Managing Leadership^®

Sometimes it can be downright dispiriting to see the really stupendous quantity of inanity that is tossed around about individual leadership and the mystical qualities of those purported to practice it. The mavens of the field discuss, with not a jot of irony, everything from how to spell it, to how to do simple arithmetic with it, to how many ways you should love it.

And those examples are just the most recent, at the bow wave of the sad momentum behind this curriculum of leadercraft and wizardry. One of my favorite examples of the lineage of this movement is about a leadership training program based, many years ago, on an observation a hockey star had made.

Asked to explain his really extraordinary ability, he said he had a secret: he skated not to where the puck was, but to where it was going to be.

Now, I’m from Detroit, and used to watch a lot of hockey. I don’t recall ever seeing the rink filled with players milling around in confusion, wondering why the puck wasn’t where it had been when they began skating toward it.

It seems that the star’s secret wasn’t very closely held in that, or any other, sport. But it has the sort of superficial profundity that attracts certain types of bandwagon jumpers, and the resulting leadership training program inspired by this sport figure’s fatuous advice was just one early sample.

Here’s another story to consider in this context. Some years (well . . . decades) ago, I was part of a military unit crossing the Atlantic on a small, shallow-draft ship. Someone had mounted a basketball net to a smokestack on the ship’s tiny flight deck, and that game became the main sporting activity on board.

The problem was, the little ship moved a great deal with the action of the seas. So, if you launched the ball toward the basket as the ship started a roll, the ship, smokestack, and basket would have moved out of the path of the ball, sometimes leaving it to sail forlornly into the ocean.

The ship wouldn’t go back for basketballs overboard, so the players had to adapt. They learned to sense the rhythm and pattern of the ship’s movements, and to instinctively calculate the effects of these on a shot. As a result, when a player began a scoring shot, he would throw the ball to a point several feet away from where the basket was at the moment.

It was a really remarkable thing to see the basket, carried along by a chain of physical events that began who knows where in the Gulf Stream, move to a point just under the ball precisely in time to let it pass through. As far as I was concerned, these shots were worth a lot more than two points.

Our team became quite good, with a reputation to match. During a port visit, a military detachment assigned to a nearby base challenged it to a game, which was held at the base. Unfortunately, our boys still had their sea legs, and kept throwing the ball several feet to the left or right of a basket that didn’t move at all. On this court, there really were players, from both teams, milling around in confusion.

Typically, advice of this sort is just plain wrong. Even when right, it has limited applicability, usually quite tightly defined. In either event, if you try to develop business or leadership lessons from it, you are likely to sound silly when expounding misplaced theory, and look silly when employing specific procedures in general contexts.

Don’t be fooled by false incantations pretending to call forth the universal secrets of leadership, and don’t fall into the bad habits purveyors of these teach. None of them can be generalized to every situation, most of them are simply phony, and they are all far more likely to generate confusion than clarity.

There’s no clarity in self-absorption. Please: just do your job.

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