Solitude and Leadership

William Deresiewicz

Here is an excerpt from an article written by William Deresiewicz for his “All Points” column that is featured online by The American Scholar website.

“The American Scholar is the venerable but lively quarterly magazine of public affairs, literature, science, history, and culture published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society since 1932. In recent years the magazine has won four National Magazine Awards, the industry’s highest honor, and many of its essays and articles have been selected for the yearly Best American anthologies.”

Given the recent S.E.A.L. mission in Pakistan, I think this article has even greater meaning and significance.

To read the complete article, check out other resources, sign up for email updates, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

*     *     *

If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts.

The lecture below was delivered to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point in October of last year. mind solitude, the ability to be alone with your thoughts. And yet I submit to you that solitude is one of the most important necessities of true leadership. This lecture will be an attempt to explain why.

We need to begin by talking about what leadership really means. I just spent 10 years teaching at another institution that, like West Point, liked to talk a lot about leadership, Yale University. A school that some of you might have gone to had you not come here, that some of your friends might be going to. And if not Yale, then Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and so forth. These institutions, like West Point, also see their role as the training of leaders, constantly encourage their students, like West Point, to regard themselves as leaders among their peers and future leaders of society. Indeed, when we look around at the American elite, the people in charge of government, business, academia, and all our other major institutions—senators, judges, CEOs, college presidents, and so forth—we find that they come overwhelmingly either from the Ivy League and its peer institutions or from the service academies, especially West Point.

So I began to wonder, as I taught at Yale, what leadership really consists of. My students, like you, were energetic, accomplished, smart, and often ferociously ambitious, but was that enough to make them leaders? Most of them, as much as I liked and even admired them, certainly didn’t seem to me like  leaders. Does being a leader, I wondered, just mean being accomplished, being successful? Does getting straight As make you a leader? I didn’t think so. Great heart surgeons or great novelists or great shortstops may be terrific at what they do, but that doesn’t mean they’re leaders. Leadership and aptitude, leadership and achievement, leadership and even ex cellence have to be different things, otherwise the concept of leadership has no meaning. And it seemed to me that that had to be especially true of the kind of excellence I saw in the students around me.

See, things have changed since I went to college in the ’80s. Everything has gotten much more intense. You have to do much more now to get into a top school like Yale or West Point, and you have to start a lot earlier. We didn’t begin thinking about college until we were juniors, and maybe we each did a couple of extracurriculars. But I know what it’s like for you guys now. It’s an endless series of hoops that you have to jump through, starting from way back, maybe as early as junior high school. Classes, standardized tests, extracurriculars in school, extracurriculars outside of school. Test prep courses, admissions coaches, private tutors. I sat on the Yale College admissions committee a couple of years ago. The first thing the admissions officer would do when presenting a case to the rest of the committee was read what they call the “brag” in admissions lingo, the list of the student’s extracurriculars. Well, it turned out that a student who had six or seven extracurriculars was already in trouble. Because the students who got in—in addition to perfect grades and top scores—usually had 10 or 12.

*     *     *

To read the complete article, check out other resources, sign up for email updates, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

William Deresiewicz is an essayist and critic. His book, A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter, will be published later this month. His piece in the Spring 2010 issue of the SCHOLAR, “Solitude and Leadership,” is a finalist for this year’s National Magazine Award in the category of Essays & Criticism.

David Weinberger on “Stripes and Hierarchies”

David Weinberg

Here is an excerpt from an article written by David Weinberger for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

*     *     *

This post is part of an HBR Spotlight examining leadership lessons from the military.

It took me a couple of years after I left the academic world and went into the business against my will (long story, not interesting) to realize how much I hated one particular aspect of my old life: The academics I had been hanging out with seemed to spend every minute of their life with one another trying to show that they were the big dog in the room. I’m certain this was worse because I was in philosophy where there is no objective measure of truth and so few external markers of success. So, you are constantly being challenged to show that your ideas are unique and uniquely valuable. This resulted in a typical form of conversation that accepts what was just said as obvious and that then shows how your own thinking is far more profound: “Well, yes of course that’s right, but only if one fails to notice that ____.”

