On Leadership...whatever that means

I am teaching a new course this semester: Leadership and the Liberal Arts.  It’s a course in the Complex Organizations program, which is Mount Hoyloke’s crypto-business minor.  The Economics department absorbed Complex Organizations this year, one of my colleagues is in charge of it, and he spent some time convincing me to teach the class.  It used to be something like an MBA Leadership course, but not surprisingly, I turned it into a Great Books course.  The reading list will become apparent here over the next 12 weeks.

But, all of this is just a preliminary to the question at hand.  What exactly is Leadership?  Here I am teaching a course with that word in the title, and as soon as I try to figure out what this course is supposed to have as its subject matter, I run into the seemingly important matter of the lack of any meaningful definition of the term.  I got a bunch of textbooks on leadership—the textbooks are hopeless in general, and they have a hard time with a definition beyond a fancy rewording of the definition “Leadership is the act of leading.”  Maybe by the end of the semester, I’ll know what this course is about—in the meantime, we are reading a lot of Great Books.

But all of that last paragraph was just a preliminary to the book review at hand.  In my Christmas stocking this year, I found a copy of a small book (6.5” x 4.5”) entitled: Leadership Lessons of Abraham Lincoln: Statements, Advice, and Words of Wisdom on Leadership, Responsibility, and Power.  Apparently either Santa Claus or my wife knew I was teaching a course on Leadership and either commissioned (in the case of the former—do the elves write the books which Santa Claus gives out at Christmas?  Or do the elves just bind books already written?  Clearly I need to learn more about how the present-generating-process works at the North Pole) or found at Barnes and Noble (in the case of the latter). 

It was a rather curious book.  Edited by Meg Distinti (no clue on the title page if Distinti is elf or human), it is a collection of quotations from Lincoln about…well, there is the catch.  Are these quotations about leadership?  If you think a quotation on leadership should be a quotation about, you know, leadership, then there are virtually no quotations about leadership in this volume.  However, if a quotation about leadership can actually be a quotation about, well, anything, then there are lots and lots of quotations about leadership in this book.

Taking a quotation at random.  (Really, I opened at random and took the first quotation in the page.) “It is always magnanimous to recant whatever we may have said in passion.”  [Letter to William Butler, February 1, 1839].  A true enough sentence.  But is that about leadership?  Wouldn't that also be good advice to a follower?  (Why don't we have a class called “Followership and the Liberal Arts” at Mount Holyoke?  Indeed, we have a Center for Leadership, but no center for Followership.  Why not?)  the editor puts this quotation in a chapter  entitled “Words of Wisdom for Conflict Resolution” in a subsection entitled “Passionately Pursue Peace.”  But is that Leadership?  Does that mean leaders are people who resolve conflict by passionately pursuing peace?  Is being a “Leader in Conflict” an oxymoron?  I genuinely have no idea how that quotation, which is nice and all, has anything to do with leadership.

Consider another example:  “I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false, is guilty of falsehood; and the accidental truth of the assertion, does not justify or excuse him.” [Letter to Allen N. Ford, August 11, 1846]  Again: what does that have to do with leadership? 

After 121 pages of that sort of thing, I am convinced that either anything Lincoln said can be considered to be about leadership by definition (or some other such logic), or it is impossible to put together a book with quotations about leadership written by Abraham Lincoln. 

So, why does this book exist?  Obviously there is a market for such things.  There can’t be that many people who are teaching a course in the Spring and have a wife who is looking around at Barnes and Noble for something small enough to fit into a stocking.  Obviously, people want to learn about leadership.  Obviously, Lincoln is a great leader.  Put those two together and a book is born.  But, is everyone disappointed with this book after reading it?  Sadly, I suspect so.