2/28/2008

Everyday leadership psychosis

Today's lesson for MBA wannabes, free of charge:

(1) You are training to be a middle manager, not a leader.

(2) The day-to-day demands of your job will prevent you from developing into a leader in almost any sense of the word nor is it ever likely you will be perceived as one. Nothing you study can change that. It's not you, it's the job.

(3) Visiting a battlefield does not entitle you to put yourself in league with a Hooker or Lee. Resist the temptation. Think of yourself more as the leader of some mule train off in the distance.

(4) Having a strategy discussion after two hours of guided tours will not make you a leader. It relates more to being a camp follower or newspaper reader.

(5) Nothing learned on a battlefield tour maps back to your day job as a middle manager. Except one thing, that managers are not leaders.

If the tour helped you understand the unbridgeable chasm in circumstances between men willing to risk death on orders from a leader and the doings of a manager in your little work unit, then the trip will have been well worth it.

So stop talking about "leadership." Thanks.