The End of Leadership

Barbara Kellerman

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780062069160
• eBook ISBN: 9780062069177
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

From one of the pioneers in the field of leadership studies comes a provocative reassessment of how people lead in the digital age: in The End of Leadership, Barbara Kellerman reveals a new way of thinking about leadership—and followership—in the twenty-first century. Building off of the strengths and insights of her work as a scholar and a teacher, Kellerman critically reexamines our most strongly-held assumptions about the role of leadership in driving success. Revealing which of our beliefs have become dangerously out-of-date thanks to advances in social media culture, she also calls into question the value of the so-called “leadership industry” itself. Asking whether leadership can truly be taught, Kellerman forces us to think critically and expansively about how to thrive as leaders in a global information age.

Part I

Power Shift

Chapter 1

Historical Trajectory—lessening power

Leadership has a long history and a clear trajectory. More than anything else it is about the devolution of power—from those up top to those down below.

On High

In the beginning we had gods and goddesses. They were heroes, or hero-leaders, removed from ordinary people and quotidian concerns, to be venerated and emulated and fixated on—notwithstanding an Achilles’ heel or even fatal flaw. Some hero-leaders were imagined, for example, the Greek god Zeus, and his daughter Athena. Others were (or thought to be) real, men such as Abraham, Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed.

Hero-leaders are part of our collective psyche—they serve a psychological purpose. Mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote, “Freud, Jung, and their followers have demonstrated irrefutably that the logic, the heroes, and the deeds of myth survive into modern times.”¹ Freud certainly was fixated on both leadership and followership, convinced not only that “the leader of the group is still the dreaded primal father,” but that the group itself, all groups, long for a strong leader. “The group,” he maintained, “has an extreme passion for authority”; and individuals have “a thirst for obedience.”² Similarly, Jung developed a heroic archetype, a hero-leader who appears and reappears, everywhere, throughout human history.

The heroes of myth and legend, otherworldly and oddly familiar at the same time, become so only after battling demons and emerging triumphant, if scathed and inexorably changed. Campbell writes, “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”³

Lest this voyage to elsewhere and back seem impossibly remote, separate and distinct from our own mundane lives, think of recent hero-leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela, both of whom survived stretches in solitary confinement and, in Mandela’s case, long incarceration, only to emerge from their ordeals more powerful as leaders than ever. Or think even of Apple’s iconic CEO, the late Steve Jobs, who, after first being fired and later fighting pancreatic cancer, which is nearly always lethal, returned, repeatedly, until he could no longer do so, to lead his company and produce products more wondrous than their predecessors.

Our longing for a hero-leader is, then, ancient and simultaneously completely contemporaneous.⁴ When nineteenth-century philosopher Thomas Carlyle wrote of great men, great leaders, he invoked the word hero and exalted the “heroic” in history. “We have undertaken to discourse here . . . on what I call Hero-worship and the Heroic in human affairs.”⁵ And when countless numbers of Americans screamed and stomped for Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign, it reflected widespread wishful thinking—that here was a hero for our own times, a Great Man who had overcome great odds (most obviously his being an African American) to create change and cure what ails us. In a typical scene a month before the election, in Columbus, Missouri, lines formed early for a nighttime rally. Thousands gathered to pack tightly around the stage on which Obama would appear, and thousands more circled a huge, larger-than-life screen that promised his likeness. Video cameras were held high to capture the moment, while throngs shifted, hoping to catch a glimpse of the man himself, of the human incarnation of “the audacity of hope.”⁶

Of course the hero-leader has a counterpart—the monster-leader. Our vulnerability to leaders who turn out to be tyrants is as old as the proverbial hills—and remains a human conundrum. Sometimes the tyrant is clearly distinguishable and immediately recognizable as a menace. Campbell writes that the “figure of the tyrant-monster is known to the mythologies, folk traditions, legends, and even nightmares, of the world; and his characteristics are everywhere essentially the same. He is the hoarder of the general benefit. He is the monster avid for the greedy rights of ‘my and mine.’ ”⁷ But there are other times when the monster-leader is less obvious, hidden even, because he and the hero-leader are one and the same. During the 1930s, Hitler was on the one hand revered as a hero-leader by millions of Germans who were in total thrall to the power of his persona. As one early Nazi sympathizer put it after hearing Hitler speak, “My critical faculty was swept away . . . I experienced an exaltation that could only be likened to a religious conversion. . . . I had found myself, my leader, and my cause.”⁸ On the other hand there were others who recognized early on that Hitler was a monster-leader—the difference in the eye of the beholder.

