experience--no longer regarded as adequate responses to the challenges of the marketplace. The corporation of 40 years ago was imagined as a machine, rather like an assembly line; it received standard inputs and produced standard outputs. Today we would make the analogy to a computer, which may at any time have to run entirely new software, and even have its physical components replaced by new ones at frequent and unpredictable intervals.
Thus, leadership has become all the rage, and discussion of leadership has become not a cottage industry but a full-size industry, grinding out books and articles by the hundreds. Gary Heil, Tom Parker, and Rick Tate, in their book Leadership and the Customer Revolution, tell of being on a plane with
The president of a well-known training and consulting company. He told us that his company was trying to
figure out what products they were going to sell after 'Total Quality' had run its course. After some thought,
he added, 'We think the next issue is LEADERSHIP.'"
All of which, of course, raises the question, what is leadership, and more specifically, what are the characteristics of successful leaders?
A leader is not necessarily the person "in charge" in a formal sense. Howard Gardner, in his book Leading Minds, identifies two types of leaders, the direct and the indirect, characteristic examples being Winston Churchill and Albert Einstein.
I see both Churchill and Einstein as leaders--as
individuals who significantly influence the thoughts, behaviors, and/or feelings of others. Churchill exerted
his influence in a direct way, through the stories he communicated to various audiences; hence, I term him a direct leader. Einstein exerted his influence in an indirect way, through the ideas he developed and the
ways that those ideas were captured in some kind of a
theory or treatise; hence, he qualifies as an indirect leader.
It ...