Managing Leadership^®

We’ve always had an uneasy fascination with people who seem able to ignore the rules to which the rest of us so eagerly conform. They step over the lines with what appears to us to be a spectacularly cool-headed daring, striding with bland directness straight to their goal. Natural out-of-the box thinkers – natural leaders, in fact, perceiving goals that are unclear to us, blazing paths to them that ultimately become the new highways down which we soon find ourselves placidly herded.

Indeed, many of these sorts do actually become high-profile leaders in our businesses and communities. Their certainty – so clearly grasped by them but so beyond our ken – unsettles us into impishly grinning admiration and complicity. Sometimes we find it helpful to construct whimsical explanations for their disorientingly attractive charisma, but these never seem to capture the essence of what’s really going on, much less the interest – although, sometimes, the astonishment – of their objects.

Endlessly creative, we are able to keep these mutually agreeable fictions going for amazingly long periods. But nothing lasts forever, and sometimes these all come to a conclusion at the same time.

We are, of course, experiencing a cascade of such denouements now. In government at numberless levels and locales, and in business across several industries, these mutually self-deceiving stories are unwinding into decidedly unhappy endings.

And we find ourselves at last, sheep without shepherds, wandering bemused and aimless in what we thought were well-managed pastures, but opening our eyes to the devastation those little scamps have actually wrought. They never really envisioned anything other than their own self-aggrandizement, and simply saw nothing wrong with frankly and unabashedly reaching out for it.

At first charmed, and later dazed, by these peculiarly unfolding dynamics, we fell under a spell we ourselves wove around our dysfunctional, mutually destructive relationship with these quaintly mischievous little rascals. Why wouldn’t they take advantage of it, and pursue their selfish agendas under its cover?

Why wouldn’t they continue to do so?

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Today’s tips: Speaking of mischievous scamps, please see this piece from Michael Wade on the mystifying shenanigans they sometimes get up to.

And speaking of unabashed self-aggrandizement, please see The Economist for the latest evidence of growing resistance to this in Europe.

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