Freud himself (who was forced by the Nazis to go into exile in England) was stunned that in twentieth-century Germany a leader like Hitler could exert such power, could have such a hold on his people. “How,” Freud asked in his last book, which at the obvious level was about Moses, “is it possible that one single man can develop such extraordinary effectiveness, can develop out of indifferent individuals and families one people?” To his own question he provided an answer: “We know that the great majority of people have a strong need for authority which they can admire . . . and which dominates and sometimes even ill-treats them.”⁹

But, notwithstanding our apparently innate inclination to hero worship, over the centuries our attitudes toward governance evolved. Generally they became somewhat more grounded and pragmatic, more preoccupied with this world and less with other worlds, whatever they might be. Moreover to the problem of who should lead to maintain order and keep the peace, Confucius and Plato, who were approximate contemporaries (400–500 BCE), had the essentially same solution: find extraordinary men and provide them an extraordinary education so they learn to lead wisely and well.

Confucius believed in cultivating leaders who were “gentlemen,” who possessed de, which is to say, virtue. Confucius’s ideal leader was, in modern parlance, a role model, a gentleman to be emulated, and finally followed, because he was older, wiser, better. His capacity to lead was based on moral suasion: he attracted followers by setting an example, by himself being as close to perfect as possible; and then presiding over rites and rituals that were symbols of stability and security.

Confucius was asked, “How does one qualify to govern?” The Master answered, “He who cultivates the five treasures and eschews the four evils is fit to govern.” Next he was questioned, “What are the five treasures?” To this Confucius replied, “A gentleman is generous without having to spend; he makes people work without having them groan; he has ambition but no rapacity; he has authority but no arrogance; he is stern but not fierce.”¹⁰

Plato’s ideal leader, the philosopher-king, seems on the surface to have little in common with Confucius’s ideal leader, the gentleman. Whereas a gentleman is virtuous above all, the philosopher-king is virtuous—and then some. The product of an intense and extended, even lifelong education, the philosopher-king is exceptional in every aspect, a ruler who is a philosopher, a philosopher who is a ruler, a perfect leader trained over a lifetime to lead cautiously and cleverly, seriously and sensibly, in a realm of truth and beauty.

Not incidentally, Plato’s philosopher-king has a fully realized counterpart, a monster-leader whom Plato terms a tyrant. Of him he writes, “He is the joint product of his tyrannical nature and his despotic rule, and the longer he rules, the more oppressive his tyranny.” Given the times in which he lived, small wonder that Plato’s philosopher-king is an ideal to be conjured, whereas his tyrant is real, a man to be feared. And, given the times in which he lived, small wonder that Plato believed that unless “philosophers become kings in our cities, or unless those who now are kings and rulers become true philosophers . . . there can be no end to our troubles.”¹¹

Still, differences notwithstanding, Confucius’s gentleman-leader and Plato’s philosopher-king have key characteristics in common: they approximate perfection; they crown a context that is leader-centric; and they are of an historical moment in which good governance seemed completely to depend on good, even great leadership. In the history of leadership, therefore, they belong to a time when it was widely believed that only hero-leaders, great men of singular virtue and accomplishment, could save us from ourselves.

Down to Earth

After eons in which leader-power was or seemed near-total, there was, finally, a limit on leadership. In 1215, King John of England was obliged to sign the Magna Carta, obliged formally to accept that his authority was not absolute and his will could not be arbitrarily exercised. It was a turning point in the history of leadership—and a turning point in the history of followership. The king was forced to sign the document by some of his subjects, noblemen determined to protect their personal and political privileges, first through a council and later though an increasingly powerful parliament. The signing of the Magna Carta was a watershed in Western history, in which the leader was compelled to succumb to his followers, who came together and stayed together until they had gotten their way with His Majesty.

Change was slow. This was, after all, still the Middle Ages, when royalty ruled here on earth and when God, through the authority of the Catholic Church, ruled the kingdom of heaven (at least in the West). It was all the more remarkable, then, that during the early Renaissance there emerged arguably the greatest leadership theorist of all—one whose secularism and pragmatism pertain to this day.

Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513) has justly been called the most famous book on politics ever written. Machiavelli’s hard-nosed, astute advice to his leader, his prince, is so much a product of his preternatural understanding of the human condition, and so free of frippery, it will forever be universal in its application, one of the few great works of literature to transcend time and place.

