The Constant Contemplative

Few words are as overused and as empty as leadership. Business schools have turned it into an industry, the social sciences into an endless quarrel, common sense into a fog. We have looked for the leader in his traits (the great-man theory), then in the situations that reveal him (the contingency approaches), then in the bond he forms with those who follow (the transformational and servant models), without ever arriving at a definition everyone would accept. Hundreds of definitions coexist, often contradictory, and their one constant is that they do not overlap. This confusion is not a failure of research. It is the symptom of a genuinely composite object, wrongly treated as a single quality when it is in fact an unstable assembly of heterogeneous ones. So let us set down, in the absence of consensus, a demanding definition. Leadership is the capacity to identify a community's challenges and to take them in hand effectively, exercised under the constant subordination of that effe...

Peu de mots sont aussi sollicités et aussi vides que celui de leadership. Les écoles de commerce en ont fait une industrie, les sciences sociales une querelle interminable, le sens commun un brouillard. On a successivement cherché le chef dans ses traits (la théorie des grands hommes), puis dans les situations qui le révèlent (les approches contingentes), puis dans la relation qu'il noue avec ceux qui le suivent (les modèles transformationnels ou serviteurs), sans jamais parvenir à une définition consensuelle. Des centaines de définitions coexistent, parfois contradictoires, et leur seule constante est de ne pas se recouvrir. Cette confusion n'est pas un échec de la recherche. Elle est le symptôme d'un objet réellement composite, que l'on a tort de traiter comme une qualité simple alors qu'il est un assemblage instable de qualités hétérogènes. Posons donc, faute de consensus, une définition exigeante. Le leadership est la capacité à identifier les défis d'une ...

Some philosophical disputes survive their refutation because they continue, nonetheless, to shape our intellectual vocabulary. The one opposing Hobbes and Rousseau, regarding the original nature of humanity, belongs to this peculiar category. Any reasonably educated reader knows, or believes they know, that a choice must be made: either the war of all against all tempered by the social contract, or original goodness corrupted by property. And we see this debate resurface, almost mechanically, with every collective tragedy. A war breaks out, a genocide is revealed, an unexpected act of cruelty emerges, and we find ourselves returning to one side or the other in search of confirmation of our intuitions. Yet this routine must be abandoned. Three quarters of a century of primatology, evolutionary anthropology, and developmental psychology have rendered the debate obsolete, not by identifying a winner, but by revealing that the question itself was poorly framed. The defensible answer, and i...