Hindu Dharmic Leadership

At Harvard’s Bhukti Yoga Conference in 2025, Ed Anobah spoke on dharma (right-acting) leadership as a means of making progress in solving societal problems using Hinduism’s spiritual tradition of bhukti (devotionalism).  Anobah based his talk on the book, Leadership for an Age of Higher Consciousness by D. T. Swami. In the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna says that what great people do, other people follow. What constitutes healthy, impactful leadership? The ideal leader in Hinduism is also a great sage, like Plato’s notion of a philosopher king. Leadership that deals wholistically with the human condition by exemplifies the character of a leader, which does not mean that only highly educated persons can or should be leaders. Rather, “everyone is a leader,” potentially, and “we are all leading our own life.” Each of us is a leader potentially for other people on the interpersonal level. Each of us can inspire other people. Anobah claimed that certain universal principles of leadership can apply across the board. I submit that this view is vulnerable to being too utopian when it is applied in the business world. Being realistic as to possible practical difficulties and even limitations in applying dharmic leadership in business (and government) is advisable. Even there being different metaphysical assumptions can get in the way, practically speaking, as compassionate leadership runs up against the profit-motive in business.   

Dharmic leadership begins from the inside out: leading oneself by “working on oneself.” This can result in “random acts of kindness.” A leader is someone who understands that real leadership is by being lived, hence by example. People see the effects of the example of a leader. Bhukti yoga, whether meditation on Krishna or other ways of devotion to the deity, is a practice of inner-discipline that can bring out a person’s better nature, by which a person can lead by example in random acts of kindness. Our better nature is not desire, and thus not greed: the desire for more. Practice of inner-discipline, as for example by chanting the many names of a deity, can not only bracket or strengthen mental control of desires, but also give a person a clearer “lens of reality.” Perception with clarity (and compassion) is an asset in terms of inner-led leadership. Therefore, finding some way to nourish the best within us is vital to being able to exemplify compassion, as per that of Krishna and the devotee thereof. That is, by loving devotion to a deity, especially if compassion is in its nature, a person is better able to instantiate dharmic (right-acting) leadership.

As per Krishna’s teachings to Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita, a leader is a person of action, but without worrying about whether one’s leadership is successful or not. Even encountering detractors can be useful in strengthening a leader’s self-discipline, similar to a butterfly’s struggle to get out of its cocoon strengthens the wing muscles. In Christian terms, encountering hateful people can be an important means of exercising selfless benevolence, which Samuel Hopkins argued is the essence of the kingdom of God.[1] The metaphysical basis of such compassion is agape, which is divine love as self-emptying (in God being incarnate in the world in Jesus Christ). In Advaita Vedanta, by contrast, the metaphysical basis of compassion is that each person’s realization that each person’s true or underlying self is identical with brahman, which is infinite being. In the Bhukti Yoga tradition, the metaphysical basis is reality being ultimately in the form of a Supreme Person, which is Krishna in the Gita.

I submit that being aware of whatever metaphysical basis supports even very practical exercises of leadership not only in religion, but also in the worlds of business and government, and grounds a person’s notion of leadership. Even in exercising fiduciary duty to stockholders as an example for managers within a corporation, a CEO’s underlying metaphysical assumption is that of materialism. Profit-seeking as an end in itself presupposes a reality of materialism, which can be contrasted with a reality that is deity that is known as the Supreme Person, whether that be Jesus or Krishna. Such different metaphysics can account for why the sort of leadership that is oriented to profit-seeking does not exemplify compassion as an end in itself, whereas dharmic leadership does. To superimpose the latter sort of leadership on the metaphysic of materialism is like throwing seeds on rock rather than soil. Put in practical terms, a CEO, such as that of Ben & Jerry’s in 2025, could legitimately be fired for putting the stockholders’ wealth in the company to use in the company promoting certain political activist stances that do not directly contribute to profit. The same can be said of programs of corporate “social responsibility,” which do not generate profit and thus dividends in the short- or medium-term. Therefore if “consciousness-raising” leadership based on dharma is to be applied in the business world, limitations should be acknowledged because that world is founded on a very different metaphysic. “Keep your feet on the ground and reach for the stars” is preferrable to drifting off into a utopia that really only exists in the mind’s eye.

---

1. Samuel Hopkins, An Enquiry into the Nature of Holiness (New York: William Durell, 1710).

 

On the Reputational Capital of a Business Leader on a Societal Stage

Is it better that companies be publicly or privately held? Such a question is of such magnitude that glossy, simplistic answers should be eschewed. This is not to say that the answer is situational in nature. Rather, it is more likely that each comes with pluses and minuses from the perspective of an economic system as a whole. As business “leaders” give their advice, it is important to keep in mind whether any personal or institutional conflicts of interest exist and thus could warp the space itself of the advice. Yes, I am intimating Einstein’s theory of general relativity here. Rather than provide an answer without having studied the matter sufficiently, I will provide a way to look at the advice given by Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase.

In 1996, the number of publicly traded companies in the U.S. peaked at 7,300; less than 30 years later, that number stood at 4,300.[1] Companies were increasingly staying private. Jamie Dimon was not happy. “The total should have grown dramatically, not shrunk,” he wrote in his 2024 shareholder letter.[2] Private equity funds were behind the trend of taking or keeping a company private. Although it is true that such institutional investors can “boost their profits as quickly as possible for a quick sale down the line,”[3] it is also true that private companies do not face stakeholder pressure to maximize quarterly profit reports. Neither system is perfect, but the orientation of the managements of publicly traded companies to their respective quarterly earnings reports is legion.

