A monument to Karl Marx stands above his remains in one corner of Highgate Cemetery, north LondonMichael Crabtree
Leadership
By Barbara Kellerman
McGraw-Hill, 299 pages, $40.95
Lao Tzu, Freud, Elizabeth I, and Marx are an unlikely quartet of leadership gurus. But they are a sample of an eclectic group of writers and leaders whose words are captured in Harvard University professor Barbara Kellerman's compilation Leadership: Essential Selections On Power, Authority, and Influence.
The book, which evolved from a course she teaches called "Leadership Literacy," is a throwback to the past, when leaders-to-be were schooled on great writings and thought, rather than the latest utterances of management consultants. She views her collection as the leadership classics: "Every single selection is about leadership or is, of itself, an act of leadership. Every single selection has literary value - not always aesthetic value, but always, necessarily, value in the use of language on leadership. Every single selection is seminal: It changes forever how and what we thought and/or how and what we did."
Have you read Lao Tzu, recently or at all? His Tao Te Ching is the most widely translated book after the Bible, and the selections from it leads off a section that includes Confucius, Plato, Plutarch, Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill and, inevitably, Machiavelli.
Lao Tzu told us: "When actions are performed without unnecessary speech, people say, 'We did it.'"
Provocatively - and tersely - he advised: "No fight. No blame." He was equally succinct on trust: "He who does not trust enough will not be trusted."
More elaborately, he counselled, "In dealing with others, be gentle and kind. In speech, be true. In ruling, be just. In business, be competent. In action, watch the timing."
He warned about adversity: "Accept disgrace willingly. Accept misfortune as the human condition."
Prof. Kellerman follows each selection with a commentary that helps readers to understand what in some cases will seem abstruse readings. She contrasts Lao Tzu's counsel with today's prevailing belief in the West that leaders always have options for action, and must act. But Lao Tzu differed: "As far as he was concerned, inaction was nearly always preferable to action," Prof. Kellerman writes .
She has also written a book on " followership," so Freud's views are a natural fit in this compilation. "We know that the great majority of people have a strong need for authority which they can admire, to which they can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill-treats them," he noted. "We have learned from the psychology of the individual whence comes this need of the masses. It is the longing for the father that lives in each of us from his childhood days."
Prof. Kellerman says that selection is important because while the longing to lead is easy to understand, the longing to follow is not. "What Freud makes plain is that leadership and followership are arrangements from which both sides stand to benefit," she observes.
Prof. Kellerman notes that Queen Elizabeth I's rousing speech to the troops on the battlefield at Tilbury in 1588 is considered the most memorable of her reign. Elizabeth fashioned a silver breastplate over her white velvet dress, and held in her hand a commander's baton, aligning herself with her fighters with the words "I myself will take up arms," although later noting that her lieutenant-general would act in her stead. She also aligned her troops with her, and history - and the country - while dealing with their doubts: "I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England, too."
As for Marx, the language seems dated, but some of his commentary might apply to today's constant upheavals: "The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society." Marx changed society, as did some of the other writers in the book, such as Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King., Mahatma Gandhi, Winston Churchill and, less well known, animal liberation theorist Peter Singer.
A book on classic writing on leadership wouldn't be complete without Mary Parker Follett, the wise, unheralded American social worker and management consultant, who in the 1920s and 1930s anticipated so much of the leadership wisdom proclaimed by male leadership gurus a half-century later. Prof. Kellerman's book, like all such compilations, can be disconnected, and some of the writings aren't hugely inspiring, but if you long for some classical readings on leadership, it's a good bet.
To win the daily double, find a copy of Mary Parker Follett: Prophet of Management - A Celebration of Writings from the 1920s, by Pauline Graham, which was published in 1996.
Special to The Globe and Mail
Harvey Schachter