The Leadership Challenge, 2025-style.
It's different now. Leadership, that is. But are we able to define the current version of the function? You are welcome to join this 2025 challenge.
Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) was a hugely influential American reporter, writer and political commentator. Writing in the New York Herald Tribune, just two days after the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), he declared:
The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.1
That’s pretty good, isn’t it? It succinctly captures the idea that leadership is ultimately about groups of people ‘carrying on’, ‘moving forward’, ‘going further’, in terms of whatever environments, circumstances and objectives that may apply.
Lippmann then added:
The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully.2
That’s a wonderfully optimistic and uplifting expression of the concept, isn’t it? The idea that the evidence of good leadership will be found in whatever group is involved - not just in the supposed ‘top echelon’ but in every single person in that group. Ultimately, it is the empowerment of the group, all members of the group, that matters - their ongoing ability to successfully ‘carry on’, ‘move forward’, ‘go further’.
But Lippmann’s analysis was in 1945. Eighty years ago. Coincidentally, the year of my birth.
So, even if he was right then, do his conclusions still hold? And if things have changed, how and in what way or ways?
This is the challenge that I have set myself for my eightieth year - to try to illumine at least some answers to these questions. Well, why not? And I’d welcome your participation in ways that I will set out as we go forward.
It will, I hope, give you confidence in the project to know that I have the support of my good friend Dr Olaf Hermans who, when it comes to cognitive analytical matters, clearly demonstrates a level of genius; whereas I, “without the grace of genius”, am delighted to be, so to say, enthusiastically following the leader.
Coming up shortly, I’ll offer up some hypotheses that we can use as sounding boards to test ideas.
For now, however, given that this is New Year’s Day 2025, a fact that to my mind summons up thought of the most northerly UK citizens, I’ll conclude with what might be a project motto from The Scottish Play …
Lay on, Macduff;
And damn’d be him that first cries ‘Hold, enough!’3
Thanks for reading.
The image of FDR at the top is from Shutterstock.
Walter Lippman. Roosevelt Has Gone, New York Herald Tribune, 14 April 1945.
Walter Lippmann. Ibid.
William Shakespeare. The Tragedy of Macbeth (1606)
Sounds interesting!