What Leaders Are Saying About

Building Better Leaders

“It’s doubtful Apollo 13 could have returned safely to Earth without dedicated and inspirational leadership on the ground. As the commander of that spaceflight, I have been grateful every day since.

“Now, more than ever, we need inspiring leaders with their eyes on the sky and their feet on the ground. BUILDING BETTER LEADERS shows the way forward with inspiring leadership of its own. This is an important book at a pivotal moment in time, packed with profound wisdom and practical advice for leaders and aspiring leaders alike. Do read it. Then, go forth and lead!”

Captain James A. Lovell (ret.), Commander, Apollo 13

“In BUILDING BETTER LEADERS, author Thomas J. Lee builds an emphatic case for rethinking leadership. His concept of whole leadership is especially resonating. This is an incredibly well-written book, which can serve as a blueprint for first-time and seasoned leaders alike.”

Dave Whan, Vice President, People & Culture

“Poor leadership can kill your career, wreck your business, and — as we have seen recently in numerous countries around the world — undermine the foundations of representative government. Thomas J. Lee’s outstanding book reminds us that the best leaders communicate effectively, build trust and help people accomplish together what they couldn’t accomplish alone. They create a shared vision that people can rally around, using multiple communication forms to appeal to their hearts and minds and drive positive change.

“Drawing from a wide range of sources, including his extensive experience working with some of the world’s biggest companies, Tom provides a comprehensive set of models that people can use to improve the way they communicate and lead. BUILDING BETTER LEADERS offers an inspiring vision for all of us to play a leadership role in making the world better.”

Mike Bennett, Vice President, Communications, Honeywell

“I have known Tom for twenty-five years and had the advantage of learning from him at points in time over that period. He helped me fashion my own leadership style, and I have used him to help educate other leaders who were struggling. If you want to understand what leadership is and what it should be, you have a great guidebook available to you here.”

Richard Spies, former CEO, Pan American Energy

About the Author

THOMAS J. LEE has taught leadership to thousands of executives and managers at some of the world’s largest corporations. He has spoken and consulted in fourteen countries in North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. His business clients have included the largest and most respected companies in aerospace, heavy equipment, motorcycles, finance, energy, pharmaceuticals, food service, machinery, beer, biotechnology, insurance, broadcasting, chemicals, healthcare, and electronics, along with several agencies of the United States government and a couple of global conglomerates. He is an alumnus of the University of Wisconsin at Madison and of The University of Chicago, where he has lectured on leadership and has mentored graduate students for more than twenty years. He blogs at arceil.com.

Sound Bites

(Quotable Quotes)

“If serving is beneath you, real leadership is beyond you.”
“A conscience that does not exercise dominion over conduct isn’t much of a conscience at all.”
“In a nutshell, the work of management meets the predetermined expectations held by known stakeholders, while the work of leadership sets new expectations for people to embrace as aspirations for themselves.”
“Leadership that is honorable but ineffective, or noble but incompetent, is a nice try. Leadership that is effective and competent but dishonorable or ignoble is a joyride to nowhere. People want and need both honorable and effective leaders, both noble and competent leadership.”
“Most importantly, you must live your message. You must be your message. You must offer yourself as a working example of the leadership you preach. Your behavior and your decisions are part and parcel of your communication. You must become your own First Follower.”
“Just because you have a number doesn’t mean you have valid, meaningful, and actionable data. Numbers — especially decimals, with their veneer of precision — have a devious way of implying accuracy that may or may not be truthful.”

About the Book

(From the Preface)

Building Better Leaders has a threefold purpose. First, it rings a firehouse alarm to decades of poor leadership: the fundamental misunderstanding of it, the notion that it belongs only to the few at the top, the confusion between it and management, the weakening of its moral backbone and its foothold in reality, the wobbly wheels that send it careening off course, the retreat from its full fiduciary responsibilities, and especially the brazen abuse of its power and privileges. Second, by distilling a lifetime of experience, observations, and thinking on leadership, it sheds light on one of the most demanding challenges that dedicated, driven people ever undertake. Finally, like a good leader, it blazes a trail of its own — in this case, to argue for a fuller and better leadership ethic for the twenty-first century, grounded in emotional maturity and stewardship. I call it whole leadership, and I believe it can save us from our own worst instincts.

My Thesis

(From the Introduction)

To say we have a crisis of leadership is so banal it feels empty of meaning. We have all heard it said a thousand times. That alone tells you something. Like that old chestnut on the weather, everyone talks about the sorry state of leadership but no one does anything. Building Better Leaders is a reveille call for change. Our crisis of leadership itself requires leadership: yours, mine, and ours. We need to lead the way to a new and better ethic of leadership.

It isn’t just the simmering crisis of American culture and politics or the ascendancy of authoritarian strongmen around the world. Yes, leadership is plainly suffering in politics and government. It is also hurting in some big corporations and big churches, in families and in schools. Not all of them, certainly, but enough to be a serious problem — and, as any true leader can tell you, therefore also enough to offer a big opportunity, in this case rescuing honorable and bold leadership itself for the future.

We can see the crisis whenever trusted leaders abuse their moral authority, whenever the control freak in the room threatens and intimidates, whenever a boss blames someone else and takes the credit for himself. We see it whenever conspiracy theorists conjure up a new falsehood and post it to social media, whenever screaming voices and crimson faces overwhelm the calm and quiet voice of fact and reason, whenever anyone in a position of influence and confidence chooses self-indulgence over decency and common morality — and, yes, when a powerful, petty politician asks people to believe nonsense, to profane their values, and to take dramatic, devastating action on his behalf. All this has happened so visibly — and some of it routinely — that we have grown numb to it. Much as we wish to think otherwise, it has become our culture. At this point, anyone who isn’t despairing over the sorry state of leadership doesn’t really understand what’s going on.

Excerpts

(From the Introduction)

We have been accepting pale imitations of leadership for so long we don’t really recognize the real thing when it comes along and kisses us good morning. Today, in an atmosphere of cynicism and scornful derision toward public enterprise of almost every kind, after so many prominent figures have so brazenly squandered their moral authority, and without even a broadly accepted factual reality, it is extraordinarily difficult. But our tomorrows depend on it, and therefore we depend on it. Somehow, we must rise to the challenge.

(From Chapter 1)

By leadership, I have in mind something far greater than getting other people to do what you want. That is a small, crude, and obnoxious take on leadership. I recoil whenever I hear it. It is small because it dwells more on expedience for someone’s arbitrary agenda than on a large, transcendent cause eclipsing individual concern. It is crude because it has more to do with control and manipulation than with high inspiration. It is obnoxious because it implicitly regards followers as vassals to some sort of quasi-feudal lord. If just getting people to do what you want is your definition of leadership, you have already failed as a leader, and in the twenty-first century you will never succeed until it no longer is.

Rather, we should think of leadership in a larger way, as the uncommon and noble work of engaging the complete will of people — physically, mentally, emotionally, arguably even spiritually — and sending it into battle against an unsatisfactory and unsatisfying status quo, so that people can achieve big things together they cannot achieve alone. It is the hard work of identifying and giving voice to a future that people want so much they will passionately and courageously invest themselves in its achievable reality. They may grouse along the way, of course, but they will often surprise even themselves. Years later, like grizzled old war veterans nursing a beer, they will recall the experience with reverential respect. Leaders who embrace such a large, enlightened view of their work will find their leadership to be much more effective and satisfying, and its happy results to be much more sustainable. In short, as leaders we must ask more, much more, of ourselves, and we must ask much more of the people whom we lead. If we fail to do that, we are not leaders but unleaders.

(From Chapter 1)

If you ask me, leadership is effective when it reaches out to people, finds their values and concerns, touches their heart, and then enrolls and guides them through a large challenge to a productive and satisfactory result. Leadership is honorable when it rests on both empirical and moral truth, when it holds itself accountable rather than blaming others or whining like a victim, when its results are widely seen as decent and propitious to the well-being of large numbers of people — not just to the leader’s own reputation, comfort, or wealth — and when these results contribute to a society in which most people want to live. Some aspects of good leadership, such as the affirmation of people and uniting them in a constructive common cause, live in both houses. In other words, leadership is honorable and effective, which is to say good, when its touchstones are real, its soul is intact, and people are better off because of it.

(From Chapter 1)

The first steps on the road to wisdom are the steps we take toward seeing reality, not as our cultural pride and political mythology would have it — cue the pastoral sunrise with a Dodge pickup, bales of straw, and Sam Elliott’s earthy baritone — but rather as it is, with its blemishes and abuse and dysfunction, all of a piece. The alternative is to condone and perpetuate the mistakes we have been making, in which case we will be unable to muster our will to meet the challenges we face.

(From the Introduction)

Cynicism is so prevalent it seems almost benign, as if it were the mature sobriety of seen-it-all experience. But it casts a foul odor over the possibility of constructive change. Downwind from the smokestack of cynicism, no one expects a better tomorrow anymore. No one believes in its promise. People lose hope. Because they expect to see the worst, they actually do see the worst, or they imagine it as the worst and explain it away as inevitable.

(From Chapter 1)

All around us, it seems, the individuals to whom we look for wisdom, morality, courage, and guidance turn out to be profoundly in need of it themselves, or so capricious and self-indulgent that they are useless as role models. . . . These smoldering embers of leadership absolutely deserve our time, attention, and response. We must stoke up their flickering flames, lest we find ourselves unable to control our own destiny. Among the important conversations we need to have is a conversation about leadership itself: What have we come to expect of it? What should we expect of it? What can we reasonably ask of it? What norms should we demand that it respect? How can we challenge it to be more, do more, offer more? These questions are relevant for all of us and especially relevant for the positional leaders of our great institutions — presidents, chief executives, board chairs, and directors. We all need to question and rethink some of our basic assumptions about leadership.

(From Chapter 4)

Frankly, a lot of the casual knowledge and popular assumptions about management and leadership are leaky boats. For example, as we discussed earlier, you don’t have to look very far to stumble across the old canard that you should stop managing and start leading. I saw it again twice this week. Whoever is at the oars of that boat probably has the best of intentions, likely a preference for civil and respectful relationships (kind and gentle) over arrogance and fiat (mean and brutish). We can all agree with that much. Kind is good. Gentle is good. So be kind. Be gentle. Life is short.

Trouble is, kind and gentle have nothing to do with the definitions of managing and leading. It’s important to define words precisely and to keep their real and substantive differences in mind. Managers aren’t just leaders in gestation, in some sort of chrysalis, as the manager’s pupa to a leader’s butterfly. A leader is not just a kind and gentle manager, and a manager is not just a thoughtless, bumptious leader. Lots of managers are kind and gentle, and, yes, some leaders have rough edges or even a mean streak. While their attitude toward people will affect their success for better or worse, it is misleading to use the terms manager and leader as moral or even stylistic emblems. The real distinction between them isn’t so much a matter of attitude or of style and sophistication, any more than it is a matter of pay grades and job titles. Rather, it is all about the work they do.

(From Chapter 6)

What exactly is good communication for leadership? It certainly may involve oratory, but speechifying is only a small part of it. Nor is it just a knack for clever phrasing, or cool sangfroid in the glare of television cameras, or a dazzling PowerPoint slide deck, or a fulgent smile, or a politician’s gladhanding along a rope line. Good communication for leadership involves much, much more. At a minimum it must convey clear, credible, coherent, and cogent messages, and it must take responsibility for the interpretation and application of those messages. Beyond that, and similar to leadership itself, it must reach out to people, touch them, and bring them into the fold. It works like the philosopher’s stone of medieval alchemy, inasmuch as it creates belief out of doubt, confidence out of despair, energy out of inertia, unity out of disunity, direction out of confusion, enthusiasm out of indifference, coherence out of chaos, perseverance out of vacillation — in short, more out of less. So-called leaders who rely on shouting, lies, intimidation, insults, grievance, threats and the like have the opposite effect. They are not leaders but unleaders, and their minions and trolls on social media are not conscientious followers but mere marionettes.

(From Chapter 6)

Successful leaders communicate whenever, wherever, and however they can. They have a message they passionately believe in, and they speak it. Their message is one of aspiration, of need, of confidence. They describe. They declare. They demand. They cite examples and comparisons. They tell stories. They ask a litany of questions, one after another, often on a single theme. They listen. They craft catchy aphorisms, little ditties, or clever quotations. They cajole. They persuade. They needle. More importantly, they engage in dialogue — lots and lots of dialogue — and they repeat themselves over and over and over again.

Finally, and most importantly, they live their message. They are their message. They offer themselves as a working example of the leadership they preach. Their behavior and their decisions are part and parcel of their communication. They become their own First Follower.

(From Chapter 6)

Communication for change has any number of forces marshalled against it. I call them frenemies, because they don’t appear to be outright enemies. They include money, time, pride, comfort, and outmoded if not puerile assumptions about leadership and management and about communication itself. Perhaps the worst of it is an enduring if not endearing instinct for GARBAGE (gobbledygook, acronyms, rigmarole, bromides, argot, guile, and euphemism). You can pronounce it gar-BAHZH to give it a sweet, genteel lilt. If you work in a sizable organization of any kind, with a handful of happy exceptions, you have probably seen your share of GARBAGE.

(From Chapter 7)

In a culture characterized by agape, you wouldn’t have one-upmanship. You wouldn’t have colleagues who undermine every good idea simply because it wasn’t their own. You wouldn’t have bosses who seize the credit and pass the blame. You wouldn’t have Millennials ignoring the advice of Boomers because it’s from — ewe! — Boomers, and you wouldn’t have Boomers thinking they have seen it all and therefore know it all. You wouldn’t have a teammate whose go-to phrase in brainstorming sessions is: “Well, let’s play the Devil’s Advocate.” Instead, everyone would want to play the Angel’s Advocate. The whole experience would feel more like a team, whose members are truly cheering for one another, and less like a league in which everyone is competing against one another. I’m all for healthy competition, but we should remind ourselves to be competing with the other organization — the other company, the other candidate, the other team — rather than with the good people on our own team.

(From Chapter 8)

Here's the nub of it all: If serving is beneath you, real leadership is beyond you. It’s that simple, that stark. Leaders serve, good leaders serve well, and the best leaders serve exceptionally well. The leader is not there to be served, but rather to find ways to serve and to act creatively and constructively on those opportunities. By serving people well, leaders model and create a community in which people learn to serve and support one another. In your heart, you know it’s the kind of culture where you have always wanted to live and work.

Building Better Leaders:

Whole Leadership for the Twenty-First Century

(www.betterleadersbook.com)

Thomas J. Lee

© Copyright 2021. Thomas J. Lee. All rights reserved.

www.betterleadersbook.com

thomas.lee@arceil.com

(650) 464-1770

Foreword

Preface

Introduction: Our Crisis of Leadership

Part I: Rethinking Leadership

1 Leadership Good and Bad: What It Is and Why It Matters

2 Moving from Position to Purpose: Rediscovering the Potential of Real Leadership

3 Troglodytes and Philosophers in the Corner Office: The Evolution of Leadership

Part II: The Soul of Leadership

4 Go East, Young Leader: The Yin and Yang of Managing and Leading

5 Tiptoe Through the Tulips: The Four Petals of Trustworthy Leadership

6 Connection Is Everything: Clear, Credible, Coherent, Cogent Communication

Part III: Whole Leadership

7 The Whole Leader: Emotionally Mature Leadership and the Problem of Charisma

8 First, Be of Service: The Secret to All Great Leadership

9 The Gestalt of Leadership: The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts

Appendix: A Leadership Lexicon

Acknowledgements

Endnotes

Index

Present word count (gross): 123,300

Present word count (net of promotional material above): 120,800

Present word count (net of promo material and Leadership Lexicon): 116,300

Anticipated final word count (net of promotional material above): 110,000

Preface

The book itself had an unlikely beginning on a sunny but brisk March afternoon in San Francisco. Indulging a lifelong passion for reading, I pulled on a hoodie and trekked over to the legendary City Lights Bookstore in North Beach. More than just a purveyor of fine books, City Lights is a cultural landmark, recognized by the U.S. National Register of Historic Places as a storied patron and literary fortress for such avant-garde writers as Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and the bookstore’s co-founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti — all icons of what Kerouac would christen as the Beat Generation — in the mid-twentieth century.

Those were years of anxiety and uncertainty. Over the preceding generation the world had coped with a global depression, an axis of fascism, and a second world war. Now the fear of polio, communism, and atomic bombs was palpable. People turned to television, rock ‘n’ roll, and their own growing families to take the edge off, and a new normalcy set in. Into this catnapping plebeian society stepped the countercultural, proto-hippie “beatniks,” who called everything into question. Soon, cultures clashed. Decades of tradition and repression heaved up and gave way. Youthful, headstrong rebellion reared back, gathered itself, and charged ahead, as paradoxical notions of individuality and community, so well-established today, found their footing together, as one. Before long the Beat Generation was transmuting into hippiedom, its flower children abloom in Haight-Ashbury and Greenwich Village and on college campuses across the country.

In the rear of City Lights a narrow wooden staircase beckoned to me, and upstairs I went. I sank into an old easy chair, its dry crinkled Naugahyde torn and fairly exploding with yellow foam cushioning. A warm beam of buttery sunlight poured through a window and lit up a little dust storm. As the dust resettled, I looked over the jam-packed bookcases. A slender volume on the bottom shelf caught my eye: The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry by Ernest Fenollosa.

Paging through the odd little book, I soon came across an absorbing discussion of the Chinese ideographs for man and word. The written characters appeared first individually and then alongside each other as in “a man standing by his word.” Together the two words forged an altogether new ideograph, the Mandarin word for trust or integrity or loyalty — just as two distinct English terms might combine to form a new and different third word, like crosscurrent or afterthought. The phrase “standing by your word” thus proved to be a cognate: verbal first cousins between languages. This particular cognate reached clear across the Pacific Ocean and across the cultural schism between East and West — so important and so vital is trust to our understanding of ourselves, our society, and the great institutions we establish. Trust is the fulcrum of leadership. People need to believe one another, and they need to trust their leaders. When leaders abuse that trust, as they have been all too often, society loses its cohesion, its identity, its claim on the future.

Until that afternoon it had never occurred to me to regard beatniks as leaders. Even now it feels counterintuitive. But if leaders are as leaders do, then leaders they most assuredly were. Those writers of the Beat Generation led people to think differently. That is what leaders do. They teach people to see and think differently and to live their lives accordingly. Then, thinking for themselves, people take their new sensibilities to places of their own choosing and design. By preferring loose reins over tight, real leadership thus spawns a wellspring of creativity and growth.

Daring to question the unquestioned, daring even to question the unquestionable, the beatniks of the 1950s proved inspirational to millions of young people. Their ethic evolved into a culture that celebrated a bold unorthodoxy, an insistent freedom, and a beatific spirituality. It truly isn’t much of a stretch to connect beatniks with the likes of Woody Guthrie, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, a futurist like Buckminster Fuller, Rolling Stone magazine and the Whole Earth Catalogue, the Grateful Dead, Bono, Willie Nelson, Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream, and even Steve Jobs. Nor is it really a stretch to draw a dotted line from beatniks to the popularity of yoga and meditation, to the free forms of jazz and improv, to the legalization of gay marriage and cannabis, to the Vietnam War protests, and eventually to organic social activism for environmentalism, racial equity, and feminism. Even more loosely, you can feel its distant aftershocks in best-selling breakout books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and The Inner Game of Tennis, in Phil Jackson’s meditative Lakota-inspired basketball coaching, in creative fields like advertising, in sardonic cartoons like Doonesbury and Calvin and Hobbes, in corporate cultures like Trader Joe’s, and in socially iconoclastic, edgy, or rebellious activities of any sort. Leadership is like that; more than controlling or defining the future, it creates a culture that inspires people and influences their choices for years ahead. Sometimes you don’t notice or appreciate it for years to come, and all the while its second- and third-generation progeny are ricocheting through society in untold and unforeseen ways. Like the branches of a tree carrying water to twigs, its own countless social synapses carry leadership far into the future.

Now as it happened I was in San Francisco for a speaking engagement the next morning. My talk was to focus on purpose, culture, integrity and leadership in large organizations. The hours I whiled away in the City Lights attic became a fateful muse from an earlier generation, looking after me and inspiring my thoughts and emboldening me to say things that so needed to be said.

The next day I said those very things, and I say them again in this book, with the hope of reaching vastly more people at a time when it is needed all the more. My purpose is to bring attention, insight, excitement, and energy to a subject of considerable misunderstanding and unrealized potential. I want to inform, influence, and inspire public officials, business executives, and agents of change to embrace a larger and nobler philosophy of leadership — an ethic of whole leadership built on a foundation of trust, empathy, dignity, inclusion, decency, service, and community. It is as applicable in business as it is in public affairs, and it fits a good many other spheres of life as well.

*** * ***

Building Better Leaders is intended for anyone with an interest — professional, casual, or academic — in leadership and the big changes it can bring about. In particular I want to reach anyone who aspires to be a better, bolder, and more effective leader — in business, government, advocacy groups and non-profit organizations, schools and churches, and neighborhoods and families. I especially want to reach readers who are concerned about something they believe must be changed and who will step up to lead the change. With any luck, you will learn how to lead more effectively and then go forth to offer your own whole leadership. I can only draw the floorplan and lay the foundation, though. It’s up to you to build your own house. To that end, we include a section titled Praxis at the conclusion of each chapter. It will help you move from theory to practice.

At the risk of sounding a little cosmic, I also hope to spark concern over the state of our leadership, public and private, and to prompt a serious conversation about the role of healthy leaders and the role of healthy followers in a society that depends on both, now more than ever. Ideally, this conversation will include discussion of leadership as the purposeful agency of change (or real leadership); of clear, credible, coherent, cogent communication as its energy — its solar power, if you will — and of both emotional maturity and stewardship as essential components of wise, connective, and productive leadership in the twenty-first century. I’m hoping it will prove to be a refreshing counterpoint to the recent proliferation of wannabe autocrats around the world, from Russia and Turkey to Brazil and India.

On the road to that conversation, beware the common mistakes of ignoring the wisdom of the ages either because it flows from savants who lived long ago (aka dead white men), or because it is too philosophical or theoretical, or because it conflicts with your own preconceived notions. Wisdom, unlike knowledge, is timeless and evergreen. Assuming you have even half the brains you were born with, you can apply it to your situation regardless of when or where you are living and working, regardless of how old you are, and regardless of what challenges you are facing. Wisdom is wisdom. Nor should you retreat because it is philosophical or theoretical. All wisdom is philosophical, and theory is the foundation of expertise of any sort. Given a choice between a surgeon who understands germ theory and one who does not, which would you ask to operate on you? Choosing between two otherwise identical candidates for a senior executive’s job, would you prefer the one who understands management theory or the one who does not?

By the same token, do not make the common but costly mistake of rejecting the wisdom and expertise of others out of hand. All too often, facing a challenge to their prior beliefs, people deny the validity of new information because it would require them to think critically about their own beliefs. So instead they fall back on their own preconceptions and unchallenged assumptions, and their growth slows to a stop. “A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices,” the American philosopher William James wrote. Indeed, you’re far better off thinking critically and rigorously, and the first step of that is to learn from the wisdom and expertise of others you have reason to respect. Nor should you foolishly limit yourself to examples and insights from your own sector, field, or cohort; business executives can learn plenty from politicians, scientists from artists, Republicans from Democrats, the public sector from the private, the old from the young — and all vice versa.

Accordingly, this book covers a lot of territory. The work of leadership stretches across whole sectors: business, government, associations, academia, media, political campaigns, sports, the fine arts, law enforcement and military, religion, families, diplomacy, and more. The principles of good leadership apply pretty much across the board. In this book I usually address them all without specific reference to a particular venue or context. Where appropriate, as in our discussion of the differences between management and leadership, I will focus on one or two of those contexts. Still, the insights will be of value to any leader anywhere.

