’t find the parking ramp exit. 

And here’s the kicker: research shows that overconfidence doesn’t just make leaders look silly, it actively hurts performance. An article in Harvard Business Review pointed out that leaders who are most sure of themselves are often the least effective, precisely because they don’t stop to gather input, question assumptions, or let competent people lead where they should.⁵ It’s the management version of Jack charging into Lo Pan’s lair without a plan, immediately getting flattened under a henchman’s corpse, and spending half the fight trapped on the floor while everyone else does the real work. 

Now imagine Jack Burton as your CEO. Quarterly earnings call: he starts with a rambling story about his truck breaking down on I-80, detours into a rant about “kids these days,” and then fires a revolver into the ceiling tiles for emphasis. The stock drops twelve points before Wang Chi quietly pulls the actual report from his briefcase and salvages the meeting. Employees leave wondering if they still have health insurance, but Jack signs off convinced he nailed it. 

This is the academic point dressed in Carpenter’s neon: charisma without competence doesn’t just fail to lead—it creates drag for everyone else. Wang and Egg can’t just focus on their actual work; they’re constantly compensating for Jack’s chaos. And in real workplaces, that compensation is costly. Gallup found that poor managers are responsible for 70% of the variance in team engagement.² Translation: if your leader is a Jack Burton, your people are spending more energy cleaning up than creating. 

The Competence Vacuum

The funniest part about Big Trouble in Little China isn’t Jack’s pratfalls—it’s how little they matter to the outcome. The truck driver with the movie-star face can fall asleep under a pile of henchmen, and the story keeps moving just fine because Wang Chi is slicing through enemies like a wuxia demigod and Egg Shen is calmly uncorking magical potions. Jack’s absence barely creates a ripple The team doesn’t stall out waiting for him, because he was never the one powering the mission in the first place. 

This dynamic—loud figurehead in the spotlight, quieter figures actually moving the plot—is what organizations often get wrong about leadership. McKinsey’s research on organizational health makes this point bluntly: the most effective companies aren’t the ones with the flashiest executives, they’re the ones where competence and execution are spread throughout the system.⁶ Put another way: you can plaster your CEO’s face on a magazine cover, but if your mid-level managers and technical experts aren’t strong, the wheels come off. 

That’s exactly what Carpenter is winking at. The spectacle of Jack Burton is a decoy. The real heroes are the ones the camera isn’t framing as the “main character.” Wang risks everything to rescue Miao Yin, using his own skill and courage. Egg knows the rules of the supernatural world and passes that knowledge to the group. Neither of them needs to narrate their importance into a CB radio; their importance is obvious because without them, the mission simply fails. 

The leadership lesson here is subtle but crucial: when an organization mistakes charisma for competence, it creates a vacuum where the actual leaders have to work twice as hard to keep things afloat. They solve the problems, navigate the obstacles, and then watch someone else pose for the victory photo. Gallup calls this the “mismanager effect”: when the wrong person gets put in charge, team engagement collapses, and talented people either burn out or bail.⁷

Jack Burton isn’t malicious, but he is a distraction. Every time he struts into the fight, someone else has to cover his blind spots. And in real workplaces, those blind spots turn into unpaid overtime, unacknowledged stress, and the quiet grind of people carrying more than their share. 

Why We Keep Handing Jack the Keys

So why do organizations keep putting Jack Burtons in charge? It’s not bad luck—it’s culture. For decades, we’ve been taught that leaders are supposed to look and sound a certain way: loud, confident, larger-than-life. Psychologists call this the halo effect—if someone seems impressive in one area, we assume they must be impressive in others.⁸ Combine that with the “romance of leadership” bias, and suddenly the guy narrating his own greatness into metaphorical CB radio is getting tapped for the corner office. 

Carpenter’s whole joke was that Jack looked like the protagonist because he fit the poster, not because he fit the story. The same thing happens in organizations that confuse “executive presence” with actual leadership. We say we value humility and competence, but when it’s time for promotions, the tie usually goes to whoever has the louder laugh, the firmer handshake, or the uncanny ability to dominate a Zoom call without ever answering a question.

