THE TROUBLE WITH LEADERSHIP
- Dudley Tal Stokes
- Mar 18, 2020
- 4 min read
In any area of human life where we need to act in groups, whether it is war, politics, business, or sport, leadership has been identified as the key thing. The most important thing. The difference-maker.
Leaders are visible, vocal, and capable of seeing the vision and communicating at every opportunity. They rally the troops and the faithful, convince the skeptics, and make their vision a reality; this is leadership.
The trouble with leadership is that so many examples of good leadership have produced poor results:
The Iraq war, the financial crisis of 2008, the destruction of middle America, the NE of England, and most of Wales and Scotland. The leaders? Bush, Blair, Greenspan, Obama. Individuals surrounded by mystique, with a commanding presence and a command of the language. All this while seemingly knowing things we couldn’t possibly guess at (okay, maybe not Bush). These leaders weaved their magic, offering us hope, and we, in large enough numbers, got up and followed into the abyss.
Leadership, and its now accepted characteristics of charm, charisma, and good looks, suffers from the same sickness that has created the Incompetent Citizen. It is but a chapter in the playbook of How to Exploit the Workings of the Brain to Create and Maintain Elites Drawn from the Knowledge Classes in a Position of Ascendancy. From this position, they are free to recreate the world in their own image.
In so doing, they have moved away from the real underpinning of leadership: management.
In simpler times, the essential qualification for leadership was the ability to manage. As things became more complex, management would inform leadership in deciding strategy. This change signposted the route to a destination that might have been desirable: for leadership to communicate and excite. Most importantly, management executed, and this tended, at least in the areas outside of politics, to give management the upperhand. When the math said no, leadership changed course as did the management.
The financial crisis of 2008 was a triumph of leadership over management, in what should be the most demanding of disciplines: not only business, but finance. Greenspan set a global course cemented in the minds of ‘leaders’ by incomprehensible statements that many of us incorrectly assumed he at least understood. ‘Rock star’ leaders rose to the heads of large institutions, and in a soon-to-be-surpassed display of recklessness, built empires from cardboard. When they came crashing down, other ‘leaders’ rose and, defying capitalism’s cardinal rule, invented an entirely new concept: “too big to fail.”
“Too big to manage” would be more accurate. As organizations scale, leadership becomes very political and management declines. Catastrophe follows not far behind.
This, however, is not inevitable. We have examples of leadership in its proper place in business: 1. The Berkshire Hathaway pair of Warren Buffet and Charlie Monger. Both are individuals of exceptional capacity, with Buffet’s understanding of the capital markets complimented by Monger’s gritty real life experiences.
2. Brain Clough and George Taylor, who won the European Cup twice with Nottingham Forest; a team from a city of just over half a million at the time. Pep Guardiola has not been the same since Domenec Torrent left for New York FC and has really struggled since his replacement, Mikel Arteta, left for Arsenal.
I suspect that there are many more examples from various fields that I do not know, but it seems to me that the best leadership comes from teams in which one member is the outward looking public interface, and the other is concerned with the nuts and bolts of how things work.
One team being shaped right now is Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings. BoJo, like his hero Churchill, was born for command, and has not been comfortable in the lesser positions on his way to the top. He has quite sensibly aligned himself with Dominic Cummings, who, when all is said and done, is essentially a manager that is deeply interested in how things work. Just as well, as the road ahead for the UK is going to demand exceptional competence and effort.
One space to watch is the automotive sector, with its switch to battery and other technologies while fleeing the internal combustion engine. Tesla with its charismatic leader, Elon Musk, is valued more than General Motors, a company several times its size in every other respect. Elon Musk has almost single handedly put the electric vehicle into the minds of people as the solution to vehicle emissions, and almost all other manufacturers are struggling to catch them. With the exception of Toyota, whose management has done the math and figured that there is no way that the company will have enough batteries or that the batteries will have enough range to put a dent in global transportation needs. Ergo, Toyota has gone aggressively into hybrid vehicles, meaning internal combustion engines supporting batteries (or vice versa), while making the engines burn increasingly cleaner. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
This is an interesting perspective very timely as there is so much talk about leadership with not enough analysis of what it really means and how it functions in the organisation