The Prince has a special place in the history of leadership as well: it was the first significant treatise on leadership to concern itself exclusively with what was real, rather than ideal. Machiavelli did not, as did Confucius and Plato, dwell in the realm of the perfect. In fact, as God is absent from The Prince, so is the rule of law and so for that matter is a moral compass of any kind. Machiavelli’s prince is embedded in the here and now. He is self-aware and self-contained, impervious to outside influence, including from on high. He is single-minded and single-tracked, interested above all in securing first the preservation of his power, then the preservation of his principality, and finally the preservation of peace among his people. (Machiavelli’s opinion of the human condition was low. He described the prince’s subjects as being “ungrateful, fickle, pretenders and dissemblers, evaders of danger, eager for gain.”)¹²

But however brilliant was The Prince, it was not Machiavelli who finally broke with the past. Rather it was Thomas Hobbes. It was Hobbes who proposed an arrangement between leaders and followers that was new and different altogether.

Like their predecessors Confucius and Plato, Machiavelli and Hobbes shared a single overriding concern: how to maintain order in a disorderly world. But Machiavelli was part of an earlier tradition, in which the fixation was on the person in power. Hobbes was more expansive: he turned his attention from those with power to those without, particularly regarding their right, our right, to life. It was a sea change. For the first time in the history of Western thought, at least one claim of the ruled superseded in importance the claim of the ruler. As philosopher Leo Strauss observed, the change from an orientation by natural duties to an orientation by natural rights finds its most potent expression in the ideas of Hobbes, who put the unconditional right to life at the center of his argument.¹³

Like Machiavelli, Hobbes believed that man was not to be trusted—he was fearful and rapacious, selfish and dangerous. Moreover, like Machiavelli, whom he succeeded by not much more than a hundred years, Hobbes believed that the best leader was authoritarian, someone with power and authority sufficient to control those otherwise unable or unwilling to control themselves. But, unlike Machiavelli, Hobbes had an embryonic conception of what later came to be called a social contract. The arrangement that Hobbes proposed was this: Followers would grant absolute power to an absolute leader who would give them something in exchange. Through the state, he would provide them with protection—first to secure the right to life, and second to provide for a life well lived, one that, as Hobbes put it, was “commodious” and occasionally even “delightful.”

Like all histories, the history of leadership is one of intrusions and interruptions. So the phenomenon of which I write—the power shift from top to bottom—did not follow a linear path. Some three hundred years had to pass between the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215 and Martin Luther’s historic challenge to the absolute authority of the Catholic Church. (For centuries the church controlled access even to the Bible, available in the Middle Ages only in Latin. Thus only scholar-priests who read Latin had the right to read it; ordinary people, who did not read Latin, did not.) Moreover, the first modern revolution—the so-called Glorious Revolution in England, which demolished the idea that kings rule by “divine right”—did not take place until 1688.

Just as Hobbes’s ideas on relations between ruler and ruled signaled a break with the past, so did the Glorious Revolution. A few salient points: First, real revolutions are rare and distinctive events, which fundamentally alter the state or society within which they take place. Second, the intention of revolutionaries is generally to redistribute power, authority, and influence, by taking some, or even all, from those who have and giving it to those who do not. Third, as Steve Pincus has pointed out, “the Revolution of 1688–89 was the first modern revolution not only because it transformed English state and society but also because, like all modern revolutions, it was popular, violent, and divisive. The revolutionaries of 1688–89 numbered in the thousands. They were not a tiny political elite.”¹⁴ Fourth, this particular revolution was a necessary precursor to the great late-eighteenth-century revolutions that would take place in America and France.

The Glorious Revolution was, then, a turning point in the history of leadership and followership, and a foreshadowing of greater change yet to come. The fact that this particular upheaval was the first that can reasonably be described as “popular,” the first in which relatively large numbers of followers were bound and determined to diminish their leaders, makes it a historical event important in its own right, as well as a harbinger of a future for followers that was far different from their past.

All Hell Breaks Loose

While democracy in ancient Athens has long been fabled, the Greek experiment in participatory government was actually short-lived. It took another two thousand years for the rights of the led to be irrevocably, enduringly encoded in political theory and practice. Until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was the leader who was at the center of the action, just as, until Copernicus in the sixteenth century, it was the earth around which revolved everything else.

John Locke was born in 1632, less than fifty years after Thomas Hobbes. But his work on the relationship between leaders and led was a great leap forward. As I’ve written elsewhere, “Locke’s logic concerning the right to hold private property; his conception of social contract theory, which claims that governments derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed; and his insistence that this consent be applied to the leader as well as to the led—all were breakthroughs. In fact, Locke’s [declaration] that if the leader does not sufficiently satisfy the led, he may be recalled, by force if necessary, puts him finally complete...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction: Twenty-First-Century Leadership— and Followership
• PART I: Power Shift
• PART II: Shifting Sands
• PART III: Paradigm Shift
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Also by Barbara Kellerman
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher