Leadership Qualities: Leadership in information rich environments

Leadership Qualities Leadership in information rich environments Gunter Heim, Aachen, Germany September 2002
The Challenge of Deciding
[1] From his very beginnings right through to our times man was never at rest. Rivalling hordes of fellow men, wild animals, climatic changes or diseases: man was always in peril and usually there would have been more than one way to to react.
[2] A number of general strategies have evolved over millions of years and one of them involves the strong initiative of a leading individual.
[3] One or two million years ago some of our ape-like ancestors may have felt threatened by the presence of another horde living nearby. Should they try and find a new home somewhere far away? Or would it be better to attack the intruders with warlike grimaces, stones and sticks? Such behaviour may have brought success in the miocene Or would it even be a good idea to make friends with the new neighbours? Or, should nothing be done at all? Surely, a decision had to be taken and carried out.
[4] And how should a small group of wandering indo-europeans have reacted to an attacking jaguar? Would individual flight be better than collective defense? Quick and decisive action might have made all the difference between death and life in those days.
Flight or fight: all or none!
[5] And in Cesars times, what alternative options did the ancient Swiss contemplate before they decided to enter the territory of Roman allies in their hundreds of thousands? In his book "Bellum Gallica" Cesar tells us how desperate these Alpine people were because of worsening environmental conditions and why they might finally have opted for a military adventure into Gaul.
[6] About 1500 years later, in the Middle Ages, two thirds of Europes population died in a great epidemic disease called the Black Death. Epidemological knowledge then must have been rare, but still some observant people seem to have known that wide-scale burnings of infected areas could check the spreading of the disease. So, again, there was a decision to be taken and to be carried out: should a whole village be burnt to save those who have yet survived?
[7] And in our times, too, there is a constant need to decide and act. How real is the threat of a climatic catastrophe and what should we do now? How much money should be spent on meteorological research if, for political reasons, the same money could also be used to relieve the immediate effects of a drought somewhere in Southern Africa?
[8] In this essay I want to make one central point. It is the following. During the long history of human strive, the need to decide and act has never really diminished. But the exploding number of humans living within individual societies has fundamentally changed the role individuals should play. Particularly, and that will be the main point of this essay, the role of the classical leader, boss or superior is becoming less and less important, although it won`t totally disappear. The first reason for this is that the amount of potentially relevant and available information to be considered is rapidly growing and has long surpassed the capacity of any single human in many cases. Secondly, the coordinated execution of decisions depends more and more on institutionalized workflows that don`t require personal leadership.
[9] Before we go on to look at the importance of social conventions and how they could be adopted to changed needs, however, we first have to characterize the nature of modern decision making as opposed to the way our ancestors could manage things in pre-historic times.
[10] Let us look at the way humans would deal with climatic changes now and many thousand years ago.
[11] In pre-historic times people lived in nomadic tribes counting a few dozens of members at the most. Geographical, meteorological or historic knowledge was probably somewhere near nil. If times got worse in terms of prey to be hunted or food to be gathered there must have been a very limited number of options to be considered and there were few hard facts known to be taken into account.
[12] Perhaps there were rumours about evil ogres living in the land where the sun rises. Perhaps, there was some sort of oral tribal memory of deserts lying in the opposite direction. And perhaups there were some stories of old that told about similar situations and how the ancient spirits should be invoked for advice.
[13] Speaking in modern terms, there was comparatively little knowledge work to be done. There were no archives to be sifted, no experts to be consulted, no computer simulations to be evaluated and no sophistacted laws to be considered.
[14] In those long-gone days, any individual with some fair amount of common sense could have taken the decision just as well as any other member of the community.
[15] The real challenge for a tribe in those days was not so much to find the best of all possible decisions but to guarantee unity of action.
[16] Then, probably much more than today, the immediate success of a course of action was determined by the number of people that followed it.
