Leadership like Love ...

Who do you listen to? How do you decide to follow? And, more importantly, for enthusiasts like us who will be the business leaders of the world, how do we chose to lead?

I was listening to Susan Hockfield's chat with Charlie Rose online. Among other things she was talking about research, higher education, stereotypical thinking around women not being engineers, and about being a woman in a leadership position.

The conversation around leadership started this morning. I was sitting at home staring into my computer screen and cradling my coffee mug. Lazy Saturday had just begun and I was thinking about valuation. Value. Value creation The other day I came across an interesting idea. The idea goes something like this:

Value is created from "beauty and good", and that is what allows people to expand their capacity as members of society. Because they are more capable, they can likewise expand the activities which society itself engages in.

Value-creation has a slightly different definition in the world of strategy, and valuation is a lot more different in the world of finance. That just led me to this.....

While we are on the subject of leadership, I attended a conference on corporate social responsibility by a senior executive at Coca Cola. The speaker said he'd seen both good leadership and bad leadership throughout his career. He also said something that made me think about the legacy of the work we choose to do in society. Who will take up the work that we've put so much time and effort into? These were some of the things I was thinking about when I asked a friend what she thought leadership was.

"Leadership, like love, is hard to define. It is something you always have to work at."

"Well said", is what I should have said, instead, I said, "what crap?" That reminded me every time I had to make up crap when someone asked me this question. Some people went on to say, "This is the first time someone has so simply defined leadership that it sounds right." We kept on arguing for a while when someone turned the whole thing around. It was like Chinese Whisper.

"Leading is different than managing. Managing requires a certain level of competence, but leadership is another thing. Setting the course is another thing," he said. Even before I could say, "Where did that come from?", he had people all over him trying to prove this wrong.

I walked out so I don't know whether they reached any consensus. Come to think of it, these two words are so interchangeably used that one tends to forget the difference. I thought of an experiment. I tried to list don a few leaders and a few managers I could think of , just to reinstate the difference. I could not get past the first name itself for an hour, pondering if he was in either class. Mahatma Gandhi, was he a leader, was he a manager or just a good orator? Who's to decide? After this unsuccessful attempt, I eventually jumped to another name, Adolf Hitler. Now that should be easy, I thought. He has to be a leader.

After accomplishing this, I thought to myself, can someone who led a whole civilization to ground zero ever be termed as a hero? Surprisingly, Hitler was not a good choice after a mind boggling Gandhi. While I was planning to work out another name, the same words sounded in my head again.

"Leadership, like love, is hard to define. It is something you always have to work at."

It suddenly sounded true. Maybe true leadership is just a pursuit. Like the image of god, or love that has been puled over peoples eyes to make them perform better. Maybe every leader has weaknesses. Maybe as long as you can lead people the good way, or the bad way to whatever fate and people blindly follow your ideas, you are a leader.

I wish I could give the right answer to that question someday.