I have been teaching leadership and its cousins — communication, trust, and service — for twenty-five years, mainly but not exclusively in the corporate universe. When I was getting started, I labored to find effective ways to explain the abstractions of leadership and strategic communication, and I soon realized the value of imposing structure and graphic design on abstraction. Mainly this takes the form of models that depict a reality of some sort. They have the advantage of showing rather than just telling, so that people can see things as they are and visualize things that are not yet. That matters because many people find it difficult to take ownership of anything they cannot fully grasp, and they cannot grasp what they cannot see. In other words, to own something, people must see it first. In addition, seeing it helps to bridge the gaps between differing cognitive styles (as in engineering versus the liberal arts) and to overcome cultural, linguistic, and national differences and barriers around the world.

The work of building better leaders has taken me to more than a dozen countries on five continents and to the lecterns of a top university. It has always been a joy; at the end of the day I am physically exhausted but mentally, emotionally, and even spiritually rejuvenated. Thousands of business managers and executives have come through my master classes, and I have learned as much from them as they from me. Together we have plowed the furrows of this great field so that you don’t have to. What we have learned from one another will help you become a better and wiser leader, I am confident.

In the interest of full disclosure, you should know a few other things about me. I have always been fascinated by leadership, and over the course of my life I have studied it and thought about it a great deal. My first experience in the world of grown-up leadership came at the age of seventeen; I will share the insights from that experience in this book. I am now happily pursuing my third or fourth career, all of which have had something to do with leadership, so it has been a lifelong vocation as well as avocation for me.

My first career was in journalism. Because my beat was politics, I had many opportunities to interview major political leaders (including four U.S. presidents and countless presidential candidates) at some length. After picking up an advanced degree that included the academic study of leadership, I worked for a multinational corporation as a speechwriter for the CEO and chairman of the board. In that capacity I observed and learned a great deal about corporate governance and leadership, and I was able to begin a practice of benchmarking successful companies; to date I have visited almost thirty large corporations to learn what they have done well and not so well. In the 1990s I embarked on a path of consulting and training leaders and aspiring leaders. You are about to read many of the insights, principles, explanations, and stories from all this work.

Further in the interest of full disclosure, you should know that I am a white male who has lived his entire life in the Upper Midwest of the United States. I grew up in a town-and-gown community named Appleton, which is so all-American even its name sounds all-American. My breadbasket roots and American perspective are undeniable frames for me. But I have been fortunate to travel widely, and I am sensitive to marginalization. In this book I have tried my best to keep any biases in check and to offer broadly inclusive examples. Ultimately, my ethnicity, race, gender, age, and perspective will remain indelible markers. You can take the boy out of Wisconsin, but you can’t take Wisconsin out of the boy.

*** * ***

It is important at the outset, if only briefly, to flag a few important concepts and themes that run throughout this book.

One theme is the subtitle’s reference to the twenty-first century. You certainly do not need to be told how much has changed in the last thirty or forty years. Technology alone has revolutionized the world. Donald Trump and his ideological kin upended politics. Some of the largest companies in the world didn’t exist a generation ago. Many of those that did are no longer in business. Terrorists struck at the epicenters of global commerce and democracy. Social media have nearly displaced the news media. A worldwide pandemic brought almost every aspect of life to a standstill. We are finally having a long-overdue conversation about race in America, albeit prompted by recurring violence. Political fanatics, religious zealots, and white supremacists are unapologetically brazen. In parts of the world both gay marriage and marijuana are legal, a reality inconceivable until recently. Communism is a faint shadow of its Iron Curtain contours, though a few old apparatchiks are stubbornly and feverishly despotic still, and in some quarters democracy itself is under siege. Globalization, for better or worse, is both a fact of life and a favorite whipping boy for populists, even after the pandemic took a bite out of it.

Aspiring leaders must weave all these profound societal changes into their large leadership, simply because they must connect with followers in a way that their followers embrace. The work of leadership must be contextual. Of course we can learn from history, and we should; however, leaders who act as if the twenty-first century is a rerun of the twentieth century are and will continue to be unable to connect with most people in the 2020s and beyond. It’s an uncertain and challenging time to offer leadership but, to invoke imagery from Corinthians, no leader can afford to blow an uncertain trumpet.

Another theme is the distinction between leadership and management. As you will see especially in the fourth chapter, leadership and management are fundamentally different — though perhaps not for the reasons you think. It is not true, for one thing, that managing is bad and leading is its better. Nor is it true that leaders and bosses are cat-and-rat caricatures, that you should start being a leader and stop being a boss (though if you are commonly bossy you should definitely stop that). Nor is it true that leadership is the head and management is the belly of corporate morphology. Nor, finally, is it true that good leadership and good management are mutually exclusive. We actually need them both, and we need them both together in the same persons everywhere — up, down, and across any company, cause, or campaign with an eye on change and growth. They are complementary, and both are essential.

Still another recurring theme is the importance of a culture of dignity, emotional maturity, and stewardship — dimensions of whole leadership that, even early in the twenty-first century, get too little attention. Discussions of culture run throughout this book. Emotional maturity (the concept is similar to Daniel Goleman’s emotional intelligence, but it is also substantively different) gets its due in chapter 7. We devote chapter 8 to stewardship, also known as servant leadership or, in my own nomenclature, Fifth Degree Leadership.

Finally, it is important to establish communication as the energy of leadership. Nitin Nohria, former dean of Harvard Business School, put it well: “Communication is the real work of leadership.” For too many executives and government administrators, communication is an afterthought. To the extent they do communicate, they see their effectiveness as a matter of articulation and influence, and of direction and dispatch, so as to secure the alignment of people by telling them what to do and insisting they do it. That’s good and quite sufficient for the tasks of positional management. But the work of real leadership requires more, because it is all about change. It cannot settle for mere alignment. It must insist on engagement, for true engagement is at the heart of a culture that can embrace and sustain the fruits of change and organic growth. That requires communication for the sake of leading people — and lots of it.

*** * ***

Someone once called Walt Disney a Hokey Pokey leader, and I can see why. The label comes from the old children’s song, “Do The Hokey Pokey,” which we can use as a cute little anthem for leadership. I’m probably getting some of the lyrics wrong, but it goes a little like this:

You put your whole self in,
You take your whole self out,
You put your whole self in,
And you shake it all about,
You do the Hokey Pokey,
And you turn yourself around,
That's what it's all about!

Hokey Pokey leaders put their whole self in, and they turn themselves around. They don’t just go halfway, and they don’t ask others to do what they themselves are unwilling to do. Leading people is not a matter of doing things halfway. You go all in. You bring your whole self to the task. You become your own First Follower.

Let us all strive to be, like Walt Disney, whole leaders — Hokey Pokey leaders. That’s what it’s all about.

Introduction

Our Crisis of Leadership

We can see the crisis whenever trusted leaders abuse their moral authority, whenever the control freak in the room threatens and intimidates, whenever a boss blames someone else and takes the credit for himself. We see it whenever conspiracy theorists conjure up a new falsehood and post it to social media, whenever screaming voices and crimson faces overwhelm the calm and quiet voice of fact and reason, whenever anyone in a position of influence and confidence chooses self-indulgence over decency and common morality — and, yes, when a powerful, petty politician asks people to believe nonsense, to profane their values, and to take dramatic, devastating action on his behalf. All this has happened so visibly — and much of it routinely — that we have grown numb to it. Much as we wish to think otherwise, it has become our culture. At this point, anyone who isn’t despairing over the sorry state of leadership doesn’t really understand what’s going on.

To people like me who grew up in gentler if not kinder times, these lapses and offenses don’t just smell. They reek of indifference, distrust, and zealous overcontrol. For as bad as they are, their sheer number and grievous nature combine like street drugs to aggravate the cynicism pervasive across society today. That is no small problem. Cynicism is so prevalent it seems almost benign, as if it were the mature sobriety of seen-it-all experience. Yet it casts a foul odor over the possibility of constructive change. Downwind from the smokestack of cynicism, few people expect a better tomorrow anymore. Few believe in its promise. People lose hope. Because they expect to see the worst, they actually do see the worst, or they imagine it as the worst and explain it away as inevitable. Thus do we sow the seeds of our own despair.

So they withdraw. They cleave to people like themselves and to views like their own: the cable news that tells them what they already believe, friends with whom they already agree, and even their own far corners of social media to brief them on what they already “know.” Everyone is in their bubble. In some places they buy into absurd QAnon and 8kun conspiracy theories, and they join calls to shun vaccines and to overturn a free and fair election.

Leaders respond rationally but desperately. In politics, too many leaders rely on the artifice of gerrymandering, on media echo chambers, on quiet quid pro quos, on bundling campaign donations, on absurd accusations, on crude partisan intimidation, on knee-jerk filibusters, and on favors for friends, and they choose division over addition. In business, they fall back on repeated restructurings, dense take-it-or-leave-it terms and conditions, the hammerlock of unnecessary noncompete agreements, ambush pricing, and the amorality of rootless consultants, and when they run out of options for growth they throw up their hands and sell the company — if necessary, to a competitor. On cable television, they scream and yell. Across society people let old tropes, identity, stereotypes, denial, and bias substitute for facts and reasoning, and they commonly put their own short-term gratification over the legitimate long-term interests of society. Even in religion you see it; some have gone so far as to weaponize scripture for their own cultural revolution and to find Satan lurking behind the curtain of commonsense policy initiatives. Everywhere, the badge of cynicism is virulent. It leaves us all fighting among ourselves rather than working together. It’s enough to paralyze democracy, even to defeat democracy. If we ignore it, we may have an existential crisis on our hands.

Lionhearted spirits will say this harsh critique is hyperbole. They will argue that for every fallen leader, hundreds of other good leaders are laboring away unnoticed. No question, some are; and many of them ask for neither fame nor appreciation. We all should doff our hats in their honor. But the need for honorable and effective leadership is so great, and its execution often so faint and feeble, that constructive change all but grinds to a halt while despair and cynicism grow deeper. Patterns of disappointment are so profound and so pervasive, and they occur at such a high level of presumptive moral authority — priests, police, presidents, parents — that it’s no stretch to call their leadership broken and failing. It is up to all of us — you, me, our neighbors and colleagues and buddies and, most of all, our kids — to change it. We must not let despair and cynicism win, for if they do, all of us lose.

A big part of the problem is confusion over the very meaning of leadership and its implications for day-to-day activities that give life to its promise. Akin to that is an airy disregard for the huge moral wake of any single leader, almost always someone in a position of legal and official authority. For too many in such positions, cultural change is an Achilles’ heel. They shrink from the difficult and demanding work of actually leading people and changing things for the better, mainly because they don’t want to change themselves. Another part of the problem is a naïve approach to communication, as if it were merely a matter of composure behind a lectern or a tidy PowerPoint slide deck or a rah-rah motivational talk to the troops — rather than the energy of leadership, the solar power that captivates attention and compels people to think, ignites their concern, and clears a path forward. Yet another part is machismo and arrogance, to the neglect of emotional maturity and temperament. Then there is the inattention to the vital matters of trust, service, decency, and community. It’s a long, long list.

Real leadership isn’t easy or simple in the best of circumstances, and it is a tall order in times of despair or chaos. We have been accepting pale imitations of leadership for so long we don’t recognize the real thing when it comes along and kisses us good morning. Today, in an atmosphere of cynicism and scornful derision toward public enterprise of almost every kind, after so many prominent figures have so brazenly squandered their moral authority, and without even a broadly accepted factual reality, it is extraordinarily difficult. But our tomorrows depend on it, and therefore we depend on it. Somehow, we must rise to the challenge.

Meeting such a big challenge will require vigorous, sustained leadership of its own. But the severity of the problem need not paralyze us. Turning it around certainly is a challenge, but real leaders are up to it, as long as we have some guideposts and guardrails to keep us moving in the right direction.

Providing those guideposts and guardrails is one cornerstone of this book. Challenging wrongheaded but conventional notions of leadership is another. Offering practical suggestions that translate theory to practice is yet another. My hope is that anyone reading these pages and thinking about their message can immediately become a better leader.

*** * ***

What do the pages of this book hold for you? I have organized this book in three parts, each of which has three chapters. Each of the nine chapters concludes with a section titled Praxis, a short but uncommon word for moving from theory to actuality, in which we list specific things you can do — questions you can ask, actions you can take, choices you can make — to understand leadership more clearly, to think about it more rigorously, and ultimately to lead more productively in the twenty-first century. Here’s a little roadmap.

Part I is titled “Rethinking Leadership.” These first three chapters tackle conventional assumptions and thinking on leadership and establish a foundation for taking a different and better approach.

In chapter 1, “Leadership Good and Bad,” we will survey the landscape of leadership, define our terms, and explain what good leadership is and why it is so important. I’m afraid this chapter, despite its title, must paint a bleak picture of contemporary leadership. That is unfortunate but inescapable, simply because so many of our leaders have been disappointing us for so long. I write these words in the wake of the alarming January Sixth Insurrection at the United States Capitol, which represented an abject failure of leadership to a degree that I have never before witnessed, and which appears to be a harbinger of things to come. But so many other failures preceded it that people are all but inured to poor leadership. Thousands of authority figures have revealed themselves to be morally obtuse or even soulless.

There’s a reason for the pall of cynicism over society, and it’s long past time that we demand and impose a higher standard for leaders everywhere. I am not asking for perfection — leaders, like the rest of us, are imperfectible — but we have every right to expect leaders to care about all of us, not just themselves and their partisans, to offer the best of themselves consistently, not just on their good days but every day, and proudly to turn away from the temptations of unmitigated greed and gross moral turpitude. We should constantly ask: Is that the best you can do? Is this the most you can care? Do you really give a damn?

Chapter 2, “Moving from Position to Purpose,” explores five empirical perspectives, or lenses, on leadership, which coincide with five pedestals for offering leadership or asserting influence over people — as a position at the top of an organizational chart, as the exercise of any number of kinds of power, as the presence of appealing personal traits and attributes, as the leverage of an informal role or incidental prominence, and especially and most importantly as the purposeful pursuit and advocacy of change. All five lenses are valid and common. Think of them as ways of understanding the subject. I ask that you lean more heavily on the last of them, real leadership as the purposeful pursuit and advocacy of change, whether it’s a cultural transformation in a corporation or a social renaissance throughout society, or anything in between. That’s the work of leading people through change.

In chapter 3, “Troglodytes and Philosophers in the Corner Office,” we trace the history and evolution of leadership, in both philosophical and practical terms. Here we will look at how leadership and governance continue to evolve, conceptually and practically. You will meet four archetypes of leadership that have all held different orientations for leaders and different expectations for followers. We will also travel back in time to find the ancient origins of important concepts at the beating heart of leadership. My intent here is to show that the principles of good leadership are nothing new — some of them date back three thousand years — and that whole leadership is a sustainable ethic, not another passing fancy or fad.

Part II is labeled “The Soul of Leadership.” These three chapters explore the challenges of balancing the interests of multiple stakeholders, building trust, and building engagement for organizational and cultural change. All of it hinges on finding the fundamental purpose and ethos of your leadership, and all of it works through a rich, meaningful culture.

Chapter 4, “The Geography of Leadership,” unpacks the similarities and differences between managing and leading, both in terms of the work they require and the communication that drives them. Properly understanding these complementary concepts is a prerequisite to bringing about cultural change. There’s a great deal of misunderstanding about management and leadership, and it proves self-limiting. This chapter serves as well as an inquiry into the stakeholders of organizations, especially corporations. We will also examine and dispel a number of oft-quoted myths and misunderstandings about leadership, especially a few hoary aphorisms that have acquired the grand status of cliché. Further in this chapter we dissect the differences in communication for managing and for leading in terms of their values, intent, substance, style, and tone. That’s important, because if you use the wrong one you’ll get the wrong result or not much of any result. It alone goes a long way toward explaining why the vast majority of corporate change initiatives are all but dead-on-arrival.

In chapter 5, “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” we analyze the challenge of being trustworthy in an era of cynicism. It relies on a proprietary model we call the Trust Tulip, a sort of Venn diagram with four variables that together account for interpersonal trust: character, competence, affinity, and presence. I call it the Trust Tulip because the diagram relies on ovals, which, when arrayed as a Venn diagram, look like the petals of a tulip.

Chapter 6, “The Connection Is Everything,” looks at the principles of clear, credible, coherent, cogent communication for leadership. We’ll examine some of the common problems in communication for both macro- and micro-leadership. We’ll tell you about the metamessage, which alone accounts for a great deal of miscommunication, and show you how to manage it. We will offer an eight-step approach to listening more fully and deeply as well.

Part III has the label “Whole Leadership.” These final three chapters show you how to become a better leader, capable of inspiring a new generation of leaders who can follow in your footsteps. The keys are emotional maturity and soulful service. We close it, and the book, with a discussion of the gestalt of leadership.

Chapter 7, “The Whole Leader,” is perhaps the most challenging part of this book for many readers, as it explores commonplace notions of charisma and dissects little-discussed aspects of emotional maturity (similar in some respects to Daniel Goleman’s concept of emotional intelligence but differing in both structure and composition). Emotional maturity includes big issues relating to community, dignity, vulnerability, empathy, and much more. My hope is that you will reflect deeply on each component and ask some tough-love questions of yourself on the intent and the reality of your presence as a leader. I suggest doing so with a private journal, in any of a zillion smartphone apps designed for this purpose (my preference is Day One) or a nice leather-bound journal, which you can pick up for twenty-five bucks at most booksellers. I personally use both.

Developing the material for this chapter posed a challenge of its own for me. I danced around the subject for years before finally creating a supplementary day-long workshop to explore its components in depth. (This day follows two other full days of the master class devoted to leadership and communication, so I was increasing the time commitment and the price tag by fifty percent each.) I was reluctant to “go there” because of the emotional and introspective nature of the subject. Some colleagues advised against it, on the grounds that business is all about nitty-gritty numbers. As I subsequently came to appreciate, however, those numbers follow the work of people. Business is actually all about people. Thus we need to keep the spotlight on people.

What finally nudged me in the right direction was the strongly favorable reaction of engineers and other STEM-trained managers (mostly male, and at that time mostly in manufacturing) in our two-day master class to a single PowerPoint slide with just four or five words as prompts. As I recall the words were dignity, empathy, vulnerability, authenticity, and perhaps self-awareness. What surprised me so was that people always wanted to talk and talk about that one simple slide. They would talk deeply and candidly, too. They would talk for forty-five, even sixty minutes about just those four or five words — and these were introverted engineers!

I finally decided that, as much as we all have to make our monthly nut, keeping our sanity and finding our heart have something to be said for them as well. Unless and until we explore the real nature of working in community — and especially the emotional dimensions of leadership, which is after all an emotional connection — we will be a frustrated lot. We can pay a severe price in terms of pathologies like hypertension, anxiety, isolation, pent-up hostility, and worse, and it can manifest itself in various unhealthful forms of exit. In the workplace they include abrupt resignations, unnecessary turnover and retraining, ridicule, marginalization, and tragically even violence. Away from work it can show up as a sickening brew of high blood pressure, addictions, depression, road rage, alienation, ostracism, domestic abuse, anger, divorce, and even suicide. We owe it to ourselves, our families, and our communities to do better. Indeed we must.

In chapter 8, we turn our attention to the ill-named subject of servant leadership. If anything can fairly be termed the magic sauce of great leadership, this is it. The name is problematic though. I prefer to call it stewardship, or serving leadership, or service leadership, or Fifth Degree Leadership — anything to get away from the image of a dour British butler like Anthony Hopkins as Stevens in Remains of the Day.

Stewardship has a glorious pedigree at the roots of all seven of the great religions of the world. But, not unlike Stoicism, it fell into the dustbin of history over the millennia. The late Robert K. Greenleaf, an AT&T engineer in the 1950s, rescued servant leadership in his retirement years, and a handful of forward-thinking organizations that value leadership (perhaps counterintuitively, even including the United States Marine Corps) took notice. Companies that have adopted a culture of stewardship commonly have workforces at the highest level of engagement, and you regularly see their trademarks on the cover of magazines that publish lists of best employers or best places to work. We will explain what it’s all about, and we will do some advocating for change ourselves. (Happily, we note that Stoicism is also enjoying a revival. It even has its own Facebook group with 50,000 followers.)

Finally, in chapter 9, “The Gestalt of Leadership,” we bring everything together to paint a portrait of good leadership. My aim here is to show you that, contrary to the habits of an analytical mind, we should synthesize what we know about leadership, what we know about communication, what we know about emotional maturity, and what we know about stewardship to create whole leaders who are more than the sum of their parts.

*** * ***

One last preliminary note. As you read the pages of this book, you will notice I use certain modifiers to describe idealized visions of leadership. For ease of reference:

Real leadership refers to leadership as the purposeful pursuit of change. It is the fifth and last of the five empirical perspectives, or lenses, on leadership that we introduce in chapter 2. We call it “real leadership” not because the other four lenses are unreal but because people commonly use that phrase as shorthand for the active, responsible work that successful leaders do — particularly in its absence.

A true leader is anyone, regardless of position or rank, who knows, appreciates, embraces, and carries out the hard work of leading people. True leaders are also ground leaders, who may or may not be official or titular leaders.

Large leadership refers to leadership that undertakes especially tall challenges involving vast numbers of people. Its distinguishing feature is its outsize ambition and scope.

Whole leadership refers to real leadership that embodies purposeful change, mutual trust, noble communication, emotional maturity, and stewardship in significant measure. It brings together leader and led and finds a soulful connection between them, and it moves people to principled and inspired choices and behavior.

I rarely use the term thought leadership, in part because it strikes me as stale and in part because all active leadership involves leading people to think differently. If it matters to you, a good thought leader would find resonance with all four of the terms we just defined.

Ready? Let’s turn the page and get started. Enjoy!

Chapter 1

Leadership Good and Bad

What It Is and Why It Matters

For all our differences, people everywhere still have a few things in common. Regardless of our age, our religion, or our native land, almost everyone enjoys an evening around a fireplace or campfire, a good story well told, and a hearty laugh with friends. We feel moved by music that recalls our youth, our heartland, or the home fires of family and romance. And no matter who we are, or where we are, or what we believe, we generally want to come together to work and play with other people. We always have, and we always will.

When we do find ourselves in community — it can be a business or a church, a political campaign or a football team, an orchestra or an infantry, an agency of government, a neighborhood or a condominium association, a service or advocacy organization, or a fledgling public cause of some sort — we prefer to be with like-minded people who share our values and concerns, perhaps even our background and education. If things are fine as they are, most of us just want to stay on course. But when change is in the air, or when something threatens our security and well-being, or when our common interests and values begin to fade, or when a stifling pallor of uncertainty and fear settles over us, we look to leaders who can give us direction and meaning, who can remind us of who we uniquely are and what we believe, who can energize us and hold us together, and who can bring out the best in us. We want leaders whom we can trust and believe in.

That’s a lot to ask, we are learning. In both politics and business and in every other walk of life, good leaders come along all too infrequently, and their cheap substitutes disappoint all too frequently. Ordinary folks commonly use the phrases “a leadership crisis” or “a leadership vacuum” to describe it, and they often express a plaintive appeal for “some real leaders” to come along and rescue them. Even as we pine for good leadership, and even as we pride ourselves on a heritage of noble leadership in years past, the sobering reality is that we see so little of it today that we have largely lost sight of its value and potential.

All around us, it seems, so many of the individuals to whom we look for wisdom, morality, courage, and guidance turn out to be profoundly in need of it themselves, or so capricious and self-indulgent that they are useless as role models, or so self-satisfied with their own success they are oblivious to everyone else, or just stuck in the muck of stale, insipid notions of leadership that serve no one well. The ancients called it caecus caeco dux — the blind leading the blind.

