So, You Want to be a Leader! Leadership as Great Ideas

So, You want to be a Leader!

Leadership as Great Ideas


James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2005

This is one of a series of essays on leadership in all its aspects, from scientific to intellectual, social to political, moral to spiritual, economic to industrial. One of the great myths of management is that as long as you understand the fundamentals of management you can manage anything. That has proven a costly societal error. Likewise, management is often treated as if synonymous with leadership when management as leadership has constantly failed. Leadership, in the same sense, is considered a linear concept that can be easily plugged into a discipline or function and succeed. We are experiencing the unhappy consequences of this thinking in the twenty-first century with worldwide corruption, chaos and seemingly no one is in charge. Leadership, like most things in human experience, is multi-dimensional and a complement of many perspectives.


So, you want to be a leader! How do you know that you aren’t already one? A man asked a rich man, how do you know when you are rich? He answered, “If you must ask, you obviously aren’t.” It is the same with leadership.

Leadership is first and foremost an idea. It has often been said, with much justification, that America is not so much a country as an idea. As long as the idea of a democratic republic exists, America will survive. But it does not necessarily follow that an idea will resonate with all, or that it is complete within itself. Leadership steps into the void and assesses the will, mood and purpose of its charges, and realistically moves forward.

Likewise, as long as ideas are pursued for the beauty and challenge of the pursuit, leadership will live in the ideas. It is when leaders forget their role, become enamored of themselves, take themselves too seriously, and assume the demeanor and privilege of oligarchs that leadership perishes.

Leadership is not driven by the status quo, but of the rising reality of the day. Leadership looks beyond the accepted, the norm, the sacred, the known, and the popular to what is necessary to survive. It does this with curiosity, courage, commitment, consummate attention, passion, resilience, and dedication with little interest in the benefits.

The paradox of our times is that we are rich in technology but bereft of ideas. We continue to piggyback on the hard work of decades or scores of years before. The original mind has taken a holiday, delighting instead in replication, duplication, and refinement of the micro world. This is as true in economics as science, psychology as with philosophy, art as in music. The needle is stuck on the safe.

Ideas have taken a back seat to the glorification of the individual who refines the known. We make celebrities of the rich and equate their accumulated booty with brilliance, when it has more to do with avarice, cunning, boldness, risk taking and serendipity.

The fact is we are and have been coasting on the back of great ideas of such men as Thales, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, Farady, and Einstein, to name a few, for the better part of a century. We have moved from what Einstein referred to as his “wacky concepts,” to the safety of the technology of toys today. Yes, I said toys, not tools!

This is not new. Eric Hoffer was right when he said you could judge the quality of a society by its toys. Man’s inventive schemes throughout history first were treated as toys of amusement before they became tools of employment.

The typewriter, for instance, was a feasible concept in the fourteenth century, first patented by an English engineer named Henry Mill in 1714, and patented again by an American typographer named William Burt in 1829. Remington didn’t manufacture the prototype of the modern typewriter until 1874. It was a business flop. It wasn’t until 1900 that the federal government adopted the machine for federal business that it seeded wider use.

Another curiosity of this invention is that the keyboard was designed to discourage fast typing so as to maximize employment. A hundred years later, with all the sophistication of computers, the computer keyboard remains essentially as it first appeared.

The Internet, cell phone, iPod, and so on, are associated with this invention, if only obliquely, but remain more toys of enjoyment than tools of employment. Visit any office, mall, supermarket, home or business, or ride in a car with a friend if you need corroboration. People today cannot stand silence or to be alone in a crowd for very long. They must dial someone, play a video game, or resonate to some noise meant to resemble music because they dare not be alone with their thoughts. It is not only children who love game boys, but their parents as well.

Small wonder there are so few Isaac Newton’s amongst us. It is obviously locked in the character of the times. Newton's musings held sway in science for 300 years, or until Einstein. Perhaps Einstein’s will now hold sway for at least another hundred years. Meanwhile, leadership as great ideas plays out as entertainment as we wait.

* * * *

Leadership is not preoccupied with itself. Leadership is at heart a matter of passion rather than reason, although reason may be the driver of the passion. Since the beginning of man’s wondering, when breakthroughs have occurred, it is “as if God is laughing at me,” as Einstein puts it. He claims ideas are always profound in their simplicity.

