Leadership and What it Means and What it Must Be
Within the story of the last century we see the rise not only of the great Liberal – Darwin – Freud conflict over the question of human nature and human freedom, but we see towering above the masses the crags and peaks of peculiar individuals, our human ancestors and comrades, called leaders, that seemed to stand out against the background, as the catalysts of change. What then constitutes the cellular and molecular makeup of these rare characters ?
Harry Truman, erstwhile President during the later and following stages of the Second World War, stated a definition of a Leader that is pithy and simple; “A Leader is a man who has the ability to get other people to do what they don’t want to do and like it.” This was the man who had on his desk during his presidency “The buck stops here.”, broadcasting to his people and underlings that his desk was where the last court of appeal would rest.
Interestingly Truman was never thought to be much of a Leader before he acceded on the death of FDR to the highest office in the world. Yet his conviction that a Leader must take the ultimate responsibility within a clearly defined organisation and set of goals have led revisionist historians to rank Truman as one of the most influential presidents this century, with the dropping of the atomic bomb and the commencement of the Cold War marking this era as one of the most difficult and messy in the history of modern International Relations.
But the greater point at issue is the seeming dearth of leadership skills in our public officialdom and in society and business at large. Something has gone rotten in the state. As Walter Bennis a scholar respected for leadership studies once commented: “But