In the first part, we explored the question, “Are modern leaders making management lessons look absurd?” In this part, we will dig deeper into the spiritual nature of leadership, the personality of leaders, and the “conspiring universe.”
In international relations, there is something called the “great man theory”. It posits that all important historical events are willed by leaders who bend the world to their whims. It is an attractive theory because it is elegant and establishes easy causality. Examples – Gandhi got India independence; Hitler killed millions, etc., though there were thousands of people involved in both endeavours. Our limbic systems are wired to connect us to humans, and there is a strand that links us to the dead leaders of our tribes. Hence, the hypothesis is that we are slaves to myths and stories.
Liberal historians have taken great pains pointing to various extraneous causes of world-defining events. But in disguise, perhaps they wanted to diminish the “great man theory” lest students are stoked and cause trouble on their way to becoming great men themselves. They perhaps thought that by teaching humility and infusing dispassionate analysis, they were appealing to the better angels in their students.
But not all future leaders get brainwashed by scribblings on typed paper or lectures by intellectuals. They go and do their “thang,” driven by instincts that flow from forces beyond.
In the classic, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, Joseph Campbell refers to leadership in almost spiritual terms. He says, “The cosmogonic cycle is now to be carried forward not by the gods, who have become invisible, but by the heroes, more or less human in character, through whom the world destiny is realised.” In Hinduism, power is postulated as the manifestation of the Ma Shakti.
But, whenever an individual shows promise, we become sceptical. It may be due to “lessons taught” from history, our innate wisdom about the fallibility of humans, the risk-averse nature of our species or just plain old jealousy. So we put the wannabe heroes through the grind before we ordain them any greatness.
The archetypal hero in “The Hero with a thousand faces” undergoes life-changing tribulations. Not everyone is put through the cauldron or chooses to be put through (Think Jayalalitha!). We know about Steve Jobs’s trip to India and Musk going to the verge of bankruptcy with Tesla.
The unstructured nature of organisations and systems poses additional challenges. Prime examples are politics and the entertainment industry. In politics, organisations cannot be designed deliberately. They are products of time, social forces and burning personal ambitions. Prometheuses have to grab fire. In ideologically driven parties, the cadres must be enthused and given directions as the hero climbs up the totem pole on their backs.
If the heroes are not acknowledged magnanimously, they can simply walk away. Batman could stay a carefree millionaire. Naveen Patnaik could have been a writer, and Ratan Tata could have been an architect.
Even the Buddha, after his spiritual triumph in Gaya, doubted whether the message of realisation could be communicated. Thanks to Brahma, he decided not to retreat away from society.
Timing and personality – Does the universe conspire?
Two Supreme Leaders of China, coming from the same school of thought and organisation, captured their zeitgeists differently. Deng in the 1980s and Xi in the last decade had such contrasting perspectives.
Deng Xiaoping said
- hide our capacities and bide our time
- be good at maintaining a low profile, never claim leadership
Xi Jinping said
- be proactive & achieve things
- Unite & dare to fight
How does the personality-timing fit (like the product-market fit) happen? Do the times choose the leader? Or does the leader creatively mould his personality to suit the times to claim leadership? These are subtly different questions from “How does the leader shape the times?” Maybe we should settle on the “universe conspires” proposition!
Such questions sound like great mysteries. However, the leader’s tunnel vision is undistracted by such analysis. Clouding of thoughts distracts from the focus on actions. Aerodynamically, the bumblebee shouldn’t be able to fly, but it does!
In his immortal speech, former American President Theodore Roosevelt spoke about the leader, the hero, as the “Man in the Arena”. It is worthwhile to recall the best part of the speech:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
In the next part, we will see if we can be heroes ourselves.
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