Leadership is never any grand design, never any complex theory, never a many-tiered bureaucratic assault on a problem, but nearly always the crystal clarity that rises out of the solar plexus as insight, and manifests itself as an idea, something new, unwashed and not at first clearly seen or understood.

Today, we are preoccupied with leadership, which explains why we seldom experience it. Could it be we fail to understand that leadership is a process and not an outcome?

When the focus is on outcomes, we see people doing what they do because others approve of it, because it is profitable, because it brings fame and fortune, because of the recognition in the doing, because it makes a point, because it means being etched in a biographical anthology, or because it is impossible to do otherwise.

Plato’s metaphorical cave looms large in the present climate.

Leaders, on the other hand, are in touch with their muses without embarrassment. They accept the pain and ridicule, the sarcasm and criticism, the ostracism and rejection, the isolation and loneliness, the depression and anxiety that come from seeing what others refuse to see, living as they do in a world of shadowy distractions with little inclination and even less will to acknowledge much less listen to their muses.

Leaders have the will to explore what others would deny, the passion to entertain their doubts, and the wisdom to be unafraid of their prescience.

There are many myths associated with leadership. We make leaders out to be mythic heroes when they are quite ordinary, actually magnifications of our ordinariness. One myth that persists is that leaders of great ideas tend to be effete geeks, or consummate geniuses.

Thales was a keen athlete, as was Plato. Plato was actually a husky, broad shouldered and imposing champion wrestler. His given name was Ariston, but he assumed the name Plato at school as his popular sobriquet. Plato means “broad shoulders.” Our own Abraham Lincoln was a wrestling champ. His lanky sinewy fine-toned body excelled at take downs of much more bulky opponents. Joseph Campbell, the author of “The Hero With A Thousand Faces,” and popular chronicler of cultural mythology, was an Olympic champion sprinter. The Greeks were right; a fine body supports a fine mind. Byron "Wizard" White was a great football player before he was an esteemed Supreme Court Justice of the United States.

Today, we are inclined to categorize thinkers from doers, athletes from geeks, managers from workers, the rich from the poor, the educated from the ignorant, the sacred from the profane, the competent from the incompetent, the sophisticated from the common, the elite from everyone else, with one race superior to another when everyone, without exception, is the greater or lesser of these distinctions, or an amalgamations to some degree. Nothing is either/or nor is anyone for that matter.

* * * *

Ideas over the Ages

It was Aristotle that showed we are all virtuous, but may suffer from excesses or deficiencies of virtue, but that no one is virtue less. For example, courage is a virtue that we all possess, but some are moved to display its deficiency or cowardice, while others are moved to display its excess or rashness. The same can be said of temperance. We all possess it. But some of us are slaves to its deficiency or insensibility, while others to its excess or licentiousness. Likewise, we are all capable of the virtue of kindness, but some of are locked into pettiness, while others into vanity.

Leadership follows Aristotle’s table of virtue: courage, temperance, generosity, kindness, morality, ambition, patience, candor, humor, openness, modesty, and righteous indignation.

If you are acquainted with the life of Abraham Lincoln, you know how he struggled with these virtues, and often proved haplessly deficient in them, at least to his mind. A most human and humble man, he demonstrated that we could treat ourselves with respect and dignity without feeling damaged when others note our flaws. This proved disconcerting to Lincoln's critics when he would acknowledge the wisdom of their observations, but remained saddened that they had not expressed them directly to his face.


Society has always been obsessed with a social pecking order with a delight in comparing and competing, as if the only way to feel less small is to belittle someone more esteemed. Paradoxically, such people are obsequious to a fault in accepting an arbitrary social system: first as obedient students, safe hires as workers, and then ultimately as if puppets on a string to a market economy. They dance to the shadows on the wall, and seldom venture far from arbitrary norms no matter how miserable they are because of the safety, security and comfort of such boundaries.

They become slaves to television and video games, Internet junkies living in the minutia of the web, or obliging respondents to the constant subliminal bombardment of “buy it now, have now, and experience it now” that assails their senses from all forms of media. White noise rides on the belly of a market economy that dulls the senses to Aristotle’s deficiencies or excesses. Shadows are more real to us than direct light because life has become essentially a second hand experience.