For his part, Dimon wrote, “This trend is serious.”[4] He pointed to “intensified reporting requirements, high litigation expenses costly regulations, overbearing board governance, shareholder activism, heightened public scrutiny and ‘the relentless pressure of quarterly earnings’” as reasons why a publicly traded company might go private.[5] If these factors are so onerous,  perhaps being privately-held is better, economically speaking. Nevertheless, Dimon was concerned. But rather than assume that his warning is the result of business expertise, we should be prudent by noting that “Dimon’s company, of course, makes a huge amount of money from taking companies public, so he’s not exactly an impartial observer.”[6] So even though “Dimon said his concerns are broader than JPMorgan’s bottom line,” we should not be so naïve as to take him at his word.

To be credible societally,  business CEO seeking to be a business leader on the societal stage cannot simply advise that which is in one’s company’s financial interests. If it is, then unless the CEO has enough reputational capital on the societal stage from having given advice for the good of the economy at the expense of one’s own firm’s interests, then the public is wise to be skeptical.

The gravitational pull on his analysis (from his orb, JPMorgan) can be detected from his statements on the quarterly earnings reporting of publicly traded companies. “There is something very positive about detailed and disciplined quarterly financial and operating reporting,” he wrote in his statement to shareholders. Is it to be supposed that managements of privately held companies owned by institutional investors face no pressure to maintain accurate accounting? It seems to me that making quarterly reports public would only increase a management’s orientation to quarterly performance at the expense of long-term profitability—excessively so. Yet Dimon only notes that CEOs and boards of directors of publicly traded companies “should resist the undue pressure of quarterly earnings, and it is clearly somewhat their fault when they don’t.”[7] Any financial person on Wall street would easily dismiss any moral sway of “should resist” and admit to us that Dimon’s reliance on ethical responsibility would only be dead on arrival on the street. Dimon’s straw-man assurance that moral suasion is sufficient to eliminate excessive focus on quarterly profits of publicly traded companies is evidence of his bias in favor of publicly traded companies doubtless because JPMorgan makes money in taking companies public. 

In other words, in extolling the benefits of that system of business while nearly dismissing its major weakness with an inadequate fix, the gravitational pull on Dimon can be detected. Not owning up to it only deepens a CEO’s lack of reputational capital societally. It would have been much better had he owned up to the bias in his view and claimed that there was still some merit to some of his points than try to hide his real agenda.  

See: More on business ethics at JPMorgan Chase.

---

1. Nicole Goodkind, “The Stock Market Is Shrinking and Jamie Dimon Is Worried,” CNN.com, April 9, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.
6.  Ibid.
7.  Ibid.

Leadership “Coaches” on Social Media: Utopian Ideologues

Leadership as a topic in business became popular in the 1980s. It was not enough, however. James Burns distinguishes transformational leadership from the mere transactional leadership in his book, Leadership. Servant leadership raised the ethical bar by applying the ethical model of Jesus in the Gospels to leadership in business. Leadership vision quickly became a buzz word, as was charismatic leadership. All of these renderings can be interpreted as business trying to escape its mundane terms for a loftier enterprise in which ideals are more salient or applicable. As valuable as efficiency is, it is difficult to get excited about it. The problem is that many (or some) leadership consultants on social media have gotten too caught up on their utopian platitudes that leadership becomes a mere subterfuge. Certainly the utopian ideologies do not define leadership or are attributes of it, and yet the "coaches" claim that platitudes are necessary to leadership. In other words, I contend that leadership gurus, or "coaches" (a mis-applied analogy that wrongly dismisses the word "consultant" as too boring), had by 2023 taken to social media to project whatever utopian ideology they value onto leadership. The term has become too vague as a consequence. In fact, the concept of leadership became a near synonym for goodness in human relations and excellence in terms of virtue ethics. As a result, the concept approaches being a tautology whose actual meaning has been rendered vacuous from the a projection of so many subjective, utopian ideologies. Relative to such lofty remakes of leadership, management has become almost a dirty word—certainly not as flashy as visionary leadership. In actuality, the "coaches" are evangelical ideologues. 

I contend that what a CEO says in representing one’s organization to the wider society and characterizing what the business stands for to the employees as a whole is distinct functionally from what a department manager does in coordinating worker schedules, ordering new product and supplies, and “doing the numbers” for accounting purposes. Vision does not apply to both levels; neither does charisma. 

In his book, Charismatic Leadership: The Skills You Can Learn to Motivate High Performance in Others, Kevin Murray dismisses the definition of charisma with disdain. In the book's description paragraphs on Amazon, he writes that charisma is not "widely-applauded magnetism or shallow charm." Apparently, leaders such as Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, Gandhi and admittedly even Hitler did not have charisma. Murray presumes furthermore to redefine charisma, which literally means gifts of the spirit, as a skill applicable to mundane supervision. Never mind that Ronald Reagan, who had loads of charisma, was terrible in supervising subordinates in the White House; he trusted too much in delegation. From sacred origins, charisma has in Murray's book fallen to a banal skill in business. Spirit and skill represent the sacred and the profane; they are antipodal, as in the spirit of the law versus skill in observing the law. 

Transformational and visionary leadership go with charismatic leadership; charisma has no place in the transactional language of management. One need only consult Max Weber's theory of bureaucracy to understand that charisma and administration are like oil and water. 