You know you have a serious problem when elections fall into question for no reason, when cops and coaches and clergy commit heinous crimes with seeming impunity, when madmen shoot up schools and theaters and workplaces, when people believe anything they want without evidence, when the peaceful transfer of power in the world’s oldest democracy is suddenly rocked with violence and its outcome uncertain, when civic responsibility looks to some like an assault on freedom, when people call themselves patriotic while waving flags of old mortal enemies, when so many people routinely expect the worst of everyone else, and when moral and intellectual authority loses its standing altogether. None of this is normal. None of it is customary. All of it together is a mess. It is chaos. It is the flotsam that weak leadership leaves in its wake.

These smoldering embers of leadership absolutely deserve our time, attention, and response. We must stoke up their flickering flames, lest we find ourselves unable to shape our own destiny. Among the important conversations we need to have is a conversation about leadership itself: What have we come to expect of it? What should we expect of it? What can we reasonably ask of it? What norms should we demand that it respect? How can we challenge it to be more, do more, offer more? And their other side: What does real leadership demand of us, as leaders? These questions are relevant for all of us and especially for the positional leaders of our great institutions — presidents, chief executives, board chairs, and directors. We all need to question and rethink some of our basic assumptions about leadership.

* * *

Leaders who embrace such a large, enlightened view of their work will find their leadership to be much more effective and satisfying, and its happy results to be much more sustainable. In short, as leaders we must ask more, much more, of ourselves, and we must ask much more of the people whom we lead. If we fail to do that, we are not leaders but unleaders.

We should challenge and rethink another basic aspect of leadership as well. Leaders, especially those operating from a high-level position in an organization, often feel as though leadership is mainly a projection or application of their own vision, their own values, their own priorities. It is that, of course, but that isn’t the entire picture. Something else is of critical importance: the relational context in which leader and led find each other and begin working together in common cause.

Leadership actually comes into being “in the between” — in other words, between the leader and the led — as a kind of mutual-aid agreement, which is always mitigated by their social and cultural environment. Like an exothermic chemical reaction, its extraordinary power is a product of three elements. They are, first, the leader’s direction (a vision, or agenda, or priority, or concern); second, the follower’s receptivity (values, needs, will, and meaning); and, third, both of them together in a conducive time, place, and culture.

The context alone can be determinative; what works in peacetime doesn’t necessarily work in war, what works in America doesn’t necessarily work in Asia, and what works in a Silicon Valley startup may or may not work in a prideful, unionized, century-old widget maker. But in no context do leaders lead all by themselves, any more than followers follow all by themselves. Rather, they both rely on each other, in the here and now. More than anything, leadership is a connection, a coupling, within the context of particular circumstances. The ice-cold reality is that the leader needs followers more than any follower needs a leader. If anything deserves to be labeled by that ungainly word synergy, it’s the relationship between leaders and the led. Only self-congratulatory and seriously delusional leaders give themselves all the credit.

* * *

But wait. Reasonable people can reasonably ask whether anything has really changed. Haven’t we always had malicious or foolish leaders? Is dysfunctional leadership truly anything new? Paradoxically, the answer to both questions is yes. We have indeed always had poor leaders. But lately we have lowered the bar quite a bit further. The consequences are not pretty.

To acknowledge the obvious: Evil has always been with us, and awful leadership has always been around the next bend. It shows up as deceit, recklessness, greed, ignorance, hatred, paranoia, manipulation, zealous overcontrol, and worse. It has led to many of the worst experiences in human history: war, famine, dislocation, enslavement, slaughter, and misery.

Nonetheless, over the course of centuries, the world was slowly moving from worse to better. In his myth-busting 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker crunched the numbers to demonstrate that people were materially much better off than ever before, over the eons of human life. {Endnote: Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Viking, 2011), pp. ____.} It is easy to forget that for most people throughout most of human history, life was, as Thomas Hobbes put it, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Only a generation ago, civilization stood fairly united in a remarkably halcyon time. Technology was beginning to bestow its gifts on the world. Apartheid had ended. China was rapidly becoming modern. The Troubles in Northern Ireland were drawing to a close. The Cold War was over, and the Berlin Wall lay in broken, scattered bricks. Democracy was triumphant; the noted political economist Francis Fukuyama, now at Stanford University, went so far as to declare “the end of history” as liberal democracy stood in blessed victory. We were even making some progress on such gnawing, stubborn problems as pollution, inflation, nuclear arms, and civil rights; and, in the United States, we actually balanced the budget for three years straight. To be sure, our overall progress was inconsistent and incomplete, and the world was still far from perfect, but things were a whole lot better than they had been since time immemorial. Even our wrenching ordeals had something of a salubrious aftertaste: from the horror of holocausts to the latest partisan power grab, at least we witnessed broad outrage and revulsion. Now even that seems a forlorn hope.

What happened? Over the last few decades we have seriously weakened the norms and grievously debased the standards of our leadership. Almost everywhere you look, you see both a reluctance to lead for the greater good and an extraordinary incompetence in leadership. The evidence is in the mess all around us. Today, largely because of poor or absentee leadership, we have chaos where we once had temperance, regression where we once had progress, and toxic intolerance where we once had civil amicability.

* * *

As we have seen, the twenty-first century poses particularly serious challenges for leadership writ large, but thankfully it also offers a fountain of hope. The challenges arise from the erosion of institutional memory and cultural norms, as matters that were long taken for granted are suddenly again up for grabs. They stem from the profusion of irresponsible voices in the arena of public opinion, eager to dispute obvious facts and straightforward reasoning. They flow from technology that poses unseen threats by hackers half a world away who can tamper with the vast networks of computers and data that hold us together but whose vulnerability most of us have scarcely thought about. Most especially, the challenges arise from the slow decline of democracy around the world and even some early signs of its decline in liberal, rule-based Western societies. If it dies, there will be no need for leaders. We may be closer to that fate than many of us realize.

Ever the optimist, I nevertheless find hope in this dreary landscape. More people are educated than ever before. For broad swaths of people, diversity and inclusion have become important watchwords. The very technology that renders us vulnerable also enables almost anyone to communicate almost instantly with almost everyone. At the press of a button, we can share noble ideas and inspiring memes. Finally, we can find hope in the fact that venerable bases and blocs of institutional power are yielding to small upstarts and individual initiative. In The End of Power, a fascinating examination of the erosion of centralized authority in a broad array of fields, Moisés Naím cites examples in government, finance, the military, education, business, religion, philanthropy, labor unions, and even competitive chess to document his thesis that power and prestige just aren’t what they used to be. Those granite-block obstacles to change are beginning to crack. {Endnote: Moisés Naím, The End of Power, pp. ____.}

Civilization has always needed leadership, even if the word itself didn’t come into common usage until the nineteenth century. (The verb to lead is older, dating back to the 900s. The noun leader came along in the 1400s, and the noun leadership finally arrived in the early 1800s.) For thousands of years, what we think of as leadership consisted of a parley of tribal elders, the courage of a swordsman at the head of a cavalry, a divinely ordained nobleman, or the sway of mystics, oracles, shamans, prophets, and sages. Leadership was mainly the exercise of power — tangible or spiritual, real or perceived, as promises or threats — as well as the imprint of social meaning and tribal identity, an organizing force for conquering new territory or defending a homeland, and an arbiter of justice. Someone had to be in charge, lest the tribe disintegrate into internecine factions. As long as twenty or thirty centuries ago, scholars were noting, prizing, and thinking critically about rulers and governance. All these many years later, we still are. We still recognize the importance of good leadership. We still prize it. We still celebrate it.

Leadership is important for fundamental reasons. It knits us together. We feel closer to one another. We are blessed with new meaning and new purpose for our lives. A good leader offers us an identity and a big reason for being in this time and place. More to the point, good leadership seizes opportunities and challenges that we can use together to better our lot. As a happy result, honorable and effective leadership bequeaths to us more security, more freedom, more wealth, more community, more meaning. Finally, together with dedicated followers, it can bend the arc of history. It ushers in a new and better tomorrow.

To appreciate that, just think of some of the glorious examples of successful leadership. History, literature, and cinema offer examples aplenty. The story of England’s Henry V at Agincourt, drawn from all three, is classic if shopworn, but it’s as good as any to illustrate. We don’t know Henry’s actual words on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, but we do know the history of the historic battle, and we have Shakespeare’s eponymous drama to capture the scene and put rather Shakespearean words on Henry’s lips. You can still view Kenneth Branagh’s magnificent 1989 movie of the same name. If you haven’t already seen it, you should make a point of doing so.

As a matter of historical fact, the Hundred Years’ War made for a long, bloody century. King Henry (portrayed by Branagh on stage and in the film) and his troops were cornered in the north of France in October 1415 en route back to the English Channel and home. They were outnumbered and outmatched by the Franks. They had no realistic hope for survival. It fell on Henry to summon their will, lest they all perish the next day, on the Feast of St. Crispin’s, which had been celebrated throughout Christendom for a millennium. Shakespeare gave Henry a rare gift of eloquence:

                        We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
                        For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
                        Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
                        This day shall gentle his condition;
                        And gentlemen in England now a-bed
                        Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
                        And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
                        That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Read the first words again: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for he to-day that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.” In those brief words, Henry weaves together and draws tight the bond of brotherhood. That bond, that shared identity, was worth more than all the men and all their weaponry on the other side.

Had the English lost the St. Crispin’s Day battle at Agincourt, we would scarcely remember it, and we would have no reason even to wonder about Henry’s leadership the night before. We might even have forgotten Henry V himself. But the English miraculously won, thanks to Henry and his band of brothers, and six hundred years later we still remember.

* * *

People go round and round on the question of who is and who isn’t a leader. The question has both objective and subjective answers, which may or may not mesh for any one person. That alone can explain why people go round and round over it.

Objectively speaking, the answer depends on which “lens” you are using to view leadership — we’ll explain this concept and explore all five lenses in the next chapter — and on the criteria, or threshold, for that particular lens. (Criteria are essential. Without criteria, a judgment is nothing more than just another dime-a-dozen opinion, worth even less than you paid for it.) Although there’s no consensus on those criteria, and therefore some subjectivity can creep in, standard dictionaries have something to say about it, too. This much is clear: It’s less a matter of someone’s manner or style than it is of the influence and inspiration she casts over others. Kind and gentle have little to do with it, though of course we all like a mensch. The truth is that there are plenty of bossy, autocratic leaders out there, and there are plenty of collaborative, consensual “bosses” as well. (We’ll dive deeper into this in chapter 4.) Indeed, in some circumstances — the Titanic is sinking, and people need to get into lifeboats — bossy and autocratic can be exactly what’s needed in the moment.

Subjectively speaking, it depends entirely on you, the beholder. You get to choose. Elon Musk? Greta Thunberg? Liz Cheney? Amal Clooney? It’s your choice.

For beholders, the focus on a leader becomes abstract and academic. Reaching for a frame of reference, they think instead of their leader. Their leader is the one who represents their interests, needs, and concerns; who shares their identity and culture; who talks and acts like them, and who wants what they want. Folks who proudly wear MAGA hats have long viewed Donald Trump as their leader, for example, while others have cringed at the thought. Historically evil men like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao had plenty of dedicated followers who viewed them as their leaders. In subjective terms, the answer revolves around whether and to what degree a putative leader speaks not merely to but for certain cohorts of people — that is, the extent to which he represents their concerns, beliefs, priorities, and values. Perhaps owing to millennia of tribal heritage, people naturally ask: Is he “one of us”? The turnstile to that question is especially real in cases of socioeconomic grievance, as it was in Weimar Germany and a number of pre-revolutionary societies (think czarist Russia and dynastic China) and is now evident in visible and audible racial tension and nationalist politics as North America and Europe grow evermore diverse.

Along the same lines, people go round and round over the question of good leadership. After accepting the fact that Caesar and Napoleon were leaders period, they ask whether they were good leaders. Here again, it’s important to define your words and specify your criteria before rendering a judgment, lest you simply turn up the volume without clarifying your own reasoning or convincing anyone else of your point of view.

Now, before going any further, it’s important to talk about that eight-hundred-pound gorilla over there. I realize you may think I am leading you down the proverbial primrose path to my own politics, so a few words of candor are in order. As a private citizen like everyone else, I naturally have my own preferences for certain policies and principles in public governance and in the marketplace, but I am not here to proselytize, especially on domestic partisan politics. I’ll leave that to politicians with perfect coiffures. As an observer and critic of leadership, however, I do speak out and advocate for minimally acceptable standards that apply across the board, in public governance and in business enterprise, on the left and the right, in America and abroad, and in every field of endeavor.

These standards consist of the guardrails and guideposts I mentioned in the Introduction: simple respect for people; an ethical compass and a sense of common decency; straightforward honesty and the recognition of empirical reality; thoughtful preparation and policy; a large embrace of community and a commitment to bringing people together in a transcendent common cause; the affirmation of people regardless of irrelevant criteria; emotional stability and maturity; the wisdom and humility of one’s years; continuous learning and growth; the recognition of duty and obligation; reasoned and rational advocacy; service to others before oneself; appealing to “the better angels of our nature,” as Lincoln put it; and clear, credible, coherent, and cogent communication. None of this should be too much to ask. As basic as this threshold is, and as familiar to us all as it once was, it seems to be out of reach for too many leaders today, and far too few people seem to care or even to notice.

To my thinking, good leadership is minimally a two-horse carriage: what a leader proposes to do and how the leader proposes to do it. Thus it strives to be both honorable and effective, both noble and competent. It is a matter of purpose and process, of priorities and energy, of philosophy and technique. It’s a classic twofer, and either alone is never enough. Leadership that is honorable but ineffective, or noble but incompetent, is a nice try. Leadership that is effective and competent but dishonorable or ignoble is a joyride to nowhere. People want and need both honorable and effective leaders, both noble and competent leadership. Because appraising the what of good leadership depends so much on someone’s personal views and values, and the how of good leadership on a sophisticated understanding of the art of leadership, two reasonable persons can reasonably disagree as to whether any particular leader is good.

If you ask me, leadership is honorable and noble (the what) when it rests on both empirical and moral truth, when it holds itself accountable rather than blaming others or whining like a victim, when it functions within the norms and expectations of a particular culture, when its results are widely seen as decent and propitious to the well-being of large numbers of people — not just to the leader’s own reputation, comfort, or wealth — and when its results contribute to a society in which most people want to live. Leadership is effective and competent (the how) when it reaches out to people, finds their values and concerns, touches their heart, unites them in a common cause, and then enrolls and guides them through a large challenge to a productive and satisfactory result. Some aspects of good leadership, such as the affirmation of people and their cohesion in a constructive common mission, live in both houses. In other words, leadership is honorable and effective, or noble and competent, which is to say good, when its touchstones are real, its soul is intact, and people are better off because of it.

Good leadership has an ugly swan of a cousin: strong leadership. I say “ugly swan” because it’s something that could be beautiful and admirable but commonly isn’t. People frequently say they want strong leadership when — I hope, anyway — what they really want is good and steadfast leadership. The trouble is that, here again, its meaning is unclear. At one extreme, you could think of strong leadership as far-sighted initiative, undaunted perseverance, and stoic self-control in the face of adversity. At the other extreme, you could conjure up a banana-republic tyrant — a “strongman” — in a military uniform and medallion-bedecked saffron sash, clenching his fists as he berates someone before dispatching him to the firing squad. The phrase one person speaks isn’t necessarily the phrase that someone else hears.

My own take is that strong leadership should never be confused with the arrogance of command or with brutish aggressiveness. Rather, we should think of strong leadership — and of the real strength required of true leadership — as the courage of conviction, as the will to persevere, as the ability to control one’s instincts, as the capacity for deep self-reflection, and as the recognition of the importance of emotional intelligence. Here are a couple of simple litmus tests: If you are raising your voice to overwhelm other voices, you are not a strong leader but probably just another loudmouth. The same is true if you are ambushing someone else’s posts on Facebook and other social media; in that event, you are probably just another cynical troll. And if you are ridiculing someone who isn’t as smart or talented as yourself, you are probably just small. Remember, to belittle is to be little.

In his unlikely best-selling book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a modern classic, Robert M. Pirsig wrestled with the definition and description of something he called Quality — his caps, not mine — and reached the conclusion that we can know it by its absence. When something is no better than its complete absence, it isn’t a thing of quality, value, beauty, or utility. Apply that test to leadership, and its optimal value is instantly clear. We know leadership optimally to be of value because, when it is absent or even just poor, we’re left with a mess on our hands. We’re in a state of chaos. That’s where we find ourselves today. {Endnote: Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (William Morrow, 1974), pp. 215-219.}

For something of such value, you might expect a robust consensus on what leadership is and how it works, but that is not the case. There are literally hundreds of definitions of leadership — most of them silly, reductive, or useless — along with widespread misunderstanding of it, which we will straighten out in chapters 2 and 4. For now, just appreciate a few core truths: First, real leadership is never inert or infirm, but what may appear to be strong leadership is often only weak leadership in disguise, flailing its arms and gasping for breath — something “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” as Macbeth put it. Second, trustworthy leadership minimally requires integrity, competence, affinity, and presence. Third, communication is both the energy of leadership and the face and expression of leadership, and thus, for all intents and purposes, the quality of a leader’s communication is the quality of her leadership, at least as it is perceived by people receptive to its message.

That raises two other questions: What exactly does communication for leadership look like? And what exactly does good communication for leadership do?

The communication certainly may involve oratory, but speechifying is only a small part of it. Nor is it just a knack for clever phrasing, or cool sangfroid in the glare of television cameras, or a dazzling PowerPoint slide deck, or a fulgent smile, or a politician’s gladhanding along a rope line. All that is icing on the cake. The meat and potatoes of communication for leadership involves much, much more. At a minimum it must listen to people and feel what they feel; it must convey clear, credible, coherent, and cogent messages, and it must take responsibility for the interpretation and application of those messages. And, as we shall see, because it begins and ends in community, its success requires a colloquy of some sort, a discursive conversation with multiple voices at the table. It speaks not just to but with and for the people it leads.

Indeed, like leadership itself, it reaches out to people, touches them, and brings them into the fold. Optimally, it works like the philosopher’s stone of medieval alchemy, inasmuch as it creates belief out of doubt, confidence out of despair, energy out of inertia, unity out of disunity, direction out of confusion, enthusiasm out of indifference, coherence out of chaos, perseverance out of vacillation — in short, more out of less. In contrast, so-called leaders who rely on shouting, lies, intimidation, insults, grievance, threats and the like have the opposite effect. They are not leaders but unleaders, and their minions and trolls on social media are not conscientious followers but mere marionettes.

* * *

The ultimate test of leadership is in the hands of history: Do people sense that things changed, and did they change for the better? That’s simple enough, but time is a fickle juror. It tends to minimize, in the mind’s eye, just how much has actually changed. Time bends the spectrum of right and wrong, too. The years dilute passion, just as they broaden perspective. Concerns of the moment come and go. Selective memories recall this but not that. A leader who appears dark and dismal in his own time may appear bold and enlightened in the eyes of a decade or a century hence, and vice versa.

As a teenager, for example, I scorned U.S. President Lyndon Johnson’s ever-deepening commitment to the Vietnam War, and I cheered when he withdrew from the 1968 presidential campaign. Decades later, I have a more beneficent and amicable view of Johnson, whom I see today on balance as basically a decent and effective leader whose legacy was eventually handicapped by a stallion’s blinkers of pride, groupthink, convention, and obstinacy. The converse has occurred with regard to slave-owning founders of the United States, whose names, reputations, and likenesses were fixtures of the American narrative and landscape but now are fading before our eyes.

We have no time machine — we cannot look back on ourselves from the vantage point of generations to come — but we can acknowledge the obvious: Without honorable and effective leadership up, down, and across society, especially in government and in business at all levels, we are stuck. It can feel as though we are bound at the wrists and shackled at the ankles, unable to grow, unable to move. Constructive change is beyond our fingertips.

How long has it been since Americans, to take the nearest example, last enthusiastically embraced a large, broadscale cause? It seems like forever. Today even an easy rallying cry like overcoming a common enemy, a deadly pathogen, by simply masking, distancing, and vaccinating instead became a cleaver drawn down the middle of the body politic, slicing us apart rather than pulling us together. Or take an earnest and heartfelt plea for dignity and decency — that Black Lives Matter, too — which is deemed so offensive to aggrieved but privileged people that they brandish semi-automatic weapons in hopes of intimidating protesters. And such a routine matter as counting ballots in an election somehow falls into a noisy dispute because, and only because, one of the candidates irrationally refuses to accept reality and then all but demands an insurrection. Within an hour, the mob would build a gallows and chant calls for the arrest and summary execution of the vice president of the United States — this, in 2021! These are the depths to which a great democracy can quickly sink in the absence of honorable and effective leadership.

We must not forget that shameful day or, for that matter, a whole litany of failures of leadership over the course of decades, lest we run the risk of sacrificing everything we have and value to Nero’s fiddle. The first steps on the road to wisdom are the steps we take toward seeing reality, not as our cultural pride and political mythology would have it — cue the pastoral sunrise with a Dodge pickup, bales of straw, and Sam Elliott’s earthy baritone — but rather as it is, with its blemishes and abuse and dysfunction, all of a piece. The alternative is to condone and perpetuate the mistakes we have been making, in which case we will be unable to muster the will to meet our challenges ahead, simply because we cannot recognize the need for good leadership when we see it.

The rare jewel of leadership both noble and competent stands in marvelous, inspiring contrast. Over the last few centuries some towering figures — Addams, von Bismarck, Bolívar, Catherine the Great, Churchill, Deng, Gandhi, Havel, Humboldt, Helen Keller, King, Lawrence of Arabia, Lincoln, Mandela, Nehru, Nightingale, Peron, Reagan, the Roosevelts, Salk, Shackleton, muckrakers like Sinclair and Tarbell, Mother Teresa, Thatcher, Queen Victoria, Walesa, Washington — stood apart from other, lesser leaders because they were seen as both basically decent and atypically talented. Of course, none was perfect or even close to it, and they all had vocal critics eager to call them out. But the ledger of their ultimate impact, in the judgment of large populations of people and of history, was generally or at least arguably in the affirmative. Additionally, as their number shows all too well, they were uncommon individuals in uncommon times. That’s why the world remembers their names.

We are not here just to sing their praises, however. They have had enough hosannas. Rather, I am hoping to ignite a prairie fire of leadership for legitimate public campaigns and causes and in organizations of all kinds — corporations, associations, agencies, banks, hospitals, startups, nonprofits, advocacy groups, clubs, teams, orchestras, museums, armies, even families — that together represent life in the twenty-first century. For in order to gather sufficient will to confront the serious challenges we face, we need more and better leaders who can draw us together and send us forth. That is true in politics and in business, in our civic life and our private life. It is true for celebrities and for the common person. It is true in America and abroad.

The work of leading certainly has its headaches. It minimally requires stepping out of our comfort zone, asserting our point of view, and risking rejection or failure, which not everyone is equipped or ready to do. It requires accepting more accountability — and, when things go wrong, more blame — for events that can be largely beyond our control. It requires more self-confidence and more self-discipline than many of us can muster, and it requires offering ourselves as a model for others. It doesn’t ask for perfection, but it does ask for our best. Indeed, when a supposed leader makes it look too easy, he’s likely operating only on a superficial level. Whole leadership involves exploration and change, outside and in, so it is inherently discomfiting for leader and the led alike.

It’s difficult, too. It requires strategically thinking things through two or three moves ahead, like a grandmaster in chess or a guru in game theory. It requires uncommon skills, uncommon intuition, uncommon judgment, uncommon initiative, and an uncommon work ethic. Frankly, it’s a lot easier to do something else or nothing at all. It’s easier still to assume competence in leadership that you actually lack and then not even bother to fill in the gaps, because you don’t know what you don’t know, and, more problematically, you don’t even know that you don’t know it. When I think of the worst leaders I have known or observed, they seem to have that in common: They don’t even realize that they know so little about real leadership, and they are exasperatingly incurious about it.