[17] Consider how much more precarious genetic survival must have been in a group of ten rather than in a group of twenty adults. A few homosexuals, one or two impotent mates, the odd tigre snatching away a stray toddler and an infortunate sequence of still-births might have put a small group to extinction where a slightly larger group might have survived genetically.
[18] And, a little bit less abstract, consider how much the success of scaring away an attacking lion must have depended on a large enough number of strong adults participating.
[19] It would not have been such a good idea to split up in case of disagreement. Leadership in those days, above all, required the ability to enforce a coherent, coordinated action on all memebers of the community. It was perhaps in those days that the ideal leader was imprinted as an archetype on the human psyche. A leader had to be physically strong to dominate rivalling members. He (or she?) had to have charisma to enthrall and enchant his social environment and to focus all attention on his word and deed. He had to yield enough authority to prevent unfruitful palaver when direct action was called for. Dissension would have done no good.
Viking raiders could only be successful as unified groups.
[20] But what should be so different today, one may ask. Today, too, a company, a nation or even the whole of humanity needs to act in unison to be successful. In the face of the climatic catastrophe perhaps waiting for us it would be no good to act half-heartedly. If one half of the earth favoured renewable energies and the other half encouraged the further use of fossil energies, energy intensive branches of industry would simply migrate towards regions friendly to coal, oil and gas. And the overall effect would be one of wasted ressources in more than one sense of the word.
[21] And if an oil-producing company decided to change its image from a ruthless global quasi-monopolist towards a democratic, ecologically and socially responsible benefactor of humankind then obviously public relations, production planning, operative divisions and the general management must not give the impression of tactical falsehood. The company should act as a coherent whole.		Since its Brent Spar experience, Shell seems to be undergoing such a change.
[22] And to guarantee such collective behaviour, you may continue to argue, strong leadership is needed just as much as for confronting lions during the Stone Ages.
[23] In so concluding, you are right and wrong at the same time. Of course, strong leadership is needed to ensure consistent collective action. But unlike in former times, decisions taken today can be carried out by a multitude of institutionalized and anonymous instruments. Environment friendly behaviour can be just as well be put into action by penal law, taxes or educational curricula as well as by personal charisma. The pre-historic alpha-leader did not have laws, curricula or taxes.
[24] So, finding the best of all possible actions and putting it to effect must have been entrusted upon living people in our tribal past.
[25] Today, decision-making and enforcement of action are much shaped by the practice of division of labour. Not only may those who are involved in decision-finding knowledge-work today be different from those executing the decisions. The idea of division of informational knowledge labour goes much further.
[26] In modern cyberspace there exists a superabundance of potentially useful information. No single human is capable of seizing up all that may be important to any single decision.
[27] We all cannot but be content to reflect some tiny aspect of whatever is important in relation to some complex topic. The idea of a single and personal alpha-leader taking important decisions at the level of large and complex social groups all on his own should be as obsolete as the discovery that flintstone makes excellent and most durably sharp edges.
[28] The focus of personal leadership today is much more on the process of mediating and correlating knowledge-work and interests from a variety of sources and actors. This quite adequately mirrors the rapidly increasing amount of distributed knowledge potentially accessible to decision makers. Executing a decision today is more of an administrative business rather than a matter of social competence. Making a good decision, however, requires more and more social skills.
[29] Before we go on to look a the kind of personal leadership demanded for such an environment, let us first look at the legacy of our genetic past. Let us first characterize and appreciate the type of leader that was moulded in the old days but still holds much ground today. Let us call him the classical leader.
The Classical Leader
[30] The classical leader is male and he has an intuitive sense of good style in dressing. When walking together with his inferiors, he is always guarded by someone on his left side to shield his heart. This has probably been so ever since the Miocene.
[31] When chancing upon a group of inferiors talking with one another he feels no natural retraint to wait until asked. He straight away says clearly what he has to say.
[32] A statistical survey would reveal that he significantly more often stands right before someone else`s face than vice versa. Statistics would also reveal that when walking in a group he would maintain a steady speed and pace thus forcing others to either accelerate or step back when walking in curves.