Plato parable of the cave appears in his best-known work, The Republic.

This parable challenges people’s notion of reality and direct experience. Plato sets up a situation in which he likens the general populous to being chained together since childhood in a cave. Behind them is a fire, and they are shackled so that they can only look in front of them seeing the fire casting shadows on the walls.

The shadows become their reality. Then one of them breaks free, stands up, looks around, and sees the real people and the fire that casts the shadows. In this shocking discovery, he realizes that there is more to life than shadows. It is not a pleasant experience, however, because looking directly at the fire hurts his eyes. He then walks out of the cave into the sunlight. This is even more painful to his eyes, but he realizes for the first time that he sees the perfect source of light and not light's reflection. He is in touch with reality.

Light is a fascinating metaphor for leadership.

So often in our present climate of leaderless leadership, we are programmed to chase shadows in a cave, chained to our fears, and consumed with paranoia of what might happen because some shadowy mind has suggested it from on high.

That said ideas have shaped our destiny, and risen from the sphinx of our doubts by individuals with the courage to take note of the light at great risk to their safety. Such men have been with us for more than 2,000 years.

Pythagoras, for one, had a passion for numbers. He had to be constantly on the move, however, to escape persecution for this passion. Mathematics was then considered inconsistent with the wisdom of the gods. Numbers to him were masculine and feminine, beautiful and ugly. He thought that the integer 10 was the very best number of all because the first four integers (1+2+3+4) equaled 10. He went on to discover prime numbers (1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11 . . .), or numbers that can only be divided by 1 or the number itself. Mathematicians are indebted to him as mathematics is the language of science.

Although Pythagoras is best remembered for his Pythagorean theorem, his interest did not confine itself to numbers, alone, but to music as well. He determined, for example, that strings of different length produced different vibrations and consequently different patterns of sounds. Indeed, he discovered music followed the forms and patterns of mathematical principles. The magic of classical music, then, is an exercise in mathematical composition and a gift of his idea.

Plato, on the other hand, envisioned a Utopian society ruled by a philosopher-king. To him, the possessor of the light would realize the highest good in a rigid hierarchically structured society of workers, soldiers, rulers, and slaves, all knowing their relative positions in a totalitarian system. He attempted to put these ideas to the test when invited to Syracuse to teach the ruler, Dionysius II, the discipline of his “dialectic of forms.” It was a disaster and he barely escaped with his life.

Aristotle, who had been a student of Plato’s, believed in democracy and the pursuit of the science of inquiry, and not the absolute truths of Plato. He developed methods of analysis and categorization that were based on observing the substance from which things were made. His basic four categories were fire, water, air and earth. This led to seeing people in three clusters: the pleasure seekers, the honorably employed, and the elite. He created the Lyceum to train this elite class to rule. The Lyceum became popularly known as the “peripatetic school” because he walked up and down as he talked and worked.

Aristotle depended on his students to transcribe his lecture notes. They became his great works on philosophy, ethics, politics, and science that are still referred to today. He saw no inconsistency with democracy and slavery, believing humans are social and moral, but that hierarchy and subordination were inevitable. His importance lies as much in his analytical methods as in his conclusions.

Like Pythagoras and Plato, Aristotle had to be constantly on the move for his ideas, or otherwise be condemned to death. This was the case with Socrates, who refused to move on, taking hemlock to end his life.

The theme throughout the history of ideas is that those who led with their minds ran into constant threat to their bodies and souls. Men of ideas that go against the grain today are academics who fail to receive tenure, politicians who aren't reelected to public office, film and television performers who suffer lost income at the box office, or have their television programs canceled, personnel who are demoted in the military, or workers who fail to win promotion with their companies. These people are the exception rather than the rule as there is a dearth of men of ideas willing to risk all.

Consider Galileo, called the “first physicist,” who was confined to house arrest for many years (1633 - 1642) and forced to recant his proof of Copernicus that the earth revolved around the sun, and was not the center of the universe.

Galileo's Dialogues contradicted Aristotle, the darling of the church, and defended Copernicus. The church banned his works for nearly two hundred years (1632 – 1822). His theories with fallen bodies, experiments with pendulums, and discoveries with the telescope would seed the work of many others, including Newton and Einstein.