Successful leaders, those who bring about great change through and for people, and who change themselves in the process, somehow figured it out for themselves along the way. They have proven themselves up to the challenge. They have what the French call je ne sais quoi, the ineffable something that others lack. But make no mistake: They were not born with whatever it is. They may have stumbled onto a golden opportunity at a tender age, as I myself did. Perhaps they derived a few key insights from their own experience or observation. Perhaps they had an uncanny sixth sense, or perhaps they had the good fortune of a valued mentor or tutor — a parent or sibling, or a coach or teacher — someone who taught them something important about human relationships and social dynamics, about taking responsibility and seizing opportunity, and about the work that people can do when they come together with a compelling motivation and a clarity of purpose, the necessary resources and tools, and a path forward.

That’s a lot of uncertainty for such an important force in self-governing societies and growth-oriented businesses, along with any number of other spheres of life. All that uncertainty renders leadership — and the big changes that it can bring about — a roll of the dice. It becomes an accident of time and place, not the intentional result of learning for ourselves and investing in the growth and development of the next generation of potential leaders. So when times do call for change, we may or may not have a backbench of wise, capable leadership that we will need to meet a looming challenge. We certainly cannot be sure of it.

A few minutes at your computer can produce reams of survey data to show that, now more than ever in our shared experience, people have misgivings about the state of leadership and, more broadly, about withering social trust throughout society. They frequently use the word crisis to describe both. You’ll quickly learn that, in their judgment, too many leaders in business, government, and other aspects of life are not measuring up and are not trustworthy. The fundamental reason is plain: The leaders are seen as either (a) intent on doing harm or (b) oblivious to doing good, as perceived by ordinary people, or (c) they intend to do good but are unable to. Thus, people intuitively appreciate what we have already observed: that leadership is a matter of both intent and ability, that successful leadership must be both honorable and effective, both noble and competent. Altogether too much leadership is one but not the other — or it is neither, just plain awful.

Of course, anyone’s judgment on these matters is their own. What is honorable and effective to one person isn’t necessarily honorable and effective to another. That has rarely been truer than it is today, two decades and change into the twenty-first century. American society is riven by political extremes, by cultural schisms, and by generational, socioeconomic, and geopolitical divides. In politics alone, we seem not to have mere differences of opinion anymore, but a profound divergence in core values, fundamental beliefs, and rigor of thinking. Even our collective grip on truth seems weak, as conspiracy theories abound, conjecture masquerades as fact, and the denial of observable and verifiable reality invades the public square of our times: social media.

* * *

My indictment of so much casual understanding of leadership and of what passes for leadership today is not to suggest that anyone in charge of anything is an incompetent fool or a malevolent tyrant — even if, on a bad hair day, it can seem like it. The truth is that many leaders are quite capable and fair. A few are bold and imaginative. Others are good and decent women and men who are trying their best against long odds.

But their best, well-intended efforts face huge, unseen, and under-appreciated hurdles in the twenty-first century: stunted and self-limiting assumptions about leaders and followers; confusion over the real meaning and work of leadership (and management); a heedless neglect of noble purpose, cultural context, emotional maturity, selfless service, and soulful reflection; and, all too often, the absence of big thinking, big aspiration, and big ambition to start. Together, they render the work of leadership all but Sisyphean. It’s almost a surprise when it actually works.

It hasn’t always been that way. Americans who grew up with their own origin story need no reminder of the fact that, in the 1770s, many of our forebearers were extraordinary and exceptional leaders. They were all crowded together in a narrow strip of land, perhaps twelve hundred miles long and one hundred miles inland from the Atlantic coast, and far across an ocean from what they regarded as civilization: London and Paris and Amsterdam. Even today, two hundred fifty years later, we can easily rattle off their names, one of whom has a long-running Broadway musical in his honor, and many of whom have new biographies published in the last twenty or thirty years. They knew something about leadership that so many of our contemporary leaders — and I use the word advisedly — seem to have forgotten if they ever knew it. Our founders were all concerned with, and dedicated to, creating something bigger than themselves, something that would embody noble principles and stand the test of time, something that represented both structural and cultural change. Their debates were substantive and philosophical, not petty and partisan. Though woefully imperfect, theirs was leadership writ large, and we have enjoyed its fruits for more than two centuries. Think about that.

Today, in lieu of large or robust leadership, what we see all too often are attempts to leverage a position or power of some sort to get people to do something. (There’s that small, crude, and obnoxious definition again.) Their agenda is usually personal or proprietary, often even petty. The means are typically threatening, implicitly or explicitly, and they are often demeaning. People go along with it because they see no practical alternative. But they certainly don’t feel good about it. Far from vocally engaged, they are quietly disengaged. That is because true leadership is both affirming and affirmative, and if their experience is neither affirming nor affirmative, people will be inclined to check out — first emotionally, then cognitively, and finally physically.

We also see that few leaders are willing and able to create the cohesive culture of engagement necessary to take on great challenges. Many don’t even try, or they reach out only to people like themselves. (It’s so much easier for them to dismiss their opponents, those dunderheads, as unrealistic converts anyway.) Others just muddle through. In business, they too often fall back on the tasks of administration, on restructuring and retrenchment, on a single-minded focus on profit (aka shareholder value), on excessive controls over intellectual property, on lawyered policies and fine-print terms that take customers and other stakeholders for granted, and on me-first trick-or-treats of any sort. In politics and government, they resort to hyper-partisan tweets, to the addiction to gerrymandering, to goose-and-gander posturing, to the bundling of financial contributions, to parliamentary gambits, to intimidation of their own partisans, to grievance and grandstanding, and of course to the proverbial back room.

The frustration spills over. As a society, we are frayed at the edges. People have little to rally around, little to strive for together. For many of them, day-to-day life makes them feel as though they are slipping behind, no longer making the progress their parents and grandparents made, no longer optimistic their kids will have it easier than they did, and no longer confident that such building blocks of society as civility, integrity, justice, education, respect, decency, responsibility, and opportunity even matter anymore. On social media we see one aggressive troll after another, and on cable TV one loud, self-important know-it-all after another. The only thing that seems to matter anymore is the shouting and — figuratively speaking only until it isn’t — the shooting.

Unless we do something to change this situation, it will far outlast the politicians, the cable-television pundits, and the modern-day robber barons who have sown the seeds of it, and generations to come will profoundly regret it. As long as leadership is something less than what it can be, people will be hard-pressed to join together to meet their overriding needs of today, and the next big opportunity of tomorrow will always loom impossibly daunting and therefore out of reach for a thousand little reasons. Its final legacy is cynicism, an acid rain of disappointment and despair that eats away at the fabric of democracy, enterprise, community, even our humanity, and which may be our last undoing.

We can do better. We must do better. I have some ideas as to just how we can, and I share them in the pages to come.

Praxis

Here are some specific questions you can think about to understand leadership more clearly, reflect on it more deeply, and ultimately lead more productively in the twenty-first century:

• Recall some situations you have experienced in which real leadership has made a difference. What did the leadership look like? How did people feel about it? What did it accomplish?

• We appeal for a deep conversation about leadership, and we pose these questions as prompts: What have we come to expect of it? What should we expect of it? What can we reasonably ask of it? What norms should we demand that it respect? How can we challenge it to be more, do more, offer more? And their other side: What does real leadership demand of us, as leaders? How would you answer these questions? How do you think your colleagues and friends would?

• Whom do you currently regard as real leaders? Why? Whom do your colleagues and friends? Why? What differences do you see?

• What do you see as the particular obstacles and the particular leverage for leadership today?

• We list the following as a statement of minimally acceptable standards for leadership: simple respect for people; a sense of common decency; straightforward honesty and the recognition of empirical reality; thoughtful preparation and policy; a large embrace of community and a commitment to bringing people together in a transcendent common cause; the affirmation of people regardless of irrelevant criteria; emotional stability and maturity; the wisdom and humility of one’s years; continuous learning and growth; the recognition of duty and obligation; reasoned and rational advocacy; service to others before oneself; appealing to “the better angels of our nature,” as Lincoln put it; and clear, credible, coherent, and cogent communication. What would you add or subtract from this list?

• How does your own leadership communication compare with that of people you regard as leaders in your community, workplace, school, house of worship, political party, or any other venue where you see leadership?

[end of chapter 1]

Chapter 2

Moving from Position to Purpose

Rediscovering the Potential of Large Leadership

There’s a good case to be made for banning the sports metaphor once and for all, but if that ever happens Vince Lombardi and John Wooden, two of the winningest coaches ever, should get their own grandfather clause. These two men had something in common besides gilded trophy cases. They both liked to begin with the basics, and they both liked to think big. Let’s do the same. We’ll begin at the beginning, with the basics, and we will go deep.

Wooden, who coached the UCLA men’s basketball team to ten championships (including seven in a row) during his storied career, began each basketball season by teaching his players how to — wait for it — lace up and knot their basketball shoes. As it turns out, there are dozens of ways to tie your shoes, and most of them are unhelpful to competing in a fast-paced game. Wooden explained all that and then insisted that players tie their laces his way, so that their shoes were neither too tight nor too loose and the players could run faster and jump higher than their opponents, especially in the final minutes of a hard-fought game.

Lombardi, too. He took a losing, woebegone professional football team and, with the same roster of players and within a couple of years, began winning championships. It was no fluke; his small-town Green Bay Packers went on to win five National Football League championships in seven years, including the legendary Ice Bowl and the first two Super Bowls. At the beginning of each season, Lombardi took a basketball — yes, a basketball — and bounced it up and down before his assembled players. After each bounce, as he helpfully pointed out, the ball came right back to his hands. Then he set the basketball aside and picked up a couple of footballs and dropped them to the floor on their point, only to watch them squirrel away this way or that, before explaining the obvious for dramatic effect and finally intoning: “Gentlemen, do not drop the football.”

Like tying your shoes and bouncing a ball, the basics are a good place for us to start. I prefer to think of it not so much as going back to the basics but as moving forward with the basics, so that each of us is working with the same set of definitions and expectations. Only then can we cut through the muck of so much stolid misunderstanding on leadership. To do that, we introduce the five empirical perspectives on leadership. We call them the Five Lenses.

Five Lenses on Leadership

By empirical perspectives, or lenses, we have in mind the distinct ways of looking at something abstract — an angle or a sightline with implicit assumptions, mainly as to what is most important or what provides the driving force. When it comes to leadership, there’s a quintet of them, each taking its label from its dominant perspective, and coincidentally all beginning with P: the Position lens, the Power lens, the Persona lens, the Platform lens, and the Purpose lens. They overlap a little conceptually and practically, which is to say you can view a particular example through two or more lenses, but they are sufficiently distinct to warrant individual analysis.

[Insert artwork of eyeglasses with five lenses. Each lens has one word on it: Position, Power, Persona, Platform, or Purpose. No caption.]

All five lenses are valid and useful, depending on the circumstance, though you will find that the fifth and last one, the Purpose lens, is the most conducive to large leadership in a broad array of contexts. It’s also the most accessible to anyone, regardless of circumstances and roles. More importantly, you’ll see just how much impact these mental models have on our thinking. Few people realize it, but our understanding of leadership changes quite a bit depending on which lens we’re using, simply because we’re looking at it differently. You just don’t want to find yourself imprisoned by only one, such that you cannot use the others — especially the fifth and last one. Let’s look at each of them.

The Position Lens (or, Leadership on a Pedestal)

This lens deserves top billing. It is by far the most common. Everyone relies on the Position lens frequently, so much that many of us are hamstrung into thinking of leadership strictly as a matter of position. Viewing leadership as a high position — as, for example, the C-suite and board of directors of Apple, or the mayor and councilors of Paris, or the pope and the College of Cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church — you are working on the assumption that leadership is the responsibility and opportunity of those in senior administrative authority only, that it is essentially a matter of status and of executive roles.

[Insert half-size artwork of eyeglasses with five lenses. Art is flush right; the text wraps around to the left. Four of the lenses are shaded and without labels. One lens (the far left) is clear and labeled Position. No caption.]

This perspective is common, even dominant, in Western society. Major publications like the Harvard Business Review and the Wall Street Journal routinely use the word leadership as a synonym for the senior management of a business and for high-level public or prominent officials. You can argue that this thinking is built into our common DNA, for its origins date back to millennia of nomadic, embattled tribes and their chieftains. Tribes that established some sort of hierarchy of authority likely survived a little longer, because they had the cohesion of command and an organization that could assign roles and responsibilities and hold people accountable. By surviving a little longer, they had more offspring. We are their descendants, and we are carrying their social DNA.

Given its long history and predominant use, the Position perspective clearly has something to be said for it. It is a nod to the familiar, lofty expectations that people usually attach to senior positions. We naturally expect whoever is in charge to speak for an organization. So without a second thought we talk about “the leaders of XYZ Company” or “the leadership of ABC Association” almost as if the positional leadership is the organization and vice versa.

The trouble is that it begs a big question as to whether the persons so labeled are in fact capable of leading anything or anyone anywhere. All too often, the supposed leadership at the top actually consists of one or more authority figures who regard themselves as leaders because of their high position and lofty title but who actually know scarcely anything about the real work of leading change and are not much inclined either to learn or actually do the work that real leadership requires. They may be assigning people to tasks, or approving a policy or a reorganization, or transferring people, or even selling the whole enterprise to a competitor — but are they truly leading people through a challenging situation, through a thicket of change? Not typically. Usually, they’re just running things. While people commonly look to high-level positions for their leadership, they often find leaders in position only. I joke that some senior LIPOs couldn’t lead a fifth-grade soccer team to the ice-cream parlor after a hot summer game, and that is not far from the truth.

By the hierarchical test, no one is a leader until someone in official authority declares it to be. The opposite is closer to reality, for the leaders who have truly changed the world were commonly not designated as a leader by anyone else. They are the likes of Mandela and Gandhi, Jesus and Mohammed, Tubman and Friedan, King and Walesa — and many others like them. I wince when I hear young managers or grad students say they look forward to becoming a leader one day. They need not wait! Real leadership is what leaders do, not what their title or job description is. Anyone with a passion can do it, if some better than others.

That alone explains why so much leadership fails. You cannot expect a turtle to jump over a rock, but we routinely expect big things from anyone appointed to or elected to a high-level office, regardless of their individual capacity for carrying on the actual work of leadership. If the newly anointed leader relies only on instinct, or, worse, assumes he knows something about leadership that he actually doesn’t, nothing much will happen, and the people who were expecting great things will naturally be either disappointed or deluded. Two factors account for it.

First, viewing leadership as a position highlights the scepter and sable mantle of leadership but glosses over the hard work that it requires. We’ll explore the roll-up-your-sleeves work in some detail, but for now just remember that leadership is not a static thing, and that no one can idly or passively exercise leadership. That beautiful black leather swivel chair is not a throne, and anyone who thinks it is will soon find out otherwise. The truly important black leather is the soles of your shoes.

Second, as the busy executive peers out from behind a grand desk, he likely feels a natural tendency to use the levers of institutional control as extensions of his will: to merge those departments, to fire that manager, to build the new office in Centerville. Although that can yield satisfactory short-term results, the leader’s long-term impact is achievable only through a vibrant, healthy relationship with legions of followers and a culture that enables and encourages people to act nobly in concert with strategic imperatives. That takes work, and it isn’t necessarily the kind of work that the new leader is accustomed to doing or even wants to do. It’s easier to lean back, put your feet up, admire the new digs, and tell people what to do.

A position with its hands on the official levers of control is a beguiling siren. It can artfully deceive. It can fool us into thinking that its occupant is in control of outcomes. Shortsighted leaders can come to believe that they do not need and frankly do not want independently minded people to think and act on their own, but rather just a few good robots who will do what they’re told. In fact, the reins of power usually feel better taut than loose. When we are relying mainly or solely on the legal authority of our position, it’s tempting to prefer that people not think and act for themselves.

The problem is that this delusion compromises our potential for large leadership, and, often in unseen ways, it actually thwarts change. We would do well to realize that some of the most effective leaders in society may be the thoughtful merchant or the busy hairstylist or the engaging salesman or the inveterate volunteer or the creative schoolteacher — individuals whose personal character, presence, and behaviors elevate them in the eyes of others, who eventually become followers. (Remember this when we discuss Aristotle’s high regard for ethos later in this chapter and in the next chapter.) In ways large and small, these leaders, at any station of life, truly lead.

Another disadvantage to the Position lens is that it conflates the thrust of leadership with the thrust of management — two entirely different, though complementary, things — and blurs them to such a degree that they are all but indistinct but for pay grades. That alone causes big problems. It’s important to think of leadership and management as distinct but parallel kinds of work — not as particular positions at the head or around the belly of the organization — and to appreciate their respective deliverables: engagement for leadership, alignment for management. They’re two different things, and neither is the same as morale, satisfaction, or loyalty. We will delve deeply into this critical point in chapter 4.

Yet another disadvantage of the Position perspective is that it imposes artificial and unnoticed limitations on organizations, for it presumes that middle management and lower-ranking workers have only an incidental role in facilitating change. That foists a huge burden on the shoulders of those at the top, who presumably must do it all alone. Which, of course, is impossible, and so change grinds to a halt. Thus, by not understanding leadership as inspiring, guiding, and diffusing or distributing work throughout the organization, even senior executives undermine their own best efforts, as people below them are resigned to just going through the motions.

For large, complex organizations, the concept of distributed leadership is important. Primary leaders (those who set and “own” a vision or priority for the enterprise, a site, a department, or a team) cannot be everywhere. To borrow a term from military operations, they need to force-multiply their message or concern. They do so through the supportive work of collateral leaders. Together, the primary leaders and collateral leaders are a system of distributed leadership.

The Power Lens (or, Leadership with a Punch)

If it isn’t a matter of position, leadership is commonly a matter of power — who has it, whom it helps and whom it hurts, how it is used, what it buys. Viewed through the Power lens, leadership boils down to the acquisition, recognition, and deployment of social, financial, or logistical muscle. It is the ability or the leverage to make something happen or prevent it from happening. That can be a function of an official position, but a lofty office and title is hardly the sole perch from which power can be exercised.

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Power can be economic or financial, as in the power of the purse — a budget, say, or a slush fund, or the petty-cash drawer, or seriously deep pockets. (In the state where I live, a recent referendum compelled two rival gazillionaires to spend more than forty million dollars each on television advertising.) Power can be legal or official, as in the enforcement of a law or a regulatory standard or the insistence on adhering to a vital process. It can be rhetorical or intellectual, as the power of the press, the power of the pen, the power of the pulpit, the power of a punch (such as a threat or a threatening example), or the power of a plea: a particularly cogent speech, argument, or analysis. It can even be emotional power, allaying or aggravating fear and uncertainty, bolstering or eroding someone’s dignity, or tolerating or confronting abusive treatment. Finally, it can be implicit or behavioral, as the power of a positive example, the power of positive thinking, or the power of personal agency and self-reliance.

The main advantage of the Power lens is the fact that power is actually central in large, complex organizations to the work of executive authority, which, as we saw in the foregoing section, is often the pedestal of leadership. Walking arm-in-arm with senior positions in large organizations, power is always present, although bureaucracy and internal political rivalries can frustrate even a savvy executive.

Power as a proxy for leadership goes back a long way. In his pioneering but now dated 1978 book, Leadership, James MacGregor Burns viewed power as foundational to the work of leaders. He was hardly the first. Almost two and a half thousand years earlier, as we’ll discuss in the next chapter, Pericles dwelt on the power of Athens in his famous Funeral Oration. Two millennia later, Niccolò Machiavelli devoted his masterpiece, The Prince, to an analysis of political power and came to the rather unsettling conclusions that he did. Less than a century later Shakespeare’s character Iago, in Othello, would channel Machiavelli’s prince. In The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky explored the intersection of brute power and religion in his parable of Cardinal Tomás de Torquemada, the Dominican friar and Grand Inquisitor in Spain's ethno-religious cleansing of the fifteenth century, and whose name now personifies the cruel Spanish Inquisition. In the nineteenth century the United States and Canada used the power of Winchester rifles and Gatling guns to all but wipe out indigenous peoples and their foodstuff: between thirty million and sixty million bison. A century later the grotesque tyranny of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot was powerful enough to render their countries as unimaginable hellholes.

At least their heinous power over people led to some insights on the human psyche. Two books published during and shortly after World War II stand out. In Escape from Freedom, the psychologist and social philosopher Erich Fromm suggested that people so need a sense of certainty, security, authority, and community that they will sacrifice their own freedom — their own power — to obtain it, thus paving the way for the exercise of mass tyranny and its tragic consequences, even including genocide. {Endnote: Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (Holt, 1941), pp. 205-274.} In Man’s Search for Meaning, the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived four Nazi concentration camps, challenged the conventional Freudian thinking on the nature of motivation. He asserted that people want higher and deeper meaning more than fleeting pleasure in their lives. Leaders should remember it. {Endnote: Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Beacon, 1946), pp. 99-106.}

But, just as we saw the mistake of thinking of leadership only or mainly as a template of position or legal authority, it is also a mistake to be imprisoned by thinking of leadership strictly or primarily as the exercise of power. The disadvantages are too many.

For one thing, if overdone, the reliance on power can run roughshod over human relationships by glossing over big issues of trust, relational strength, and resilience. The leader who heedlessly and unnecessarily pushes people around, or who arbitrarily forces someone to do something, risks undermining the trust in that relationship, if only a little this time and a little more next time. He may not even notice the damage. For a while, the pawns obey, but with less and less loyalty over time. Eventually the pawns begin to rebel or to act out of spite.

A friend, who was for many years a criminal court judge, taught me an important lesson one day as we were riding our bicycles across Iowa with mile after mile of corn to the left and the right. He said he had learned from his first days on the bench that “trust flees a judge.” Criminal defendants do not trust the judge, and judges don’t trust criminal defendants. To build on the famous phrasing of Lord Acton, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” we can also recognize the truth of its converse: The absence of power corrupts, and the total absence of power corrupts totally. Thus, for the powerless and the powerful alike, trust crumbles in the face of arbitrary or asymmetric power, and the gathering clouds of cynicism grow blacker.

For another, the Power lens implies that leadership is a matter of using whatever truncheons are at hand to prevail over an obstacle or a rival. It is all about carrying the day, and it can come at the expense of broader confidence and inspiration. That begs other questions of intimidation, manipulation, and fiat — not exactly what most people have in mind when they visualize a halcyon state of leadership. It plays into the small, crude, obnoxious definition of leadership as getting other people to do what you want. For if leadership is merely a matter of controlling people, when isn’t it a matter of manipulating them? A television commercial can sway people; would you call that leadership? A midway carnival barker cajoles people into taking a chance; is he a leader? A narcotics junkie or an itinerant preacher or a politician on the take can steer people this way or that; are they necessarily leaders? All are dubious propositions at best. Moreover, an overemphasis on brute power has an uncomfortable place in the Western business and professional canon, which conventionally puts a premium on common courtesies (though unquestionably honored in the breach by brutish managers) and decorum. At the least, polished executives don’t wish to see themselves as neighborhood bullies.

Leaders who instinctively resort to the levers of power run a serious risk of losing sight of their own impact on others. This can play out innocently enough, as when a powerful figure fails to notice that someone else is confused or lost. It can also take on dark overtones of mischief and manipulation. People of the male persuasion are especially drawn to this temptation. As we will discuss more fully in our treatment of the Platform lens, but which is relevant here, powerful men have a long, sad history of using their power to abuse other people, especially women and more particularly winsome young women. Women have been complaining about the casting couch (and its equals in other halls of power) as long as they have aspired to be something more, while too many men have given it no more concern than a wink and a smirk. The offenses extend well beyond Hollywood, but they all have a power dynamic at their core. Not long ago, I sat in stunned silence as a friend revealed to me that she had lost her virginity to impregnating rape and had been raped by both her father and her older brother. The horror of it all sank to the pit of my stomach.