Indeed, leadership as a phenomenon is distinct from management. To sketch the latter as the former is intellectually dishonest, even if done to motivate managers. In 1893, the University of Chicago’s law school renamed the undergraduate, for first, law degree, which at the time was the LLB (Bachelors in the Letters of Law), as the Juris Doctor even though a first degree (3 or 4 years) in a field of knowledge does not a doctorate make. Similarly, preaching that a department head in a Target retail store is a visionary leader does nothing to change the manager’s job description and actual tasks. Vision does not apply to coordinating worker schedules and keeping inventory. Nor does charisma. Rather, politeness should apply, as the mundane daily tasks of managing and working in a business characterized by specialization of labor can get boring. Hence the appeal of a leadership guru on the sidelines, who preaches—and it is preaching—that leadership is never giving up, being all one can be, overcoming adversity, looking at solutions rather than problems (yeah, right), being positive (as if negatives are not a part of human existence), and, of course, “success!”

Well, Hitler never gave up. He nearly wiped out European Jewry in being all that he could be. He overcame the adversity of the Communists by exterminating them. He turned his attention to the final solution rather than stayed fixated on problems. He was positive about the future of the Aryan “race,” and thus of a Jew-free and Communist-free Germany. He was successful in getting Germany out of the Great Depression by rearming the country, and freeing it of the shackles of the humiliating treaty that ended World War I. He had charisma; even his enemies admitted that. He had a vision of a blood-pure and economically prosperous Germany.  The self-labeled “leadership coaches” that began springing up on the sidelines of the American business world since the 1980s are too ideologically-bent to admit that their utopian notions of leadership can include Hitler if his value-set of ideals is assumed.

Furthermore, efforts to define leadership ideologically as a virtue or utopian world that goes beyond leadership cannot define the term. For example, to say that leadership is success ignores or leaves out instances of success that do not involve leading an organization (or other people). Leadership is therefore not success per se. Similarly, a person can be tenacious in overcoming adversity without being a leader. A person can be a leader without necessarily overcoming every obstacle, or always being positive rather than negative.

In fact, President Reagan campaigned in 1980 against the stagflation (i.e., inflation and low economic growth) and the federal government, which he labeled as part of the problem rather than the solution. He led with that vision, and enough of the American people followed that he won in a landslide. Hitler, too, included negatives in his vision as he campaigned for his party in 1933. Germany was in an economic quagmire, and so too was its democracy. Hitler did not minimize scapegoats: the Jews and Communists. It is not uncommon for a leader to go negative on the problems that justify the positives in a vision, whether for an organization or a country. To claim that leadership is always being positive is simply incorrect, as is the conflation of leadership with management.

Leadership has been practiced by good and bad people. Of course, just who are the good ones and the bad is to some extent debatable among reasonable people. This is another problem with insisting that a given ideological value is necessary for leadership to be leadership. For example, to claim that leaders appreciate diversity ignores Japan and China, whose populations are more homogenous than those in the U.S., where diversity itself has become an ideological weapon as well as an ideal. Subjecting leadership to a particular definition of the good is overly constraining, and dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary. To define leadership in terms of the content of an organizational or societal vision conveniently excludes many instances of leadership. Leadership involves convincing people to accept a vision, which we can treat as a black box.

The self-proclaimed leadership “coaches” go even beyond human utopias on social media in telling us about leadership qualities. This is often done by showing videos of other species. In one instance, a large herd animal is racing across a river as an alligator is in pursuit. Just as the predator pounces, the prey reaches the banks and leaps out of the water just in time. Leaders don’t give up. Well, actually, human leaders are not at all like prey running for their lives so not to be killed and eaten. The anthropomorphism here is out of control. Even CEOs in competitive industries, in the proverbial “jungle,” are hardly in anything even remotely like a real jungle. The CEO of a company that buys another company at a great price does not make a killing in any sense like an allegator does in a river. The military language often used in the business world is also far-fetched.

In actuality, leadership “coaches”—and business is not a (blood) sport either—preach their personal ideologies in the hope that even managers who do not actually practice leadership will accept and value the respective ideological utopian ideals. These gurus that preach under the veneer of business leadership are like the business ethicists who use thou shalt not to get managers to behave as the ethicists want. It is a power-grab of a Nietzschean sort wherein those on the sidelines are driven by an instinctual urge to have power over the “players on the field,” whose uses of strength are not necessarily appreciated and may even be resented.[1] The “coaches’” will to power is evinced in using the concept of leadership as a subterfuge by which to tacitly impose an ideological value or ideal concerning human nature and relations on society by beguiling powerful opinion-leaders in the business world. It does not concern these new birds of prey that the concept of leadership is warped, distended, obfuscated, or rendered vacuous as a utopian tautology in the process.  “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” the Wizard says as Toto pulls the it back to reveal an old man manipulating Dorothy and her friends by fire and brimstone in the film classic, The Wizard of Oz (1939). People are not always what they lead on.

See also: The Essence of Leadership

---

[1] Skip Worden, “A Genealogy of Business Ethics: A Nietzschean Perspective,” Journal of Business Ethics 84 (2008): 427-56.