That’s how you end up with Jack Burton in the C-suite. He’s the freshly minted VP of Strategy because “he just has that X-factor,” even though his five-year plan is literally written on the back of a Waffle House receipt. He’s the keynote speaker at the annual summit, strutting onstage in a tank top, ranting about reflexes while the real experts are backstage duct-taping the servers back together. He’s not evil, not corrupt—he just keeps getting rewarded for looking like the movie poster version of leadership. 

And that’s the bigger tragedy. Not that Jack fails—he fails in hilarious ways. The tragedy is that whole systems are wired to keep mistaking his ceiling-shooting bravado for actual leadership. Until organizations stop confusing the performance of authority with the practice of it, we’re going to keep finding ourselves in meetings where Jack Burtons are at the podium, and the real work is happening offstage. 

Jack Burton Isn’t the Hero, and That’s the Point

At the end of Big Trouble in Little China, Jack Burton does technically land the killing blow on Lo Pan—but only after fumbling his knife, retrieving it, and then lucking into the throw that saves the day. It’s the most fitting ending possible. The movie gives him a sliver of victory to keep the parody intact, but by then the audience knows: this story wasn’t his to begin with.

That’s the leadership takeaway. Jack isn’t a fraud, he isn’t malicious—he just not the leader he thinks he is. And that’s fine, as long as the Wangs and Eggs of the world are empowered to actually do the leading. The danger is when organizations convince themselves the Jack Burtons are the ones driving outcomes. That’s when competence is buried under charisma, when “executive presence” gets mistaken for strategy, and when whole teams end up wasting their time cleaning up the rubble instead of building something new.

Leadership isn’t about who looks best on the poster. It’s about who makes sure the story moves forward. And if you find yourself sitting in a meeting with a Jack Burton at the head of the table—swaggering, narrating, convinced they’re the main character—remember: the movie only worked because everyone else knew their role and stepped up. Just make sure you don’t let the ceiling cave in on your head while you wait for him to save the day. 

Endnotes

¹ Meindl, J. R., Ehrlich, S. B., & Dukerich, J. M. (1985). “The Romance of Leadership.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 30(1), 78–102. — Summary overview of the seminal research arguing that we often fall in love with the idea of leadership more than its actual outcomes. Basically, it’s about how we turn whoever’s in charge into a myth, even when they’re objectively terrible at the job.

² Gallup. (2015). State of the American Manager: Analytics and Advice for Leaders.— Found that managers account for about 70% of the variance in employee engagement. Which means your boss’s mood might actually determine whether you hit your quarterly goals or cry in the parking lot.

³ Kellerman, B. (2004). Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters. Harvard Business School Press. — Identifies seven types of destructive leadership, including incompetence, rigidity, and pure malicious intent. Think of it as Rick Sanchez’s autobiography if he ever took tenure.

⁴ Bass, B. M., & Riggio, R. E. (2006). Transformational Leadership (2nd ed.). Psychology Press.— Expands on Burns’s theory that true leaders inspire through vision and morality. Also unintentionally explains why charisma without ethics just creates very charming villains.

⁵ Krueger, J. I. (2015). “The Perils of Being Overconfident.” Psychology Today.— Discusses research by Mannes and Moore on how humans consistently overestimate their accuracy and underprepare for failure. In leadership terms, it’s what happens when confidence outpaces competence—also known as “the Monday morning meeting.”

⁶ McKinsey & Company. (2024). Organizational Health Is (Still) the Key to Long-Term Performance.— Data showing that organizations with healthy internal cultures consistently outperform those run by chaos goblins. (My phrasing, not theirs.)

⁷ Gallup. (2015). State of the American Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights.— Focuses on engagement, well-being, and productivity. The short version: employees don’t quit companies—they quit bosses who make every meeting feel like jury duty.

⁸ Thorndike, E. L. (1920). “A Constant Error in Psychological Ratings.” Journal of Applied Psychology, 4(1), 25–29.— The original study identifying what became known as the halo effect—our tendency to let one positive trait (like charm, confidence, or a sweet mullet) distort our judgment of someone’s overall ability. Free PDF via MIT, because apparently, even a century later, we still haven’t learned to separate leadership from good hair.