Finally, relying too much on Power can be at war with emotional maturity and the imperative of stewardship (aka servant leadership), both of which command too little regard in vast swaths of leadership, and which we need to reclaim for the twenty-first century. We’ll delve into each of them at some length in Part III of this book. For now, just know that stewardship is the notion that the most effective leaders are committed to serving more than being served by their subordinates. Most of all, remember and mind this vital catchphrase: If serving is beneath you, real leadership is beyond you.

The Persona Lens (or, Leadership for Pretty People)

Marching close behind the Power perspective is the Persona lens. In this view we see a leader’s personal attributes and traits as a particular kind of power of its own and the wellspring of his leadership — what is sometimes known as the traits model of leadership. It nudges up against the old nature/nurture debate over leadership, probably discussed after midnight in every college dormitory in the land: Are some persons predestined to be successful leaders? Are they born with the quiver of arrows that a leader is thought to need: intelligence, confidence, presence, eloquence, courage?

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The Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle thought so. In 1840 he articulated the Great Man Theory, holding that historical pivots have occurred because a great man, endowed with extraordinary qualities from birth, comes along in the nick of time to meet a great challenge. Twenty years later the English thinker Herbert Spencer threw cold water on that idea. He argued that leaders were themselves a product of their times. “Before he can remake his society,” Spencer wrote, “society must make him.” Meanwhile, at his country estate south of Moscow, Leo Tolstoy was writing the first installments of a Russian magazine serial that would become the novel War and Peace, which asserted that history is the record of deeds not by great men at all but by common, ordinary folks. You’ll recall that the outcome of battles in War and Peace turned on individual valor and perseverance more than on the grand strategies of generals. Tolstoy, who converted to Christianity in middle age, refers in War and Peace to the Sermon on the Mount’s celebration of “the meek,” and he cautions leaders to keep the rank-and-file front and center. As a leader, you should talk frequently with people on the front lines and listen to them. Your connection to them is your leadership.

I see this phenomenon play out in business all the time, and one of my favorite clients would agree. He cut his teeth at General Electric under the legendary Jack Welch before moving on to another global manufacturing company, where I got to know him. Until he retired a couple of years ago, Dave managed four large factories, which together employed several thousand people in a silos-and-smokestacks Midwestern city. Dave was constantly and unhurriedly out on the factory floor and always encouraging hourly workers, most of whom had no further formal education beyond high school, to offer up ideas as to how a machine or a product or a production process could be improved. Dave often said that no one knows a particular machine or tool better than the worker who uses it all day.

The late Sam Walton, whose discount stores now crowd America’s suburbs and small towns, did something similar. He often showed up unbidden at the loading dock of stores late at night, introduced himself, and chatted with hourly workers. He found out what no one would otherwise have told him and what he otherwise would not have known. Alas, at the opposite pole, a senior executive of a large company once told me over lunch that he took pride in never conversing with anyone more than two levels below him. I was appalled. Here was a well-paid, highly regarded executive all but taking delight in not knowing what was happening around him. It was a joy of ignorance. Adam Grant of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School put it well: “When you listen only to the smartest person in the room, you miss out on what the rest of the room is smart about. Everyone you meet knows something you don’t — and has wisdom from experiences you haven’t lived. Every conversation is a chance to learn something new.”

Don’t let yourself get too friendly with the traits model and its kissing cousin, the notion of the natural-born leader. The late Warren Bennis, a renowned leadership scholar at the University of Southern California for thirty-five years, settled the question once and for all. “The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born — that there is a genetic factor to leadership,” he declared. “This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That’s nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.”

Today only the self-absorbed, almost narcissistic leader seriously entertains the notion that he is somehow blessed with supernatural attributes that enable him to exercise authority and power over others. Clear-eyed leaders know that they owe as much or more to the people they aspire to lead, to accidents of history, and to their own hard work, as they owe to their parentage. So the next time a megalomaniac beats his own breast to proclaim that he and he alone has the answers, you would be well-advised to run, not walk, in the opposite direction. Hiring managers, boards of directors, and electorates that fall for it will only and always get what’s coming to them. Karma has a long memory.

Still, the Persona lens has real value. It recognizes that leadership is in the eye of the beholder. It takes into account the fact that leadership revolves around the connection between leader and led and emerges in the middle between them — a fundamental point at which we have hinted and to which we shall return — and that personal attributes are undeniable parts of any human relationship, including between leader and led. After all, people relate to people. The beating heart of leadership requires a beating heart, and one beating heart naturally looks for another.

In this sense, leadership rests not around the leader’s position or power, but around her persona: her presence, personality, judgment, and character as people see it. People naturally ask: Just who is this person? They may recognize someone as a leader because of her conduct and choices, especially in demanding or potentially compromising situations. Or, to borrow a phrase from John F. Kennedy, their choice may be wrapped up in someone’s vim, vigor, and vitality; personal energy counts for more than you may assume. For still others, it is a merely a matter of their physical appearance or social appeal — the leader straight from Central Casting, the polished and poised executive of a certain stature and bearing, the telegenic and magnetic candidate for high office, wearing the tailored suit and elegant Italian shoes. Studies have actually shown that, in both business and politics, physical appearance and height are biasing factors in the selection and election of leaders. That is true even for those of us who insist it isn’t.

Viewed through the Persona lens, leadership is a collection of those human traits — among them charisma, dynamism, eloquence, social finesse, grooming, attire, personal bearing, a warm and gracious smile, and the elusive “mask of command” commonly associated with jut-jawed generals. It can even be ineffable and almost magical, some sort of imaginary velvet rope that pulls leader and led together but confounds rational analysis or explanation. If we step around the masses of people figuratively standing before us and peek back in the direction they are looking, we see the leader as followers see her, and we realize that they, the followers, can revere her as the next closest thing to Pied Piper simply because they so choose. The seventeenth century French thinker Blaise Pascal observed: “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows naught.” That pretty well sums it up.

The flip side of that argument is the main disadvantage of the Persona lens: its lack of consistency, of universality. Many legendary leaders — Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill come quickly to mind — were unluckily dealt few of these blissful cards at birth. Lincoln was awkward and gangly. Roosevelt was asthmatic and sickly. Churchill had a speech impediment that may have originated in loneliness and insecurity. We can wonder if their work ethic and accomplishments in life amounted to their response to these humiliating slights of birth. In all three men, as for many other people of achievement, the key was sheer grit and determination, along with acknowledging and learning from mistakes, attaching themselves to good mentors, and building solid networks of peers and friends. More than anything, they worked hard at it; as if to presage the old Smith Barney commercial, they made their name the old-fashioned way: they earned it.

Charisma in particular can be a deceptive barometer of leadership — and, as we shall see in chapter 7, it can backfire and actually undermine leadership. For every charismatic leader like a Ronald Reagan and a Barack Obama, both of whom were happily married and sexually continent public figures, you can rattle off numerous others who were similarly blessed with a charismatic personality but wound up in morally compromising situations: Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, John Edwards, and Donald Trump, to name only six of a long, long list. Some of them paid a high price for the liberties they took, as they had to know they likely would, yet it didn’t stop them or apparently even give them pause in the moment. Others just walked away, wiped their hands, and smirked.

The Platform Lens (or, Leadership on a Podium)

A short step away from the Persona lens is the Platform lens. The platform we speak of is an informal podium or incidental prominence of some sort. Under this rubric we find famous athletes and coaches, Hollywood actors and producers, singers and musicians, television hosts, C-suite executives, physicians, teachers, clergy (especially those who preach strict moral codes), and even the spouses and other relatives of the rich and famous. We view them through this lens not because of the high official position they hold or the power they wield or the characteristic traits of their personality and presence, but rather because of their prominence and in some cases their performance in their calling or craft. People pay attention because they recognize someone’s name or because of a visible role someone plays. We tend to lionize people on such a public podium. We wish, perhaps in another triumph of hope over experience, that they would use their fame and influence to set an example for young people and embody the virtues that many of us embrace. When they don’t, they disappoint everyone, and they usually fall hard.

That has certainly been true of the well-known individuals outed by the #MeToo movement. Their informal podiums made them a public target. The offenses committed by Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose, Roger Ailes, Al Franken, Les Moonves, Andrew Cuomo, R. Kelly and the like would certainly be no less serious if committed by someone without their fame, but their public profiles accounted for the tabloid news, which in turn accounted for their Scarlet Letter humiliation in the public eye. Moralistic preachers and televangelists — the likes of Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Ted Haggard, and Jerry Falwell Jr. — committed sins of hypocrisy as well as morality, with devastating implications for their faithful flocks.

It isn’t only a matter of name and fame. Roles have an important place as well. That is the case for little-known teachers, coaches, and priests caught in sexually abusive relationships with children and adolescents or charged with crimes of pedophilia. Numbers are vague and uncertain, but it appears that hundreds of thousands of young people have been accosted by teachers in the United States alone. Among coaches, the prosecutions of Gymnastics USA coach Larry Nassar, who sexually assaulted hundreds of teen-age gymnasts including Simone Biles, and former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who abused kids as a high-school wrestling coach years before he went into politics, were instructive. In 2021 the University of Southern California settled sexual-abuse claims by hundreds of young women for the astounding sum of $1.1 billion, and a few months later the Boy Scouts of America settled with victims of sexual abuse for $850 million. According to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, more than four thousand American priests and deacons were credibly accused by more than ten thousand victims of sexual abuse over the latter half of the twentieth century, and similar rates of abuse have been reported in Europe, Australia, and South America. Again, as for the rich and famous, the offenses alone are grave and reprehensible. The fact that so many authority figures have been implicated compounds the social evil, casts a stench of cynicism across society, and undermines the work of others who are legitimately engaged in noble leadership.

The main advantage of using the Platform lens is that people actually do look to individuals on a podium of some sort for moral authority and exemplary conduct. Perhaps they shouldn’t. Perhaps they should have learned better by now, but they still do so. If we were to gloss over it, we would be missing an important locus of broadly perceived leadership and, all too often, its failure. By the same token, especially for persons in roles of public responsibility and for those charged with the care of the young, in too many cases we would stand accused of ignoring or even tacitly condoning heinously offensive behavior. Like it or not, mere fame and the informal platform it provides will always pose their own special accountability.

The Purpose Lens (or, Leadership with a Point)

The Purpose lens, our fifth and final empirical perspective, is like the proverbial middle child, all too often neglected and ignored. It takes its name from the purposefulness of leadership, the reason somebody undertakes it — the very point of guiding people through change — but it throws a spotlight mainly on the actual work of leadership that is essential for doing what leadership sets out to do. Indeed I often refer to it as “real leadership,” not because the other four lenses are unreal but because people commonly use that phrase as shorthand for the active, responsible work that successful leaders do. “We need some real leadership,” the refrain goes. It is all about the purposeful pursuit and advocacy of change.

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Let’s talk about that for a moment. Lots of people aspire to leadership, and they hope their youngsters do likewise. Occasionally friends and clients invite me to coffee or lunch with their college-age kids to talk up the importance of leadership. That’s all to the good, and I am happy to offer whatever counsel I can, but I wonder if their aspiration for leadership is more about status and remuneration than about the positive social change that good leadership can bring about. As mere status (look back to our discussion on the Position lens), leadership is often an isometric exercise: lifeless, impotent, and stagnant but for its levers of official authority. The comforts and prestige are nice perks, of course, and we all like nice perks. But the wake of your leadership, the impact of your leadership, is what truly matters. As a vehicle for purposefully advocating change, leadership is much, much more than a title and a paycheck.

In tandem the Purpose lens does something else quite useful. It calls out the putative leaders who are actually unable or unwilling to do the hard work that purposeful leadership requires. Terry Pearce must have had them in mind when, in Leading Out Loud, he observed that these wannabe matadors suddenly “find themselves in the ring with two thousand pounds of bull bearing down on them, and then discover that what they really wanted was to wear tight pants and hear the crowd roar.” {Endnote: Terry Pearce, Leading Out Loud (Josey-Bass, 2013), p. ____.} That gets to the heart of the matter.

More to the point for most readers, the Purpose lens is the most valuable of the five perspectives for anyone who aspires to lead without a position of authority, without a power base, without an appealing personal presence, and without a ready-made “platform” — in other words, for the rest of us. It also helpfully explains the many failures of leadership that depended on an elevated position or a power base or personal attributes or a platform of some kind. The fact is that purposeful leadership is hard work, and the failure to do that work dooms real leadership to failure — even in the presence of a position or power or persona or platform, and never more than in the twenty-first century.

Case studies of leadership spill over with glorious examples of it: the nobodies who cared so much they risked their name, their careers, their wealth, and in some cases their lives to bring about change. They were driven by an extraordinarily strong sense of purpose, and they were quite willing to do the work that it required. Whenever you’re tempted to fall for the shibboleth that one person cannot make a difference, remember their legacies.

We can think of Rachel Carson, a marine biologist and author whose 1962 book Silent Spring sounded an alarm over the effects of chemical pesticides and saved the bald eagle from extinction; César Chávez, the California laborer who co-founded the organization that grew into the United Farm Workers and who spearheaded the Delano Grape Strike in the mid-1960s; the legendary Rosa Parks, whose 1955 refusal to move to back of a Montgomery bus led to a bus boycott and eventually a U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring segregated seating unconstitutional; and Lech Walesa, the Polish longshoreman and electrician who lit a fuse of protests that contributed to the collapse of the Iron Curtain.

Or we can point to David Brower, the twentieth-century environmentalist who saved the Grand Canyon from a proposed dam that would have flooded it; Candace Lightner, the California mom who, in grief over the death of her 13-year-old daughter by a drunk driver who had already lost his license, founded Mothers Against Drunk Driving; Harvey Milk, the San Francisco merchant who used dog poop in a municipal park to turbocharge the gay rights movement; Anne Burke, a 24-year-old physical education teacher who conceived of the Special Olympics and approached the Kennedy Foundation to fund it; Rachael Denhollander, the first young woman to accuse Gymnastics USA coach Larry Nassar of sexual assault; and, today, Alexei Navalny, locked away in a Russian prison as I write, who, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, is “the man Vladimir Putin fears the most.”

None of those individuals had an official position to leverage, or any institutional or financial power to speak of, or any special traits or attributes that accounted for outsize influence, or, until they began their efforts, any platform from which to speak. They just had a passion for their cause and an intuitive sense that their voice mattered. They knew their own purpose. So they began, and each of them eventually found legions of others who thought alike and who became followers behind the leader’s initiative.

Let’s not be starry eyed, though. The Purpose lens has its limitations, and one of the biggest is the plain fact of stubborn institutional resistance, often with deadly force. Consider the sorry litany of rebellions that ran into a solid brick wall of official opposition: Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in 1831; the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, in which the British Raj violently put down a peaceful protest in Amritsar, the holy city of Sikhs in the Indian state of Punjab; the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968, which the Communist Bloc suppressed; the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989, which the Chinese government put down despite global television coverage; the Arab Spring protests of 2010 and 2011, which captivated a worldwide audience and toppled several regimes but ultimately proved fruitless, and, most recently, the valiant pro-democracy protests on the streets of Hong Kong that were suppressed by Beijing. All these demonstrations were suppressed or their demands largely ignored and evaded in spite of purposeful leadership that welled up organically from within.

[Insert diagram of 8C Model. Caption: Leadership for the pursuit of change (the Purpose lens) involves an iterative process of eight stages.]

Leadership for Change

In viewing leadership through the Purpose lens — as a concerted effort to bring about change — we can begin to appreciate the hard work it involves. It goes far beyond organizing people and issuing demands. The work is a serial and iterative process. Its eight stages must be repeated over and over, and they can never be allowed to be so rigid as to preclude flexibility. As I see it, the stepwise process requires leaders to:

1. Get to know and understand the people you wish to enroll as followers. Leadership must begin here, in community. Ronald Reagan said it well: “All great change in America begins around the dinner table.” The symbolic dinner table can be colleagues at work, friends in a golf foursome, next-door neighbors across the backyard fence, or literally one’s own family gathered for Thanksgiving. The point is that engaging leadership must begin in a community of some sort, at ground level. Early in The Music Man, the long-running Broadway musical by Meredith Wilson, the traveling salesman sings, “You gotta know the territory.” Indeed you do. Start there, and start by asking questions and listening patiently.

2. Notice and acknowledge the concerns that prospective followers share. What is on their mind? What stories do they tell? What problems do they want to solve? What are they fearful of, and what are they hopeful for? This is the grist of what Aristotle called pathos, the appeal of emotional persuasion. If an aspiring leader is not keenly aware of the emotional currents coursing through the community — and remember, a community can be any social cohort, from a workplace to a nation — she can have no realistic expectation of leading people anywhere. In Dreams of My Father, his 2004 memoir, Barack Obama reflected on his years as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. He emphasized the importance of a foundational connection with people. One of his key insights was that, as an outsider arriving in Chicago, he had a great deal of work to do just building trust. So he began in the only way he could: one conversation at a time, one person at a time. That is slow and laborious, but it is wise. Only a fool expects to parachute in and make things happen right away. {Endnote: Barack Obama, Dreams of My Father (Crown, 2004), pp. 123-270.}

3. Identify one, two, or three causes that emerge from the litany of concerns. These are specific courses of action that can be taken to address the concerns. Because the causes reflect concerns, they are organic to the community, and they are likely to be embraced by the people in the community. Give each cause a catchy name. (But be careful. Tea Party and Six Sigma were memorable and safe names. Defund the Police, not so much.) Then, do the homework. Gather facts and figures to make your case. They are the grist of what Aristotle termed logos, the persuasive appeal of logic and reason. Next, flesh out an organization with roles for people to fill. Look for opportunities to meet stakeholders and make your case for the change. Develop your own unique vision, and make sure it is visionary. It will function as your big picture.

4. Translate the big picture to many small pictures, each of which represents the work that individuals and small teams must undertake, and which together answer the larger question of what you’re asking people to think and do differently. That is a critically important question, which, in my experience, is rarely even asked, let alone answered, in businesses contemplating a change in strategy. Senior management endorses the change and announces it with fanfare and tchotchkes. Then, invariably, frontline workers ask their supervisors what it means for them, and the supervisors can only shrug their shoulders. They are unable to reply knowledgeably. “Don’t do anything differently just yet,” they finally mumble. “If that changes, I’ll let you know.” At that very moment, of course, the new strategy is effectively comatose if not already dead. You must show people what they can do and avoid doing in order to bring the vision to reality. In other words, make molehills out of a mountain.

5. Build a coalition of like-minded organizations and people. No one can bring about a big change by herself. You must broaden the base of stakeholders who will support the cause you have identified and articulated. There’s a lot of strength in numbers, not the least of which is the perception of a bandwagon of support for your point of view. Rarely are a small number of proponents sufficient to make social change happen. By finding more supporters and giving them both an emotional stake in the change as well as a factual basis for their support, you can build a much larger base and develop a great deal more momentum. In large, complex organizations, distributing responsibility for leadership among collateral leaders is a counterintuitive approach that can pay big dividends.

6. Become your own First Follower. Figure out the implications of your causes on your own visible behavior, and then live it zealously. This is the grist of what Aristotle referred to as ethos, the powerful appeal of personal example — and the most important of the three. Recall the dual Mandarin ideograph that we met in the Preface: a man standing by his word. That’s what this is all about. As a leader, you are under a klieg light that illuminates all your actions. Folks are constantly watching you. I advise clients to remind themselves of a simple fact of life in the twenty-first century: Outside your home (and maybe even inside) you are almost always being filmed by one security cam or another. Just think of those cameras as the eyes and ears of your followers, who, as a practical matter, are watching you whenever they can. That is especially true if you live and work in a small town, where neighbors and the children of your associates can pick you out of a crowd and will happily tell everyone if you are curt with a cashier or short with a waitress.

7. Talk, talk, talk, and then start talking about your cause. Talk to anyone who will listen, and then talk to robots and statues if necessary. Ask questions. Tell stories. Cite examples. Smile. Be approachable and accessible. Strike up conversations. Relax and be yourself, but be serious enough to earn your gravitas. Mark my words: Everywhere and always, you are communicating — sometime even with words, and sometimes even aloud, but everywhere and always. The late Stanford business professor Paul Watzlawick put it memorably: “You cannot not communicate.” As a corollary, remember that it is impossible to overcommunicate. Ignore anyone who complains that you have already said something and you’re just repeating yourself. Good! Thank him for noticing and then say it again! (Remind yourself, if necessary, that Homer Simpson has uttered “D’oh” well over a thousand times, and no one seems to mind.) You will be wise to seize any opportunity to speak about your concern and causes. When there are no readymade opportunities, create your own, or find other creative ways to push your cause.

8. Build a critical mass of support to a tipping point. A critical mass can be short of a majority, but in the right circumstances it can be enough to make itself heard. More commonly, it may be fifty or sixty percent. The important thing to remember is that it need not be unanimous. Ideally it is enough to sap the energy from the obstructionists and to propel the change forward. People want to be on the winning side of history. Over time they will buy into the change. As they do, they will be modifying the culture in subtle ways that together, incrementally, make a significant difference. That culture will alter the community from which you began and to which you now return. But unless you first build a foundation, it will be unlikely to take hold, and it certainly will not stand the test of time.

Finally, as the shampoo bottle instructs, rinse and lather again. In other words, do it all over. Then, do it again, and again and again. Take it from a bald man. Lather is good.

Yes, that oversimplifies things a little, but it serves as a tidy little pre-flight checklist for the actual work of purposeful leadership.

Praxis

Here are some specific things you can do and questions you can ponder to understand leadership more clearly, think about it more rigorously, and ultimately lead more productively in the twenty-first century.

• As you reflect on the reality or aspirations of your own leadership, which of the five lenses or empirical perspectives do they fit most neatly?

• In chapter 1 we observed that an assessment of leadership depends on which lens you are using and what criteria you adopt for that particular lens. Give some careful thought to your own criteria for acknowledging someone as a leader in each lens — Position, Power, Persona, Platform, and Purpose. Why do you list the criteria you do? Do they reflect a cultural consensus, or are they a lonely voice in the wilderness?

• If you are in or aspire to be in a position of leadership, think about what you can do to lead in terms of the other four perspectives.

• List some aspects of your larger life — your family, workplace, neighborhood, membership organizations to which you belong, and society in general — that you believe ought to be different. What can you do to exert leadership within the Purpose lens with respect to these challenges?

Chapter 3

Troglodytes and Philosophers in the Corner Office

The Evolution of Leadership

Years ago I came across a four-panel cartoon, perhaps drawn by the brilliant Cathy Guisewite, thumbtacked to a cubicle wall in a Chicago office tower. My recollection is vague, but I think it was labeled “The Evolution of Leadership.” Other than the label, it had no words. Each panel consisted solely of a pair of footprints. The first panel showed the footprints of an ape. The next panel showed the barefoot steps of a Neanderthal. The third showed the imprint of a contemporary gentleman’s oxfords. The final, climactic panel showed the footprints of a woman’s elegant high heels.

Now I wish we could honestly say that leadership has been maturing by gender. Perhaps it has somewhat, and any progress is certainly welcome, but it’s a long haul. With no offense intended to gorillas and gibbons, it’s closer to reality to say that the ideal has ever-so-slowly been evolving from dark and brutish to enlightened and galvanizing. We can think of it less as moving toward kinder and gentler, and more as cultivating and growing whole leadership — that which embodies purposeful change, mutual trust, noble communication, emotional maturity, and an ethic of stewardship.

Let’s take a tour of this evolution of leadership. We’ll set out from two trailheads. One trailhead puts us on the path of four archetypes that reflect the evolution of leadership. The other introduces us to philosophical cornerstones that shed much light on leadership. They will show us that what’s truly important is also truly timeless.

The First Trailhead: Evolving Archetypes

The first trailhead sets us on a footpath through four orientations, or archetypes, of leadership: absolute leadership, traditional leadership, modern leadership, and inspirational leadership. Look on these archetypes as “schools” or “doctrines” of leadership. We will see how the exercise of leadership is slowly but surely evolving from the baser to the purer. The sooner that more leaders reach the inspirational archetype, the better, but you would be foolish to hold your breath. For many of them, just getting to the modern archetype would be a long step forward. We may have to wait a few more generations to see much inspirational leadership, and that assumes we don’t slide backward.

