“Lead so that you would want to follow someone like yourself”
A doctrine of leadership will tell you that a true leader is an ardent follower. Most of us have also read it. But when it does come to practice we are but raccoons hiding among tall trees.
My experience in front of voting machines and the fact that we still have armpit hair are two solid proofs of how much we are yet to progress in our evolutionary process. We love to follow what is there already without bothering to send enough blood into what is up above. But when we do stop and stare behind what we have been doing for ages, we tend to realize how old a newspaper we have been reading all the way through. Ah yes, I love the saying “Today’s newspaper is tomorrow waste paper”. Let us first cast an unbiased eye on what we have been doing in the name of leadership.
Who is a leader? We do have strange definitions for this based on which side of the well you want to jump from. But in the broader sense leaders have traditionally been people who take credit for the rain and not the blame for drought. Leaders have always been people who walk away with huge bonuses, which if hung around their neck would snap their spine into two.(It is rumored that they have one despite empirical evidence stating that they have given it to building their own stock). This, despite the fact, that their ardent followers spend the rest of their lives living in cardboard boxes under railway bridges, surviving on their earwax. What then is leadership and who then is a leader? Now don’t start about Mr.M.K.Gandhi, though I still believe he was the first fully developed human. Mr.Gandhi lived in an era where fastest way to have told about his own death was to sent a lousy “I am dead, pick me up” message through a tap-tap messaging system, proudly christened ‘Telegram’, which by itself killed many other people on it’s arrival(Shouting from the roof top wasn’t a bad option at all). In this world, a leader, by definition, is one who has the right contact, to give the right money, in the right time, to achieve the wrong thing through the right people. Ah yes here is a thought. *A leader’s brain – left has nothing right; right has nothing left. *Ok now back to mother earth, why this apathy in serving others? A good question to ask here is are the leaders earning more by following their own goals, than uplifting the lives of his followers? If so, along with greed and gluttony, mentioned as two of the seven sins in the Bible, the other five would have to be Monday to Friday. But as always, fact is stranger than this myth. This is something like the debate going on between the flesh eating and plant-eating humans. Though the fleshy ones may claim eating plants depletes the earth of its greenery, the fact is sheep and cattle consume more plants than a leafy human. Just think. Which moron would refrain from voting for a party, which, out of all other things, takes effort in laying good roads(are there any other type)? Simple eh? Exactly the reason why leaders don’t understand. The act of giving at least one thousandth of your earnings back to the public, by itself, would earn you a Demi-God status. But then why aren’t they doing it?
The reason is an ego more bloated than his paunch. Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude. These so-called leaders resort to attacking the messenger and not the message. That is where they loose.
Why and how then should a leader be? I am by no means prophesying that a leader should be a ladder, stay where they were and let others climb by stepping on them, in short like a teacher. The leader that I am talking about is a true light to guide others. A leader aware of the art of management. The management that I refer means, in the last analysis, the substitution of thought for brawn and muscle, of knowledge for folkways and superstition, and of cooperation for force. It means the substitution of responsibility for obedience to rank, and of authority of performance for the authority of rank.
The ultimate leader is one who is willing to develop people to the point that they eventually surpass him or her in knowledge and ability. By doing this, the leader’s position is never at stake. Remember a horse has never given birth to a donkey. A follower brought up under such a leader will not tend to invade his mentor, but will try to develop other leaders. But then again, the sad fact is that all the good minds and flat tummies get blown off once you reach the top. Pride and greed gets faster into your mind than the alcohol from the large pint of beer intake. It isn’t the incompetent who destroys the system. The incompetent never gets in a position to destroy it. It is those who have achieved something and want to rest upon their achievements that are forever clogging things up.
There have been many who tried to rake up the dead leaves. They left looking like toilet papers washed down the bowel, useful when they were by themselves and destroyed by what they came to clean. They tried to teach the mule to sing. The mule was irritated and people wasted their time.
Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them. Gone are the days when promises of a milky rain coaxed voters like insects to their mate. They ate their spouses after mating. The people of today have become a little more society conscious, though, their inherent sympathy towards their tummies remain the same. They have learnt a lot from their mistakes. But then experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again. At least so much of sense is a good sign. But, at what cost? We no longer live in a latent society. The world is no longer static.
We live today by what truth we can get only getting ready for tomorrow to call it falsehood.
The man that walked before Copernicus said the world was flat. So in this dynamic cauldron, the sooner we change, the better for we don’t inherit the world from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. The day will come when the risk to remain tight in a bud will be more painful than the risk it takes to blossom. Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
So let us shed our lust to decorate our houses with candles lighted by the pyre of a dead neighbor. Leaders are those that change the destiny, by following what they would like their followers to. As the noble John F. Kennedy said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”.
Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon’em. A leader is not a ladder; he is an escalator that raises with his subjects yet remains there waiting for others. It is not titles that honor men, but men that honor titles.