Strategic Leadership

Strategic planning is oriented to enhancing the bottom-line.  Leadership affects organizational performance as well.[1] Therefore, strategic leadership, which can be defined as the formulation and articulation of a vision depicting a social reality and incorporating strategic aims, can enhance a firm’s sustainable competitive advantage.[2] Strategic leadership is an intangible core competency that can give rise to a core capability differential involving reputation.[3] That strategic leadership is difficult to understand and therefore to imitate contributes to its value in no small measure. But a straightforward application of strategic leadership may be thwarted if a tension develops in its exercise.  In particular, the principles behind an enduring leadership vision can be at odds with pressing strategic interests, especially as these profit-interests change while the abstract vision still holds.

Because strategic leadership involves the organization as a whole and its relationship with its environment, it falls on top-level executives to exercise it.[4]  Indeed, a leader’s distance from operations “can generate and establish lofty principles and goals and visions”.[5]  So strategic leadership as used here pertains to executive leadership, stressing the relationship between strategy and leadership.

Strategic leadership relates an organization’s ideologies, identity, mission and view of the macro environment system to its differentiated core competencies. The word relates implies that the leadership vision is not identical to the strategic elements.[6]   Therefore, the visionary and strategic can be at odds.

With regard to the vision component, leaders depict or construct not only a vision of the organization’s mission, but of an encompassing social reality of the environment (i.e. society).[7] Relating the organizational mission to the values in the encompassing environment pertains to the legitimacy and credibility of the vision and the organization. Whereas an organization’s mission is broad or abstract enough to be consistent with values held by the wider society, strategic plans tend to be more tightly oriented to a firm’s exclusive interests or competitive niche. Such plans may thus be at odds with societal interests and values even though they dovetail with the organization’s mission. The wider societal system is not centered on the interests of a leader’s particular organization even though that organization may have a mission congruent with both the plans and societal values.

For example, a hospital’s mission of curing disease may be consistent with a societal value on health.  The hospital’s strategic plan to minimize its treatment of uninsured patients may be consistent with sustaining that particular hospital as it cures disease, even as this strategy is opposed to the societal value on health.  The organization’s interests differ from those of society; the difference is typically labeled as externalities.  Effective strategic leadership aims to breach this gap, satisfying strategic concerns as well as the firm’s legitimacy and credibility.

For a leader’s vision to be regarded as credible, the interpretation of social reality “must not be affected by success-oriented considerations in favor of the corporation”.[8] The interpretation must transcend personal or organizational interests and frameworks to be credible in society. Enhancing credibility and legitimacy from an ideology presented in terms of disinterest is not consistent with efficiency.[9]

With regard to its strategic component, however, strategic leadership is self-consciously and unapologetically oriented to furthering the organization’s exclusive interests. It contains both broad questions of what an organization ‘is’ in terms of its being unique and distinctive among its competitors, and relatively narrow strategic plans oriented to maximizing the tangible (i.e. financial) gain of the enterprise as a method of competition.[10]  It is the latter, dovetailing with efficiency, which can be in tension with the vision in executive leadership.

In short, a strategic leader may have to deal with tension between short-term profit-interests and the relatively enduring vision. This is not to say that the tension is inherent to strategic leader. A good strategic leader wields profit-interests such that they are in line with the vision of what the organization stands for and how it claims to relate to society. Perhaps because CEO’s so often crimp on the pre-established organizational vision rather than let it get in the way of a changed profit-line, the tension has been virtually ignored in writings on strategic leadership. It is even possible that the tension is inherent in strategic leadership even though individual leaders have been able to quickly reorient breaching profit-interests. Abstractly, the tension boils down to a trade-off between broader values evoked in a leader’s vision and relatively narrow values pertaining to strategic planning. Unlike the organization’s mission and the society, strategic plans are not within a leader’s vision. So a strategic leader must have one foot in strategic planning and the other in ‘the vision thing’ (mission and societal social reality).   Holding onto both poles can be a difficult task for a strategic leader, given that both of them are legitimate within the practice of strategic leadership.

Badaracco and Ellsworth provide an excellent depiction of the tension with which strategic leaders must grapple--between strategic and visionary values.[11]  They cite the CEO in the large, decentralized company with a strong faith in autonomous divisions. On the one hand, the abiding values of local autonomy and a sense of ownership at the division level had served the company well for decades. But on the other hand, it was clear that duplication of efforts and higher costs were letting a very powerful competitor with efficient centralized operations make inroads into the company's markets, causing immediate financial damage.   The strategic value of efficiency conflicted with the value of liberty in the leader’s vision, and the heightened competitive pressure exacerbated this tension.  For the organization to be sustained and the leadership remain credible, both values would need to be given weight. 

---

[1]. J. A. Petrick and J. F. Quinn, “The Challenge of Leadership Accountability for Integrity Capacity as a Strategic Asset,” Journal of Business Ethics 24 (2001): 331; S. Finkelstein and D. Hambrick, Strategic Leadership: Top Executives and Their Effects on Organizations (St. Paul, MN: West Publishing, 1996); J. Ciulla, “Leadership Ethics: Mapping the Territory,” Business Ethics Quarterly, 5, no. 1(1995): 5-28; K. B. Lowe, K.G. Kroeck, and N. Sivasubramaniam: “Effectiveness Coorelates of Transformational and Transactional Leadership: A Meta-analytic Review of the MLQ Literature,” Leadership Quarterly 7, no. 3 (1996), 385-425.

[2]. R. D. Ireland and M.A. Hitt, “Achieving and Maintaining Strategic Competitiveness in the 21^st Century: The Role of Strategic Leadership,” Academy of Management Executive 13, no. 1 (1999): 43.

