Solitude and Leadership

Last October, former Yale professor William Deresiewicz gave a brilliant speech to the freshman class at West Point — one that has caused me to come back multiple times to take in its full meaning and eagerly pass along to close friends.

What made it so special was not just its wisdom, but how different it was from the usual collection of words spouted off by the lineup of suits and brass that make their way through the military academy speaking circuit year after year.

During my four years at USAFA I was privy to hundreds of post-lunch, mandatory pep talks in Arnold Hall where the warm, stale air, soft murmur of whispering cadets and full stomachs often lent itself more to dozing and less to absorbing the wisdom of the elders.

I say this not to paint a grim or self-important picture, but simply to say that it took a very special speaker to shake the cynicism and sleep from a crowd of cadets who had heard it all already.  I wasn’t present when the Professor stood in front of the cadets, but I can imagine that this was one of those speeches.

You should definitely read it here in full, but below are a few choice segments. Thanks to Dr. Al Chase at The White Rhino Report for pointing it out.

So I began to wonder, as I taught at Yale, what leadership really consists of.  My students, like you, were energetic, accomplished, smart, and often ferociously ambitious, but was that enough to make them leaders?  Most of them, as much as I liked and even admired them, certainly didn’t seem to me like  leaders.  Does being a leader, I wondered, just mean being accomplished, being successful?  Does getting straight As make you a leader?  I didn’t think so.  Great heart surgeons or great novelists or great shortstops may be terrific at what they do, but that doesn’t mean they’re leaders.  Leadership and aptitude, leadership and achievement, leadership and even excellence have to be different things, otherwise the concept of leadership has no meaning.

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So what I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers.  Any goal you set them, they could achieve.  Any test you gave them, they could pass with flying colors.  They were, as one of them put it herself, “excellent sheep.”  I had no doubt that they would continue to jump through hoops and ace tests and go on to Harvard Business School, or Michigan Law School, or Johns Hopkins Medical School, or Goldman Sachs, or McKinsey consulting, or whatever.  And this approach would indeed take them far in life.  They would come back for their 25th reunion as a partner at White & Case, or an attending physician at Mass General, or an assistant secretary in the Department of State.

That is exactly what places like Yale mean when they talk about training leaders.  Educating people who make a big name for themselves in the world, people with impressive titles, people the university can brag about.  People who make it to the top.  People who can climb the greasy pole of whatever hierarchy they decide to attach themselves to.

But I think there’s something desperately wrong, and even dangerous, about that idea.  To explain why, I want to spend a few minutes talking about a novel that many of you may have read, Heart of Darkness….

Now everyone knows that the novel is about imperialism and colonialism and race relations and the darkness that lies in the human heart, but it became clear to me at a certain point, as I taught the novel, that it is also about bureaucracy—what I called, a minute ago, hierarchy.  The Company, after all, is just that: a company, with rules and procedures and ranks and people in power and people scrambling for power, just like any other bureaucracy… Just like—and here’s why I’m telling you all this—just like the bureaucracy you are about to join.  The word bureaucracy tends to have negative connotations, but I say this in no way as a criticism, merely a description, that the U.S. Army is a bureaucracy and one of the largest and most famously bureaucratic bureaucracies in the world.  After all, it was the Army that gave us, among other things, the indispensable bureaucratic acronym “snafu”: “situation normal: all fucked up”—or “all fouled up” in the cleaned-up version.  That comes from the U.S. Army in World War II.

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That’s really the great mystery about bureaucracies.  Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things—the leaders—are the mediocrities?  Because excellence isn’t usually what gets you up the greasy pole.  What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering.  Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you.  Pleasing your teachers, pleasing your superiors, picking a powerful mentor and riding his coattails until it’s time to stab him in the back.  Jumping through hoops.  Getting along by going along.  Being whatever other people want you to be, so that it finally comes to seem that, like the manager of the Central Station, you have nothing inside you at all.  Not taking stupid risks like trying to change how things are done or question why they’re done.  Just keeping the routine going.

I tell you this to forewarn you, because I promise you that you will meet these people and you will find yourself in environments where what is rewarded above all is conformity.  I tell you so you can decide to be a different kind of leader.  And I tell you for one other reason.  As I thought about these things and put all these pieces together—the kind of students I had, the kind of leadership they were being trained for, the kind of leaders I saw in my own institution—I realized that this is a national problem….

We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going.  Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them.  Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them.  Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place.  What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of exper tise.  What we don’t have are leaders.

What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers.  People who can think for themselves.  People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things.  People, in other words, with vision.

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Tagged as: leadership, solitude, speech