The Art of Leadership: Key Insights of Inspiring Leaders
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The Art of Leadership - Robert Blackstock
THE ART OF LEADERSHIP: Key Insights of Inspiring Leaders
Copyright 2018 ROBERT BLACKSTOCK
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior written permission of the copyright owners or holders.
Every effort has been made to locate and obtain permissions from the copyright owners or holders of the copyrighted material in this book.
ISBN: 978-1-54395-479-1 (print)
ISBN: 978-1-54395-480-7 (ebook)
DEDICATION
To Jackie, who is everything to me and who enchants me still
To our children, Thomas, Chris, and Sarah, and their children, Hazel, Bert and Aki, who are the light of constant joy in our lives
To my sister, Bonnie whose love, support, and example have been a constant and beloved wellspring in my life.
To the students, faculty, and staff of Hillsdale College, treasured friends all, who have made this book possible and my career a blessing beyond words.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My debts in writing this narrative are too deep and too many to allow a full expression of them here. Still, some are so essential to this book, or to my life, that they cannot go unmentioned.
My wife, Jackie, whose encouragement, support, and tireless help reading manuscripts for meaning made the project possible.
Bill Brodbeck, Larry Arnn, and David Whalen whose support through the years has been simply immeasurable.
Jon Lewis whose incredible patience have dragged me (mostly) into the world of 21st century publication.
Emily Walker, whose editorial skills saved me from my worst rhetorical habits; but what errors remain despite her protestations are my responsibility alone.
Tom Carstens, friend and mentor, who first researched and selected the fourteen core readings discussed in this essay.
My many students and colleagues on the Hillsdale College faculty and staff whose friendships and countless conversations have made learning so very rich and rewarding.
Table of Contents
Part I: Getting It Right: Readings on the Nature of Leadership
Choosing to Lead Well
Emerging from the Darkness: Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
The Human Factor: Plutarch’s Life of Alexander the Great
Leadership Lessons from The Gospel of Luke
Dealing With Our Darker Side: Machiavelli’s The Prince
The Power of Rhetoric: King’s "I Have a Dream
PART II: The Good and the Bad: A Study of Human Nature
Staying Grounded: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
The Misspent Life: Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych
Pride and Mission: Bridge On the River Kwai
Power and Justice: Sophocles’ Antigone
The Need for Order: Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure
Order and Justice – The Challenge of Leadership: Melville’s Billy Budd
Decision Making
Managing Ambition: Arthur Miller’s All My Sons
Living a Lie: Miller’s Death of a Salesman
The Search for Truth: Evidence and Levels of Confidence
The Impulse to Thuggery: Orwell’s 1984
PART III: The Theory and Skills of Leadership: Contemporary Research
Shakespeare on Robots: Imagining A Better Type of Leadership
Imagination in Action: A Few Examples
Teaching Leadership: The West Point Way of Leadership and The Art of War
APPENDICES
Appendix A: Attitude
Appendix B: Skills of Leadership
Appendix C: Resources for Further Study
Part I:
Getting It Right: Readings on the Nature of Leadership
Chapter 1
Choosing to Lead Well
A Tale of Two Islands
Each semester I ask students to choose one of two islands as their new home. Residents of the first island are honest, peaceful, law-abiding, brave, disciplined, and compassionate. They work hard, they work smart, and they look out for one another. They educate their children for intelligence and character.
Residents of the second island are liars, cheats, and thieves. They are lazy, shiftless, violent, and greedy, and no person or thing on their island is secure. They have forgotten how to nurture their children to wholeness or self-sufficiency, and they have lost sight of why such things matter.
On which island do you choose to live?
Let’s push the scenario a little further. Assume that your job is to govern both of the islands. Which island will require the greater number of laws and the larger police presence to enforce them; the more intrusive, aggressive, and restrictive means of enforcement? And which island can be allowed to live in relative freedom and peace with relatively few laws or enforcers?
No society is as thoroughly good or as thoroughly bad as I’ve portrayed these two here. All cultures and organizations fall somewhere on a continuum between the two: some more virtuous, prosperous, and peaceful than others, some more corrupt, violent, and impoverished.
Over the long term, the fates of all social orders are closely tied to the character and effectiveness of their people. Some nations enjoy extended periods of peace and prosperity; others are a curse to their own citizens and to all who encounter them. The same can be said of businesses and families, cities and churches, and any other form of human association you might wish to examine. In each case, the fate of a group is made better or worse by the character of its people. And the character of their people is strongly influenced by their leaders, by the examples their leaders set, by the principles and ideas they embrace and project, and by the means through which they rule.
This represents the choice and the challenge we all face as we interact at home, at work, in our cities, and in our nation. We are social creatures by nature and are driven to the company of others for comfort, security, and for economic reasons, but history shows two things with compelling clarity: human relations range from rich harmonies to brutal dystopias, and leadership plays a defining role in determining just where on that spectrum we will land.