You sense Galileo the fallible man rather than the historic icon through his correspondence with his daughter. The letters span 33 years and reflect the dramatic events of the time, including the Thirty Year War, the plague, Galileo's new philosophy of science, as well as his daughter's convent life. A nun, often in poor health herself, but always solicitous to the needs of her father, she was the only person in his life once the church turned against him. His world reduced to solitary confinement, and nearly blind, he pushed on to complete his Discourses, then smuggling them out to a Dutch publisher shortly before his death in 1642.

Fallible man is also revealed in the life of Isaac Newton. The most revered man of science of his day, Newton lived a life that sounded more like a novel. He was a sad child, hated his parents, and was reclusive. As a teenager, he threatened to burn his parents’ house to the ground, and them in it. As an adult, he preferred secrecy to publication, yet remained the most famous scientist for three hundred years for his theories, once published.

Newton suffered several nervous breakdowns, which may have been the result of inhaling laboratory gases, explaining his high strung nature and inclination to giddy episodes. In any case, he was knighted for his work in mathematics, and for establishing the nature of light and the universal force we call gravity.

Aside from science, he directed considerable time and energy to the pursuit of alchemy, history and religion. He was consumed with the belief that lead could be converted into gold, and that biblical prophecy could be reconciled with Greek mythology. His personal library contains vastly more books on the humanities than science making note of this preoccupation.

* * * *

Light and gravity, space and time, which were part of Newton’s legacy, would wait three hundred years before Einstein would arrive to challenge Newton’s interpretations.

A fair question, at this point, might be why write about philosophers and scientists on such a subject as leadership; indeed, why display such leadership of ideas?

First, I would suggest that the outsider or the one not fully conventional in the accepted sense of his day was more likely to rise above the fog of convention. Often such men, such as Roger Bacon (not Francis Bacon), for example, a cleric, overcame the turbulence and contentious intellectual climate of his day to reconcile theology with science, and for it become known as "the first scientist." He was a total amateur, as were many others to follow. They led the way for Newton and company.

Amateurs I see on the rise again, going against the grain, and making breakthroughs as leaders of ideas. They don’t have any vested interest, or territory to protect, as do the specialists. I don’t see the specialists programmed at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Columbia, nor those residing at Stanford, Cal Tech, or MIT in their billion dollar laboratories showing the way. Amateurs live in the laboratory of their minds wondering on God knows what. Best we stay tuned because we shall be hearing from them.

Leaders of ideas over the centuries have not been mythical characters. Some were strong of will while others fearful and even cowardly. Some were humbly born while others came out of the ruling elite. Common to them all were curiosity and a deficiency or excess of virtue. It is only in modern times that the amateur has disappeared from our midst, replaced by the specialist, but he is resurfacing.

Why, then, did leaders of ideas leap out of the crowd to become stories we treat with mythic delight? There are, of course, their discoveries. But what of them as men? What were they like? Perhaps, it can be said they were more passionate and determined than most, but no less fragile or inclined to doubt and depression, and perhaps a bit masochistic. Single-mindedness comes to mind as well as a touch of madness. Take Michael Faraday.

Michael Faraday introduced mankind to the concept of electricity, electrolysis, and electro-magnetic motion. He demonstrated the first electric motor, and "faraday" still defines the quantity of electricity transferred in electrolysis. Yet, he couldn’t have been lower born or more poorly formally educated. The time, place and circumstance of his age were such that only the Aristocracy was given to pursue science. Science was the high art for the intellectual few. Faraday, the outsider, was trained as a lowly print binder with a passion for chemistry and physics, and an ambition to be a scientist. People laughed at him and said he had delusions of grandeur.

Grandeur had nothing to do with Faraday’s aspirations, only the wonder of chemistry and the invisible forces of electricity. He read everything he could find on science, taught himself mathematics, attended every lecture on science he could get into, which was not easy, and placed himself in position to overhear scientists talking after the lectures, making careful note of what they said. He constantly badgered Sir Humphry Davy, an established scientist of the day, to become a technician in his laboratory in the Royal Institute. He was repeatedly rebuffed. Through perseverance and good fortune, however, he finally realized his goal. The student quickly surpassed his reluctant benefactor in intellectual depth, publishing papers on chemical electrolysis, electro-magnetic motion, and magnetic forces without Sir Davy's knowledge. There followed a demanding work schedule, along with contentious dealings with colleagues, resulting in a severe mental breakdown. He was still in his forties, never to regain his full physical or intellectual strength.

