Lost in the woods of modernity?
Just whip out your handy-dandy Executive Compass
Leadership used to be easy. You hatched a suitable vision, you pointed your sword at it, your people put down their rakes and started to march.
It was a simple time. The schools were terrible. All the ancient books were condemned, and the Renaissance was years away. It was a great time to be in charge.
You could lead any of three ways. The favorite was rule by decree. The tummy of the CEO up in the castle growled, and three chickens down in the courtyard lost their heads. Command and control was a wonderful deal; no one dared go against the leader's mailed fist. Why, he got his power straight from God. And he could have you boiled.
The second was rule by paternalism. The king and the bishop both did their share of this. "We know what's best for you. Trust us."
The third, rapidly gaining in popularity, was deception. Whatever it takes to succeed, go for it. Lie, cheat, wear twenty pairs of pants to a funeral — who cares if you get the job done? That fellow down the road,
Machiavelli, even wrote a book about it. People are suckers — and if they find out, what can they do?
Of course, all three approaches yield the identical result: control over people. Yep, as long as these Middle Ages continue, and people remain unempowered, uneducated morons, you can be a leader with both hands tied behind you.
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Alas, the Middle Ages ended. The classic texts of ancient civilizations were dusted off and were reintroduced. The old power centers withered under the onslaught of new ideas. King and church were no longer the sole authorities. The seeds of democracy and humanism sprouted, and a new order sprung up on the site of the old one.
It was a world where human beings made their own choices — a world where traditional leadership was all but impossible. With the splintering of orthodoxy, different minds beheld four different visions of the ideal society.
From ancient Athens, Plato told us that the best hope for a true, good society was one ruled by "philosopher kings," specially trained to make better decisions than the rest of us could hope to make. At about the same time, in China, Confucius was saying the same thing, which resulted in the creation of the mandarin class of leader-sages. The wise few choosing for the unwise many — the idea embodied the principle of Efficiency.
A few miles away, in Macedonia, Aristotle was arguing that a great society was one that aimed to provide "the good life" for all its citizens. The state existed for the sake of the happiness of all, Aristotle said — an idea embodying the principle of Community.
Flash forward to the Renaissance, then skip ahead to the Enlightenment, and two other values are being forged. As authority melted away, new attention was being focused on the individual, through most of history little more than a slave. Philosopher John Locke opined that people were not bound to laws in whose making they had no voice. It was a brand new insight: people were rightly and naturally free — an idea embodying the principle of Liberty.
The same Enlightenment was meanwhile crafting an antipodal thought. A young Virginian slave-owner, asked to write a letter on behalf of some quarrelsome colonists, wrote: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Thomas Jefferson had defined the principle of Equality.
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The four principles — two pairs of opposing ideas — are the four points of James O'Toole's "Executive's Compass."
They may be seen as typifying, each in turn, the four eras of American history. We began our nation because a few disgruntled businesspeople wanted to be free of the onus of paying taxes to Great Britain. (Liberty)
Within a century the compass had turned a quarter revolution, and big business — railroads, robber barons, and the trusts — ran the country. (Efficiency)
With the Great Depression, the myth of business as grand provider nosedived, and the government emerged as a force guaranteeing fair treatment to all people. (Equality)
Finally, in our own day, we have become a nation of consumers and voters eager to guarantee for ourselves economic prosperity, a clean environment, and reformed government. (Community)
The four compass points are in large part what make modern society so rich and vibrant compared to that of our medieval predecessors. But the tension created by them (historian James MacGregor Burns calls them "the deadlock of democracy") is also responsible for much of the grief of life today, and leadership is nearly impossible.
Consider the garish, overcrowded picture reproduced on page 3. O'Toole led off his September 13 Masters Forum session by asking members what it was a picture of. Some answers: a mob, a carnival, a freak show, the Mardi Gras. Then O'Toole told the title of the painting: "Christ Comes to Brussels," painted in 1888 by Belgian artist James Ensor.
Sure enough, if you look in the exact center of the painting, which is loaded with grotesque people in and out of uniform, in masks, there is indeed the figure of Jesus on a donkey, with the traditional gold halo around his head.
The painting is one of the landmark events in expressionism. Ensor, who had shared with the medieval surrealist Hieronymus Bosch the lowlander proclivity for hideous group scenes and monstrous skeletalized figures, drew the crowning event of Jesus' public life — his triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday — as a forgettable detail in a macabre parade of grotesques.
[Note: the painting does not reproduce well. A larger, full-page version appears in overhead section at the end of this Application Kit. Don't be surprised if you, like the Belgian citizens, fail to identify Jesus.]
What does this mean, and what does it have to do with O'Toole's Executive's Compass? First of all, it's not a religious statement, according to O'Toole. Ensor's sensibility was ahead of its time, anticipating the gruesome art of the 20th century. He had the unhappy task of pushing his work upon a public that was in love with the lush pastels and sensuous tints of the impressionist painters.
Ensor, O'Toole says, was a leader trying to make himself heard in a world preoccupied with other things. The painting is a depiction of the plight of the leader in the modern world. No matter how perfect one's message, he said, one will have an impossible time getting it across in a world where billions of people don't give a damn about you — with or without a halo.
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Put yourself in Ensor's peculiar picture. Pretend you are Christ. Only instead of being born in some simple peasant land, you are born in a modern industrial democracy.
The world is divided into thousands of armed camps, special interests. Businesspeople clamor for a society dedicated to pure Efficiency. Environmentalists don't trust the businesspeople one inch and call for an opposite society, based on what's best for Community. The achievers of the world are passionate believers in the power of Liberty and oppose any effort at all to curtail it. The bleeding hearts of the world are more concerned with justice and treating every citizen with complete Equality.
