Education for Leadership

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One might think, in that case, that leadership is easy enough to pick up. And, in fact, the basics are readily enough taught, even to children. Consider the following episode from C.S. Lewis's children's stories, The Chronicles of Narnia. In A Horse and His Boy, Lewis tells the story of two princes separated at birth, the older of whom is brought up in a distant land by a fisherman. After various adventures, Cor is reunited with his younger brother, Corin, and their father, King Lune. To his dismay, Cor learns that as the older son he is to become king.

"But Father, couldn't you make whichever you like to be the next King?"

"No. The King's under the law, for it's the law makes him a king. Has not more power to start away from thy crown than any sentry from his post."

"Oh, dear," said Cor. "I don't want to at all. And Corin--I am most dreadfully sorry. I never dreamed my turning up was going to chisel you out of your kingdom."

"Hurrah! Hurrah!" said Corin. "I shan't have to be King. I shan't have to be King. I'll be a prince. It's princes have all the fun."

"And that's truer than thy brother knows, Cor," said King Lune. "For this is what it means to be a king: To be first in every desperate attack and last in every desperate retreat, and when there's hunger in the land (as must be now and then in bad years) to wear finer clothes and laugh louder over a scantier meal than any man in your land."

In a passage readily accessible to an intelligent 10-year-old, one has some fundamental principles of leadership at hand. Cor has already begun to learn the difference between responsibility and office and the importance of personal example in both prosperity and adversity, of cheerfulness in the midst of difficulty and, implicitly, of visible self-sacrifice for a larger good.

Good military organizations obsess about the importance of developing good junior leaders. Understanding full well the terrible stresses war puts on soldiers, they know that formal authority may count for very little in a pinch. During the siege of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, for example, the nominal commander of a beleaguered French base in the Laotian highlands was deposed by a committee of middle-ranking officers. The general ended up taking a backseat as a small band of majors and lieutenant colonels organized a desperate and, in the end, impossible defense of their surrounded outpost.

Modern armies seek not merely willing and intelligent obedience, but initiative--often in situations of ultimate difficulty. They, too, begin with the basics. In 1942, General William Slim led a badly battered polyglot army of Indian and British soldiers out of Burma: They had barely avoided annihilation at the hands of a Japanese force superior in virtually every respect. He had the task of rebuilding not only the form of the organization but its spirit, and for that reason his memoir, Defeat Into Victory, is well worth reading. One of his speeches to officers included this famous sentence: "I tell you, as officers, that you will not eat, sleep, smoke, sit down or lie down until your soldiers have had a chance to do these things. If you do this, they will follow you to the ends of the earth. If you do not, I will break you in front of your regiments."

As military organizations seek to create effective junior leaders, they pound into them these kinds of simple maxims: "The fellow in charge eats last." "Your priorities are, in this order, your mission, your men, yourself." "Don't ask your people to do something that you are not prepared to do." "The command is not 'forward,' but 'follow me.'" In a myriad of ways, they create circumstances in which junior leaders must put these maxims into practice and, in military organizations with well developed noncommissioned officers systems, they pair the new officer with a sergeant or petty officer who is a nominal subordinate (though 15 years or so older than the new lieutenant or ensign) but actually a kind of leadership coach.

The maxims of elementary leadership are thus quite simple--although, of course, often difficult to live by. One need only look at the wretched corporate scandals of recent months to see how easy it is for those at the top of organizations to think of perquisites as rights, to forget that simple mantra of "My mission, my men, myself." Nor is this any less true of governmental or nonprofit organizations than of