ON LEADERSHIP AND LEADERS

"Never follow leaders." Bob Dylan

Early last week the flagship BBC radio programme, Today, had, as it does each day over the festive period, a guest editor; this particular morning the editor was the CEO of Barclays Bank Antony Jenkins. Listening to the programme what was most striking was how little changed was the financial and business reporting. Any pretence at distance and balance in the financial journalism of the BBC has long gone. Each morning the un-mediated ‘wisdom’ of the City of London pours forth, - the market is king, big bonuses essential, private good public bad.
Barclays CEO Antony Jenkins

This particular morning was not however without its comic moments. Thus we had a member of the banking industry speaking to a class of schoolchildren. A representative of the industry that gave us the financial crash of 2008, the train wreck of Northern Rock and RBS, widespread tax avoidance, Libor rate rigging, money laundering for drug cartels and a host of other crimes and misdemeanour's,  telling schoolchildren that “we must all strive to leave the world a better place than we found it!” It is one thing to have someone pick your pocket, but to have them deliver moral lectures whilst doing so is simply beyond chutzpah.

One of the children asked, what might be termed the ‘kings clothes’ question, “Why given the performance of the banks did they still get such large bonus payments? “Argh” our well heeled spokesman responded with a weary sigh, “high bonus payments were just one thing you must accept if you are to have a thriving banking industry,” neatly sidestepping the fact that this is precisely what we do not have. Thus fat bonus payments are simply like the sun coming up in the morning and going down again at dusk, just the way things are. This is the authentic voice of greed, the unmediated propaganda of the financial services industry.

The theme he chose for the programme was ‘leadership,’ for me the most overrated of all qualities. Having spent a portion of my working life working in a non-hierarchy I have learnt just how much the idea of leadership distorts peoples experience of employment, effectively meaning that the best part of their lives are spent in a form of dictatorship, benign or otherwise. If we are to grow and develop as a species, indeed if we are to survive, one thing we need surely to jettison is the demand for leadership.

The great speaker as leader must surely have been demolished by the presidency of Barrack Obama, the finest orator president since Kennedy, yet what has all his fine words amounted too? From Syria and Palestine, from China to Russia and Europe Obama has proved wholly impotent.

Putin on the other hand, a third rate gangster, is portrayed as an effective leader.[1] Certainly he gets his own way, which of course is one thing that leaders are supposed to do. However should you wish to converse with some of his Russian critics, such as the journalist Anna Politkovskaya you will find the conversation a trifle one sided.

Here in Britain we have the Bullingdon Prime Minister, the public school bully who like all bullies is driven by fear, fear of those he is supposed to lead, the tail that wags the Tory dog. When political leaders boast, as Cameron so very often does, about their ability to make tough decisions you know they are talking about their ability to do unpleasant things for which their will be no cost in votes. When it comes to genuinely difficult decisions with serious electoral consequences, like airport expansion for example, he dithers, ducks and kicks matters into the long grass.

I suppose that one minister who imagines himself a leader of men is the welfare minister Iain Duncan Smith, ex-army. Probably the most incompetent minister in living memory, who manages to combine grotesque crudity with cruelty and cowardice; the sight of him sneaking out of the commons debate on food-banks turned the stomach.

Even the so called great leaders such as Churchill or De Gaulle rarely stand close examination. Churchill was a voice, a great voice that perfectly encapsulated the defiance of the British people in 1940, but as a military leader he was a disaster; the service chiefs constantly exhausting themselves trying to keep Churchill’s hands of operational matters, or trying to repair the damage after he had done so. De Gaulle on the other hand was the great fraudster and illusionist, the man, if you believed the Gaullist propaganda line, who saved France. The man who hitched a ride with the US army so that he could enter Paris with a contingent of the small Free French army so that he could make the claim that France had liberated itself.

Stalin, that other great wartime leader, was in the key days following the German invasion in 1941 completely paralysed by funk and had to be dragged from his dacha outside Moscow to return to work.[2] Later others were shot, taking the blame for his failures.

The most successful organisation of the Second World War, from a British perspective, an outfit that shortened the war by at least a year and arguably two, was Bletchley Park. At Bletchley hierarchy was derided, the atmosphere collegiate and collective. Alan Turing was many things, primarily a genius, but leadership material he was not.

Actually exercising leadership is comparatively easy; people are so willing to surrender to you what power they have, glad to be relieved of the burden of decision making. Life becomes a lot easier when someone else is in charge.
Of course when you are placed in such a position of authority those placed below you in the hierarchy feel, understandably, resentful at this arrangement. It is these tensions created by inequality of power, income, social prestige that is the most difficult thing for any manager to manage. Many people on your team harbour the belief that they could do a better job than you, some probably could. Hierarchies squander talent the way that Victorian plumbing leaks water.

I can already hear the opposition to these arguments, those who protest that some sort leadership is always essential. Maybe they are right, maybe we need leaders, people to take charge and tell us what to do? The history of the last hundred years suggests that this need carries with it, to put it extremely mildly, immense dangers. As for the banks, an industry that gave up Fred Goodwin and Bob Diamond, I am not sure they are in a position to give lectures on leadership, or anything else for that matter.

One of my favourite images of leadership comes from the revolutions of 1848.  A young man is shaving, preparing for another day of revolutionary exertions. Suddenly he hears shouting outside and going to the window he sees a crowd moving along the street shouting slogans and waving banners. He leaps down the stairs, lather still on his face, his braces loose around his legs. “Wait for me,” he shouts pulling up his trousers, “I'm your leader.”


[2] Stalin had received numerous warnings, all from reliable sources, of German intentions, however exercising the superior leadership skills for which he was lauded, he ignored them all.



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