Everything I Need to Know About Leadership I Learned In… No. Wait.
I am amazed at the number of leadership books that get published every year. I am glad for it, one of my favorite things to do on a rainy Sunday browses the leadership section of a bookstore. Browsing different authors’ ideas about what effective leadership is or ways to effectively manage change is my idea of fun and my kids’ idea of death.
I have noticed a creeping trend on these bookshelves lately though — the growing number of comically oversimplified leadership theories. Maybe they’re not even theories… leadership ideas.
“Leadership Lessons of Tinkerbell” or “Everything I Need to Know About Leadership, I Learned In Kindergarten”. No. Stop. If you learned your leadership lessons in kindergarten or from a fictional character, you do not need to know all you need to know about leadership.
Someone must be buying these books, I mean I see them on the shelves. That means someone is publishing them. Publishers won’t publish unless someone is buying. Right?
I can’t really be sure because I’ve never actually seen someone buy one. Although I have had someone try to convince me that I should have all my administrators do a year long book study on something about cheese, and someone else made the same argument regarding a book about fish.
This whole movement makes me wonder if it is a universal shift in leadership thinking or if it is a uniquely American thing that speaks to our cultural desire for simplistic and instant solutions. We are, after all, the land of rapid weight loss and instant pudding.
I suppose there is a bit of logic to the evolution of this. If we were to write a book that really detailed how to be a very good leader, it would probably be too long and detailed. Very few people would actually buy and even fewer would read it. But, a book that can promise to help you become the CEO of a Fortune 500, drop those last stubborn 70 pounds, and pick the next breakthrough stock, all in under 140 pages (illustrations included!) will probably resonate with far more people.
I suppose it’s not the bookshelves, or that people might be making money from these books that bother me. It’s that I’m finding people in positions of some importance that think these are the leadership texts that matter. Leadership by aphorism. How did they get to these places? I have been in the business long enough that I now get hired by organizations to help these leaders become better, but what I really wonder is how they got hired in the first place. And, even moreso, which school did they go to that taught this stuff. Cheese? Fish? Not in any leadership curriculum I would recommend. But, maybe I’m just cranky and old.
The challenge of leadership is to be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have humor, but without folly.
— Jim Rohn
