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| Sunday, 18 September 2005 |
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Business |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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'Leadership'
another 'Sinhalen Business'
We are living in a hazardous period of human evolution where perceived realities are far removed from actual reality. Earth itself is trembling from threats to the environment, so are countries and social entities including business organisations. Leaders have brought us into this situation and leaders are urgently needed to extract us out of it. Deepal Sooriyaarachchi's wisdom on the topic is contemporary in this context. Since the evolution of thinking man, people have been assigning a wide range of reasons to the social phenomenon of a power elite emerging periodically to lead others and why human behaviour in any of its forms is distributed in such a fashion while most are mediocre, a small group deviates positively from the majority. Leaders are evidently more competent, more visionary, more committed to achieve goals, and therefore more powerful and knowledgeable than the rest. Herein lies the paradox of leadership: more powerful leaders create more competent followers, and more powerful followers have more competent leaders. The best of leaders in powerless societies will be less competent than lesser individuals of more powerful societies. The quality of leadership within a group or society therefore reflects the quality of its community and vise versa. Societies have the task of building their leaders through culture. History is replete with such evidence. The lakkana sutta of Buddhist scriptures describes signs that individuals possess which lead them to be either a Buddha or a Chakravati. The ten transcendental virtues or parami are finely blended with hard virtues such as virya and adittana as well as soft virtues such as dana and upekkha. The bosdhisattvas of the Jatakas give excellent example of how the ten transcendental virtues drive their leadership roles. Max weber in his Protestant Ethic thesis describes how a powerful set of virtues enabled the economic rise of Europe and eventual colonisation of the world in the recent past. Confucian ethics and the way of Tao in addition to Buddhist Zen have been accountable for the discipline of leadership in East Asian countries such as Japan, China and Korea. The advice given by Krishna to Arjuna before the battle in the Mahabharatha no doubt influences the culture of Indian leadership. Leadership therefore like all management behaviour is culture bound and indicates the strategies evolved by societies to develop their own champions. Leaders have been described in management literature as transformational when efforts on radical change, are significant: as transactional when being conservative in maintaining stability; transcendental or guru or teacher-like; or even transient when leading from behind. The saying of Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher of 6th century BC describes this last style in the following quotation. A leader is best when people barely know he exists. Not so good when people obey and acclaim him. Worst when they despise him. Fail to honour people and they fail to honour you. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will all say: we did this ourselves. Are leaders born or made? Recent research in genetic studies have shown evidence that they may indeed be born, in that individuals could carry in their genetic structure such traits as the tendency to dominate, be alert, possess high energy, and as such are pre-determined to be leaders. Individuals should also be capable of being developed as leaders, or else management science would not be viable. But what would happen if everyone is trained to be a leader? Would society have an over-abundance of leaders? The normal distribution would always take care of this and shift the mean to a higher point to make room for leaders of superior quality. Here we come to the importance of Deepal Sooriyaarachchi's latest work. In writing this collection of vignettes on leadership; he implicitly and expertly covers the entire range of leadership thought in deed and precept and in doing so has made a contribution to shifting the mean upward. Dr. Travis Perera, Senior Consultant, Postgraduate Institute of Management, Colombo 8 |
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