Managing Leadership^®

Have you noticed the uniformity, in recent years, in the must-have look for male actors – and, indeed, for celebrities in many fields? In this age of painstakingly politically-conscious and carefully market-researched entertainment, you can rest assured that this particular fashion trend clearly is intended to make a statement.

Without belaboring the tedious and really rather disturbing point, suffice it to say that the meticulously unkempt, spiky hair, and what we are expected to believe is an irrepressibly manly beard, frame a most peculiar patchwork of masculine and feminine features. Rosy, gimlet, pouty, firmly set, pink, forbidding, full, taut, round and soft, granite-edged, dreamy, icy, hinting at vulnerability, clearly displaying invulnerability – match these with the facial features that occur to you. The odds are good you will then be able to identify most or even all of them on nearly every young male celebrity face you see.

The prospect of these characteristics competing for prominence on the visages of contemporary celebrities is no less appetizing than the hermaphroditic personalities they are intended to represent, the grotesquely manipulative marketing they express, or, even, the unsettlingly inconsistent dialogue and acting that inevitably accompany them.

Today’s leader is often similarly portrayed as simultaneously all things to all people – available and aloof, open-minded and relentlessly focused, empowering and in complete control – comprising every possible strand of both traditional and fashionable leadership and organizational design philosophies. We will soon discretely review a recent management book which is only one sadly common example of this.

And the problem is not merely in the existence of those who promote the creation of these composite clones, but in those who strive to become them. The questions are: what is their agenda, or what culturally prominent philosophy are they writing into their scripts, or attempting to work into their roles?

Who is employed by who, or to what purpose, and why? Are managers and executives to give expression to presumed social yearnings, to strive to become the something-for-everyone idols of the “thought-leading” elites – or are they to do their jobs? We’ll be looking at what lies behind some of these questions in coming days, and hope to have you join us.

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Today’s tip: Speaking of agendas and consequences in both theory and reality, please see Cam Beck’s take on one way these play out in the current social climate.

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