[3]. Petrick and Quinn, “The Challenge of Leadership”; J. A. Petrick et al, “Global Leadership Skills and Reputational Capital: Intangible Resources For Sustainable Competitive Advantage,”  Academy of Management Executive 13, no. 1(1999): 58, f.n. 2.

[4]. Ireland and Hitt, “Achieving and Maintaining Strategic Competitiveness,” 48.; A. A. Cannella and M. J. Monroe, “Contrasting Perspectives on Strategic           Leaders: Toward a More Realistic View of Top Managers,” Journal of Management 23 (1997): 213-237; D. C. Hambrick and P. Mason, “Upper Echelons: The Organization as a Reflection of its Top Managers,” Academy of Management Review 9 (1984):193-206; P. Shrivastava and S.A. Nachman, “Strategic Leadership Patterns,” Strategic Management Journal 10 (1989), 51-66; H. Mintzberg, The Nature of Managerial Work (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall,1973).

[5]. N. Brunsson, The Organization of Hypocrisy: Talk, Decisions, and Action. In Organizations (NY: John Wiley (1989): 223.

[6]. Ireland and Hitt, “Achieving and Maintaining Strategic Competitiveness,” 48.

[7]. S. Worden, The Essence of Leadership: A Cross-Cultural Foundation  (Phoenix: The Worden Report, 2017).

[8]. G. Enderle, “Some Perspectives of Managerial Ethical Leadership,” Journal of Business Ethics, 6 no. 8 (1987): 661.

[9]. N. Brunsson, The Organization of Hypocrisy ,198, 218.

[10]. L. T. Hosmer, Moral Leadership in Business (Burr Ridge, IL: Irwin, 1994, 237.

[11]. J. L. Badaracco and R.R. Ellsworth, Leadership and the Quest for Integrity (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1989).

Non-Positional Leadership: A Matter of Charisma?

The concept of non-positional leadership is typically associated with charismatic leadership.[1] The Hebrew prophets are a case in point, as none had any formal civic position.  To be sure, a non-positioned leader need not be charismatic; such a leader can be effective in utilizing persuasion to get his or her position (i.e., "vision") sufficiently adopted by followers to become the default.  Obviously, a positioned official, whether in the upper echelons of a large corporation, government, or religious institution, need not “stoop” to persuasion; power from authority can be sufficient for an official's will to be done. However, does that evince leadership or simply raw power?

Gandhi epitomized non-positional leadership. He never held a formal office in religion or government. Is the strength of non-positional leadership necessarily moral?  Image Source: Idleindia.com

Authorized power is typically also reckoned as leadership, especially if the official’s decision is unpopular at first, yet quickly implemented and effective in the end. In fact, merely the stature of “high” position can give a decision itself the semblance of leadership. Modern society lavishes an extraordinary amount of credence on organizational position itself, regardless of the particular occupant. Such positional power, as distinct from positional leadership, is excessive, even reckless. For example, Richard Fuld was able to inflict Lehman Brothers with an overwhelming amount of risk, and for so long, in line with a warped “vision” and without having to lead in the sense of persuading others of his vision. To assume almost blindly that CEOs are not only “natural” leaders, but also persons of high caliber in terms of skill and character, simply because of their position is foolhardy and yet this is typically done in modern society.

---

1. On “non-positional” leadership, see David Burkus, http://theleaderlab.org/

The Founder of Theranos: A Flawed Charismatic Vision and Leader

“Theranos rose quickly from being a college dropout’s idea to revolutionize the blood analysis industry to a hot tech bet that accrued $700 million in funding and many famous names for its board.”[1] Elizabeth Holmes, the company’s founder, was stripped of her position at the company in 2018 after the SEC discovered her deep involvement with the fraud at the company. Her “smarts, fierce determination and Steve Jobs-inspired look . . . were critical” to her being able to perpetuate the lie that the company had a device that could do blood tests with just a scant amount of blood, obviating the unpleasant experience of having blood drawn by needle.[2] Although Jack Welsh, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs accomplished enough to warrant their fame, I submit that companies are too prone to create “champions”—even strangely calling them “rock stars.” In other words, even though charismatic vision is of value to a business, neither such a leader nor his or her vision itself should be overplayed. Business, I submit, has a marked tendency to do just that, and often with impunity.

At 19, Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford University because she had an idea of how blood tests could be done without the need of so much blood that a needle is required. She was “determined to create a company that would help anyone who, like herself, was afraid of needles and dreaded taking blood tests.”[3] Where the school Northern Illinois University or the University of Arizona, her decision to drop out for such a reason could be reasonable, but to give up a Stanford education so people wouldn’t have to feel a needle for “blood work” indicates a flawed judgment. Where were her parents? She was 19! Finish college then start your company. That it took her a decade of work before she debuted her company—and even then without the requisite technology—suggests that there was no rush. Simply out, it is very odd that she dropped out of Stanford. Yet this point was somehow missed by investors such as Rupert Murdock, Cox Enterprises, and Walgreens, and board members including George Schultz and Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Secretaries of State,  former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, and the current Defense Secretary James Mattis. Did they all show up drunk at board meetings? Was there even an audit committee that reported directly to the board?

Clearly, we can be dazzled by celebrity, and the famous can cash in on their reputations. That no flags were raised concerning the founder raises larger questions in business related to the troublesome transfer of power and position from charismatic founders to managers. Investors should not rely on the charisma of founders; even the promises of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs warranted being independently checked out. CPA firms should not have to rely on founders, or even managers, for renewals. Business, in other words, can easily get too cozy, leaving investors out in the dark.

In terms of leadership, charismatic vision should be distinguished from the implementation of strategy. I’m not even sure “avoiding needles” is big enough to warrant being reckoned as a vision. Founders and managers alike may distend what are actually good ideas into charismatic vision.[4]

In conclusion, the background of Theranos, including that of its founder, should have raised red flags. Likening her to Steve Jobs because she wore black turtle-neck shirts borders on the ridiculous, and yet a self-aggrandizing company can easily get on that band-wagon, ignoring the hypertrophy. Leadership vision is valuable, but in a business context the vision thing must be related to concrete strategies, with realizable benchmarks. This is not to say that leadership vision should collapse into strategic interests, for such reductionism rids the vision of its own integrity and coherence.[5] The point is not to get carried away with charismatic vision in business even as such vision should not reduce to strategy.

---

[1] Marco della Cava, “Behind the Scenes of Theranos’ Dramatic Rise, Fall,” USA Today, March 16, 2018.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] On leadership vision, see Skip Worden, The Essence of Leadership: A Cross-Cultural Foundation

[5] Skip Worden, “The Role of Integrity as a Mediator in Strategic Leadership: A Recipe for Reputational Capital,” Journal of Business Ethics, 48 (August, 2003) No. 1, 31-44.

Leadership Consulting: Stances on Scholarship

As the field of leadership consulting continues to proliferate, fringe-elements have developed that risk taking down the credibility of the field itself as well as its more solid practitioners. In this essay, my objective is to make those practitioners aware of the damage to their field (and indirectly to their own practices) that is being committed on the periphery. Relatedly, my task extends to making scholars of leadership aware of how leadership itself is being undermined as a concept used (and abused) in the business world. I contend that maintaining the distinction between consulting (including writing on it) and scholarship is in everyone’s interest, even if some “coaches” believe they have a momentary interest in blurring the lines for personal gain.

Taking a practitioner's experience, which is quite valuable in its own right as praxis, as tantamount to scholarship involves a rather basic category mistake. Treating an academic literature as if it were merely another opinion among those of practitioners is also a category mistake. For example, practitioners who view the academic literature on business leadership as "one of the many perspectives that make up the puzzle" attempt to reduce theory or the results of empirical research to opinion, as if the strictures of research methodology were mere dross. A category mistake is also made when one treats non-scholarship as if it were scholarship simply on the basis of being “actionable.” This includes conflating a "how to" book with a theory or the results of an empirical study.

I am not claiming that every (or even most) practitioners commit such category mistakes. Nor am I contending that scholars are the only people with knowledge; rather, scholars are in the business of formulating knowledge under fixed rules of reason and methodology and then passing it on to the benefit of practitioners. I am merely contending that the roles are distinct, even if some practitioners (and scholars) may blur them.

If scholarship is indeed the same as anecdotal experience or opinion--both being "perspectives" or knowledge--the accumulated knowledge is essentially relegated, not to mention disrespected. While Thornton may be a fantastic consultant, she does not have the educational credential necessary for her to function as and be recognized as a scholar. I want to emphasize that I am not disvaluing the work that she or other consultants do. In my view, they provide valuable services to managers and even entire companies. My point is merely that, as I'm sure more practitioners know, consulting experience is not the same as expertise in the study and knowledge of leadership.

The bottom line is perhaps that the accumulation of knowledge on leadership is difficult enough. A "new age"-like democratization of the formulation of what counts as knowledge, whereby every leader and consultant deems himself or herself to be an expert on the knowledge of leadership without an advanced degree on the subject, dilutes what counts as knowledge and misleads people who take the opinion as fact. That is, conflating opinion with knowledge is apt to increase undetected fallacies and errors exponentially (not to mention result in perpetually reinventing the wheel) because the "rules" established and followed by scholars in accumulating knowledge are not necessarily followed. Users assume they are, and are thus mislead when the rules are not followed because they are not known.

Therefore, I recommend that practitioners, whether leaders or consultants, take great care in utilizing the academic literature of leadership. Does the author have a doctorate, meaning a terminal degree that includes comprehensive exams graded by an academic faculty and a successfully defended dissertation (e.g., Ph.D., DBA, DSciM, JSD, or EdD)? Does the text look solid academically, with citations or end-notes and a healthy bibliography including articles in academic journals, or is the book essentially a "how to" book with bullet-points and "feel good" potential-sounding platitudes? My point is that there is A LOT of daylight between these two types of books on leadership; they should certainly not be conflated. Doing so puts the user at risk for relying on something stated as if it had survived analytical or empirical methodology when it had not.

To be sure, "how to" books with lists and inspirational platitudes may serve a viable purpose for some practitioners (including those who write them). This hypothesis could be tested empirically by a social scientist careful to distinguish positive correlation from causation. My point is that this purpose is different than that which is satisfied by the knowledge on leadership formulated and vetted by scholars. By its very nature, ratiocination and its accompanied research methodology live at some distance from praxis, even where the analytical beam is focused on an applied concept. You have a taste of this distance right here if you are thinking ratio what? Ironically, the best knowledge is accrued by scholars who do not conflate what they are with what they are studying. In the scholars’ world, “actionable” does not trump or eclipse, much less expunge theory and empirical results.