[33] Statistics, being very powerful in revealing the subconscious, would clearly show that the amount of time he waits before he is allowed to speak is negligible as compared to the amount of time his inferiors have to wait for the same privilege.
[34] Statistics, however, are not needed to make obvious the fact that the classical leader has the biggest car amongst his followers. It goes without saying that a big car is synoymous with status.
[35] Unlike his inferiors the classical leader feels no qualms about parking his car right in front of any main-entrance with a clear sign saying that parking is not allowed there. Quite on the contrary. Rather than suffering from a slight but amiable pang of bad consciousness the classical leader regards it as his divine and unalienable right to stand a little bit outside the petty and annoying laws of common men. The classical leader is aristocratic by nature and he has a healthy instinct how to act his superiority:
Aristocratic parking
[36] Accordingly, those living around a classical leader as his inferiors have a decent instinct for pragmatic subordination. Decisions taken by a leader are, as a rule, not questioned openly. Decisions made explicit by a leader are hardly ever confronted publicly by alternative decisions thought up by inferiors. A little tragically, the classical leader is rather flattered than alarmed by such questionable tokens of approval.
[37] Another unfailing indication of the peoples` high esteem for classical leaders is the immediacy with which they attend to minor technical problems their leader may have. A broken telephone cable, login problems with a computer or mislaid car-keys: the really classical leader may reliably expect helping hands in all such situations.
[38] The really truly classical leader is even helped with his or his families private problems. Inferiors fixing some computer software, helping out with the offspring`s schoolwork or even washing private cars relieve the classical leader of such lowly work so that he can concentrate more fully on applying his exceptional qualities for the good of the group.
[39] In short, the classical leader and his flock live in perfect symbiosis. Respective social roles are implicitly and silently accepted. And this is, more or less, how it should be for small groups somewhere below 20 members. Groups of less than twenty people are well below the threshhold of mechanisms of collective and anonymous information processing. Therefore, the most important function of the leader is to stimulate coordinated action rather than encourage too much pseudo-democratic activity.
[41] I want to finish this reflection on the archetypal leader of small groups with two rather curious observations.
[42] The military is particularly dependent on absolutely reliable execution of commands and unanimous collective action on the scale of small groups. Small operative units in times of war may come very close to life as our ancestors lived it in times of external threats thousands of generations ago. And perhaps some quaint remnant of our racial genetical past has survived as a living fossil in the military.
[43] Our ape-like forefathrs had a strong cranial (?) extrusion at the top of their heads and large bulging extensions at the sides of their heads. These acted as levers for the muscles moving the lower jaw. The more prominent these extrusions were, the more force was available to the individual for biting purposes. Bulging extrusions around the upper head stood for immediately available power. The following sketches of military helmets may therefore respond to some genetically encoded sheme (?) to recognize alpha-leaders:
Some historic headforms indicative of our genetic past		<= Greek warrior of about 500 B. C. from Dodona, Prussian "Pickelhaube", and heads of recent apes
[44] The second example of our archaic past still alive in our brains is more curious still. It refers to a common act of communication between alpha-leaders and inferiors of a certain species of apes (unfortunately, I don`t remember which). If an inferior wants to demand the right of passage of an alpha-animal physically controlling the desired path the following behaviour may be observed. The inferior slightly lowers his head and puts his flat and outstretched hand somewhere near his front. If the alpha-animal responds in a similar way (without lowered head) the right of passage is granted. The striking likeness to the formalized act of military greeting needs no further explanation.
Man as an imperfect being
[45] So far we may conclude that for small social groups where unison of action can be brought about more easily than a well considered decision with much information work behind it the human type of the classical leader fits the role perfectly.
[46] But modern life, alas, is more complicated. Modern societies are not made up of clearly defined, stable groups of 20 or 30 people any more. Any single human belongs to a multitude of constantly chaning social groups of all sizes.
