Leadership1

Open Amazon. Search for "leadership": 18636 books. Search for "leader": 26499. These are the books that show you how to find out if you were born with the natural characteristics of a leader, that offer you advice and exercises to develop your leadership skills, that teach you how to feign leadership skills by your tone of voice and body language, that propose that leadership is not necessary and that it is better to do without leaders...

There are books that say that leadership is an art, it's something that you carry inside you that wants to get out, it's a spiritual trait of your soul, it's a vibration, it's emotional intelligence, perhaps a habit, a series of moral principles, it's the armory of the company, a science, some tricks that you use so that they happily obey you, a gift from God, a matter of common sense, a matter of personal discipline, a privilege that currently belongs to women, a neuronal activity, anthropology, charisma, the opposite of being a manager, it's when others want to know you, to be a teacher, to be assertive, that you need coaching...

Then there are those that say that if you want to improve your leadership skills you should read about Lincoln, Giuliani, Atila, Jesus, Ulysses S. Grant, Colin Powell, Jack Welch, the US Navy, the samurai, football trainers, Churchill, the arctic explorers...

The popular management magazines follow this trend, and rarely does an issue of  HBR, as one example,  not have an article about the subject (616 articles in one search), including a whole issue devoted to leadership in 2004.

And of course, the recent  Expomanagement in Madrid could not disappoint its visitors without urging them to take the sacrament from no less a figure than  Deepak Chopra who spoke on the "spirit of leadership". The leader should be the symbolic soul of the group who acts as a catalyst of change, the development of leadership implies "synchronicity", the capacity to create "good luck" and the reserves of power to reach a higher state, converting oneself into a "non local" being, following seven keys to achieve "synchrodestiny", amongst which are "harmonizing the feminine and masculine" and "the world as an extension of oneself". Chopra was not the only one who spoke about leadership; if one was not enough, the session of Boyatriz was called, "Developing leadership without emotional intelligence is like dancing without rhythm", from which we can deduce that leaders drum and that rather than synchronizing what one has to do is to tune in. The cost of each one of these sessions (total days/number of sessions) was about 200 euros.

But haven't they been told that to push oneself to the front is a sign of a bad upbringing? It is curious that at this time when there is a deficiency of leaders, in comparison with other times in history, there is so much latent desire to have followers (who hardly anyone ever writes for, by the way). After all this, I draw three conclusions.

• many people want to lead
• many of these are ready to pay and to obey any fool who makes them believe that can become better leaders (are these people leaders or the most gullible followers?)
• every need can be satisfied by a class of "professionals", whether these know anything about their subject or not.

In conclusion, thinking about this subject, I remembered two short quotations from classical authors that I believe have encapsulated what there is to know about leadership. In the popular books there are no doubt some interesting chapters and stories and advice that can help many, but I believe that thinking about the two quotations that I have in mind will certainly be better than reading the bad half of all these thousands of modern books (and who knows which half that is). These two quotations will follow in the next post.