At bottom, great leaders understand that this world, or their little corner of it, will be made better or worse by their conduct, and that their conduct will be shaped by the ideas they embrace. Leaders wield outsized influence for good or for ill. Two examples will highlight the difference leaders and their ideas can have on a social order. North and South Koreans live side by side on the same peninsula, yet South Koreans enjoy a standard of living twelve times that of North Koreans (as measured by gross domestic product per person). On top of that, the North Korean people cower under a brutal totalitarian regime whose policies keep them ever on the brink of famine. Similarly, the Dominican Republic and Haiti are situated on the same island, and yet the Dominican Republic enjoys a standard of living six times that of Haiti’s. The difference in both cases hinges on the ideas around which the leaders shape their policies, their leadership, and their actions.
Compared with the free-market constitutional republics of the West, North Korea is a dystopic nightmare that would have beggared the imagination of George Orwell. Venezuela may be headed for a similar fate because fifty years ago, its leaders embraced ideas that tend over time to dysfunction, economic malaise, and authoritarian rule. In just fifty years Venezuela, a nation that holds greater oil reserves than any other country on the planet, has fallen from relative prosperity to desperate poverty.
Businesses, too, may be led poorly or well. Badly run businesses do not suffer the desperate privation of poorly led countries like North Korea and Haiti; they simply cease to exist. Still, resources are wasted. Lives are upended. Opportunities are lost.
So, what are the ideas, policies, qualities, and practices that make for great leaders and great organizations? It is our purpose here to explore this question using primarily examples from history and literature. We’ll consider some of the best leaders of all time and some of the worst. We’ll seek out those beliefs, attitudes, policies, and practices shared by all great leaders. We’ll also note how leaders with wildly different temperaments, abilities, and philosophies can achieve great things. And we’ll also try to discern why strategies and approaches that work famously for one leader fail utterly for another. Two examples will serve to illustrate our purpose.
Ronald Reagan and Steve Jobs both changed the world in profound ways and for the better (although I’m less certain of Steve Jobs achievements every couple years or so when I go through the terror of upgrading my phone). Yet while both were visionary and effective leaders, one is remembered for his decency, humor, and ability to inspire a nation, the other for his shameless abuse of friends and foes alike.
From 1980 to 1988, Ronald Reagan’s leadership helped Americans remember the high principles that made America good and defeated one of the most brutal, totalitarian regimes the world has seen. Judging by his reelection results and the outpouring of emotion on his death, he was a unifying and inspiring leader who spoke effectively to all Americans and summoned the best from us all. Even to his enemies, Reagan was a decent, kind, and honorable adversary.
Between 1976 and 2011, Steve Jobs revolutionized not only digital computing, but also the way we interact with information and with each other. On a large scale, his impact was profound and lasting; but as a leader and a boss he was a tyrant. Many are the stories of abusive, deceitful, and inhumane treatment of even his family and his closest allies and friends.
These and many other differences show themselves in effective leaders over and over again. There is no magic formula for great leadership and no essential list of must-have qualities to achieve success, but with study we can see the packages
of skills that make one leader great, another leader mediocre, another repugnant.
A list of explicit dos and don’ts aren’t sufficient here, though they offer a start. A deeper understanding can be gained from a more fully synthesized analysis of several different types of leaders. How did these different leaders with different of skills and opportunities achieve their successes? And what lessons are to be learned from the differences in their methods and in their legacies? Specifically in our example, what are the skills, attitudes, and attributes that enabled Reagan to change the world by inspiring us? And which were so sorely lacking in Jobs? In the end, it probably is the case that Steve Jobs was a stunted man, highly capable, but lacking in those principles and skills that would have enabled him to achieve his successes with grace and kindness.
Our challenge, then, is to become an effective force for good in the world and remain fully humane.
The Paradox of Leadership
Another historical example will further illustrate the challenge we face in understanding effective leadership. How is it that two leaders as different as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln both managed to win wars, establish and preserve a young nation, and define the character of that nation? Washington and Lincoln were different types of men and varied greatly in their physical bearing, their intellectual preparation, their interpersonal presence and their rhetorical styles.
But there are similarities among these two great leaders as well. They shared common virtues and skills and were focused on and committed to high, noble purposes. They often displayed clarity not only of purpose, but of thought and speech, as well as heroic measures of courage and discipline.
No leader is perfect. All are human. All are prone to weakness. All are susceptible to vice. And contemporary culture washes over each of us just as the cultures of earlier generations washed over our forbearers. Injustice and imprudence that seem obvious to later generations are obscured as in a fog for those who lived the moment. We do indeed see life as through a glass darkly
—often blind to the faults of our time.
The study of leadership is made especially difficult by the differences among us, by the improbable success of poor leaders, and by the equally improbable failure of good leaders. A successful