Two thousand five hundred years ago, when Athens was establishing the first democracy, it hesitated between slow and fast ambition. The philosophers said that its citizens should simply strive to maintain moral standards, honouring truth and virtue for the common good and not expect instant rewards. Itinerant teachers called Sophists offered courses in the application of these ideals to practical life and were influential in developing Athenian democracy. But the more impatient among the Sophists, simplifying traditional wisdom, taught that since human beings were intent on pleasure and wealth, and were moved by passions and self-interest, the strong would inevitably dominate the weak; so all they needed to understand was how to get what they wanted, for which there was just one magic tool, the art of persuasion. They were the first professional teachers of success, who claimed that anyone could learn how to get others to follow their leadership. Instead of physics and mathematics, they focused just on the art of persuasion (which is not so far from management). Power, they said, came from control of the emotions (an idea revived many centuries later as ‘emotional intelligence’). They attracted vast numbers of students because they promised rapid rise to influence and demonstrated how to get any argument accepted, if only one acquired the skills of rhetoric. Foreshadowing the belief that people only value what they pay for, they charged fees for their lessons, unlike the philosophers. This caused a scandal, all the more so because the fees were enormously high. Whereas a judge got half a drachma for a day’s work, the Sophists charged up to fifty drachmas. One of them was even said to have been paid as much as 10,000 drachmas, more than the ten most celebrated sculptors of the city put together. Only the rich could afford them, which made them unpopular, but that did not diminish their appeal.
These Sophists saw Athens not as a beacon of civilisation, but as essentially a centre of maritime commerce, accumulating wealth so as to enjoy luxury and feasting. Their writings have not survived, because they did not write for posterity, any more than the authors of business books today. A second wave of Sophists appeared among the Romans, and had even more success, touring the empire, attracting huge crowds by their skill at improvised persuasion, almost forerunners of modern motivational speakers. Sophists were practical, not idealists.
Since their day, business schools have been the most prominent institutions directing and encouraging ambition. Fifty years ago a graduate of the Harvard Business School said, ‘We are not the intellectual elite, nor the hereditary elite, nor the artistic or creative elite. What we are being groomed as is the competent elite. We’re being trained as the guys who stay sober at the party. We are being handed the tools to get out there and run things’, and these were tools which ‘like aspirin or like dynamite would work on just about anything’. This mixture of modesty and arrogance, however, ultimately proved inadequate. Business schools were originally established to transform managers and merchants into a more highly esteemed, cultured and respectable profession, but by concentrating too narrowly on finance and administration and forgetting about culture, they left the managers they trained one-legged, vulnerably dependent on always succeeding in making profits, unable to switch to any other basis of support. So business schools had to think again.
The person who in 1977 first publicised the notion that to be a manager was not the height of achievement, and that the real goal was to be a ‘leader’, was a Harvard Business professor who believed that psychoanalysis held the key to a better future, and who wrote a book on ‘how Freudian theory can turn good executives into better leaders’. Abraham Zaleznik (1924–2011) attacked managers for being too rational, impersonal, interested only in efficiency and process rather than ideas, intuition and empathy. He offered them a chance to be ‘born again’ and to find self-esteem. The way to do this, he said, was by ‘convincing others of the validity of one’s own conclusions’. To be able to do that, one needed to ‘empower oneself’ by liberating oneself from the doubts in one’s unconscious which prevented one’s talents emerging. The problem with too many managers was that they lacked a father figure, physically or metaphorically, resulting in anxiety, a desire to control uncertainty and a longing ‘to be born again’. Zaleznik married this idea with a second source of inspiration that became fashionable in the 1980s – Japan, which was threatening the industrial supremacy of the West. He idolised Konosuke Matsushita (1894–1989), the self-made electronics industrialist, whose company is now called Panasonic, whose philosophy of management was enshrined in an Institute of Peace and Happiness through Prosperity (founded in 1946), and whose biography was written by Zaleznik’s successor in the chair that Harvard established with an endowment from Matsushita.
Leadership courses have ever since become barometers of the ruling class’s changing moods and expectations. Every year thousands of books and articles appear incorporating some new preoccupation or ideology into leadership, and there are now 284 million references to it on Google. Since leadership does not eliminate the frustrations of those who do not become leaders, an egalitarian version has been added, proposing that almost everybody can be a leader (of sorts). ‘Followers’ have been held up as being as important as leaders, because no amount of teaching can prevent leaders making mistakes, and their success depends on having followers who will correct them. A leader has even been redefined simply as someone, however lowly, who ‘makes things happen’ and who ‘creates change’.
Leadership was of course originally a military idea, but what the business schools borrowed from the military was an outdated version that had already been abandoned by generals. The U.S. Army, preparing for the next war, began investigating the psychology of leadership in 1945, but revised its ideas completely following its demoralisation after defeat in Vietnam and the uncovering of a vast amount of cheating at West Point Military Academy. It invented a completely new idea of leadership. Henceforth, an officer was expected to expand his knowledge far beyond military matters; sixteen optional scientific and engineering subjects were brought into the syllabus and eight from the humanities. The new reading lists were a complete contrast with those proposed in 1910, which were dominated by forty-eight books about war, with only three books on general history, plus Roget’s Thesaurus and a list of ‘words frequently mispronounced’. The most recent discussion of leadership in the U.S. Army emphasises that officers increasingly have non-combatant roles, and need skills in technology, diplomacy and business, but that these needs are being inadequately met by specialist training, because only generalists could provide the coordination that was absent, and generalist education is still a distant ideal. The business schools have not got round to this. So soldiers are now more admired than business leaders, and are preferred to them as presidential candidates. ‘Line management’ remains as one of the ambiguous legacies that business has inherited from the army.
In 2008 yet another economic recession made it clear that leaders were responsible for a world catastrophe. Professors of leadership were forced to rethink everything they had taught, almost like professors of communism after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The dean of Harvard Business School confessed that leaders, having ‘caused so much hardship for so many . . . have lost legitimacy’; their failure was manifested not only in the economic collapse of firms but also in their ‘moral collapse’, and ‘the attendant confusion and loss of meaning they have engendered’. He castigated the teaching of leadership as being based on scholarly research that not only ‘lacks intellectual rigour’ but also fails to provide answers to the important questions. A professor of leadership at the Harvard School of Government announced ‘the end of leadership’, but without saying what would replace it. The idea of leadership has nowhere been jettisoned, even though the experts in it reported that the leaders they had studied often suffered from ‘the fear of seeming ignorant, stupid or at the edge of their competence when dealing with matters they must inevitably get involved in but don’t feel deeply informed about’. ‘They can easily get so consumed by the myriad demands (both from inside and ou
tside the organisation) that they dissipate their attention and fail to accomplish anything substantial.’ They find it ‘surprisingly difficult’ to obtain reliable information and ‘get cut off from the informal channels’ that could reveal reality to them, but they ‘have to be careful about whom they ask for information’ in case they undermine the authority of senior staff. ‘Although ostensibly they are masters of their time, the reality is that the demands on their time are endless.’ They ‘often find themselves over-committed, or spending time on things they regret’. They blame their subordinates: ‘Their greatest regret is not having acted sooner to replace underperforming members of their top management team.’ But they are themselves constantly blamed and are mercilessly evicted from their jobs because expectations are so often followed by disappointment. The effect they have on the organisation they lead, whether for good or ill, is disputed, one calculation measuring it with a characteristic claim to exactitude as 14 per cent on average, varying from 2 per cent to 21 per cent in different branches of activity, whereas others have been more sceptical. One study concluded that it might be wiser to have mere figureheads at the top of organisations instead of powerful leaders. And 77 per cent of Americans, echoing these concerns, told pollsters that there was a ‘crisis of leadership’. It was as dramatic a collapse as the ‘crisis of the aristocracy’ that afflicted seventeenth-century Europe.
Leaders have been extraordinarily vague about their goals. Harvard’s official mission was ‘to educate leaders who make a difference to the world’, Stanford’s to ‘change the world’ and M.I.T.’s ‘to improve the world’. But how? The uncertainty, and the self-questioning of Western leaders who are asking themselves whether the sacrifices needed to climb to the top were worth making, have not worried newly industrialising countries. According to China Youth Daily, two-thirds of its readers aim to become leaders and say that this is the ambition of 91 per cent of all young people. But though universities and corporations continue to sprout leadership institutes and programmes, there is increasing doubt as to whether leadership is a skill that can be taught, and whether it is so different from wisdom that it can be learned in a short course lasting a week or a year.
One of America’s most admired and humane writers on leadership, Warren Gamaliel Bennis (born 1925), has been unusually frank and illuminating about his personal experience of leadership. He wanted to be a leader, he says, because ‘I did not want to be like the people I already knew.’ He grew up ‘depressed’ by his modest background and by having an unsuccessful immigrant father. As soon as he could afford it, he underwent six years of psychoanalysis, five days a week for three years, and four days a week for another three years. Later he took a course in the ‘technology of transformation’ developed by the New Age guru Werner Erhard. Bennis was convinced that he was looking for a parent who corresponded more closely to his ideals. His elder brother, ten years his senior, appeared to him to be a natural leader. Ever since his childhood, he said, he had thought about how he too could become a leader. During his military service, his captain became his model, and at Antioch College he switched his admiration to its president (the psychologist Douglas McGregor, who said that he valued his own four years in psychoanalysis more than his four years as an undergraduate). ‘I tried to be like him in every conceivable way. I was shameless at sucking up to mentors. I was so drawn to genius perhaps because I felt so ordinary myself.’ At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ‘I imitated my professors and the brightest of my fellow graduate students . . . When I began teaching [psychology to] undergraduates. I didn’t always know who I’d be that day. On some days, I thought of myself as a total fraud.’ His ‘fatal desire to please’ tormented him. The refugees from Hitler’s Germany who played a leading role in the growth of psychology in the U.S., having tasted the grim reality of charismatic leadership, were of course suspicious of all leaders, but Bennis felt he needed ‘structure and support’, the perfect father who would combine authority with love.
Being a powerless junior professor, he dreamed of power. Having a ‘terrible sense of uncertainty, I need the illusion of understanding to feel safe’. He was attracted by people who seemed to have found certainty, who had a convincing vision, and who could satisfy ‘my natural impulse to poetize . . . I am a sucker for vision’. So he moved out of teaching into administration, as provost of the University of Buffalo, which had a ‘visionary’ president who was trying to turn it into ‘the Berkeley of the East’. This was in the 1970s, the epoch of student riots. The dream ‘never got out of the administration buildings . . . We undermined the very thing we wanted most: our actions, even our style alienated the people who would be most affected by the changes we proposed.’ Many years later he summed up his effort at leadership thus: ‘I did not learn how to integrate intimacy with ambition. I still have not.’
But he had learned something. ‘Without history, without continuity, there can be no change.’ He decided that he had moved too fast, ignoring tradition. So he had another try, this time as president of the University of Cincinnati. But different problems once again smashed his enthusiasm. ‘When I had most power, I felt the greatest sense of powerlessness . . . After a year I said: ‘Either I can’t manage this place, or it’s unmanageable.’ I have become the victim of an unwitting conspiracy to prevent one doing anything whatsoever to change the status quo. Unfortunately I was one of the chief conspirators.’ The routines of the bureaucracy left him no time for deep rethinking or fundamental reforms. ‘I believed in the false dream that people would love me if only they really got to know me . . . Leaders should not look to being loved.’ He collapsed with a heart attack. Three months of convalescence writing poetry convinced him that he should abandon trying to be a leader, he would never be happy as the leader of an organisation. So instead he would write books to tell other people how to be a leader, which he did with enormous success and brilliance. Somebody ought to turn Bennis’s autobiography into a requiem mass for the twentieth century, when the privileged publicly sang songs of self-congratulation and privately dreamt of being liberated from self-doubt.
The conclusion Bennis reached after a lifetime of personal obsession with leadership and thoughtful observation of it was that ultimately being a leader meant only being a decent human being. (But is business or politics organised to make behaving decently easy?) He discovered also that he had got his priorities wrong, deciding that ‘My three children are more important than anything else’. (Why then is family life so often damaged by work?) Above all, he insisted, no leader is complete without a ‘vision’, but the only vision he proposed was ‘to be yourself’. (Is that sufficient for the vast population that is profoundly and sadly conscious of its own inadequacies?)
I live in a country that leaves everyone free to choose how they earn their living, but in which 57 per cent of the workforce says that they have chosen the wrong job. It is no longer possible to believe that they would feel differently if they were all magically promoted to the top of the greasy pole and were hailed as charismatic leaders. There are alternatives to this kind of success. Bacon, Barlow and Bennis illustrate just a few of the pitfalls that the idea of salvation through leadership entails for the personal lives of those who aspire to it. To judge leadership on the results it produces for organisations ignores what it does to the character of the leader.
In the late seventeenth century, in Hangzhou, which Marco Polo had called ‘beyond dispute the finest and the noblest city in the world’, educated women met at the Banana Garden Poetry Club wearing simple raw-silk outfits, with no jewellery and their hair in a bun, to reflect on what was important in life, or as they put it, to ‘investigate things thoroughly’, and their conclusion was that the men who competed for power while claiming to be moral were ‘fakes’. But these women did not know how to win the support of ‘women who care about cosmetics and dressing up’, for whom they ‘felt sorry’, and so they concluded that their ideal of more honest ways of working was ‘unattainable’. Ignoring t
he obsessions of men, they decided to pursue an ‘aesthetic life’ on their own, by cultivating the arts and creating beautiful gardens. Women have had only a limited influence on the organisation of paid work ever since. Many men have continued to believe that their hunger for power and its rewards is attractive to women, and some perpetuate the tradition of turning to women only for consolation for their failures and humiliations, like the noble mediaeval French warriors who having just lost a battle said, ‘We’ll talk about it in the ladies’ chamber.’ The desire to please women has sometimes encouraged the cultivation of gentler manners, but it has not led men to reassess the value of their competitive struggles in search of wealth and influence. The ‘unattainable ideal’ is being made more attainable every time women extirpate the old-style leadership from private life, but it has yet to be linked to the business of earning a living.
The danger in the cult of leadership is that its devotees can end up as actors trying to play the role they believe is demanded of them. Calling almost everybody a leader is rather like raising everybody into the ranks of the nobility by giving them the title of Monsieur or Señora. After ten years as CEO of IKEA, Anders Dahlvig was unusually honest in saying that what he valued most of all was to receive recognition, and that this was ‘the most important driver of mankind’. But very few people believe they are properly recognised and appreciated. Public recognition is too often a façade, idealised and then suddenly withdrawn after a mistake. Private recognition goes much deeper and is worthless if it is fake.
The Hidden Pleasures of Life Page 26