As we move through the four archetypes, keep in mind that in practice you will typically see any single archetype not by itself but rather in the presence of a neighboring archetype. You’ll see absolute and traditional leadership together, for example, or traditional and modern leadership together, or modern and inspirational leadership together. So don’t quibble with the fine lines between adjacent archetypes. Instead, focus on the broader picture and its implications. (One more thing. Readers have a tendency to jump to sections that they think apply to themselves, so they may be inclined to skip over the absolute archetype or the traditional archetype or both. You can, of course, but you will miss out on a dramatic contrast to the more evolved archetypes. That contrast, that foil, will be helpful later on.)

The Absolute Archetype of Leadership

Over the course of human history, the absolute archetype of leadership has been the most prevalent. Ever since we all lived in caves and yurts, despots and dictators of every kind have relied on it, and little wonder. It kept them in power.

The absolute archetype is commonly oppressive, arbitrary, and suffocating. It insists on fealty and order. For people putting up with it — and they typically have no choice — it feels as though they’re being pushed around. Today it belongs mainly to tyrants and control freaks whose leadership is so weak that they can only pretend they are strong. Dictators weaponize it with goons, guns, and gulags (and nowadays even geeks, hacking at systems half a world away) or their verbal, emotional, and social equivalents: slurs, ridicule, abuse, intimidation, taunts, ostracism, manipulation, threats, and expulsion. If that seems extreme, I think you’ll have to agree that, at the very least, over the centuries before democracy and progressive management took hold, it has too often been the norm, and in some places it still is.

The absolute archetype strives to suppress independent thought, speech, and action. It declares: “You cannot.” It operates from a dark place of fear, greed, and anger. The absolute archetype presumes that people either lack the resolve to resist or are naturally subservient and will tolerate a heavy, crushing hand, or it enslaves them in virtual chains. In government, it relies on propaganda and brute force, physical or legal. In business, it requires threats — implicit or explicit — or manipulation or simply the fear of a forbidding boss. Wherever it is found, it is a scoundrel’s paradise.

Of course, responsible leaders must say “You cannot” from time to time, as well. Parents, teachers, cops, and judges do so routinely. Rules are necessary wherever people live together. Many of those rules, from the Ten Commandments to the Rules of the Road, declare “You cannot”: You cannot drive under the influence. You cannot embezzle. You cannot yell fire in a crowded theater. Most of these rules are conventional and inoffensive; they are there for everyone’s safety, privacy, and security. The “cannot” of the absolute archetype is different. It goes far beyond such a mild threshold. Instead, its prohibitions are gross and oppressive: You cannot think for yourself. You cannot speak out. You cannot criticize or resist. You cannot protest. You cannot organize. They are limits imposed by the somebodies in power to throw their weight around and keep people down.

The most brutal tyrants in history belong squarely in this category, and so do contemporary dictators in totalitarian regimes around the world: North Korea, Syria, China, Belarus, Yemen, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and any number of other despotic playgrounds. The worst cases involve human bondage, sexual enslavement, slaughter, genocide, and the summary execution of rivals. The most notorious of the past century have included the Third Reich, Stalin’s murderous purges and rampages, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and the straitjackets of contemporary Sunni Wahhabism and the Taliban’s rigid enforcement of Sharia law. In the United States we saw the absolute archetype in Jim Crow laws across the South, and we see it in continuing efforts to disenfranchise minority voters. We see it in a resurgence of racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric, too, and in alarming “noose incidents,” in which bigots leave a hangman’s knot on a black coworker’s locker, for example. (It happens more often than you might suppose. A board member of a global hotel chain told me it occurred eleven times in that company alone during the preceding year.)

Still, thankfully, the absolute archetype is relatively infrequent today in the experience of free people in longstanding, civilized democracies. They may see it on television news from far-off authoritarian lands, but in their own lives it is remote. If they experience it at all on their own it’s typically in calmer waters — in business, where its toll is strategic and emotional rather than mortal, and in households with harsh, severely restrictive parenting. The pain it inflicts can be grave, to be sure. In her best-selling 2018 memoir Educated, Tara Westover detailed her childhood of violent brutality at the hands of her father and brother. It’s a wonder she even survived. {Endnote: Tara Westover, Educated (Random House, 2018).}

As a business consultant I have personally witnessed the absolute archetype, accompanied by screaming, in smaller, grittier companies under the thumb of an overreaching boss, especially a founder and owner without the tempering influence of a board of directors. Larger companies are typically more sophisticated, but even they can have “screamers” in front-line management, particularly on factory floors. Occasionally it extends to a corporate headquarters. I recall a colleague in a sophisticated and strictly secular global corporation who must have had a dozen crucifixes on his desk and on the walls of his office. Ironically, he was one of the few — indeed, the only one I recall offhand — whose day-to-day speech was filled with blasphemous expletives.

Noteworthy historical examples of the absolute archetype in business — less brutal but still troubling — include the planned industrial communities of Pullman Village in Chicago, now a U.S. national historical site, and Fordlândia in the Amazon rainforest. Both have fascinating backstories.

Pullman Village and Fordlândia both owed their existence to Industrial Age moguls: George Pullman, whose tony railway cars were the epitome of luxury and comfort in the late nineteenth century, and Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Co. They doubtless regarded themselves as trailblazing industrialists, and others likely agreed. Early on, the two pioneering gentlemen were known as benevolent, visionary leaders. But things quickly deteriorated. Today their legacies are largely the long shadow of profiteering and oppression.

Outwardly both Pullman Village and Fordlândia offered clean, orderly accommodations to workers. Pullman Village, which opened in 1881 fifteen miles south of what would become the Chicago Loop, boasted pure country air, verdant parks, a library, a church, a school, and a theater — appealing perks for the era. (You can still tour the neighborhood. Friends and I did so a few years ago.) Fordlândia, established in 1928 to secure a cheap source of cultivated rubber for Ford Motor Co., was a community and plantation of almost four thousand square miles on a tributary of the Amazon River. It had American-style homes, a swimming pool, a hospital, and a golf course.

Life was far from libertine in these enclaves. Pullman Village outlawed public gatherings and newspapers as well as the usual suspects of gambling, alcohol, and brothels. Workers paid a princely rent to live in the community. Pullman himself dictated life down to the smallest details, even including what hymns were to be sung in church. Worst of all, in the Depression of 1893, Pullman cut wages but not dividends, and he insisted that workers continue paying the same exorbitant rent. In Fordlândia, the all-male indigenous Brazilian workforce was served only unfamiliar American food, and workers were forbidden from playing soccer or socializing with women. They finally rebelled, and the American managers had to flee into the jungle. Ford Motor Co. shuttered the community in 1934 after only six years. Even today, however, several thousand people make their home there, without the ghost of Henry Ford as an overlord.

The Traditional Archetype of Leadership

While the absolute archetype has been a veritable ammunition depot for despots and dictators throughout history, the traditional archetype of leadership is more broadly acceptable and considerably more progressive. Far from oppressive, it basically insists that people do their work in a certain way and meet specific standards. It is the domain not only of old-line party bosses, or of religions that assert celestial dominion over significant aspects of their parishioners’ terrestrial lives, but also of many health and safety protocols, of bureaucrats with a penchant for putting square pegs only in square holes, and of efficiency-minded managers who just want things done right the first time. And who can blame them? No one wants to waste time and effort.

At the core of the traditional archetype is the stern, authoritative, quasi-parental figure. You can imagine the traditional leader as an old Kansas City ward heeler or a fire-and-brimstone preacher, or perhaps a general like Patton or the classic jarhead of a drill sergeant. In contemporary terms, you can see her as a quality-control inspector who is admonishing workers on a standard or as your personal physician with a blunt warning about your A1C or even as your child’s schoolteacher insisting on correct spelling. In all these cases and countless others, something has to be done in a particular way, and the person in authority is explaining it and emphasizing its importance.

The traditional archetype strives not to suppress but to control independent thought, speech, and action. Unlike the absolute archetype, it declares “You must” rather than “You cannot.” It operates from a pragmatic place of necessity, efficiency, reliability, doubt, and knowledge. Its enforcement rests on standards and regulations, social interaction, traditional imperatives, hierarchy of control, official checklists, routine process, and bureaucracy. As rules, the traditional archetype is more akin to Robert’s Rules of Order or the Rules of Civil Procedure than to the Rules of the Road, inasmuch as it specifies what must be done rather than what must not be done.

Public examples of the traditional archetype range from pay-to-play legislatures and politics, in which lobbyists for corporations or unions or advocacy groups must make sizable donations to politicians in exchange for a seat at the table, to conventional military command and control in the armed forces, which is necessary for a successful military operation. It was also evident in European imperialism from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries and in the historical U.S. policy toward Indians from the Trail of Tears to Wounded Knee and onward.

In business and professional work today, it legitimately imposes boundaries on appropriate conduct. The traditional archetype has a place of honor when it comes to proprietary data, manufacturing, and finance, especially in technical or otherwise exacting fields. It is endemic to any enterprise requiring strict confidentiality or tight coordination or fast adherence to process. Thus it is common in medical and surgical protocols and in aviation and construction to ensure human safety. You can find it at the heart of Six Sigma and Lean. It is also predominant in licensing situations, such as franchising; a McDonald’s franchisee, for example, is obligated to cook French fries in a particular way, mandated by the corporation and stipulated in the license agreement. There’s no wiggle room.

The traditional archetype is commonly binary: this or that, with no halfway point, no middle ground. In his marvelous biography of Apple founder Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson recalled the years leading up to the development of the iPhone. Infamous for his binary thinking, which he himself acknowledged, Jobs was working in the traditional archetype. “This is shit,” he would repeatedly yell on seeing the latest prototype of the iPhone — until, at long last, it finally met his visionary expectations. Then, in an instant, it suddenly became “beautiful” and “perfect.” {Endnote: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (Simon & Schuster, 2011), p. 561.}

Rigid imperatives of any kind can be inappropriate to creative work or to endeavors that require flexibility and case-by-case judgment. Customer service, hospitality, marketing, sales, personal care, entertainment, competitive team sports, artistic endeavors, and first response can all fall under this rubric. Each may (or may not) have a backbone requiring exactitude and insisting on protocols, but they all can, and arguably should, allow some elbow room for workaround options when necessary to achieve a particular goal. In extreme circumstances, even engineering can find itself here. Take the memorable Ron Howard movie Apollo 13, which recounted the harrowing lunar flight of astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise after an on-board explosion en route to the Moon. You will recall that NASA mission director Gene Kranz was bearing down on his engineers to find a solution that would bring the crippled Apollo spacecraft and its crew home safely. When a staff engineer told him a key component wasn’t designed to do what the director wanted, Kranz retorted: “I don’t care what anything is designed to do. I care about what it can do!” In a personal interview with me decades later, Lovell — he of the “Houston, we have a problem” quote — credited Kranz’s perseverance and creative thinking for ensuring the mission ended as “our finest moment.” {Endnote: Personal interview with Commander James Lovell, Lake Forest, Illinois, 29 March 2018.}

But latitude occasionally backfires, too. Once, while consulting in an aircraft manufacturing plant, I heard of a lathe operator who had long been drilling holes in precisely the same spots, just as he had been instructed. Then the design changed. Now one hole was to be drilled in a slightly different place, but no one flagged it for the lathe operator. He saw the new blueprint but paid little heed to it, as he judged it to be obviously in error. So he continued drilling the holes where he long had been, and he continued tagging the full skids of drilled sheet metal for shipment to the assembly plant in another state. He thought he was doing the right thing. By and by, the shipments arrived at the final assembly plant and the mistake was discovered. But in the meantime, all his labor was for naught, and the materials that he produced soon found their way to the landfill.

Though the traditional archetype has its valid applications, it can be experienced as Manichaean, posing a sharp and judgmental distinction between good and evil. It can sanction a particular way of doing something and prohibit any other way that deviates from the standard or the ideal, and then affix a moral judgment on the choice. Friends of mine who lived for a decade or so in a municipality dominated by a single religion tell me they experienced it. For the first several years, while the local deacons held out hope my friends would join the church, their neighbors were friendly, helpful, and engaging (though they nosily objected to anyone washing a car or mowing the lawn on the Sabbath). Years passed. At some point the deacons decided my friends were a lost cause. Suddenly the light switched off. Overnight their neighbors became cold and distant. A couple of years later, exacerbated by the chill, my friends sold their house and moved to a more welcoming community.

The Modern Archetype of Leadership

In developed societies most people are accustomed to neither the absolute nor the traditional archetype, but rather to the modern archetype of leadership. It is what they see and experience in their day-to-day lives, whether in politics and business, in a service organization like Rotary International, in a church choir, or in any number of online coaching and advice sites. People may not even recognize absolute leadership, which instead strikes them as remote and historical, scarcely relevant to their lives today. They may have encountered traditional leadership in a number of situations, but they find the modern archetype more suited to the tenor of the times. It feels more respectful and dignifying.

The modern archetype is paternalistic and supportive. It seeks not to suppress or to control but rather to influence independent thought, speech, and action. Instead of declaring “You cannot” or “You must,” it implicitly declares “You should.” Whether you actually do is up to you. It suggests, implies, or requests rather than demands or implores. Leaders using this archetype are operating from a place of security, confidence, maturity, experience, and trust. To make their influence stick, they commonly engage in dialogue to uncover motivation and obstacles and then they may offer advice, capsule summaries of their own experience, mnemonic devices and witty aphorisms (or sound bites, in the vernacular), new or revised cultural norms, their own personal example, adjustments to default states, and perhaps extrinsic incentives such as bonuses to bring about a change. It’s mainly about the carrot, almost never about the stick.

Public examples of the modern archetype are legion. You commonly see it in sophisticated business environments, in coaching and counseling, on television advice programs, in responsible parenting, in newspaper editorials and columns, in advertising spots, in political campaigning, in refrains of poetry and lovely lyrics to old familiar songs, in church sermons, and in books like this one. Privately, who among us has never offered unsolicited advice, and who among us has never winced at meddlesome friends all too eager to offer unsolicited advice? “You should do this.” “You should do that.”

Of course, it’s always a lot easier and much more tempting to offer advice than to accept it. It’s especially easier to tell others what to do than it is to take the initiative of doing something without being asked. Needless to say, that leads invariably to lots of passing the buck. I recall the whimsical poem by Charles Osgood, the “poet laureate” of CBS News:

                        There was a most important job that needed to be done,
                        And no reason not to do it, there was absolutely none.
                        But in vital matters such as this, you always have to ask,
                        Who exactly will it be who’ll carry out the task?

                        Anybody could have told you what Everybody knew
                        That this was something Somebody would surely have to do.
                        Nobody was unwilling; Anybody had the ability.
                        But Nobody believed it was their responsibility.

                        It seemed to be a job that Anybody could have done,
                        If Anybody thought he was supposed to be the one.
                        But since Everybody recognized that Anybody could,
                        Everybody took for granted that Somebody would.

                        But Nobody told Anybody that we are aware of,
                        That he would be in charge of seeing it was taken care of.
                        And Nobody took it on himself to follow through,
                        And do what Everybody thought that Somebody would do.

                        When what Everybody needed so did not get done at all,
                        Everybody was complaining that Somebody dropped the ball.
                        Anybody then could see it was an awful crying shame,
                        And Everybody looked around for Somebody to blame.

                        Somebody should have done what Everybody should have,
                        But in the end, Nobody did what Anybody could have.

{Endnote: Charles Osgood, “The Responsibility Poem,” https://greatexpectations.org/wp-content/uploads/pdf/lp/responsibility/Responsibility%20poems.pdf (accessed 28 September 2021).}

The Inspirational Archetype of Leadership

Alone among the four, the inspirational archetype invites us to large, vigorous, noble leadership well-suited to the twenty-first century. Its potential is big. Its reach is wide. Its impact is galvanizing and sustainable, even over the course of decades and centuries. It is leadership capable of reclaiming the dignity and respect of all concerned. To be sure, it can be twisted around and used for nefarious ends, and we all need to be on the lookout for despots who would do just that. Still, it is ideal for honorable purposes. It is also advantageous in a practical sense, as it recognizes that a leader cannot be everywhere, will never know everything, and cannot possibly make all the decisions wisely. Now more than ever, we need a fully evolved archetype of leadership.

Recall that the absolute archetype strives to suppress independent thought, speech, and action, the traditional archetype to control it, and the modern archetype to influence it. In contrast, the inspirational archetype strives, as its label suggests, to inspire independent thought, speech, and action. And unlike the other archetypes, which declare that “You cannot” or “You must” or “You should,” the inspirational archetype declares “You can” and “We can.” It operates from a sublime place of confidence that reasonable people, acting reasonably, will exercise their best judgment and do the right thing in pretty much the right way. It reaches for nobility, even arguably at the expense of naïveté.

Inspirational leadership has a light touch. Though it can be compelling, it asks people to come along rather than pulls them this way or pushes them that way. It gives people plenty to think about — and, importantly, plenty to feel — but ultimately backs off and finally lets them decide for themselves. The inspirational leader can be a thoughtful arbiter, a clearinghouse, or a gatekeeper, but she wisely stops short of heavy-handed control. She can assert, she can cajole, and she can urge, but she doesn’t insist or impose her will unless absolutely necessary. Instead, the inspirational leader relies heavily on demonstrating the value of the direction, priority, or approach embodied in her leadership. In the best instances, she doesn’t just tell people about it. She shows them.

Among his other witty aphorisms, Steve Jobs often said, “Sometimes you have to show people what’s possible.” Leadership is like that, and the inspirational archetype obliges. It works like a love potion. I still remember the first time I experienced it for myself at an Apple store. It was in 2010 or so. I was in Providence, Rhode Island, on business. One night after dinner I walked over to the urban mall across the street from my hotel to take in a movie. En route to the theater I ducked into an Apple store with a quick question about my iPod. (Remember iPods?) The resident genius promptly helped. As I turned to leave, he said, “Wait.” He reached for the next gadget Apple was preparing to release and asked if I wanted to look at it. Zounds. On seeing this first iPad, I knew it wouldn’t be long before I would buy one, and almost all my friends would do likewise. The lesson is clear: Sometimes a leader does indeed have to show people what’s possible. In leadership, you yourself can do that, and you can do it as a matter of course, every day, simply by living your message — quietly and therefore loudly.

The light touch of the inspirational archetype is particularly well-suited to the twenty-first century because, for the first time in human history, people everywhere have constant, immediate access to current and comprehensive information. Until a generation ago, most people knew only what a relatively few deigned to tell them. Those few were a well-educated elite: public officials, doctors, teachers, editors, managers, pharmacists, producers, journalists, and the like. Today people reach for their smartphone and search for what they want to know; and if they don’t find one fact or explanation to their liking, they look for another.

Although we portray inspirational leadership as futuristic, it actually has a distinguished and historic lineage. Lao Tzu and Socrates, hundreds of years and thousands of miles apart, were two of its godparents. Recall it was Lao Tzu who said: “A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: ‘We did it ourselves.’ ” For his turn, Socrates was condemned to death for “poisoning” the minds of youth. In fact, he was just asking profound questions and then letting the young people think for themselves. There are still others. Christians will see inspirational leadership in the gospel of Jesus, Muslims in the teachings of Mohammad. Many of the Enlightenment thinkers were inspirational leaders. Immanuel Kant, the stern eighteenth-century Prussian philosopher who laid a foundation for modern thought, modeled it. A student of his fondly recalled that he “incited and gently forced others to think for themselves.” The founding fathers of the United States, in crafting a Constitution that was largely open to interpretation, and whose Bill of Rights was especially notional, were plainly exercising inspirational leadership. Their self-restraint reflected confidence in succeeding generations and in the judgment of pioneers and settlers beyond the Alleghenies and far from the seat of government.

I must acknowledge, however, that much of the world just isn’t ready for inspirational leadership. I learned this for myself on a speaking engagement in Johannesburg, South Africa. After I was finished, and most of the audience had cleared the room, a tall, handsome black man approached me. He was quite genial, well-dressed, and articulately fluent in English. He explained he was from a country in central Africa. “You have it all wrong, Mr. Lee,” he gently told me. “Where I come from, the leader is the man with the longest spear.”

I get that. The more hierarchical a culture — and the more an imposing stature, physical strength, and machismo count in a society — the less likely that inspirational leadership will find a happy home any time soon.

Still, the inspirational archetype is well-suited to emotionally mature leaders who recognize the advantages of stewardship (servant leadership). Indeed, for them it likely comes as second nature. Companies that are frequently noted and honored for their progressive management — they include Salesforce, Disney, Costco, REI, Nordstrom, W.L. Gore, Southwest Airlines, Container Store, Publix, Wegman’s, Netflix, Patagonia, and Ritz-Carlton among others — are already comfortably situated in the inspirational archetype. We’ll take up both emotional maturity and stewardship in Part III, and we will show how they play out in the marketplace.

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The astute reader will wonder about the interplay between these four archetypes and the five empirical perspectives or lenses we examined in the preceding chapter. You should treat them as separate frameworks, each offering its own insights. Both are helpful tools to clarify thinking about leadership, but they approach it from their own vantage point and for their own reasons.

The first framework, which examined the five common ways of viewing and analyzing leadership — as a lofty position, as the exercise of power, as any number of idealized traits, as an informal platform or incidental prominence of some sort, or as the purposeful advocacy of change — explores what we really mean when we use the words leader and leadership. All five lenses are certainly valid, but I am asking you to make the most of the last-mentioned and least common of them, for it is available to anyone with a passion for bringing about a particular change. You don’t need a title. You don’t need power. You don’t even need to look like a Hollywood actor or win an Olympic gold medal. All you need to get started is a passion for the importance of the change you deem necessary.

The other framework, which surveyed the evolution of governance and leadership through four archetypes — from absolute to traditional to modern to inspirational — is all about a gradual, historical, tectonic shift in how leadership is used and how it is perceived and felt by ordinary people. Each of the four evolutionary archetypes is what it is because of its orientation to prospective followers — the more trust and confidence a leader shows in them, the more advanced the stage. Responsive government and sophisticated business have long since grown out of the absolute archetype; and the traditional archetype, while it still has its applications, is legitimately confined mainly to situations where conformity to exacting protocols and standards is important, principally for safety, consistency, equity, reliability, and quality. The norm today is a blend of traditional and modern leadership, and the ideal for the twenty-first century and beyond will include more inspirational leadership.

The Second Trailhead: Ideas Matter

Now let’s move on to the philosophical trail. You may or may not be drawn to the great questions and great thinking of antiquity; if not, you will be tempted to jump ahead to the next chapter. If you’re an egghead like me, however, you’ll find these philosophical antecedents to be important benchmarks that you can use to get a fix on your bearings as a leader. Think of them as a moral analogue to a map and compass. You’ll never be lost again.

Our particular purpose here is twofold. One part is to demonstrate that whole leadership is neither fad nor fancy. It isn’t the latest anything. To the contrary, its pilings reach down to the historical bedrock of civilization, as far back in humankind’s time as we can knowledgeably go. If all this noble wisdom has stood the test of so much time, it has earned a claim on our own. The other part of our purpose is to grab hold of any vital, recurring principles and benchmarks that can help us forge our own leadership ethos. If we pay respect to the great thoughts of great thinkers, we will do better than we could on our own.

