I began this study of contrarian leadership by pointing our there is no infallible step-by-step formula for becoming an effective leader, and certainly not for becoming a good leader. But we can at least pull together a few contrarian principles which will help a leader break free of the wisdom of the herd, and strike out in bold new directions:
1. Think gray: try not to form firm options about ideas or people unless and until you have to.
2. Think free: Train yourself to move several steps beyond traditional brainstorming by considering really outrageous solutions and approaches. Your choice may at some point require you to retreat from all surrounding bills.
11. Work for those who work for you; recruit the best lieutenants available, and then spend most of your time and energy helping them to succeed.
12. Many people want to be leader, but few want to do leader; if you’re not in the latter group you should stay away from the leader business altogether.
13. You as a leader can’t really run out organization; rather you can only lead individual followers, who then collectively give notion and substance to the organization of which you are the head.
14. Don’t delude yourself into thinking that people are intrinsically better or worse than they really are: instead. Work to bring out the best in your followers (and yourself) while minimizing the worst.
15. You can’t copy your way to excellence; rather, true excellence can only be achieved through original thinking and unconventional approaches.
All of the foregoing principles are predicted on an underlying belief that leadership is highly situational and contingent; as noted earlier, what works in context at one point in time won’t necessarily work in a different context at the same time, or in the same context at a different time. Thus, every leader is locked in a moment-to-moment struggle with the context and circumstances of his own place and time, which raises the question of whether he can ever truly hope to be the master of that struggle. This conundrum in turn causes us to wonder whether leaders are the architects of history, or history is the architect pf leaders.
In the course on leadership that Warren Bennis and I teach at USC, we contrast the views of Leo Tolstoy, who believed that history shapes and determines leaders, with those of Thomas Carlyle, who believed that leaders shape and determine history. In his epilogue to perhaps the greatest of all novels, War and Peace, Tolstoy believed that leaders merely ride the crests of historical waves which have been set in motion by myriad forces beyond the leaser’s control or comprehension. “Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own free will,” he wrote, “is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole cause of history and predestined from eternity.”
On the other side of Carlyle, the nineteenth-century British historian and essayist, who was convinced that “history is the biography of great men,” the greatest of them being kings. The very word king, Carlyle contends, derived from the ancient word can-ning, which means “able-man.” In Carlyle’s view, it is the Ableman (and Ablewoman) of our species who direct the course of history and determine humanity’s destiny.
My experiences as a leader, as well as my study of chaos theory and related phenomena, have led me to a middle ground between Tolstoy and Carlyle. It may well be that our world is largely Tolstyan, subject to historical forces which no man or woman can fully measure and analyze, and the consequences of which no person can fully predict. Thus, to that extent, leaders are in fact history’s slaves. However, I am also convinced that Ablemen and Ablewomen can make a difference in the course of human events; that the decisions of leaders can indeed have a lasting impact on the world; that historical determinism is never totally in control.
That exquisite part of all this is that a given leader at a given moment never knows for sure whether he is acting as an architect of history or simply as history’s pawn. If he’s like most human beings he wants desperately to believe the former. And contrarian wisdom would argue that that is the moral preferable approach: A leader should always act as though he himself, not history or fate, is responsible for his actions.
A closely related theme in this book is that contrarian leaders should assiduously cultivate and jealously guard their intellectual independence. Warren Bennis has famously observed that “managers do the things right, while leaders do the right things.” But what is the right thing? In countless leadership scenarios that play out in a pluralistic society, no two people will agree.
The contrarian leader knows what he himself must answer the question of what’s
right from both a worldly and moral perspective. This at times will make his
experience more exhilarating than that of other leaders, and at time more excruciating.
But it will always be his experiences – one for which he willingly takes
responsibility. And what could be a greater or more meaningful adventure in
leadership than that?