Leadership

My recent leisure reading is Leadership Without Easy Answers by Ronald Heifetz.

The author is a psychiatrist by training but has moved to teach leadership and political skills at Harvard. Although the book sets out to discuss how to be a leader in general, nearly all examples that it cites come from the history of modern America. Published in 1994, Heifetz has the benefit of hindsight to judge these political decisions. For the same reason, it is easy for us to tell all mistakes that Heifetz makes when he comments on those (at that time) contemporary policies.

(In a sense, it gives me a funny feeling when reading the book some twenty years after it was published. The world changed so much. For example, it takes me quite a while to figure out the President Bush that Heifetz refers to is the father.)

Nonetheless, I cannot agree with Heifetz’s view – if there is one. No objective means for judging the quality of leadership is presented (and I am inclined to believe no such criteria exist). The feeling that I get is, in Heifetz’s eyes, a successful person is a good leader; that couldn’t be the case. Similarly, a leader that brings a good fortune to his people is not always a good leader

Just think of Faust.