His published works would one day resonate with Einstein, who would take their implications much further in his miraculous year of 1905.

Einstein started with the premise that there are no absolutes, that everything is relative except the speed of light, which is a constant. Measurement of speed, mass, space, and time are all dependent on who is measuring them and what they are doing at the time.

Mass is energy and energy is mass. Prior to Einstein, they were treated as if different entities. An object, he observed, is simply energy condensed into a form. For example, the energy locked in the atoms of one kilogram of mud has the same explosive power of 30 million tons of TNT once its energy is released.

Einstein’s “wacky concepts” (his words) revolutionized the way we view the universe. Still, in an odd way, he operated much as an amateur.

He was a rebellious student, only interested in math and science, and had little interest in being cooped up in a laboratory, or proving his theories with experiments. He preferred to wonder, to imagine himself riding a light wave, visualizing things in motion and their relation to time and space. His grades at the university were so poor that the best job he could get out of university was that as a clerk in a patent office. It was boring work, but allowed him free time to wonder. Ideas turned him on, and ideas centered on his fascination with light.

This led him first to visualizing, and then publishing three brief papers in 1905. These were sent to an academic journal as handwritten drafts with a note asking for them to be published, “if there is room.” The first paper updated Max Planck’s theory of radiation; the second announced how gas particles bounce off each other; and the third purported to modify the theory of space and time.

Einstein worked in a way that many of us do; he bounced things off his wife. He wondered what it would be like to ride on a beam of light, traveling at the speed of light. He asked her to imagine him holding a mirror to his face wondering if the light would ever make it into the mirror and reflect it back? Would he see his reflection, or would the mirror always appear to be blank? If so, relative to the traveler, light would appear to have stopped. Since light is a constant, he could never exceed the speed of light. For ten years, he puzzled over this because he was convinced that his image should not appear.

To resolve the issue, he went back to what Galileo had said, and that was that it was difficult to measure the true speed of an object. The problem was knowing whether you and the planet that you were sitting on were also moving. When we look at an object at rest on a table, it is in fact hurling through space. It appears to be at rest because the table and we are moving at the same speed. This principle of relativity said that you are not able to tell that we are moving without some other external frame of reference.

Then Einstein made a shocking discovery. The speed of light, being the constant that it is, means that time cannot be a constant; that time can actually shrink; indeed, that time must vary according to how fast the observer was traveling.

The traveler moving at just less than the speed of light would still see a normal image in the mirror, because time for that person would have slowed down. Einstein determined that if you managed to travel at the speed of light, time would stop, although you would be unaware of it. Traveling at greater than the speed of light is therefore impossible.

This was Einstein’s theory of special relativity.

This led to the famous E = mc2, the idea being that matter and energy are the same, that matter can be changed into energy and energy condensed into matter. For example, should the mass in a common pencil be released, it would have the force of the square of the speed of light, and therefore the explosive power of an atomic bomb, similar to the kilogram of mud mentioned earlier.

Einstein’s theories received little note when they were first published, but gradually the best minds in science came to confirm these theories, thus introducing the atomic/nuclear age, exploration of space, and a new appreciation of the "big bang" theory of the creation of the universe.

* * * *

The leadership of ideas displays how common men of science are in one sense and how uncommon in another. They are not gods, or necessarily supremely intelligent in the latent sense, but perspicacious in the obvious focused sense of their powers. A case could be made that men of science are like single-minded little boys playing with their computers as if surreal game boys never fully cognizant of the possible death and destruction of their discoveries. Einstein once observed, “All our lauded technological progress, our very civilization, is like the ax in the hand of the pathological criminal.”

Given this candid assessment, there must be other forms of leadership to complement the leadership of ideas. We will subsequently give them our attention.


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See Dr. Fisher’s Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man? Ideas presented here are covered there in greater detail, or check out his web site: www.peripateticphilospher.com.
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