In praise of strong leadership

Bill Gates and Sun’s Scott McNealy have kissed and made up. Intel’s Craig Barrett has defied the company’s critics. And at Apple, Steve Jobs is riding high on the success of the iPod.

It’s a moment to savour. For while the IT industry has bred some durable leaders, elsewhere there is cynicism about company chiefs.

In Europe, Shell chairman Sir Philip Watts overstated his company’s reserves in Nigeria and had to resign. At Disney, underperforming chairman Michael Eisner lost his title. In Tokyo, losses at the carmaker Mitsubishi led to the departure of president and chief Rolf Eckrodt.

Of course, IT has its own share of heroes turned villains. WorldCom’s Bernie Ebbers still faces trial. Yet since Jim Collins inveighed against chief executives as superstars in his bestselling Good to Great (2001), critics of Wall Street’s Führerprinzip have gone further than making cheap points about executive pay and executive corruption.

We live, they insist, in an unknowable world of global outsourcing. Takeovers are on the rebound and employee “churn” is a trend that has come to afflict top directors, too.

So what price the omniscient, omnipotent corporate leader?

Well: it’s true that, when kicked upstairs, brilliant professionals who specialise in managing IT can become weak leaders. The rule doesn’t always hold, but still. On the other hand, today’s fears about leadership are overdone.

Guru theorists of leadership fret about the demography and work-life balance of both leaders and led. They fear that successful young leaders have what leadership expert Warren Bennis calls affluenza – wealth but no meaning in their lives. Successful young leaders, Bennis observes, are prone to ask, “Is this all there is?”

As for the older generation of leaders, their own kids are not alone in telling them to indulge in their emotions and in ethics. The same sermons are delivered by thousands of coachers, authors and consultants.

Leadership buffs say it’s more about sense-making than decision-making; more about saying, “I don’t know,” to establish credibility, than about setting a clear direction. Worse still, derring-do leader “narratives” are meant to inspire the troops; indeed, animating people is regarded as an end in itself, regardless of what ideas you are trying to animate them about.

I don’t buy all this. The idea of leadership may sound a bit fascist, and we have all met leaders from The Office. But the concept of leadership pioneered by Tony Blair in the speech he made after being elected in 1997 – of serving the people, who are the masters – seems to me an abdication of responsibility.

IT directors might find it fashionable to prostrate themselves, in the modern egalitarian style, in front of a participative, empowered and personally autonomous workforce. They may dupe themselves that everyone can be a leader. But the true IT leader will be remembered for the progress won, the new businesses created, and for the insights developed, tested and put into action.

Any other concept of leadership is just fluff.