Bennis: Where have all the leaders gone?

In the introduction to my 2003 book, The Art of Winning Commitment, I repeated a question that leadership guru Warren Bennis first asked in 1989: “Where have all the leaders gone?” Bennis answered the question with a refrain from a popular folk song: “…long time passing.”

Bennis decried the loss of such leadership greats as Churchill, Schweitzer, Einstein, Gandhi, the Kennedys, and Martin Luther King. A group of great leaders emerged in the middle of the 20th century, then those great leaders disappeared, and we have been trying ever since to figure out what they did so that we might replicate it.

I answered Bennis’ question by positing that we have become more difficult to lead. Acceptance of any particular authority is more optional than it once was. Political leaders can be voted in or out of office, new jobs can be found, with new bosses, and there is a different brand of religion in a synagogue, church, or mosque just around the corner. We no longer rely on only two or three authoritative network news anchors to translate the world’s events for us—cable television provides a plethora of authorities. The internet has made it possible for each of us to develop our own authoritative voice by making ever more information and knowledge readily available, and by giving each of us a platform to reach the whole world with our own unique messages.

I suggested that we as a people had grown up in some important way, and that leaders had not caught up with us.

Chopra: A leader is the symbolic soul of the group.

My understanding of how we have become more difficult to lead was sharpened by a comment made by Deepak Chopra during a talk at the Harvard Business School. Chopra said that a leader is the “symbolic soul” of a group, standing for the aspirations of individual followers to transform their personal confines, and for the group to transcend its collective limits.

That seems a deeper and more poignant way of saying that a people get the leadership they deserve.

I think the term “aspiration” is important here. To “aspire” is to move “toward spirit.” A people who aspires to compassion and reconciliation will get compassionate leaders who know how to reconcile differences. A people who aspires to vengeance and defensiveness will get vengeful and defensive leaders.

Soul-sick leaders reflect a soul-sick people. What kind of people are we? Having grown up does not necessarily mean that we are spiritually mature.

Obama: We seem to be suffering from an empathy deficit.

Now along comes Barack Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope, in which he takes one step farther along the trail that I have been following through Bennis and Chopra. While discoursing on the ways in which we as a people have become soul-sick, Obama wrote, “As a country we seem to be suffering from an empathy deficit.” The book is his assessment of how we can, “…ground our politics in the notion of a common good.”

Obama would have us remember and live by The Golden Rule, which has served for centuries as a fine remedy for soul-sickness. He is challenging us, in the same way that Kennedy did when he told us, “Ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country.” Obama is telling us, “Ask not what you can do for yourself–ask what you can do for one another.” His definition of “one another” is global.

(I’m not sure when Part 2 will arrive)

P.S. I have not climbed aboard the Obama for President bandwagon. It’s way too early. I read the book. I liked what he wrote. Period!