Recall our discourse in chapter 1 on guardrails and guideposts, the handful of minimally acceptable standards of leadership, which can and should apply across the board — in all kinds of business, in politics and government, in advocacy and service organizations, you name it. They are the progeny of seeds sown by our philosophical forebears, and this is their garden. They include such foundations as simple respect for people; a sense of common decency; straightforward honesty and the recognition of empirical reality; thoughtful preparation and policy; a large embrace of community and a commitment to bringing people together in a transcendent common cause; the affirmation of people regardless of irrelevant criteria; emotional stability and maturity; the wisdom and humility of one’s years; continuous learning and growth; reasoned and rational advocacy; service to others before oneself; appealing to “the better angels of our nature,” as Lincoln put it; and clear, credible, coherent, and cogent communication. The bedrock of all these foundational ideas is the thinking of our philosophical ancestors.

The philosophical trail takes us to foundational ideas that originally emerged in ancient Mesopotamia, India, and China, continued percolating in classical Athens and Rome, found more eloquence in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and kept on growing in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. These important ideas are a rich legacy too often neglected by aspiring leaders and all but ignored today by STEM-centric university students, business schools, and pricey consulting firms. That is regrettable. If the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing, the only thing necessary for the triumph of foolery is the ignorance of philosophy by the rest of us. That is to say philosophy is wisdom, and if you don’t like philosophy you don’t like wisdom.

Much of the wisdom on leadership over three or four millennia has survived remarkably intact. Of what was lost to the ages, two important manuscripts were rediscovered a few thousand miles and a few years apart in the early 1900s — in one case on a stone tablet, or stele, found by French archaeologists in the Persian city of Susa, and in another case on dried palm leaves found in the Indian state of Karnataka. Thanks to the skill of archaeologists and scholarly translators, and to the creative intellectual labor of the original philosophers themselves, we can put our fingers on important, age-old insights that inform our understanding of leadership. Today they are a torch held high over our footpath. Let us walk together.

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Leadership is all about other people, but it begins with the heart and soul of the leader. The first cornerstone of successful leadership is understanding and managing oneself; indeed, the mandate “Know thyself” is literally carved in marble. It made its first appearance in ancient India three and a half millennia ago and then slowly migrated across the Persian and Arabian deserts to the Mediterranean. By the time of Socrates, a thousand years later, it was already inscribed in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, along with two others: “Do nothing to excess” and “Self-certainty is ruinous.” To appreciate their importance, consider for a moment the many tragedies of history, including some in the twentieth century and already in the twenty-first, that can be laid at the clay feet of leaders who ignored one, two, or all three of those commands. In your own experience, think about leaders who, on the one hand, have lived by them, and then about leaders who, on the other, have only honored them in the breach. What can you learn from their contrasting examples? What have you yourself done?

As I learned on a speaking engagement in India a couple of years ago, all four Dharmic religions — Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism — teach the importance of facing reality as it truly is, not merely as we wish it to be (though the latter remains the stuff of a motivating vision, without which “the people perish”); of speaking the truth and only the truth; of striving for an unattainable ideal; of nurturing our own self-discipline, and of leading by example. The Bhagavad Gita, a central text of Hinduism, records all this and more. It entreats leaders to be generous servants dedicated to the well-being of all, including generations of the future, and to clothe themselves with abundant empathy and compassion. Gandhi called the Gita his “spiritual dictionary,” and one can easily see why.

Here again, in our own life experience, probably all of us can cite public officials or corporate tycoons who have breezily ignored such noble injunctions. Karma is wicked, though. It’s rare that such foolish and selfish leaders survive their poor choices untouched by recrimination — think of all the televised perp walks you have seen over the years — and it’s rare that people who mistake such abuse for genuine leadership escape unscathed as well. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that, when everything comes crashing down, the failed leader who refuses to live by these commandments typically blames everyone but himself — including even his most loyal acolytes and faithful toadies. Yet in the wake of all that, some sycophants refuse to learn.

Even earlier, in one of the first official acts recorded by history, Hammurabi, the first king of the Babylonian Empire in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), promulgated a set of two hundred forty-eight edicts that came to be known as Hammurabi’s Code. Archaeologists unearthed a long-lost copy in 1901 on a six-foot stone tablet (from which the phrase “written in stone” derives). It now awes tourists from its pedestal in the Louvre. Among other things, the Code’s edicts recognized that rulers have special moral obligations, in particular the responsibility to promote righteousness and combat evil. For us, so many centuries later, Hammurabi’s Code serves as a reminder that leaders and the led share obligations to comply with foundational moral law and that leaders must constantly demonstrate their fealty to the law and their commitment to the well-being of the people they lead. That is to say: First, do no harm.

Jumping ahead twelve hundred years and east a couple of thousand miles, we come across a young nobleman by the name of Siddhartha Gautama, who, two or three centuries after his death, would be exalted as the Buddha. He lived in the fifth and sixth pre-common centuries on the plains of the Ganges River in what is now Bangladesh, Nepal, and northeastern India. Though he is better known as the father of Buddhism, he was also a fount of insight on human social dynamics and the psychology of leadership. He was perhaps the first prophet to be convinced that, from the perspective of a leader’s followers, the initiative of leadership should never feel imposed but instead always feel chosen and voluntarily embraced by followers. The distinction may strike some in positions of official or legal authority as trivial or even impertinent, but it is not. We can distill its meaning as the realization that a leader must earn the support of the people she aspires to lead. We should never take that support for granted, and we should never assume it as a matter of course. At the same time, it is a mistake to let paranoia blind us to the real support we do enjoy.

The Buddha was among the earliest sages to emphasize several basic components of strategic thinking. He asserted it was necessary to identify a clear purpose for leadership that has more to do with the followers’ needs than with a leader’s comfort. Long before modern business consultants began celebrating the importance of a vision, mission, and values for any organization of appreciable size, the Buddha was doing so. In his case they were characterized by a great deal of compassion, discipline, and mindfulness. We should follow in his steps. We’ll return to these concepts in chapter 7.

Let’s stay on the subcontinent, but shift the time frame forward just a little. Over the course of probably four or five centuries, from roughly 200 BCE onward, a Sanskrit treatise of uncertain authorship known as Arthashastra (loosely translated as the science of wealth, of political economics, or of good governance) came into circulation. Along with Hammurabi’s Code, it was among the first formal works to examine the issues and ethics of governance. It was current and quite influential until the twelfth century, whereupon it was lost. Eight centuries later, in 1904, palm leaves inscribed with its text were discovered in southwestern India.

While Arthashastra covers a wide gamut of affairs — everything from statecraft and economics to espionage and assassination to day-to-day scheduling of business — its emphasis and its main value for us today lies in its treatment of propaganda. Among the particular tactics it addresses are epithets, exaggeration, extrapolation, false flags, generalities, and transference. Hopefully, you will have no use for them, but you should be aware of their power so that you know it when someone else is using them against you. They are not uncommon today.

Multiple writers probably contributed to Arthashastra, but the presumptive author of its core was a scholar named Kautilya (350-283 BCE). Kautilya was also the mastermind of the ascendancy to power of Emperor Chandragupta Maurya, who established the Mauryan Empire and expanded it across the subcontinent. Kautilya pointed in the pages of Arthashastra to dharma (righteous living, ethical conduct) as the root of all happiness, to artha (wealth, comfort) as the foundation for dharma, to true leadership as the fountain of artha, to self-restraint as the basis for true leadership, and to humility as the wellspring for self-restraint. This supply chain of virtue strikes a familiar chord as we think about the psychological and social dynamics at play in our world today.

Arthashastra also served as a kind of consultant’s client memo (in that respect, not unlike The Prince by Machiavelli) on what we today might label strategic communication. It calls on rulers to communicate their intent by deed as well as word, and it argues that the governing elite must demonstrate the highest levels of integrity to earn continuing public support. Dharma, after all, requires doing what ought to be done. If a nobleman “does what ought not be done, or does not do what ought to be done, or does not give what ought to be given, or gives what ought not be given,” people will resent it and potentially rebel. All of which implies, does it not, that even the divine right of kings ultimately rests on the divine consent of the governed. It’s a cautionary word for secular leaders of the twenty-first century.

Around the same time, enduring ideals for leadership also arose in China. They, too, have resonance for us more than two millennia later. They include the conviction that nobles must be virtuous and generous, that self-denial and self-abnegation are virtues for leaders, and that service is at the core of worthy leadership. We can bemoan the fact that, for altogether too many high-level officials in both the private and the public sector, these ideals have gone missing; or we can see their absence as an opportunity for growth. Let us not lose sight of the former, but let us focus our attention on the latter.

Several ancient Chinese philosophers in particular left insights for posterity. One that especially appeals to me, and which we will recall in our subsequent discussions of inspirational leadership (later in this chapter) and of stewardship (in chapter 8), is from Lao Tzu two and a half millennia ago: “A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.” It is a timeless reminder to leaders: Seize the blame for yourself, and donate the credit to others. Think of it as an investment in the future of your leadership.

For the purpose of understanding leadership, I’m not as much a fan as some of my friends of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Still, it does have nuggets of wisdom. One gem is: “Amid chaos, seek opportunity.” It recalls another take on the same thing, attributable to any number of contemporary voices: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Think back to a moment of chaos or crisis you can recall, and look for opportunities inside it. Often you find one. Occasionally you find more. In our present crisis of leadership, for example, we stumble across the opportunity to challenge and change fundamental thinking on leadership and to lock in a new ethic of leadership for generations to come.

We are tempted to overlook Confucius, as so many pithy quotes have been attributed to him that, apart from memorizing the Analects of Confucius, it’s hard to know which are legitimate and which are old Johnny Carson jokes or new Facebook memes crafted by a bored teenager. A few that appear genuine and have continuing relevance for leaders in the twenty-first century include: “To gain the respect of others, one must first respect oneself.” It implies the need for self-mastery and self-control and also for high expectations built on high standards. Another: “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” That one memorably captures the danger of unnecessarily avenging every slight, most of which are too incidental to bother but nevertheless seem to unnerve the weak leader. You can find scores of other quotes attributed to Confucious with a few taps on a keyboard, but whether they are real is anyone’s guess. Be careful. Confucius say: “Believe not everything you read on the internet.”

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Over time these profound lessons made their way west to the Aegean and Ionian seas, where so much Western thinking gelled. By the fourth century pre-common, Athens truly was a special place at a special time in history. Although humbled in the Peloponnesian War with Sparta, and although slavery was legal and condoned, Athens would produce philosophy, sculpture, poetry, drama, edifices, and essays and dialogues for the ages — not to mention civilization’s first experience with democracy. For all those reasons, its legacy shines a spotlight on civil society and leadership more than two millennia later.

Any number of ancient Greek generals, historians, philosophers, poets, and dramatists inform our understanding of leadership today. We can draw important insights from poets like Homer and Virgil, from dramatists like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, from the comic playwright Aristophanes, from philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and from the Stoics in Cyprus and later in Rome. Let’s look at just a few of them.

We begin with the Presocratics, the earliest of Greek philosophers, who wrested important matters out of the grip of mythological demons and dragons and began thinking rationally about the big, imponderable questions of life. Little of their work survives, but we do know of an obscure misanthrope by the name of Heraclitus, whose philosophical bequest to twenty-first century leaders has three or four noteworthy concepts. One is the universal constancy of change. Heraclitus famously argued that we cannot dip our toe into the same river twice, for the river is always changing, and so are we. Another is the importance of integrity. “Character is destiny,” he often said, presaging Aristotle by a hundred fifty years. I also resonate to Heraclitus’s celebration of curiosity: “Those who are lovers of wisdom must be inquirers into many things.” His warning on the peril of envy is worth recalling, too: “Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.” Indeed it does.

The epic poetry of Homer — particularly The Iliad — offers enduring insight on leadership, as relevant in the twenty-first century as ever. Along with The Odyssey and, seven hundred years later, Virgil’s The Aeneid — it takes us to the cusp of mythology and real-world history. Even today, scholars cannot be certain the Trojan War actually occurred. Still, we can derive relevant insights from Homer. The Iliad focuses on the mythical Achilles, born to a goddess and endowed with divine qualities, and his nemesis, the Trojan prince Hector. Achilles, though a fierce warrior, is vengeful, petulant, and bloodthirsty. Homer presents him as a tragic hero, for he lacks compassion and empathy, is given to fits of rage, basks in his own glory, and pursues Hector to a gruesome end. In contrast, Hector is portrayed as kind and bighearted, genuinely concerned first and last about his family and homeland. Nonetheless, he falls to Achilles’s sword. We learn later that Hector’s peace-loving brother exacts revenge by shooting an arrow into Achilles’ heel. The story celebrates courage and devotion but condemns the lunacy of war. Writing in an online blog, essayist Joseph Pearce suggests that “anger, the cankered fruit of pride” lies at the heart of it all. {Endnote: http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/homers-iliad-morality-tale/ (accessed 14 July 2021).}

In a book-length commentary, classics scholar Emily Katz Anhalt observes that human frailty is often at the root of the wrath we find in Greek tragedies. The essential insight is obvious if only we should look. Tales like The Iliad, she writes, “remind us that successful relationships and constructive political decision making require us to take responsibility for our choices and the resulting consequences.” She adds: “We must acknowledge the essential humanity of our political opponents and even our enemies. We must hear and value multiple points of view. Only then can we hope that the best ideas might prevail.” {Endnote: Emily Katz Anhalt, Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Myths (Yale, 2017), p. 11.}

Of the dramatists, I like to single out Sophocles, whose play Antigone (and its two Oedipal prequels) illustrates the peril of ignoring the legitimate interests of others and contravening what we may regard as moral law, an innate sense of decency. Antigone revolves around a young Athenian woman, Antigone (whose name may derive from “born to oppose”), as she seeks an honorable burial for her brother. The play highlights the tension between the prerogatives of the leader and the sensibilities of the people he seeks to lead. The tension can pose difficult choices that defy a simpleminded reduction to win-win reconciliation. Still, the choices persist.

Aristophanes is worth noting as well. His great comedy The Clouds is remarkable for its pioneering use of ridicule and caricature to bring down famous elites. Indeed, Plato would later blame Aristophanes for contributing to the mania that led to the trial and execution of Socrates. The Clouds lampoons a school that Aristophanes has named The Thinkery, which resembles The Lyceum where Socrates actually taught. Aristophanes reduces it to a school for scandal; it teaches sophistry, and no self-respecting young person should attend it.

Standing on the shoulders of Aristophanes, by embracing acerbic humor for social and political criticism, are the likes of Mark Twain, Will Rogers, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Dick Gregory, Mark Russell, Jon Stewart, and Trevor Noah, as well as television shows like “Laugh-In,” “All In the Family,” “Saturday Night Live,” and “The Office,” and of course The Onion. Numerous other examples around the world are unfamiliar to Western audiences. One involved a troupe of Belgrade actors, part of a non-violent resistance movement in the late 1990s, who used comedic street theater to ridicule and help bring down Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic. They took as their inspiration not Gandhi or Mandela but rather Monty Python. At times even the police could only laugh. {Endnote: Srdja Popovic, Blueprint for Revolution (Spiegel & Grau, 2015), pp. 6-13ff.} We all know the therapeutic value of laughter. We need to remember its political utility as well. In the right hands it can be a powerful tool of leadership.

For sheer rhetoric, let’s turn to Pericles, the great Athenian general who has been compared to George Washington (or the other way around). His legendary Funeral Oration stands as a sterling example of a leader’s rhetorical power. We have no verbatim record of it, but we do have the recollection of Thucydides, another general and, along with Herodotus, one of history’s first historians. In The History of the Peloponnesian War, which even today is studied in universities around the world, Thucydides informs us that Pericles appealed to a culture of Athenian pride, that he celebrated Athenian soldiers and paid tribute to their courage, that he was careful to give Athenians a narrative from which they could weave a common identity, that he lit a fiery passion not beneath them but inside them, and that he unified Athenians through a common cause. Not bad for a day’s work.

(The Funeral Oration must have been a good speech, for Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, one of modern history’s greatest orations, leans heavily on it. You can easily see the resemblance. Pericles began his speech by praising ancestors, and so did Lincoln: “Four score and seven years ago, our forefathers…” Pericles humbled himself before the courageous soldiers, and so did Lincoln: “We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground.” Pericles heralded Athenian democracy as unique in the world; Lincoln did the same for American democracy: “a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that…” Pericles implored his listeners to emulate their fallen heroes, and so did Lincoln: “It is for us the living…” Lincoln’s own craftsmanship was exquisite, of course. But given the fact that it also drew on Daniel Webster’s famous Second Reply to Hayne for its historic “of the people, by the people, for the people” locution, its similarities to the Funeral Oration appear too many and too clear to be accidental.) {Endnote: https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/The_Most_Famous_Senate_Speech.htm (accessed 3 August 2021).}

The three iconic Greek philosophers we have mentioned — Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle — each bequeathed a wealth of insight that remains relevant for leaders today. Socrates (by way of Plato) left a motherlode: Be exemplary in word and deed. Be humble; assume your own ignorance. Never stop learning. Always ask questions, especially large and unanswerable questions that nonetheless provoke deep introspection. Expect to be an irritant to others who prefer not to think. On the streets of Athens, Socrates noticed that prideful, Sophist businessmen would go out of their way to avoid running into him. They were too busy with material concerns to think deeply about spiritual or philosophical questions. Not he. Not that old fellow Socrates, he told himself.

Among the great questions Socrates was fond of asking: What is the best course of living? That question alone has puzzled scores of generations ever since. You can apply it to anything from marriage to golf. I like to apply it to our current subject: What is the best course of leading people? By now you should know my answer: whole leadership, which brings together leader and led, which finds a soulful connection between them, which takes its power in clear, credible, coherent, and cogent communication, which is at once a matter of emotional maturity and service, and which ultimately grows both leader and led and the community they share.

Socrates, as you may know, never wrote anything, and were it not for his great student Plato we might know little or nothing of him. Fortunately for us, Plato either took prodigious notes or had a phenomenal memory or both. He wrote thirty-six dialogues, each of which placed his old master in a starring role. In The Apology, one of a quartet of Plato’s dialogues on the last days of Socrates, we find ourselves in the Agora at the trial of Socrates, as the seventy-year-old teacher fights for his life but ultimately accepts the court’s decree that he die by drinking a cup of hemlock. The Apology is eminently readable today, and I recommend it. {Endnote: For a book-length account, try browsing a library or a used book sale for an old copy of The Trial of Socrates by I.F. Stone (Little Brown, 1988).}

It was at his capital trial that Socrates offered up some of the most soul-stirring questions and observations of all history, according to Plato: “You are wrong, Sir, if you think a man worth anything at all should take thought for danger in living or dying. He should look when he acts to one thing: whether what he does is just or unjust, the work of a good man or a bad one.” And: “Virtue does not come from money, but money and all other human goods both public and private from virtue.” And, famously: “The unexamined life is not for man worth living.”

Though some regard him as arrogant, I like to think that Socrates found equanimity in his own humility. Certainly he was not preoccupied with himself, and initially he was disinclined to think himself wise. However, in The Apology, he recalls meeting with a man he had regarded as most wise. He came away less than impressed. “I left thinking to myself, I am wiser than that man. Neither of us probably knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he does and does not, and I do not and do not think I do. So it seems at any rate that I am wiser in this one small respect: ‘I do not think I know what I do not.’ ” Almost two millennia later, Shakespeare had a clown in As You Like It similarly declare, “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool,” and the French Renaissance thinker Michel de Montaigne embraced the Socratic tabula rasa by famously asking “Que sais-je?” or “What do I know?”

Socrates asked so many and such profound questions his name became synonymous with the practice of systematic inquiry. Today we refer to Socratic teaching, in which a law professor, say, engages in a dialectic with students to deepen their understanding of the cases they are studying. Similarly, we speak of Socratic leadership, in which a leader inspires people not by lecturing them but rather by asking a succession of thought-provoking questions. Soon, they are asking themselves one thoughtful question after another. You can find a cinematic example of Socratic leadership in Sydney Lumet’s magnificent 1957 movie 12 Angry Men, starring Henry Fonda as a dissenting juror in a murder trial. Fonda’s character uses questions to compel the other eleven jurors to rethink their knee-jerk assumptions.

I have a personal anecdote from childhood to share in this regard. My older brother and early mentor, Dave, used to harangue me repeatedly when I was twelve or thirteen: “Think, Tom! Think!” he implored me whenever I wasn’t, which was often. Finally in exasperation I pleaded: “What do you mean, ‘Think’? How do I think?” Only sixteen or so at the time, he sighed, reflected a moment, and then told me: “Just ask yourself questions. Ask yourself one good question after another.” It was priceless advice. I have never forgotten it, and I have been asking myself questions ever since. For sure there’s a lot more to critical thinking than just asking questions, but it’s as good a place to start as any and better than most. Too many people never even do that. Instead, they assume. They believe they know things they actually do not.

Indeed, both Socrates and Plato regarded the masses as unthinking, uncritical herds of sheep, unwilling or unable to reason for themselves, and therefore undeserving of democracy. They believed that leadership was the duty and calling of only the wisest among us. Theirs was the diametric opposite of the populism and anti-elitism so prevalent today.

Plato makes that point vividly with two allegories, the “Allegory of the Ship of State” and the “Allegory of the Cave,” both in The Republic. In the “Allegory of the Ship of State,” he ponders whether a vessel should be navigated by a captain who is knowledgeable of constellations in the night sky and the use of wind, or instead by the oarsmen, who have mastered neither skill and who all have their own ideas about where to sail. (A recent New Yorker cartoon struck the same chord. It showed an airline passenger, standing in midflight with his hand held high to beckon support, declaring: “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?”)

Such a hollow and false brand of egalitarianism reflects a pernicious, viral strain of anti-intellectualism that is disturbingly common in Western culture today, and it summons the need for both intellectual and emotional maturity of leadership. Between anti-vaxxers and climate-disruption deniers, we have millions of people who doubt the hard-earned and cool-headed expertise of professionals, without offering a shred of evidence to the contrary, and who are all too eager to believe utter nonsense in lieu of learned expertise. {Endnote: Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (Oxford, 2017), passim.} Isaac Asimov called it “a cult of ignorance.” In a 1980 essay, he wrote: “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’ " {Endnote: Isaac Asimov, “The Cult of Ignorance,” Newsweek, 21 January 1980.} Those of you with sharp eyes and long memories will recognize a common denominator here with Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Richard Hofstadter published in 1963 and required reading in many colleges and universities for decades afterward.

Anti-intellectualism in turn reveals a cultural schism that is rearing its noisy head in contemporary American politics. For many people, a grievance they feel overwhelms an idea they think to such an extent that thinking yields to shouting or worse. Soon, knowledgeable and thoughtful people are viewed as traitors and heretics. Adlai Stevenson II observed: “Unreason and anti-intellectualism abominate thought. Thinking implies disagreement; and disagreement implies nonconformity; and nonconformity implies heresy; and heresy implies disloyalty — so, obviously, thinking must be stopped. But shouting is not a substitute for thinking and reason is not the subversion but the salvation of freedom.” {Endnote: Adlai Stevenson, A Call to Greatness (Harper, 1954), p. 99.}

Because it is emotional as well as intellectual, the breach begs for self-discipline. It’s a bit of a stretch, but I like to illustrate it by pointing to Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger and one Steven Slater, a nobody famous for fifteen minutes whom you have probably and thankfully forgotten. Sully, as you recall, saved the lives of a hundred fifty-five passengers and crewmembers in 2009 after the Airbus A320 he was piloting for U.S. Airways struck a flock of geese on takeoff from LaGuardia. The embodiment of cool professionalism, he successfully landed the aircraft minutes later in the Hudson River. In contrast, Slater, a flight attendant for JetBlue, lost his cool in 2010 over a little provocation that no one else noticed. Impulsively deciding to quit his job as the plane pulled up to a JFK gate, Slater grabbed a couple of beers, profanely announced his resignation over the public address, deployed the evacuation chute, and slid down to the tarmac. His petulant tantrum inconvenienced if not endangered passengers and cost his employer as much as $30,000 just to repack the chute. Imagine if Sully had lost his composure like that.

