The Greatness That Cannot Be Taught

I am highly wary of the self-conscious American cult of leadership. It's not unlike the American cult of dieting. Almost everyone in this country, I expect, would like to be thinner. And even more than thinner, I suspect that everyone would like to be a leader -- every man and woman his or her own Jack Welch.

We are the great learn-it-yourself, do-it-yourself society. Everything in life can be gleaned during a short course, or from reading a book. And who teaches at these traveling leadership seminars and writes these leadership books? Successful football and basketball coaches, prominent American military officers, and what might be called the "super CEO." That's a CEO who is so successful and so charismatic that he belongs not merely to the business world but to the world of popular culture, like Welch, or Lee Iacocca before him. (Somewhere out there on the sidelines, there's also that great wannabe-but-never-was Donald Trump, selling himself in good times and bad as the exemplar of the great American dream -- although he's really more like Brazil. He owes the banks so much they dare not let him fail. Say this for Trump, he's always out there hustling. Maybe someday there will be at least one grown-up in the country who takes him seriously.)

The problem with our become-a-leader-in-30-days craze is that what worked for Welch and Iacocca is not readily transferable, nor are the secrets of their success easily passed on in a book. I knew Iacocca in his Chrysler days, and he was not only very good at what he did but also equally good -- indeed brilliant -- at personalizing his success. He weaved a national success story, America's comeback against the Japanese, into his own personal autobiography. America's resurgence was Lee, and Lee was America. But I doubt that anyone who was not Lee could learn to be Lee by reading his book. To be Lee, you would need his talent, his superb skills at marketing, his almost unmatchable ego, and his rage to succeed as an Italian-American in the face of the prejudice he encountered as a young man (a rage that, by the way, also helps explain the success of another great figure of the cult of leadership, Vince Lombardi). I think you had to be Lee in order to be like Lee; I don't think you could be Lee through study. And I doubt that Lee's brand of leadership is readily transported to other business situations.

That's also true for the generals we lionize as leaders. The lessons that men such as Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell drew upon came from careers spent studying other men who had gone before them in their own profession. (The tough, hands-on Schwarzkopf is the lineal descendant of Grant and Patton. If he were a manufacturer, he'd be right there on the factory floor. The cool, controlled Powell, so subtle in estimating others and so careful to make sure that everyone is on the same page, is the direct heir of Eisenhower.) When it was their moment in the crucible, they tested those lessons on location, in very practical ways.

I suspect that little of what they learned has much validity in the broader, less hierarchical culture, in which you cannot give orders and assume that they will be obeyed. Even more so today: We have always been the least obedient of societies, and we are a good deal less obedient now than we were half a century ago. People are better educated, and the truly talented ones, the ones you want to motivate, have many more options of their own. They're not likely to sit around and take orders from a harsh drill-sergeant-like superior. In business, this means that talented young executives, if they are treated like foot soldiers, will simply walk out the door.

I have similar doubts about coaches making the leadership tour -- especially football coaches. It's our most hierarchical sport, and football players, more than most athletes and most Americans, are accustomed to doing what coaches tell them. A good football coach is not necessarily a born leader. He's simply a good football coach. In professional football today, that's less about leadership than about estimating talent, handling the salary cap, and being lucky because your players sustain a minimal number of injuries. In college football, it's more often than not about recruiting and having an amenable admissions director working with you.

So if leadership can't be taught or transferred, how do you foster it? Where do you find leaders, and how do you create them? The truth is that in most fields, it's a natural process. Leaders are men and women who have chosen the right profession. They're good at it, and because they're good at it, they like it, and because they like it, they're even better at it. They're so good at it that they'd rather work than play. They're naturals, and excelling comes naturally as well. They've understood their field from the start, and they've studied it without even knowing they've studied it. They could look around from the day they joined an organization and understand the talents of those who went before them, understand the people around them, and know when and just how hard to push them.

"Leaders often don't become serious until midcareer, because their own talent surprises them."