[47] Of all sizes! Social groups like a village, a nation, a company or a political party are often made up of thousands or even millions of individuals. The widespread application of division of labour makes each one of us an epxert in some field of life. A social streetworker has an insight into the behaviour of street gangs that is certainly not shared by an ordinary accountant who has spent all his working life in the oil industry.
[48] A civil engineer could perhaps figure out in what ways and how much more than small cars a heavy truck destroys public roads. A man of law specializing on European law, however, could tell in what ways higher taxation of heavy vehicles would collide or harmonize with existing regulations.
[49] A technical planner of a large mining company would perhaps be able to produce a number of possible scenarios on which minerals the company could focus technically. A financial planner alone, however, would be able to figure out whether a scenario is executable from a liquidation (?) point of view.
[50] Other hypothetical decisions taken on the scale of such large social bodies would produce an endless number of similar examples of the value of expert knowledge.
[51] It should go without saying that most decisions have far reaching effects and that each experts opinion somehow a relevant aspect of reality.
[52] For three reasons this simple fact alone dangerously collides with the role of the classical leader as defined before.
[53] Reason number one is the fact that it is now practically impossible to credibly produce an air of omniscience as a personal attitude. Any leader acting in a complex environment today must needs be in constant danger of being found out as either downright wrong in what he says or at best as poorly informed. In an environment where many facts and thoughts play an accepted role no single leader would be able to know or master them all. The classical leader, however, is tuned to impress the group with his ideas and pretending to know things best helps.
[54] Reason number two is that in a complex environment the number of possible decisions is often very great. And the quality of a decision is now much more dependent on an adequate consideration of the most relevant facts. Simply because now there are more facts available than, say, in the Pleistocene. A modern leader of complex social structures must therefore possess high skills of gathering information, weighing its relevance and mediating isolated pieces of knowledge between all sorts of experts. This leads us to reason number three why classical leadership should not automatically be applied to large companies, states or parties.		"Neural Management" may be one way of dealing with complex decision making processes. "Evolutionary Economics" provide another way.
[55] Reason number three why the role of classical leaders is jeopardized in complex social environments has to do with a basic fact of motivation psychology.
[56] Ordinary people will soon give up voicing their views if those views don`t make any difference for no acceptable reason. But those views often contain important information. Therefore, a leader in complex environments should always make it clear to as many people as possible why he has made his choice the way he did. Even admitting a trivial truth like not having had the time to listen to a certain expert or even admitting a feeling of distrust and scepticism towards certain persons or departments would be better than simply saying nothing.
[57] The role of leadership in complex environments, therefore, asks for some new behaviour. The leader must give up his air of omniscience and his inferiors must stop favouring bosses (and politicians) that convincingly act like knowing everything.
[58] As decision making knowledge-work has become more diversified and more demanding, executing decisions has become less of a personal challenge. Many decisions today are transformed into laws, contracts, computer software etc. Physical dominance or even charisma are of doubtful use under such cirumstances. The rules of quality management, independent controlling departments or computerized workflows carry out more and more decisions.
[59] Leading a large group in a complex environment rich in potentially relevant information should not really be called leading. Verbs like "mediating", or "coordinating" are more to the point of furthering complex decision making.
[60] But by demanding such "new" qualities of both leaders and followers do we not ask for humans that do not exist? In the following chapter I want to show that quite the contrary may be true. For evolution always works along many lines.
Man as a cooperative being
[61] When I argued that the type of the classical leader evolved as a natural result of the living conditions of early man I did so without really knowing. Everyday life in the Miocene, Pliocene or during the Ice Ages is rather unknown to modern man. I presupposed that small tribal hordes of about 20 memebers lived in a condition of constant external trheats. This, I postulated, necessitated strong personal leadership. However, looking at tribal communities still living in stone age conditions today, quite a different picture emerges.
