The Puzzle of Leadership

Everybody thinks they are countercultural rebels, insurgents against the true establishment, which is always somewhere else. This attitude prevails in the Ivy League, in the corporate boardrooms and even at television studios where hosts from Harvard, Stanford and Brown rail against the establishment.

      

As a result, today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess. If you went to Groton a century ago, you knew you were privileged. You were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed. You were housed in a spartan 6-foot-by-9-foot cubicle to prepare you for the rigors of leadership.

My views on leadership are on record; when we view elitism and leadership as inseparable, we're creating a false dichotomy.  But then, we also define success these days by material gain, which inflicts the notion of a zero-sum game; there's only so much of everything to go around.

Alas, the world's not a black-and-white place, is it?