This perpetual jockeying for position — and I admit that I may be remembering it as more prevalent than it was — was exhausting. It resulted in a hierarchy, which for an open field of thought like philosophy is generally not helpful. Worse, it created a hierarchy about which no one agreed. It was the worst of all possible worlds, as Leibniz would not have said. (Surely you’ve read Leibniz’s Theodicy? No? Well, then I win!)

The same positioning and one-upmanship happens in virtually every business meeting I’ve been to, although not nearly as perniciously. There may be something natural and inevitable about it. But, this struggle to be perceived as sitting on the highest branch serves no good purpose. The meeting is being held to advance some shared goal, but the snippiness and posing only advance individuals’ interests in their own status.

This is why I was so impressed with a working meeting I attended at West Point a few years ago. Lt. Col. Tony Burgess, Lt. Col. Nate Allen, and others were meeting with the group that created CompanyCommand.com. The range of ranks went from cadet to pretty damn senior. And yet this was one of the most informal, comfortable, productive business meetings I’d been in. It was respectful up and down, but also relaxed, funny, and — most of all — with a mutual humility shorn of attempts to advance one’s social standing.

And it seemed clear to me why the West Point meeting worked so well: the social rank of each member was literally on his sleeve. They didn’t have to work at it because the metadata about their position was attached with thread and needle. That’s way more obvious than having to read someone’s rank by interpreting how they’re leaning back in their chair or smirking whenever the new guy talks. With one’s position so obvious, you don’t have to waste time trying to establish it by always saying something smart or cutting.

If it is the case that humans, at least in our culture, are going to try to define themselves within a social hierarchy, establishing those relationships clearly and explicitly can shake a lot of the posing, posturing, self-inflation, and other-deflation out of the relationships. As I saw at West Point, it can enable more equality as well, for rank becomes a position in hierarchy governed not by social climbing, but by a common goal and mutual respect.

*     *     *

David Weinberger is a senior researcher at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His latest book is Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (Times Books, 2007).

Heroic Leadership: A Book Review by Bob Morris

Heroic Leadership: Leading with Integrity and Honor
William A. Cohen
Jossey-Bass/A Wiley Imprint (2010)

William Cohen is especially well-qualified to discuss leadership, given his background that includes graduating from the United States Military Academy at West Point, being the first of Peter Drucker’s students to earn a Ph.D. degree in business, rising to the rank of major general in the U.S. Air Force Reserve, serving as president of two universities, writing several books (notably The Art of the Leader, A Class with Drucker, and Drucker on Leadership) and serving now as president of the Institute of Leader Arts.

In this volume, he identifies and discusses what he characterizes as The Eight Universal Laws of Heroic Leadership in Part One, The Eight Basic Influence Tools in Part Two, and then The Eight Competencies of Heroic Leadership in Part Three. He devotes a separate chapter to each of the 24. None is a head-snapping revelation, nor does Cohen make any such claim. They offer great value, however, when he cites correlations and implications between and among them. Throughout his lively and eloquent narrative, he inserts dozens of real-world examples of heroic leadership both on the battlefield and in the business world.

Those who pursue what Jim Collins calls BHAGs (i.e. Big Hairy Audacious Goals) require great leadership by men or women who maintain absolute integrity, know their stuff, make their expectations crystal clear, demonstrate their own commitment to the given enterprise, expect positive results and ultimate success, meanwhile take care of those entrusted to their care, put duty before self, and “get out in front” – and stay there — to show the way.

Cohen wrote this book for those who aspire to be great leaders in all domains of human experience: in the business world, in the military, and in public service, to be sure, but also in the classroom and on the playing field. The information, observations, caveats, and suggestions he offers comprise what could be described as a leader’s “tool box.”  His advice includes inspiring others to motivating themselves, communicating more effectively, strengthening teamwork, increasing engagement (as opposed to passive involvement), and of special importance, helping others to become more effective leaders.

It is also clear to me that he believes that heroic qualities can be developed in almost anyone, and, that there are many different forms of heroism. For example, speaking to power. Great leaders insist on it. It should also be noted that, in The Divine Comedy, Dante reserved the last (and worst) ring in hell for those who, in a moral crisis, preserve their neutrality. Many of those who read this book will not “learn” how to become an heroic leader by completing checklists of aphorisms to consider or tasks to complete; rather, Cohen will help them to discover the potential capabilities they already possess…and will help them, also, to develop those capabilities in ways and to an extent they may now consider unattainable.