[62] Amazon Indians, Australian Aborigines, South African bushmen and Arctic Inuit are often depicted as living in admirable harmony with their surroundings (and with themselves). They are not constantly at war with neighbouring tribes. They do not fight with wild animals day and night and they are not troubled by diseases 24 hours around the clock. And, above all, they do not seem to live that kind of brutish mental life as is often caricatured.
Stone Age people living in a state of cooperative harmony
[63] Anthropologists reveal that the internal social life of tribal communities can be quite varied and rich. Matters affecting all are discussed in the evenings, there are ritualized, that is institutionalized, trials and other decision making processes.
[64] We may expect that the coexistence of sorceres, witches, story-tellers, shamans, medicine-men, chiefs and the like stood for some sort of division of knowledge-work. The chief, for intance, was responsible for pressing for some final decision where that was needed. He did, however, have to listen to a shaman, for example. Because the shaman perhaps represented the groups collective memory. He also had to take into account a witches opinion as she knew best what a group could do physically in terms of health, endurance and child rearing. The witch, too, might have possessed particular psychological knoweldge.
[65] Perhaps our pre-historic past, in a way, provided both scenarios: in more or less rare events of external threats a strong leader was needed to guarantee direct and coordinated collective action. Just like the Romans invented dictatorship as a temporary subordination of the group under an appointed individual, ancient tribes may have given over command to a single leader in times of war or some other peril.
[66] In ordinary, more peaceful times, however, the group may have relied on rather more sophisticated methods of decision making. The ordinary mode of ancient tribal life may well have produced many sequences of behaviour that today can be used to tackle complex decision making processes in an environment of uncertain and rich information.
[67] Our genetic and cultural blueprints today may therefore contain material fort both these modes of group-life. I want to call them the action-mode and the thinking-mode. Examples for the action-mode have been give above. I now want to give some examples for the thinking-mode of social decision making.
[68] As I write this, an election campaign is in full swing in Germany. On September 22nd, the people of Germany are asked to know and decide who will be better for Germany future. The decision is not at all easy. There are some obvious hints that a major climatic catastrophe on a global scale may be at hand. Among many other things, we have to decide about the further use of fossil fuels like coal, gas and oil. Also, unemployment has remained frustratingly high ever since the 1990ies. External threats like international terrorism, too, are much discussed in public. Finally, an international study on the standard of education (PISA) is widely interpreted as to suggest that Germany is not doing too well at all.
[69] Whoever seriously inquires into the details of any of these topics will soon have to admit how tricky things really are. They are well beyond the ken of any single individual. Will the Gulf Stream have changed its course in the year 2010 and will Europe then really suffer from Siberian climatic conditions? What would be the overall effect of rising wages? A rise of private consumption and thus a need for higher production and more employment? Or will it cripple many companies and scare them off to low-wage countries? Who really knows? Probably no one.
[70] When no single individual is capable of truly knowing all the consequences of certain decisions, then perhaps a larger group of people may know. For the larger a body of people with imperfect but non-indentical knowledge is the more knowledge it has and the better can be its decisions.
[71] And so it becomes understandable what is often critised in times of political campaigns. Many people simply follow suit and act the way the majority would act. For obviously, if I am not well informed about a problem I must look for others whose opinion is better founded than mine.
[72] Hence the great importance mock-polls play in campaigns. On August 25th the present social democrat chancellor of Germany, Gerhard Schröder, and his Bavarian contester, Edmund Stoiber of the Conservatives debated major issues of German politics in a TV duel. Most comments in the newspapers on that debate centred around the question who had won the debate in terms of public approval. Both political parties involved claimed to have won in the sense that now they had more followers than before. It may be deplored that so little attention is give to the content of speeches and so much attention is dedicated to their reception by the masses. But this reflects a primarily healthy and useful social mechanism of TV-watchers and newspaper readers. They justly feel that the topics mentioned are well beyond their grips and that a large group of people will be better informed than a small (provided there are still people who are informed).
[73] Instead of unfairly criticizing such behaviour as an Americanized version of collective ignorance we should rather be thankful for it as a useful piece of social decision making and voluntary subordination of individuals under a larger and more intelligent social body.
[74] Socially induced self-degradation is another example of a grossly misinterpreted human capacity. Many people have a demeanor which more or less indicates how much they are respected by their peers. A "good dressing down" makes some people adopt a drooping gait. In meetings some people would hold back their views if they were the only person who had not been greeted by others at the beginning or when being snubbed and ostentatiously ignored as the meeting goes on. In an extreme form, social disregard can even lead to serious so-called psychosomatic illnesses. Generally speaking, the people around us have a very strong influence on how actively we participate in collective work and, abvoe all, decision making processes.
[75] Tragically, people who react in such a way are regarded as weak in will-power. It is said that they lack the power of self-assertion and that therefore they are not very useful for business or political life.
[76] Little could be more silly and unjust at the same time. Let us bear in mind that we are talking about collective decision making processes where no single individual can surely know what is best. We are talking about problems where much more information is potentially available to be discussed or otherwise processed. We are talking about cooperative information work where each individual represents one of many interesting aspects. And we are talking about team work where it can be supposed that at least statistically the team knows more than its constituent members.
[77] Bearing all that in mind, socially induced self-degradation suddenly begins to make sense. During decision making processes like in a meeting, the group as a whole constantly has to assess the relevance of each aspect it could potentially discuss. For time and attention are surely limited ressources. If, therefore, the group comes to the conclusion that the aspects a certain person puts forward must be neglected for the time being, that person is given some implicit hints to hold back. And quite rightly, that person sacrifices his own point of view for the good of the whole. And if a social body comes to the conclusion that a certain person never really produces anything useful at all and that therefore that person should be substituted group pressure is applied. A heart attack induced by continuous mobbing may be likened to apopteosis (?) as observed at the level of single cells .		Self-degradation and mobbing
[78] At this stage of our conclusion we must be careful not be be cynical. I am not trying to say that mobbing should be justified or even wilfully applied. What I am saying is that all gradations of social disregard can be interpreted to be functionally useful for collective decision making. We should cultivate an attitude in which people are respected and promoted that adopt their communications to the needs of the group. What we should do is to appreciate and outgrow our ancient past. This, however, will be discussed later on.
Man as a semi-conscious being
[79] In his best-selling book "The User Illusion" the Danish author Tor Norretranders convincingly showed that only a tiny fragment of our behaviour reaches our consciousness. Not only simple reflexes like blinking can go unnoticed by conscious perception. Much of our social behaviour eludes consciousness, too. A & P Pearse say that when a man kisses a woman, the two brains concerned chemically analyze the other persons saliva and draw their conclusions as to the compatibility of the two immune systems with regards to a possible offspring. One result of this most certainly unconscious analysis is whether the two fall in love with each other or not.
[80] The scientific disciplines of etiology (?), socio-biology and psychology in general can give many more such examples.
[81] Protecting a superiors left half o his body to guard his heart is just as much to this point as producing psychosomatic symptoms in consequence of constant disapproval experienced at work.
[82] In fact, very much if not practically all information processing work in our brains runs smoothly and reliably below the threshhold of conscious perception.
[83] What does this mean for the daily work of leaders? It means two things. Firstly, we are probably capable of doing much more knowledge work as we are aware of. And secondly, it means that rather often than not we cannot possibly know why we react or decide in a certain way.
[84] Opinions rather than facts, vague feelings rather than logical conclusions and intuition instead of proof are the best we can sometimes expect to do. And that can be quite good.
[85] Many problems cannot yet be solved by logic and computational power alone. They are simply too complex and often many uncertain factors play an important role.
[86] Leaders and those led alike must accept that many decisions may still be good although there is no communicable logic behind them.
[87] This is hard stuff for classically minded people. It means that leaders should accept vaguely voiced opinions of inferiors as potentially highly relevant. But it also means that inferiors must accept leaders who cannot explain fully how they arrived at a certain decision and not automatically attack them on these grounds.
Man as a variegated being
[88] Before concluding this essay with the formulation of leadership qualities adapted to complex, information rich environments I want to make one last preliminary point. Attributes like "useless", "disabled", "competent", "good", "dynamic" or "no good" are sometimes used to describe human individuals. Such words have very strong connotations as to the overall worth of a person. In business life particularly one often hears sentences of fragments like "he is no good", "a good man" etc.
[89] Quite wrongly this often identifies a whole persons worth with his specific usefulness in a certain business environment. Such an attitude totally disregards the essence of decision making and work generally in a a complex environment. Every person whether by genetic programming or cultural conditioning represents a potential aspect of reality, as said before. Each person can contribute in a certain way to the solution of some certain problem.
[90] As time rolls on, some types of problems may disappear whereas new kinds of problems may arise. In times of peace, for instance, the merits of military leadership may be less in demand than, say, entertainment abilities. But it would be totally wrong to disqualify good soldiership and good soldiers as useless when no war is at hand.
[91] Nature and perhaps some cultural mechanisms "know" that nobody really knows what types of persons will be needed in future. Therefore, it is wise to have a tolerably large selection of different types of humans in stock. Who knows whether the strong capacity for human affection peculiar to mongoloid persons may not be particularly helpful for some future society. In the Netherlands, for example, blind people are specifically employed by the police to monitor telephone calls. Their fine sense of hearing makes them very sensitive to the more elusive shades of human voices. It is said that they can thus detect liars more easily than ordinary people. And they have a good ability to hear the specific social roles the members of a group have just by listening to their voices. Thus we may say, that for telephone monitoring purposes blind people are not at all disabled. They are rather well qualified for the job.
Conclusion
[92] What conclusions are we to draw from the fact that different kinds of decision making require different styles of leadership?
[93] Primarily, we should become more consciously aware of our tribal heritage. That does not mean that we should dismiss it as outdated. But we should consider carefully which role a leader and his or her followers should play. Some things should clearly belong to the past:
Only exceptional situations may excuse this in our times
[94] Within small groups that work under pressure of time the role of the classical leader is probably near the best we can expect. Inferiors should respect his monopoly on decision making and some of his milder privileges as being part of the game.
[95] Where, however, good decisions can be brought about by the cooperative interaction of many people, departments or social bodies in general, classical leadership is in the way.
[96] In such environments, leaders should encourage people around them to produce their views, to be creative and communicative. They should, above all, try and avoid depreciating others. Leaders should make the process of decision making as transparent as possible. They should make it clear to everybody where openness is not possible, as may be the case with negotations that require discretion.
[97] The people that are being mediated, on their part, must accept that leaders have the last say. They must acknowledge and respect the leaders responsibility to bring about a decision. And they must be forgiving if leaders do not give their particular views full weight. For we are all only part of something bigger.
[98] I want to finish these thoughts with a reference to a most remarkable utopia written by the English author H. G. Wells in about 1921.		Men Like Gods - a positive utopia by H. G. Wells, written in about 1921
[99] In his book "Men like Gods" Wells envisages a future society where there are no clearly visible structures of power. All decisions are being brought about by talking and giving most of the weight to acknowledged experts. But Wells also said that this somewhat anarchical state of affairs was not brought about either by revolution or by a political programme. It had evolved over hundreds of years with single individuals following the ideal of cooperation and commons sense. Perhaps we, too, have to live through hundreds of years of technological and economic turmoils and adventures before the role of the truly classical leader becomes less and less necessary and common decency has become identical with economical efficiency.
Recommended Literature: Giuliania, R. W.; Kurson, K.: Leadership. 2002. ISBN: 0786868414. The Republican Mayor of New York on leadship principles Morrell, M.; Capparell, S.: Shackleton`s Way: Leadership Lessons from the Great Antarctic Explorer. Viking Penguin, New York, 2001

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