Managing Leadership^®

John Dryden, in “All for Love,” had one of Marc Antony’s generals say this about him:

I love this man, who runs to meet his ruin;
And sure the gods, like me, are fond of him:
His virtues lie so mingled with his crimes,
As would confound their choice to punish one,
And not reward the other.

We’ve talked here before about this – the idea that the presumptively great virtues inescapably come with equally great vices. Where this is the case, it seems, sadly, that the former inevitably succumb to the latter. It is the person’s vices that ultimately determine his or her fate; the virtues merely determine, by their scope, the scale of the ensuing tragedy.

But what if these aren’t two sides of the same coin? What if they are the continuous surface of the same entity; in truth, always revealing the same thing, albeit in differing ways? Or, perhaps, the matter is like the masks of Tragedy and Comedy: whichever is worn at any given moment, the same actor, facing in the same direction, is wearing it.

Is this the real meaning of the colossal collapses we have experienced, crashing on us like waves breaking over one industry after another, over the past decade or so? How much of the grand scale of these failures is the result not merely of the terrific heights from which they fell, but also of their very ascension to them under the same leadership?

Was the hubris, much talked of lately, that brought their ruin not merely the consequence of their success, but its cause as well? Are the virtues of these so-called leaders not so mingled with what are increasingly adjudged their crimes as to essentially reflect not two confounding aspects of their characters, but one coherent truth about them?

And we – should we not be more cautious about rewarding one, lest we find it necessary to punish the very same later? Indeed, might we be rather less distinct than we flatter ourselves to be from these destructive dynamics, but rather fully complicit in them?

And yet amid the rubble born of this delusion we retreat back into it. We talk on and on about individual leadership, how we need more of it, how it is composed of this or graces us with that, how we may not know what it is but we recognize it when we see it.

Perhaps that last is true, but we just don’t recognize it for what it truly is, what it actually reflects about us – or does to us. But it just seems like madness to me.

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Today’s tip: John Phillips has been doing an incisive and even-handed series on this topic of intense current interest, and this installment is a perfect example of why you should stop over to peruse it, and to make his site a part of your daily reading.

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