There are undoubtedly many practitioners who appreciate having access to knowledge that has been vetted by scholars; such knowledge on leadership can indeed be useful, whether to a leader or a consultant. Sadly, I must admit that I have encountered some consultants who seem content to vaunt their own "actionable" opinion over academic knowledge even on leadership, and still other consultants who seem to treat what they advocate as if it too constituted scholarly-derived and vetted knowledge. It is in the interest of the consulting sector to disgorge itself of such fallacies because 1) a leadership consultant’s practice can benefit from scholarship on leadership and 2) credibility is a valuable commodity for consultants. The last label a “coach” wants applied to him or her is “snake oil salesman or saleswoman.” By drawing on the academic literature, a consultant can distinguish himself or herself from the “coaches” who sell platitudes. In other words, distinguishing scholarship (even on applied concepts) from praxis is in the interest of consultants who want the field of consulting gain credibility and their own practice appreciate in value.

See related essay: “Toward a Definition for Ethical Leadership: Disabusing the Pessimists”

From Visionary Leadership to Management: Taking a Bite Out of Apple

Founders and otherwise visionary leaders in business can be distinguished from managers, even though a manager may be running a company. For one thing, managers may resent leaders for being able to take in a larger view while relegating—even dismissing the petty, which can be so alluring to the managerial mentality. Leaders in turn may view the implementation of a vision as nugatory at best. More abstractly, change as paradigmatic (i.e., shifting from one broad framework to another) has its fans (i.e., visionary leaders), while the status quo has its own defenders (i.e., managers). Vision and big ideas are typically associated with a company’s founder or visionary leader, whereas bureaucracy tends to go with the implementation-focus of managers (including executives). In short, to suppose that leadership and management are the same is to ignore a lot that separates them. In the case of Apple, the shift from leadership to management that occurred with the passing of Steve Jobs may be at least partially responsible for the subsequent decline in the company’s stock price. In this essay, I explore the change at Apple to demonstrate why management should not be conflated with leadership.

Material from this essay has been incorporated into The Essence of Leadership, which is available at Amazon in print and as an ebook.

The Essence of Leadership

In The Essence of Leadership, leadership itself is reformulated in such a way that what emerges—the essence of leadership—is distinct from related phenomena, including management, presiding, and mentoring. This is not to say, however, that leadership bears no relation to strategy—hence the complex concept of strategic leadership, which is not without risks. Leadership itself contains risks, which a focus on the essence of leadership, rather than, for instance, taking leadership as simply about having influence, can arguably minimize. Such risks include the cult of the leader, to which charisma and attributions of heroism are especially susceptible, and the distorting impact of ideology, such as in Burns’ version of transformational leadership. Shaking out the risks and distinguishing leadership as a unique phenomenon are ways of pointing back to the essence of leadership, which applies in virtually any culture. That is, the essence is cross-cultural. Taking comparative religion as a stand-in for cultures, I demonstrate that the essence of leadership can be informed by Taoist, Buddhist, and Judeo-Christian principles.

 The Essence of Leadership  is available at Amazon in print and as an ebook.

Spiritual Leadership in Business: Transcending the Ethical

In this essay, I provide a synopsis of my booklet on spiritual leadership in business. In the text, I suggest that while it may convenient in the business world to conceptualize spiritual leadership as being essentially ethical in nature, this convenient tactic does not do justice to the distinctly religious basis and connotations of spirituality. By religion, I do not mean only theism, or even just organized religion (i.e., religious organizations); rather, I have in mind religious experience—whether through prayer, meditation, worship, or another means that is oriented to yearning beyond the limits of cognition, sentiment, and perception—as if an inherently limited human brain were nonetheless “hard-wired” for beyondness itself whether or not a transcendent religious object (e.g., a deity) exists. Rather than expunging spiritual from its native terrain and reconfiguring it to fit within a secular context as ethics, we can relate the religious sense of spirituality to the secular world of business with due deference to their respective natures rather than muddling them into something murky.[1]

The question would then be whether the sacred and profane can co-exist at such close quarters. The vaunted, high-perched stature of leadership in the business world has a veneer approaching sacredness, while the practice of management is regarded as quite pedestrian, even profane.  “Management tasks are intellectual and skills-based tasked asking the team leader to learn how to manage others and know the laws, rules, and procedures, and the tools, needs, and requirements for program success.”[2] In contrast, leadership “is a complex of spirit, intellect, and physical skill in action, and leader acts out of this complex.”[3] The spirit aspect of leadership—as distinct from spiritual leadership—likely has to do with charisma, a word that comes from charismata, which means a power gifted by the Holy Spirit. Charismatic leaders tend to have a presence more deeply rooted than the designated role and the context. My focus in regard to spiritual leadership here is not on charisma; instead, I want to highlight the effects of religious experience—not beliefs—on spiritual leadership in business.

I begin with spirituality in order to find cleave distinctive nature off any reduction to ethics. In distinguishing spirituality from ethics, I look at religious experience of transcendence as a more suitable basis for spirituality. Next, I’ll look at the business literature on spiritual leadership—scholarship that conflates such leadership with ethical leadership. I extract residue from that extant literature that can serve as a launching pad for an account of spiritual leadership that is grounded in transcendent religious experience. If my account is correct, spiritual leadership is really much subtler and less motivational or goal-oriented than the literature lets on. 

