THINKING ABOUT LEADERSHIP

THINKING ABOUT LEADERSHIP

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.© April 2007

"The true grandeur of humanity is in moral elevation, sustained, enlightened and decorated by the intellect of man."

Charles Sumner, American statesman (1811 - 1874)

I have written elsewhere "we are not happy campers. We have lost our moral compass and our way."

This phase entered my consciousness as I walked today. Then without notice three men popped into my mind: former president Andrew Jackson of the early nineteenth century, emperor Marcus Aurelius of the second century and Dick Cheney of the twenty-first century. All display variations of leadership and all were students of failure as much as success.

MARCUS AURELIUS

No one can read his "Meditations" without a firm sense of morality and the conviction of a man of moral authority.

Marcus Aurelius was a loyal subject and devoted student to law and philosophy, especially stoicism. When he rose to authority, he voluntarily divided the government between himself and his brother by adoption, Lucius Aurelius Verus.

Verus was a bad apple: self-indulgent and dilatorious in the conduct of his duty.

It was not an easy time in the reign of Marcus Aurelius. He suffered from constant wars, though in Asia, Britain and on the Rhine barbarians were checked, but permanent peace was never secured.

Rome was spiraling into chaos. It suffered from pestilence, earthquakes and floods as the Roman armies fought against northern barbarians on the Danube. The Roman army was humbled and almost annihilated while retreating across the Danube in 168 and 173.

Verus died after the first retreat in 169, solidifying Marcus Aurelius as emperor. Once victory was won over Germanic tribes, Marcus Aurelius was summoned to the East to deal with the rebellion of its governor. On his way home, he visited Lower Egypt and Greece.

At Athens, he founded chairs in philosophy for each the chief schools: Platonic, Stoic, Peripatetic, and Epicurean.

From there, he went to Germany and then Italy. In 176, he quelled uprisings along the way as he returned home.

Never of robust health, he died in Vienna in 180 at the age of 59.

Retrospectively, Marcus Aurelius is remembered, as perhaps Rome most "perfect emperor." This is largely due to the survival of his writings, principally "Meditations."

"Meditations" is the record of a man's innermost thoughts who happened to be the supreme leader of his time. It documents his loneliness. But it also indicates that he did not allow himself to become embittered by his betrayals and defeats in life. The poetic thoughts resonate with learning and sophistication, and should be read and contemplated by anyone today that finds him or herself in a position of leadership.

In a profound sense, it is introspective and honest, passionate and compelling, putting the reader, without knowing it, in contact with his or her own most intimate longings.

His death was a national calamity mainly because his rule contrasted so demonstratively with the past and disastrously with the period that began with the accession of his unworthy son, Commodus who established an imperial anarchy.

As all Christians know, Constantine I called "the Great," made Christianity the national religion in the early fourth century (312), which marked the beginning of the Christian era and Western civilization, as we know it.

NOTE:

SEED PLANTERS: Leaders plant seeds sometimes in parched earth, seeds that do not die, but wait for the soil to be blessed by sunlight and rain, and care and cultivation as was the case of the seeds planted by Marcus Aurelius that blossomed in the reign of Constantine.

PRESIDENT ANDREW JACKSON

I have written extensively on president Jackson elsewhere emphasizing that he was an "outsider" from birth forward.

Jackson's parents died when he was not yet a teenager. Soon after, he and his brother were captured by the British as prisoners of war in the Revolutionary War.

Without the benefit of any formal education, he picked himself up by the bootstraps to put his stamp on his time.

Jackson was tall (six foot) but terribly thin (135 pound) but with a sinewy physique and psychological courage that could move mountains. He had the will of a lion, the appetite for justice of an elephant, and the tenacity to stalk his way to the truth, which was his truth as he saw it and no one else's. He was Destiny's child and knew he would prevail because he never questioned his survival.

All his predecessors in power from George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams before him were part of the eastern establishment; all well educated and programmed in Eurocentric leanings and learning.

None of these leaders reflected the pioneer spirit or manner in dress, deportment or philosophy. He did.

Jackson was actually an embarrassment to the elite, no one more so than the urbane Jefferson who made scathing remarks about him in the United States Congress.

True, he didn't speak or write well, didn't have the social grace or decorum expected of a gentleman or a man in high office. What is worse, his marriage to a pipe smoking woman had the taint of scandal and suspect legitimacy.

Jackson, however, was totally his own man; totally self-made, and totally believing in the wisdom of his convictions.

Although having the appearance of being fragile, his steel blue eyes suggested a surprising physical as well as moral courage, which was displayed in a resilience many times when he appeared at death's door.

Characteristic of his personality was evident when he conquered Florida (1818) without the approval of president Monroe. He was of that self-made school that believed it was easier to ask forgiveness than permission for an action. Therefore, he apologized for his impudence after the fact. It should be noted the United States, however, never gave Florida back to the Indians or satisfied the British or Spanish for their claims to the territory.

Earlier (1814), he saved the American nation as much as Lincoln did in the Civil War with his decisive defeat of the British at New Orleans. The irony is that a treaty of peace was being signed at Ghent in Belgium at the same time.

Still, Jackson's victory at New Orleans was an exclamation point, and the British (or the French or Spanish) never gave the United States any trouble after that.

With Jackson, there was no gray area; everything was either black or white.

There was little compromise in his spirit, and he had an appetite for taking on such politicians as Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster.

