Wisdom for Leaders
“But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.” C. S. Lewis in An Experiment in Criticism
A 2013 article in The Economist heralded “Inward Bound” leadership courses as “an idea whose time has come”. Going beyond the relaxation and meditation techniques taught in “Mindfulness” coaching sessions, Inward Bound programs encourage business leaders to refresh their vision, insight, and perspectives by engaging in conversations about the great ideas of history, philosophy, and classic literature.
The Economist was playing catch-up. Among many others, I had been pushing the idea for years.
The only way to become a real thought leader is to ignore all the noise around leadership development, and wrestle with a few great thinkers. You will learn far more about leadership from reading Thucydides and Marcus Aurelius than you will from a thousand leadership experts. You will learn far more about doing business in China by reading Confucius and Mencius than by listening to ‘culture consultants’.
The leadership crisis will never be fixed by skills training, which merely asks: “what can you do?” It can only be resolved by education, which asks: “what sort of person will you become?”
Ancient wisdom saw that knowledge is of three kinds: knowing that (facts), knowing how (technique) and knowing what (judgment). The first two are knowledge of means, while the last is knowledge of ends, involving the consideration of truth and purpose, and judgments about right and wrong. Our age concentrates on the first two, and all but ignores the most important one — the ‘ends’ of good judgment.
Knowing what to think, feel, or do in any given set of circumstances requires understanding ourselves and our place in the world in relation to others, and a commitment to doing what we know to be right. It enables us to answer questions such as “What should I do about this manipulative team member?” “How should I handle this deceit on the part of my client?” and “What is the inspirational vision that will unite us a nation?”. Leadership is about people, not process, which is a management matter.
It does serious harm in our workplaces, and our society at large, to have people in positions of responsibility who deal with others according to mechanical, formulaic sets of guidelines garnered from some training program or the latest management best-seller. Training can only produce what it sets out to produce, namely functionaries who are there simply to ensure that the system operates smoothly, regardless of human costs.
Moreover, training works on the premise that the desired skills can be easily replicated, so that replacing managers is never a problem because any vacancy can be filled by a clone. This commitment to management by formula not only ignores the complexities of human nature and the intricate dynamics of human relationships, but it also inhibits the one thing leaders have to do every moment of every day — think for themselves.
Education, by contrast, focuses on individuals, their ideas, and their cultures, ensuring a rich reservoir of knowledge and experience that enables a leader to comprehend, at the very least, just how difficult it is to understand people. And education is only what it claims to be if it inspires and equips people to think for themselves.
As Dostoyevsky told us: “Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.”
Mortimer Adler explained this in “The Paideia Proposal”. “Knowing what”, the development of sound judgment, is only achieved through ever-growing familiarity with the great ideas of civilization. Reading history, philosophy, and classic literature is essential to this end, as are the Socratic Dialogue and the Scholastic Disputatio in discussing the texts and great works of art and music.
When we contemplate the global leadership crisis, it is not difficult to discern the root cause. T S Eliot expressed it with characteristic eloquence in Choruses from the Rock:
Where is the life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
A successful property developer who attended my workshops, told me how a group discussion we had on Gandhi’s trial for treason had helped him that very same day. In a thorny meeting with a difficult client, he remembered Gandhi’s approach, and modified his handling of the disagreement accordingly. The positive outcome encouraged him to purchase one of the books on the reading list I had provided – Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov”.
I know scientists who revel in the classics, international cricketers who are inspired by history, and professionals from many different business categories who have learned how Aristotle’s fourfold explanation of causation helps them think with much greater depth and precision.
This message cannot be repeated often enough for corporate executives worn down by the burdens of “being the boss”, and by constantly being “distracted from distraction by distraction”. Improve your leadership by improving your mind; read classic literature.
As the esteemed contemporary agrarian philosopher, Wendell Berry, has pointed out:
“…literacy, the mastery of language & the knowledge of books, is not an ornament, but a necessity. It is impractical only by the standards of quick profit and easy power…it alone can preserve in us the possibility of an accurate judgment of ourselves and the possibilities of correction and renewal. Without it, we are adrift in the present, in the wreckage of yesterday, in the nightmare of tomorrow.”