Back to Plato. In the “Allegory of the Cave,” a dialogue between his brother Glaucon and his old professor Socrates, Plato wonders what would happen if someone who had never seen sunlight — say, a man imprisoned in a cave who could see only the flickering shadows cast by a flame behind him — were to be released in the open air on a sunny day. The sunshine serves as an analogue for factual reality. Plato speculates that the man would reject as unreal everything he sees. That is to say we are creatures of our bedrock beliefs, benighted as they may be. In other words, “Seeing is believing” is only the half of it. “Believing is seeing” is true as well. We see only that which we already believe to be true and expect to see. Confirmation bias is a powerful dynamic in social psychology, and it has big implications for anyone who aspires to lead people.

As Socrates was teacher to Plato, so Plato was teacher to Aristotle (and Aristotle eventually to Alexander the Great). Aristotle left behind a huge legacy of thought for today’s leaders. Among his philosophical bequests are the tripartite concepts of persuasive appeal: logos, pathos, and ethos. Logos is all about facts, logic, and words: in other words, persuasion as most people are apt to think of it. Aristotle said it was the least of the three. Pathos always trumps it. Pathos is the appeal to a listener’s emotional state, often centering on fear or hope. But pathos in turn is no match for ethos, the character and credibility of the speaker or writer who seeks to persuade. “It is not merely the thing that is said but the man who says it that counts, the character that breathes through the sentences,” the eighteenth-century British statesman William Pitt the Younger is credited with saying. The lesson for leaders is clear: Be alert to the perceptions and misperceptions of you by others. Be a person of virtue. Manage your own conduct. As another mentor advised me years ago: Just do the right thing and wait to be caught at it.

* * *

But how do you know the right thing to do? The Golden Rule, some form of which is taught by every religion, is a good place to start, but it leaves a lot of wiggle room. For one thing, it lacks any substantive direction. You can read into it anything you want. For another, it is so universal it blends into the woodwork. You can easily ignore it, and most folks do. Finally, too many people unthinkingly take it as an injunction to treat people as they themselves expect to be treated, not as they wish to be treated. That already amounts to a clenched fist behind their back.

For that matter, we can reasonably ask whether it is even possible to know with certainty the right thing to do. Most of us have a moral compass of some sort, and we think we intuitively know. But do we actually? It isn’t always as clear as our parents and teachers suggested. Maybe that’s why people argue so much. For some grounded guidance, we can look again to Aristotle and to a couple of other philosophers who lived more recently: Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill.

Aristotle, not surprisingly, pointed to character. His great work, Nicomachean Ethics, beseeches us to be the best persons we can be, by adopting the highest ideals of personal responsibility. He put a premium on such moral cornerstones as thrift, courtesy, fairness, respect, honesty, civility, lawfulness, and so forth — the virtues that we commonly associate with the Scout oath.

It sounds straightforward, but is it always? In ways large and small, despots and control freaks routinely trample over those ideals, so why shouldn’t everyone else? Theirs are classic examples of honoring a value by ignoring it. In fact, all those grand virtues can vary from culture to culture and from era to era. Adolf Eichmann, the unapologetic Nazi mastermind behind the Holocaust, infamously claimed at trial that he was virtuous, because German culture had long prized fealty to authority, and he was “just following orders.” He was convicted and executed for war crimes, of course, but not before the American journalist Hannah Arendt memorialized his defense as “the banality of evil.” Can anything appear virtuous if seen in its own light? It’s a scary thought, but even Hitler, Stalin, and Mao had their apologists, and all of us are capable of rationalizing the irrational.

Kant, the great Prussian philosopher who lived from 1724 to 1804, begged to differ. He urged reliance not on wishy-washy virtues but rather on firm, clear-cut principles, which are less yielding to the vicissitudes of time and place. Kant believed that people should live according to certain timeless principles or truths, which are always valid and always governing. He called them “categorical imperatives.” Thus, he asserted, it is always wrong to lie, always wrong to cheat, always wrong to kill — regardless of circumstances or consequences.

The always is refreshing. Most of us grew up respecting boundaries, and here we have some. It feels good. But is it realistic? It may have worked in a simpler world, long ago. It is unlikely to work today, a time when moral authority has fractured into a cacophony of voices, when people are in fundamental disagreement on the moral imperatives themselves, and when many instinctively render judgment based not on principles, facts, and reason but rather on their self-defined social identity. Conservatives and liberals, the rich and poor, city dwellers and rural folks, college educated and not, all plainly have broad intellectual if not moral chasms between them. Religions, too. Even the Bible, the Torah, and the Koran have their internal inconsistencies and urge harsh punishments for what most of us in the twenty-first century regard as fine, upstanding behavior. At least Kant had a straightforward rule for deciding whether a particular course of action was right or wrong: universality. In other words, you just imagine everyone doing whatever you are contemplating. Would the world be better off or worse off?

Bentham (1748-1832) and Mill (1806-1873) argued for a situational approach, centering on consequences and known as utilitarianism. It emphasizes the outward manifestations of our ethical choices, and it urges the course of action that creates the most benefit (known as utility) or happiness (known as hedonism) for the greatest number of people. A simple matter of arithmetic, right? Not so fast. This approach, too, has severe limitations. The classic illustration involves a healthy man and four mortally ill persons waiting for organ transplants. The four would be better off by killing the man and harvesting his heart, lungs, kidneys, and liver for their own use. Though the donor would die in the process, four others would live because of it. That alone would satisfy a utilitarian calculus. {Endnote: This is one of many variations of the “trolley problem” in ethics. Wikipedia has a surprisingly good description of it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem (accessed 26 August 2021).}

You can extrapolate from there. Especially for an amoral leader who’s all too willing to stretch the truth, utilitarianism opens the moral door wide — to war, enslavement, manipulation, economic exploitation, and lying and cheating. That’s all the truer for someone who would deny the full humanity of a racial, ethnic, religious, or national group. Unfortunately, as our sad collective history shows, that includes much of the world at one time or another — some of it in ethnic cleansing not so long ago, some of it in war and conquest, and some of it in continuing political strife over minority rights. Indeed, even the foundational documents of the United States reflect it; the Declaration of Independence uses the word savages for indigenous peoples, and the U.S. Constitution counted enslaved Americans as three-fifths of persons.

* * *

Before moving along, let’s double back to ancient Greece and Rome to say hello to Cicero and to see what the Skeptics and Stoics thought about leadership. The early American president John Adams heralded Cicero as the greatest exemplar of both statesman and philosopher. Classics historian Anthony Everitt, an admirer of Cicero, quotes a contemporary from Roman antiquity attesting that Cicero “never told a lie and could not tolerate lying in others.” While both testaments may amount to hagiography, we also have Cicero himself to comment on the importance of uncertainty. As a Skeptic, he took pride in avoiding the misguided belief that he knew something he actually did not. Everitt tells us that Cicero, still in his twenties, beseeched others to “not recklessly and presumptuously assume something to be true.” {Endnote: Anthony Everitt, Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician (Random House, 2001), pp. vii, 44-46.} Everitt’s eponymous biography of Cicero is a readable introduction to the life of this essential Roman republican, who, like Socrates, paid with his life for his conscience and honor. {Endnote: “Cicero by Anthony Everitt,” Lawrence Osborne, Salon, 27 August 2002,https://www.salon.com/2002/08/27/cicero/ (accessed 22 August 2021).}

For leaders and aspiring leaders of the twenty-first century, Cicero has something else, and something especially apropos, to say on expediency and morality. For altogether too many leaders today, morality is either an airy philosophical matter with no actual claim on their decisions and conduct or a theoretical construct deserving of all the high-minded rhetoric they can muster, but no more. Expediency wins, even at the expense of sowing evermore seeds of cynicism. Cicero would have nothing of it. In his final essay, ironically published posthumously after assassins sawed off his head, he wrote adamantly: “There can be no expediency where there is immorality.” {Endnote: Cicero, De Officiis, Book III, p. 303 (Loeb Classical Library, 1913), https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cicero/de_Officiis/3B*.html (accessed 2 September 2021).}

The Skeptic sensibility requires a healthy humility. British polymath Bertrand Russell argued that “the trouble with the world” is that “the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt,” while the Irish dramatist and poet William Butler Yeats opined: "The best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.” Maybe it isn’t their fault. Maybe they were just born that way. The wry English comedian John Cleese captured the irony: “If you’re very, very stupid, how can you realize you’re very, very stupid? You’d have to be relatively intelligent to realize how stupid you really are.” Humility it is, then.

Stoicism dates back to the third century pre-common, when it was developed and taught by Zeno of Citium on the island of Cyprus. Most people today probably associate it with Seneca the Younger, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, who lived in Rome in the first and second centuries. (The Art of Living by Epictetus and Meditations by Marcus are still popular and worthwhile.) Their philosophy counsels us to accept reality as it is rather than distort it to fit a preconceived notion or world view, and to prudently manage our own response to problematic events and the difficulties they impose on us.

Over the last two or three decades, a contemporary brand of Stoicism has emerged and is becoming more popular, but the rudiments of the original Stoic philosophy are relevant to the twenty-first century. In a nutshell, the Stoics recognize that some things are under our control and others are not; that we must take responsibility for our reactions and judgments about things, and that we are called on to act with virtue.

For leaders today, Stoicism counsels us to act with deliberate independence from fear or anger, to align our own assumptions to reality, and to control our own responses to events that come our way. Stoics believe it is counterproductive to do otherwise, and we see ample evidence of that in the choices of people who live for the moment, bow to destructive emotions and urges, and drift with the winds of popular opinion. Viktor Frankl, a psychoanalyst who survived four Nazi concentration camps and subsequently wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, relied on Stoic philosophy to survive the brutality around him in World War II. His essential lesson: We cannot choose the events that come our way, but we can choose our response to them. {Endnote: Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Beacon, 1946), pp. 112-115.}

For us in the twenty-first century, the core of Stoicism is plain to see in the Serenity Prayer, written by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in the depths of the Great Depression and later adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve-step programs. You probably know it by heart: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” (Or, as a slapstick version goes: “God, grant me enough wine to accept the things I cannot change, enough coffee to change the things I can, and enough books to know the difference.”) That’s it in a nutshell.

The long list of noteworthy Stoic scholars and rhetoricians includes Seneca and Quintilian. Seneca explored the devastating consequences of uncontrolled anger and hubris. He clearly appreciated the complexity of human relationships, as well. {Endnote: Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire (Princeton, 1996) and Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Harvard, 1999).} Quintilian pointed to the danger of paralysis by analysis: “While we deliberate over how to begin a thing, it grows too late to begin it." At the very least, instead of idly pushing yourself, you might just remove the obstacle of your own inertia; get started, and let momentum pull you forward. In addition, echoing Aristotle’s emphasis of ethos over pathos over logos, Quintilian reminds us that the best speaker must also be a fundamentally good person. When we hear praise of a contemporary leader’s debating skill or oratory, but we know him to be a person of little moral courage or discipline, we should cast a dubious eye as to whether he deserves the encomiums. Again, I’m not asking for perfection, but a lifelong track record of neglecting commitments, abusing privileges, and blaming other people for your own shortcomings is hard to ignore. People who freely do ignore it reveal themselves to be not apostles of philosophical wisdom — indeed, not even the followers of a leader — but mere little tools of political power.

No survey of historical thought on leadership is complete without the Bard. William Shakespeare wrote multiple plays that spoke to the wanton abuse and reckless errors of regal authority. Macbeth, for example, illustrates the critical importance of morality as the foundation of leadership. King Lear shows the peril of believing the blandishments of sycophants around you; someone always wants something, and they will stoop to wile to get it. In The Merchant of Venice, we see the value of justice and mercy in the exercise of authority. Hamlet reminds us to think and speak only with conviction: As the king rotely prays for forgiveness with no remorse in his heart, he laments: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” How many of us today talk impetuously and thoughtlessly, often for no reason beyond sounding smart or appearing participative? In an age of instant tweeting, it is endemic to our times. I look on this simple verse as a reminder to speak with self-discipline and to speak courageously from the heart as well as the mind, but also and primarily just to keep my big trap shut and listen a whole lot more.

We must mention a few other Enlightenment thinkers whose work bears heavily on leadership in the twenty-first century: Voltaire, Bacon, Hume, Hobbes, and Rousseau. Voltaire was a noisy iconoclast, witty and satirical, who feverishly and sarcastically challenged both secular and ecclesiastical authority, and who carried on a lively correspondence with Catherine the Great in Russia. I like to think we see a little of his legacy whenever someone speaks out against despotism or willful command and control of any sort. Francis Bacon and David Hume taught us to rely on fact more than supposition, and to reason from evidence. We need to remember that now more than ever. A century apart, Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau each developed the idea of an implicit social contract between leaders and the led. From it we can deduce that leadership, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder and emerges in the space between the leader and the led. As agents of purposeful change, real leaders are in effect crowned by the people they seek to lead. By further extension, that means leadership is work, for leaders must earn the support that enables them to ask large followership by the rest of us.

* * *

All of which brings us to the doorstep of modernity. Among the many contemporary voices we could cite are two playwrights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw. Far ahead of his time, Ibsen published an oeuvre of dramas that examined leaders, morality, and society. In particular, An Enemy of the People portrays a physician who stands alone against politicians and civic boosters by daring to tell the truth about a town’s contaminated water supply, and The Pillars of Society asks us to peer into the often-hidden nexus between private interests and public investments. In Man and Superman, Shaw dares us to question our own longstanding assumptions, and he invites us to disruption, to conflict of our own making: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Shaw took incidental inspiration from Friedrich Nietzsche, the iconoclastic and heterodox Prussian philosopher probably most famous for celebrating nihilism — thus rejecting any and all absolute values or rigid certainties, so as to live authentically and deeply — and for declaring the death of God. We’re interested in Nietzsche for another reason altogether: his zealous preoccupation with growth and perfection.

You can think of Nietzsche as a godfather of continuous improvement, in a way, for he was constantly striving to better himself. He pointed to the importance of selbstuberwindung, or “self-overcoming.” Our best efforts to ease the discomfort and pain of life are wrongheaded, he believed, because they deny us the incentive to learn, grow, and ultimately fulfill our human destiny. Rather, he thought that to be fully human is to grow constantly. We are called to growth, just as a seed breaks the soil as a sprout and eventually becomes a towering oak tree. Thus, the core questions that every leader should wrestle with are: How did I grow today? How can I grow tomorrow? What bad habits did I cast away today? What insights can I take heed of tomorrow? For those leaders who captain an organization, the questions writ large become: What did our company (or agency or university or team or battalion or orchestra) learn today? What can we learn tomorrow?

Nietzsche didn’t invent the concept of the Übermensch — or Superman, the ideal human character — but it became a centerpiece of his philosophy. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he explored components of character useful to any leader: self-determination, creativity, improvement, perseverance, flexibility, self-mastery, self-confidence, cheerfulness, and courage. These seem not dissimilar to Aristotle’s virtues, and all are certainly relevant in the twenty-first century. (Lest any readers misunderstand, Übermensch has absolutely nothing to do with supposed Aryan superiority, though it is apparently true that Nietzsche’s sister had Nazi sympathies and called Hitler’s attention to her late brother’s writing, and it is true that Hitler misappropriated the term for his own sick purposes.) {Endnote: Randall Scott Firestone, “Nietzsche's Best Life: The Ten Greatest Attributes of the Übermensch, and a Comparison to Aristotle's Virtuous Person,” Open Journal of Philosophy 7:377-407, August 2017.}

Just as Shaw took inspiration from Nietzsche, so Nietzsche looked to the American Transcendentalists as a guiding light. The humanist blogger Maria Popova tells us that Nietzsche admired Ralph Waldo Emerson’s spirit of self-reliance. {Endnote: Maria Popova, “Trust Yourself: Emerson on Self-Reliance as the Essence of Genius and What It Means to Be a Nonconformist,” Brain Pickings, 6 April 2016, https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/04/06/emerson-self-reliance (accessed 15 August 2021).} Forty years before Nietzsche elegantly observed “No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Emerson had written:

“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.”

The world has those American Transcendentalists of the nineteenth century largely to thank for its understanding of civil disobedience. The likes of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela, among others, have paid homage to Henry David Thoreau in particular. Thoreau didn’t pioneer the use of civil disobedience — that honor may go to the aforementioned Sophocles, whose Antigone defied Creon, king of Thebes — but he was exceptionally articulate about it. In his Essay on Civil Disobedience, Thoreau called on his fellowman to stop paying taxes in protest of slavery. After all, a conscience that does not exercise dominion over conduct isn’t much of a conscience at all. Gandhi found a linchpin between Thoreau’s thinking and his own concept of non-violent resistance to the British Raj. He called it satyagraha. It emboldened Nelson Mandela in apartheid-riven South Africa and inspired Martin Luther King in the Jim Crow states of the American South.

Anyone who works in a modern bureaucracy can relate to one other Nietzschean theme: an antipathy to groupthink and a scorn for purposeless meetings. Nietzsche famously observed: “Insanity in individuals is something rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.” He didn’t say so, but perhaps we can think of genius as its mirror opposite. The great Oglala Sioux warrior Crazy Horse could certainly relate; a loner’s loner, he was well-known for a lifelong aversion to committees and to meetings with anyone for any reason. {Endnote: Larry McMurtry, Crazy Horse: A Life (Random House, 2005).}

Finally, in the mid-twentieth century — about the same time as those beatniks we mentioned in the Preface were doing their thing — a handful of European playwrights like Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco published prescient dramas that earned their collective name, the Theatre of the Absurd. Two in particular by Ionesco have compelling insights on leadership, particularly as the world had witnessed it since the 1920s.

Ionesco often used a character by the name of Bérenger as an observer and narrator to represent himself. In a 1959 drama titled Rhinocéros, Bérenger watches in disbelief as, one by one, his friends morph into rhinoceroses. Bérenger eventually stands alone. The play is understood to be a statement of protest against dehumanizing ideologies that demand conformity, which Ionesco witnessed as fascists gained control in his native Romania in the 1930s. Arguably even more relevant today, Rhinocéros is a reminder to think for oneself and especially to question absurdities that everyone else is taking for granted. A few years earlier, in a 1953 short play titled The Leader, Ionesco depicts a small group of persons awaiting the arrival of “The Leader,” who, when he finally shows up, is a figure without a head. Nevertheless, the onlookers herald him as a genius, and they are thrilled to have seen him. It is a vivid, timely reminder of the absurdity of a personality cult’s mindless thrall around a “leader,” and it recalls Erich Fromm’s analysis of the dynamics of populism and fascism: People so need a sense of belonging, of community, that they will sacrifice their own freedom to get it. {Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (Holt, 1941), pp. 205-274.} We have already seen the same phenomenon in the twenty-first century, and we will see it again, and again, and again.

We could go on and on. Our cursory review of all these thinkers of yore was intentionally brief, but it should be enough to remind us of the need for whole leadership that pays its dividends to the people it seeks to lead. We should also remember that these concepts are not new. In fact, many of them date back thousands of years, if only we should take notice and listen. Given our myriad challenges and our inadequate leadership of the last few decades, the twenty-first century is an exceptionally propitious time for it.

Praxis

Here are some specific questions you can ponder and things you can do to understand leadership more clearly, think about it more rigorously, and ultimately lead more productively in the twenty-first century:

• Which of the four archetypes — absolute, traditional, modern, or inspirational — do you experience the most? In what ways?

• Which of them do you wish you experienced less? Which more?

• Which of the insights of the philosophers and writers we cited can you apply to your leadership? How? What do they require you to start doing or stop doing? What other changes do they impose on you?

[end of chapter 3]

Important Note to Publishers

Building Better Leaders is nearing completion. We expect a final manuscript to be ready by October 31, 2021. It is the first of four planned books on leadership and its communication. Subsequent titles will be:

Juice: Better Communication for Better Leadership (a deep dive into practical application of the Rainbow, GearBox, Engagement Diamond, and Trust Tulip models) in late 2022.
Better Leadership Manual: A Field Guide (models, exercises, strategies and tactics, templates, checklists, analytical tools, conceptual maps, practical advice, Q&A, tough-love questions, journaling prompts, problem situations) in mid-2023.
Waveland Avenue: Essays on the Art of Leadership (a collection of new and revised essays, articles, and blog posts) in 2024.

Other books that may follow:

To Serve or Be Served: That Is the Question for Better Leadership (a deep dive into the praxis of servant leadership).
Control Freaks: A Brief History (a concise survey of tyranny in government, business, and personal contexts).
25 Great Movies for Building Better Leaders (synopses, leadership insights, production details, awards and reviews (Rotten Tomatoes, Siskel and Ebert), pivotal scenes, character development, commentary, quotations, discussion questions).
Truth or Troth: An Inquiry Into What We Believe to Be True (an exploration as to what counts as truth).
Of, By, and For Leaders: One Hundred Biographies to Inspire Great Leadership (a compendium of my reviews of excellent biographies and memoirs of great leaders).

Important Note to Agents

At present the author is unrepresented. Please direct inquiries to the author at thomas.lee@arceil.com (telephone 650-464-1770). The full manuscript is available to agents and publishers on request.

The author’s LinkedIn profile can be viewed at www.linkedin.com/leadershipexpert. His website is at www.arceil.com.

Building Better Leaders

Building Better Leaders:

Whole Leadership for the Twenty-First Century

Thomas J. Lee

© Copyright 2021. Thomas J. Lee. All rights reserved.

www.betterleadersbook.com

thomas.lee@arceil.com

(650) 464-1770

What Leaders Are Saying About

Building Better Leaders

“It’s doubtful Apollo 13 could have returned safely to Earth without dedicated and inspirational leadership on the ground. As the commander of that spaceflight, I have been grateful every day since.

Captain James A. Lovell (ret.), Commander, Apollo 13

“In BUILDING BETTER LEADERS, author Thomas J. Lee builds an emphatic case for rethinking leadership. His concept of whole leadership is especially resonating. This is an incredibly well-written book, which can serve as a blueprint for first-time and seasoned leaders alike.”

Dave Whan, Vice President, People & Culture

Mike Bennett, Vice President, Communications, Honeywell

Richard Spies, former CEO, Pan American Energy

About the Author

Sound Bites

(Quotable Quotes)

About the Book

(From the Preface)

My Thesis

(From the Introduction)

Excerpts

(From the Introduction)

(From Chapter 1)

(From Chapter 1)

(From Chapter 1)

(From the Introduction)

(From Chapter 1)

(From Chapter 4)

(From Chapter 6)

(From Chapter 6)

(From Chapter 6)

(From Chapter 7)

(From Chapter 8)

Building Better Leaders:

Whole Leadership for the Twenty-First Century

(www.betterleadersbook.com)

Thomas J. Lee

© Copyright 2021. Thomas J. Lee. All rights reserved.

www.betterleadersbook.com

thomas.lee@arceil.com

(650) 464-1770

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Introduction: Our Crisis of Leadership

Part I: Rethinking Leadership

1 Leadership Good and Bad: What It Is and Why It Matters

2 Moving from Position to Purpose: Rediscovering the Potential of Real Leadership

3 Troglodytes and Philosophers in the Corner Office: The Evolution of Leadership

Part II: The Soul of Leadership

4 Go East, Young Leader: The Yin and Yang of Managing and Leading

5 Tiptoe Through the Tulips: The Four Petals of Trustworthy Leadership

6 Connection Is Everything: Clear, Credible, Coherent, Cogent Communication

Part III: Whole Leadership

7 The Whole Leader: Emotionally Mature Leadership and the Problem of Charisma

8 First, Be of Service: The Secret to All Great Leadership

9 The Gestalt of Leadership: The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts

Appendix: A Leadership Lexicon

Acknowledgements

Endnotes

Index

Preface

* * *

* * *

* * *

Introduction

Our Crisis of Leadership

* * *

* * *

Chapter 1

Leadership Good and Bad

What It Is and Why It Matters

Praxis

Chapter 2

Moving from Position to Purpose

Rediscovering the Potential of Large Leadership

Five Lenses on Leadership

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