Traditional Wisdom... LO9124

Rol Fessenden (76234.3636@CompuServe.COM)
14 Aug 96 22:45:41 EDT

Replying to LO9066 --

John corrected me in my use of health measures as an indirect indicator of
leadership effectiveness. Let me clarify what I did not say well.

The western Europe and US cultures have been dominated throughout the
industrial revolution by a certain style of -- primarily capitalist --
leadership. That leadership has been in charge during a period in which
there was the creation of an enormous amount of wealth. At the beginning
of the industrial revolution, creation of wealth seemed like a very good
idea, even though today we might disagree with its importance. Even if we
recognize that it is a very complex situation with many other factors at
play besides the leadership, we still do not have any good historical
evidence of alternative 'leaderships' that have demonstrated such
large-scale effectiveness.

I want to stress that I am not giving responsibility to these leaders for
the creation of wealth, but it is still important to recognize that the
style of leadership available at the very least enabled or allowed that
accumulation of wealth to occur.

We have no evidence of any alternative leaderships or methodologies that
have enabled or allowed such a success. This is important because
leadership selection is essentially a conservative game. The very first
goal is to not do anything that will mess up the organization, so we
always look for leaders that are only slightly more advanced than those
who have just gone before. We like the continuous improvement approach to
our leadership. There is, at this point in history, a lot of perceived
value in the existence of our organizations, and we do not want to risk
losing that perceived value by choosing a leader who is too willing to
risk the organization.

Is this good? Well, if a new crop of leaders led GM, IBM, and AT&T down
the tubes, there would surely be a lot of suffering as a direct and
indirect consequence. You may argue that this is highly unlikely, and you
may be right. But even a low probability combined with a very high cost is
likely to make the leader selection committee shudder.

-- 

Rol Fessenden LL Bean, Inc. 76234.3636@compuserve.com

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>