Leadership and Business

Not much more than a generation ago, in the heyday of the organization-man culture, the idea of leadership seemed to have hardly any major place in the conceptualization of American business. The days of individualistic tycoons in the grand manner, like Henry Ford, were far in the past, and the modern age of the entrepreneur was yet to come. The chairmen or CEOs of large corporations were scarcely household names in the 1950s and 1960s, and they are all but wholly forgotten now. The organization, or to give it an even statelier name, the institution, was all. The very terms "management" and "administration" convey an institutional flavor. One rose in an institution by being a good functionary, and even at the top one remained a functionary.

Today, a generation later, we have come to speak again of leadership. It is likely that as many people recognize the name of Bill Gates as recognize the name of Microsoft; perhaps more do. Competition and technological change have rendered the stately bureaucratic organization of the 1950s and 1950s obsolete. We no longer imagine that because General Motors cranked out so many cars off the assembly line last year that it is inevitable that it will be able to crank out so many next year, or that it will find buyers for them unless they measure up.

Whether GM, or Microsoft, or any firm survives seems now to depend very much on the quality of its leadership. By leadership we seem implicitly to mean not the successful following

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ne not easily addressed. Or rather, though easily enough addressed--the same prescriptions come out of book after book--it seems to be something much more easily said than done. For example, Susan and Thomas Kuczmarski, using their own marriage vows as a model of mutual committment in an organization, list such characteristic traits as "consideration of others," "belief in pluralism," "open and expressive communications," and so forth. There is something of the platitude in such statements; we may all agree that these are good ideas, in management as in marriage, but if they could be readily followed there would be a much smaller market for both management consultants and marriage counsellors. In his book The Control Theory Manager, psychologist William Glasser offers the startling proposition that "if we look at our successful companies, we will find that they have taken managing for quality very seriously. In doing so, they have discovered that they must focus on the workplace far more than on the work" [author's italics]. At first glance, this thought is slightly alarming; it sounds like the assumption of conglomerate-builders in the 1970s that all business was the same, and if you knew how to mange, you could manage

Category: Business - L