Training is good for dogs, because we require obedience from
them. In people, all it does is orient them toward the bottom
line.
The list on the left is of all the qualities that business schools
don’t encourage enough, as they too often opt for the short-
run, profit-maximizing, microeconomic bottom line. Bottom
lines have nothing to do with problem-finding. And we need
people who know how to find problems, because the ones we
face today aren’t always clearly defined, and they aren’t linear.
Frank Gehry and other great architects have moved away from
the old divinity of right angles to rhomboids, rounded spaces,
and parabolas. They are designing sombreros. Aspiring leaders
must also think non-traditionally.
Leaders have nothing but themselves to work with. It is one
of the paradoxes of life that good leaders rise to the top in spite
of their weakness, while bad leaders rise because of their weak-
ness. Abraham Lincoln was subject to fits of serious depression,
yet he was perhaps this country’s best president, guiding this
country through its most severe crisis. On the other hand,
Hitler imposed his psychosis on the German people, leading
them through delusions of grandeur into the vilest madness
and most horrific slaughter the world has ever known.
What is true for leaders is, for better or for worse, true for
each of us: we are our own raw material. Only when we know
what we’re made of and what we want to make of it can we be-
gin our lives—and we must do it despite an unwitting conspir-
acy of people and events against us. It’s that tension in the
national character again. As Norman Lear put it, “On the one
hand, we’re a society that seems to be proud of individuality. On
the other hand, we don’t really tolerate real individuality. We
want to homogenize it.”
On Becoming a Leader