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Idea
Leadership

 

Feb 2nd 2009
From Economist.com

 

Leadership is “one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth”, wrote one man in a position to know. In business, interest has focused on three aspects of the phenomenon:

 

• the nature and behaviour of leaders;

 

• the nature and behaviour of those who are led;

 

• the structure of the organisation in which the leading takes place.

 

Most is written about the first of these. There is a visceral fascination with leaders and their character, and with the great issue that surrounds them: can they be made or are they only ever born?

 

There is no general agreement about the qualities of a leader. Field Marshal Montgomery thought that a leader “must have infectious optimism, and the determination to persevere in the face of difficulties. He must also radiate confidence, even when he himself is not too certain of the outcome”. Henri Fayol, an early French writer on management, said that the leader’s task is “thinking out a plan and ensuring its success”. It is, he added, “one of the keenest satisfactions for an intelligent man to experience”.

 

David Ogilvy, founder of an advertising agency, Ogilvy & Mather, and himself a leader of some quality, said:
Great leaders almost always exude self-confidence. They are never petty. They are never buck-passers. They pick themselves up after defeat … They do not suffer from the crippling need to be universally loved … The great leaders I have known have been curiously complicated men.

 

This view of the leader as complicated is supported by the personality of some undeniably great leaders, such as Napoleon and Winston Churchill. It may also lie behind the fact that up to 60% of past presidents of the United States and prime ministers of Britain had lost their fathers before they were 14.

 

The leadership of people like Alfred P. Sloan (see article), the legendary boss of General Motors, however, owed more to the structure and systems that they put in place in their organisations than it did on the individual’s personality. Henry Ford II’s success in revitalising his family’s firm after the second world war depended largely on his reorganisation of the company. The man himself was a jet-setting playboy who rarely met the David Ogilvy standards of a great leader.

 

The leading management thinker on leadership in recent years has been Warren Bennis (see article), a professor at the University of Southern California. He has said that successful leaders follow an almost universal principle of management “as true for orchestra conductors, army generals, football coaches, and school superintendents as for corporate executives”. When they came to head an organisation, successful leaders “paid attention to what was going on, determined what part of the events at hand would be important for the future of the organisation, set a new direction, and concentrated the attention of everyone in the organisation on it”. He also found that the vast majority of successful leaders were white males who remained married to the same person all their lives.

 

Abraham Zaleznik, in an influential article in Harvard Business Review, argued that “because leaders and managers are basically different, the conditions favourable to one may be inimical to the growth of the other”. In other words, a long career as a manager may not be the best training for a leader. Yet this is the training that most business leaders get.

 

The nature of leadership has been discussed since time immemorial. In perhaps the most famous book on the subject, “The Prince”, written in Florence in the 1520s, Niccolò Machiavelli set out his ideas about what a prince must do to survive and prosper, surrounded as he inevitably will be by general human malevolence. Dedicated to Lorenzo de Medici, the book draws on examples from history, of Alexander the Great and of the German city states, to teach its readers some eternal lessons. Many a corporate chief has a copy near his bedside.

 

Narcissism of leaders and authority figures

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Celebrity narcissists

 

 

 

Narcissism and Religion

 

 

http://malignantselflove.tripod.com/faq47.html

Further reading

 

Bennis, W. and Nanus, B., “Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge”, Harper & Row, 1985; 2nd edn, HarperBusiness, 1997

 

Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R. and McKee, A., “Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence”, Harvard Business School Press, 2003

 

Jay, A., “Management and Machiavelli”, Penguin, 1970

 

Kotter, J.P., “The Leadership Factor”, Free Press, 1988

 

McAlpine, A., “The New Machiavelli”, John Wiley & Sons, 1998

 

Zaleznik, A., “Managers and Leaders: Are they Different?”, Harvard Business Review, May–June, 1977

 

More management ideas

 

This article is adapted from “The Economist Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus”, by Tim Hindle (Profile Books; 322 pages; £20). The guide has the low-down on over 100 of the most influential business-management ideas and more than 50 of the world’s most influential management thinkers. To buy this book, please visit our online shop.