On Leadership

It is always gratifying to read a book that emphasises the essentially complex and uncertain nature of leadership, rather than the formulaic positivism, on one hand, or simplistic popularism, on the other, that characterises much work in this field. March and Weil have written such a book, which is partly an exploration of the value of great works of literature to understanding leadership and partly a book to stimulate thoughtful self‐reflexive in leaders.

The book investigates duty, revenge and innocence through Othello; heresy and genius through Saint Joan; ambiguity, irrelevance, power and social order through War and Peace; imagination, commitment and joy through Don Quixote. There is also an interesting and insightful chapter on gender, sex and leadership. Each chapter is followed by a section titled “Queries”, where the authors pose important and searching questions about the nature of leadership that relate to both the works of literature discussed in the chapter and to issues of leadership itself. These “Queries” confront the reader with thoughtful issues of debate and reflection.

The book also pays homage to the work of March in that it is an editing of his leadership course notes and a summary and interpretation of much of his other work by Weil. It also refers to and produces some of March's poetry, presumably those areas of leadership and life unable to be touched or ‘understood’ through his more analytic work. This poetic element of the book is a little indulgent. More generally, because the book is a mixture of edited course notes, summaries of work on organisations and issues for reflection, it is a little disjointed. While insightful and stimulating is some places, it is mundane and conventional in others.

There is no doubt that reference to great literature and film can offer significant insights into leadership specifically and the human condition more generally. This in itself is not new and excellent books exist on this subject (Badaracco, 2006; Whitney and Packer, 2001). The strength of this book lies not in its use of great literature but on the important questions it raises about leadership in the “Queries”. For those who practice human resource management, and in particular, for those involved in leadership development, the value of the book is considerable. It remains the case, for example, that corporations engage in the most trivially mundane “leadership development”. Indeed, only recently I observed middle and senior managers from a major global telecommunications corporation spend three days on “development” that included the building of obelisks with wooden blocks, forming animal shapes with their bodies, and other leadership development games. This kind of leadership development is at best good fun and at worst an insult to the intelligence. It reflects poorly on the calibre of human resource professionals engaged in such activity.

March and Weil suggest leaders need to develop the ability to self‐reflect and to consider deeply the issues of duty, revenge, innocence, heresy, genius, ambiguity, irrelevance, power, sexuality and commitment. They also, however, need to reflect more deeply on ethics, greed, conscience, character, compassion and equity. In this sense On Leadership does not go far enough: It is educational but not quite edifying; it is poignant but not provocative; it is risque without being risky. As Quixote says: “there's no taking trout with dry breeches” (book II, chapter 71), and herein lies the lesson for human resource professionals involved in leadership development. There continues to be too much emphasis on a process perspective, through which leaders are objects to be processed by professionals through systematic development programmes (programming?). In many organisations, leadership development is just not provocative enough.

What On Leadership highlights is the need to move beyond this rationalistic, modernist perspective to embrace the discontinuities, uncertainties and ambiguities of the idea of leadership. Such a view of leadership and leaders requires that the notion of leadership development is itself redefined. More emphasis must be placed on the relational and self‐reflexive aspect of leadership development. Leading well is not a matter of training, it is a matter of perpetual reflection and an almost philosophical consideration of the duties and obligations of leadership. Leadership, therefore, is not a skill to be acquired but a way of life to be embraced. The implications for professionals engaged in developing leaders is immense because we clearly move from learning skills to developing the intellect. In short, leadership development should be edifying not stupefying.

For those who “teach” leadership the implications of On Leadership will be mixed as will its impact. Those who already see the value of great literature, film, art and music in their teaching will see little that is new in this book. There will be also those who see the use of “art” as an entertaining sideshow that can never replace the dissemination of “real” scientific research on leadership through teaching. For those who offer leadership programmes a further challenge to the renaissance developer of leaders will come from those who want simply the habits and skills of leadership. In organisations where the measure of how well human resources are developing leaders is how many managers have been put through the programme in the last six months, intellectual approaches are unlikely to be welcomed.

On Leadership highlights the complexities involved in researching leadership. At the extremes leadership is either a phenomenon that has tangible, measurable characteristics or is a phantasm, a construction of language that has no substance outside of discourse. It might be possible for positivists to design constructs for joy, imagination, irrelevance, heresy and genius and seek to link this to a construct of leadership, but how would this be of use? Surely leadership, what it is and how to “do” it well, is more a consequence of personal contemplation than building “skills”. This key message of On Leadership is one of much relevance to the post‐modern world and the book should be recommended to all leaders and those aspiring to such heights as a source book for self‐reflection.