Venture into that riot at your own risk — there is no way you can satisfy any point on the compass. It's an ideological four-way food fight that could only happen at this point in the 20th century, in the new democratic world order.
That is the task of the modern leader. Balancing interests that do not wish to be balanced. Honoring ideas that do not honor one another. Learning a common language that is not Esperanto.
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You're still Jesus, and still stuck with the problem of standing out in the crowd. These are contemporary people. You can't do like the king in the Middle Ages, snap the fingers on your mailed fist and expect people to salute. ("Who do ya think you are, Charlie?") Rule by decree went out with Stalin.
You can't be the Good Shepherd and tell people you are their leader now, not to worry, you'll take care of everything. That's rule by paternalism. It does not sell in the 1990s. People aren't sheep. Trying to herd people is like trying to herd cats.
Nor can you play the Machiavellian cards and rule by deception. Oh, you might get away with a phony miracle for a day or two, or playing one group off against another. But people are incredibly hip these days — they'll see through you and send you packing.
The Second Coming could be a very challenging task.
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There is one possibility, says James O'Toole. What if the prospective leader of this fractious, prickly-pear society, instead of saying, "Listen to me," were to do the opposite, and start listening to the people he or she hoped to lead?
The typical person trying to get our attention is like the fellow in the next seat on an airplane, telling us vastly more than we would want to know about himself even if we cared — which we don't. We call these people obnoxious; we know, guiltily, that there have been moments when we have done the same thing — me, me, me.
But every so often, we meet someone who appears genuinely interested in our thoughts, our reflections, our issues. What a difference they make! Because they are sincerely interested, we learn surprising things about ourselves and our own dreams.
This was what Jesus did even in feudal Judea. It is conceivable that, starting with one person and listening to that person, and then another, and then another — pretty soon you have a small cadre of disciples, leaders taught by a leader. Maybe Jesus could make a comeback after all, in Brussels in 1888 or even Minneapolis in 1994.
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James' O'Toole's Executive Compass is a capsule history, in four simple words, of the history of Western values. But what good is it exactly?
For one thing, it will help you assess your own opinions and feelings on issues, and is a reminder that lurking just below the surface hassle of organizational politics are real values that deserve respect and consideration. Bearing this in mind helps keep disputes from boiling over into personality issues and infighting. The effect of the compass is conciliatory.
For another thing, it tells us right off that a true leader — a servant of the people he or she leads — may not be an ideologue. Yes, you may have libertarian or corporatist tendencies, but you may not be doctrinaire about them.
A leader in the dark ages could impose his opinion on those who followed. A leader in today's less dark days can propose ... teach ... coach ... listen ... even decide. But impose a vision without first explaining it, or aligning it with the needs of those who are to follow? That no longer works.
As with Christ riding into Brussels amid the madness of a Mardi Gras parade, no one will listen. No one will care.
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OK. So you know that the task of modern leadership involves, to some degree, finding a balance between the four worthy ideas representing the four compass points. How do you do that?
Historically, politicians — both public and private — have attempted to achieve consensus by seeking decisions that occur at the very heart of the compass. These are decisions that strike no one as especially libertarian, egalitarian, corporatist, or communitarian. They are more like a mulligan stew — a little of this, a little of that. Not enough of any single thing to please or enrage anyone.
When this process more or less succeeds, it is known as compromise, and its authors will step forward and take their bows. More often than not, however, compromise is an orphan — it is mealy-mouthed, wishy-washy mush. No one wants it or claims it, and it never amounts to much. In both the private and public sectors, the result of bad compromising, of hewing to the center of the compass, is gridlock.
O'Toole favors a more daring approach to balance. Any given decision should richly reflect one of the four values above the other three. Other decisions should reflect the other values.
Each decision based on a given value will cause unhappiness among fans of the other three values. But if leaders have done their homework, a relationship and an understanding exist between them and those who follow. The leader knows the followers, knows their stated demands, and knows beyond that what their unstated dreams are.
The great leaders of history and in the world today somehow knew about O'Toole's magic compass. Jefferson, Lincoln, and Gandhi all lived in the world, and had to deal with the most impossible situations you could imagine. Somehow amid all the screaming and tumult, these leaders were able to learn from the people they led, and then to take the people and their wishes to a transcendent level of fulfillment they did not know they were expressing.
Yes, there would be disapointments and reversals. But in the end they would witness something like a social miracle — equality, liberation, independence.
Among today's leaders no one can match the Czech Republic's Václav Havel. He has led his nation through the Iron Curtain, through a dismaying rupture with its Slovakian neighbors, from despair to optimism. "And without a policy," said O'Toole. "Havel's only policy is civility. And because of it, his nation is making the greatest progress of any in Eastern Europe."
The Executive's Compass assumes that deep down, few of us are true ideologues, putting ideas and abstractions over the more complicated, more contradictory needs of an entire organization or society. Deep down, the libertarian does not seek to cause pain to those who fail to successfully compete. Deep down, the egalitarian does not want to extinguish the flickering light of individual freedom.
If the people know the leader is with them in the larger sense, if they feel they have been communicated with, and if the leader has kept faith with them, they will accept decisions that go against them individually.
It is not an optimal situation. Democracy has always been a mess. People are always unhappy. But, as Winston Churchill said, we are stuck with it, because the alternative — reliance upon a single one of the four values instead of an awkward balancing of the four — is unacceptable.