Clay, whose picture was on Lincoln's law office wall in Springfield, Illinois when he was a lawyer, was always a "president-wantabe" much in the fashion of Robert Taft in the mid twentieth century.

Webster was a man of grand rhetoric but little action.

Jackson played these two like a fiddler and in the process expanded the power and prestige of the executive branch of government to its present status.

President Martin Van Buren, who was hand picked by Jackson to succeed him, continued what historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has called "The Age of Jackson."

There was a cruel and insensitivel side to Jackson that is often overlooked. Schlesinger overlooked it in his Pulitzer Prize winning book. It has come to be known as "the trail of tears" (1813 - 1835) and involved the breaking of treaties with American Indians and displacing them from their sacred lands to an exodus of thousands of miles to the Northeast. Scores of men, women and children died along the way.

Presidents before Jackson pussyfooted around the American Indian issue, but not him. He was determined to make the American continent a country for American pioneers and he did.

While showing a disdain for the elite and the Eastern Establishment, Jackson was popular with the common people in the hinterland. It is interesting that politicians have been as well ever since.

NOTE:

Were it not for the personality, mindset, courage and focus of Andrew Jackson, the United States today would be a very different country.

Author George Wills calls the actor John Wayne "America's Adam." He may be for the Teflon generation but not for the American common man. That "American Adam" is Andrew Jackson.

He made Congress and the Supreme Court cower to the Executive Branch of Government and the presidency, and that condition has continued to this day.

He also gave inspiration to people born poor but of a singular mind to pursue the American Dream and make their mark.

And finally, he made Americans proud to be a separate culture and community independent of their European forebears.

DICK CHENEY

There is a ruthlessness to this man that does not appear to be leavened with respect for anyone except those members of his social and political circle.

There appears an arrogance that is not guided by study and knowledge, philosophy and science that was so apparent in the Founding Fathers and the elite of our land.

It would seem this is a blatant arrogance without the sagacity or intution of Jackson or the humility and perception of Marcus Aurelius.

Perhaps it is unkind to identify these characteristics as the exclusive property of one man when it is, in fact, the generic quality of leadership in general in the geopolitical as well as domestic arena today. We witness such hubris across all levels of enterprise from academic to religious, from commercial to industrial, from social to governance.

Conditional to this closed loop orientation is looking for confirmation of previously held views rather than insight into reality.

Such men and women surround themselves with people of like minded orientations and views seeing all others as misinformed, misguided, ignorant, or the "enemy."

They equate wisdom with wealth, and importance with power, having a cynical view of intelligence in general and people in particular. Their "best friends" are members of the Fortune 400 list of the richest people in the world.

They are guided by what is legal, not what is ethical, by the use of power irrespective of its hint of corruption or hit on moral authority.

Consequently, plans are evaluated in terms of risk factors rather than ethical considerations, or on what will fly instead of what should fly.

They focus on the 3 to 5 percent that are devious or criminal instead of the 95 percent or more that are law abiding and good because fear is their game, and dividing and conquering their aim.

NOTE:

The human heart could not love it did not have a capacity to hate. Both are always present and it is up to leadership to determine where the fulcrum lies.

The American culture is now on a slippery slope cascading to chaos and calumny. It has been on this slope since the end of World War Two. We have never gotten beyond the nostalgia for that surreal time.

The evidence is striking. Leadership has collapsed to leaderless leadership. We see it every day in every aspect of American life. This inclination now impacts and contaminates the world.

Peter Drucker and others as well as yours truly (e. g., in such books as Work Without Managers, The Worker Alone, Six Silent Killers, Corporate Sin, and soon-to-be-published A Look Back To See Ahead) have written on this subject.

Corpocracy has lined its pockets with the hard earned money of American workers that man the jobs across American society. As a result, the few get richer and the majority poorer (only last month it was announced that 250,000 American had a net worth of $5 million, today one million Americans have such a net worth).

American executives are sending American jobs overseas rather than train and upgrade the skills of workers. This is a failure of education; a failure of the church; a failure of industry and commerce; and a failure of governance.

It has seen these same leaders lobby Congress for concessions, tax breaks, and forgiveness for failing to upgrade physical plants and technologies to remain competitive with emerging industrial nations.

It has seen war being used as fear tactics to sell "the war on terror" in its many forms: from the Iraq and Afhganistan War to the War on Drugs, to the creeping terror of immigrantion of this immigrant nation. They want to build a wall across the south to keep out immigrants. Erasmus would deem this "praise of folly" as it is folly beyond belief.

Tim Russert said recently that the answers are in the people but you won't hear from them because they could lose their jobs.

Something is wrong with this picture when people in the know are committed to silence, like lambs going to the slaughter.

Even the former CIA director, George Tenet, who has a new book out, admitted weakly that when Dick Cheney misspoke about so many things to justify the preemptive invasion of Iraq, "I should not have let silence imply agreement."

For more than forty years, I listened to people with answers as an internal and external organizational psychologist/ Like Cheney, my clients picked and chose what fit with what they already thought.

We are not only paying for this now, but creating a legacy.

TO MAKE YOU THINK, READ

"A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD!"PREORDER INFORMATION: CHECKS IN THE AMOUNT OF $20 TO DR. JAMES R. FISHER, JR., 6714 JENNIFER DRIVE, TAMPA, FL 33618-2504