The spiritual business leader who searches for personal and professional integration is the chief beneficiary of this booklet, which can also be taken for a way to promulgate meagerly a new theory on the phenomenon of religion that stresses its uniqueness and distinctiveness. It is as if religionists have historically spent so much time in other—albeit superficially related—gardens, such as those of the Houses of Ethics, Astronomy/Cosmology, Metaphysics, History, Psychology, Law, etc., that in the neglected garden of religion the native fauna can scarcely be recognized from the thicket of weeds that have thrived in the absence of the wandering, aggrandizing religionists. The Christian Gospels were not written to be historical accounts, a scientific treatise, or an ethical theory. Religious faith is sui generis (i.e., of its own type) in being oriented to a referant point or religious object that inherently extends beyond the limits of cognition, sentimentality, perception, and even gut-level intuition. The first task back to this basis of religion is to get the religionists back to their own garden from directing other sectors’ gardens; then religionists can finally set about determining just what is inherently and uniquely religious so weeding may proceed. This text is just a part of getting the religionists out of other gardens by distinguishing religion from ethics and laying down some broad brush-strokes on the core of religiosity and even spirituality.

Spiritual Leadership in Business: Transcending the Ethical is available at Amazon in print and as an ebook.

Taoist, Buddhist, and Judeo-Christian principles applicable to leadership comprise part two in The Essence of Leadership, which is available at Amazon in print and as an ebook.

---

[1]. By analogy, the notion that Jesus Christ is fully human and fully divine—a theory coined at the Council of Nicea in 325 C.E.—involves taking the human as human and the divine as divine rather than reconfiguring one term to suit the other. Just as one essence, or ousia, has a human element and a divine element, spiritual leadership can be reckoned as having a religious and a secular element. One essence can contain a notion of spirituality that is religious in nature and a theory of leadership that is been derived in a secular context.

[2]. Gilbert W. Fairholm, Capturing the Heart of Leadership: Spirituality and Community in the New American Workplace (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997): 152.

[3]. Fairholm, Capturing the Heart, 152.

Spirituality in Business Leadership

To be at its fullest, the notion of spiritual leadership applied to business should not shirk the religious basis of spirituality to make it somehow more fitting to business-or a certain rendition of business. Many of Gilbert Fairholm’s descriptions of spirituality risk embalming spirituality in a secular tomb in keeping with the bias typically found in the business world against anything religious. Fortunately, some of his other characterizations of the term provide an alternative basis for an invigorated notion of spiritual leadership applied even in the business world.

Material from this essay has been incorporated into Spiritual Leadership in Business: Transcending the Ethical, which is available at Amazon in print and as an ebook. 

See also The Essence of Leadership, which is available at Amazon in print and as an ebook. Taoist, Buddhist, and Judeo-Christian principles relevant to leadership comprise part two of the book. 

Transforming Transformational Leadership: Foundations over Ideology

James Burn’s concept of transformational leadership is in essence a process in which “one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality.”[1] This includes a moral commitment to develop followers, especially morally. To Burns, transformational leadership is therefore “an ethical, moral enterprise.”[2] I contend that the term transformation is not inherently ethical, and so it can apply to leadership in an amoral sense. Freed up from the limitations of being viewed primarily or even exclusively as moral, transformation can be seen to apply to leadership in at least two, much more direct—or central—ways than morally: as referring to a leader’s own transformation and to a leader’s vision being transformational. 

The entire essay is in The Essence of Leadership. 

---

[1] James M. Burns, J. Leadership (New York: Harper & Row, 1978): 20.

[2] Ken W. Parry and Sarah B. Proctor-Thomson, “Perceived Integrity of Transformational Leaders in Organizational Settings,” Journal of Business Ethics 35, no. 2 (January, 2002): 75.

Can ethical leadership be taught?

In the typical business school, this question would be interpreted, or “refurbished.” Can students be trained to become ethical leaders? While often conflated contemporaneously, these two questions are indeed distinct. Instructors, professors and school administrators should first decide which question is more relevant to their purposes. The question chosen should fit with the education, pedagogical method, and philosophy of education of not only the instructor or professor, but also the school itself. In this essay, I distinguish the two questions in order to unpack them with their full significance.

The entire essay is at “Can Ethical Leadership Be Taught?”

Ethical Leadership: Pruning Off the Debris

As business practitioners grapple with the intangible yet potentially valuable notion of ethical leadership, it is left to scholars to assess whether those practitioners are “coloring within the lines.” It is admittedly all too easy to draw in exogenous material that is pleasing to the eye; it is all too easy to deem such material required for ethical leadership rather than ballast weighing it down, unnecessarily. One business practitioner characterizes ethical leadership as that which “inspires the behaviors in people necessary to create competitive advantage.” As achieving a sustainable competitive advantage is the task of strategy, inspiration alone can be extracted as that which is particular to leadership. Strategy is what is left once one has extracted inspiration from the characterization.

Material from this essay has been incorporated in The Essence of Leadership, which is available at Amazon in print and as an ebook.

Sun Tzu's Art of War: A Recipe for Leadership in Business

According to Master Sun in The Art of War, “Leadership is a matter of intelligence, trustworthiness, humaneness, courage, and sternness.”[1] Although Sun Tzu is referring mainly to military (and related political) leadership, lessons can be learned on exercising business leadership by means of a careful adaptation.

 

1. Sun Tzu, The Art of War: Complete Texts and Commentaries (Boston: Shambhala, 2003), p. 44.
vable variable. 


Material from this essay has been incorporated into The Essence of Leadership: A Cross-Cultural Foundation, which is available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.