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January 18, 2004
Review: Of leaders and leadership
AS the new millennium begins to make its epoch-making importance felt, new challenges are seen rearing their heads, posing a great threat to the socio-geographic stability of the world. Bloodletting, animosity and economic disparity have begun affecting organized human life like never before. Such circumstances demand reliable, firm and understanding leadership. But how many nations today can boast of having been led by leaders who have a fair insight into the lives of their fellow countrymen? One suspects, not many. This is precisely where literature as a discipline assumes a significant position, since the most basic definition of the subject is that it gives you perceptions of life.
Leading Lessons from Literature is Sampat P. Singh’s second attempt at coming up with a plausible book aimed at providing management education using characters and situations from the engaging world of literature as a means - not an end - to discovering better leadership qualities. The author was formerly a professor at the National Institute of Bank Management, Pune and his first book, Role of Humanities in Management Education (1988) garnered a fair amount of readership.
In his new book, Sampat Singh argues that in the history of mankind innumerable leaders tried in their own distinct ways to govern their respective countries and nations in manners that suited either their disposition or philosophy of life. Some pursued their dreams while others tried to alter the course of the general environment by force or by acts that did not necessarily have the consent of all and sundry.
What is the role of a leader now? How can he be effective in shaping a better society? How does management differ from leadership? Sampat Singh strives to analyze all that in five sections. Among the five divisions of the book, perhaps the most noteworthy are the ones where the author discusses the difference between leaders and managers and problems of reading habits, literary proclivities and intellectual leanings. He believes that sometimes projecting management development pushes aside leadership growth. It creates impediments in the process of changing the compassion of leaders into passion. It is, therefore, of essence to choose with discretion what to read and to interpret it accordingly.
Sampat Singh does not come across as a typical management teacher when he suggests four approaches to leadership (trait approach, contingency approach, situational approach and constitutive approach) as if he’s addressing an MBA batch. His emphasis on the emotional and more humane aspect of life, while leading or managing, has not been presented as an important subtext in the book, but is taken up as the chief issue.
He dishes out numerous examples from the world of literature and quotations of renowned men of letters and management experts that clearly call for understanding heroic qualities (not fantasy-driven) of extraordinary human beings. For example, the name Robinson Crusoe often crops up in the book while looking at the issue of successful survival with respect to leading a group.
So also we find the names of Don Quixote and Don Juan, when the author tries to differentiate between two famous characters driven by passion. He argues, “It has always been possible to find more and more meanings in Don Quixote’s character and his actions, but it has not been possible for many writers to impart a unique meaning to Don Juan’s deeds and actions.”
This is where he hurls a question: “Is it really possible for a leader to lead people to act, if action were meaningless?”
The author carries on to delve into meaningfulness by giving examples (among many in the book) from Tolstoy’s epic undertaking War and Peace, Albert Camus’ poignant novel The Outsider and Arthur Miller’s insightful play All My Sons. In that context he touches upon the delicate issue of the individual in relation to the society he is a part of.
While doing that Sampat Singh zeros in on freedom and responsibility of the individual, the conflict between the individual and society and how that determines the ethical decisions of the former, and how people’s actions make goals take shape — relating all these aspects to leadership and decision-making.
It has to be understood here that the book does not get judgmental in stressing the importance of literature vis-a-vis organized life and management education. Rather it discusses the possibility (albeit a convincing one) of turning the leader into a bit of a poet — for according to a Stanford University teacher James March, leaders and poets, both, interpret life.
Sampat Singh seems to go along with what F. Scott Fitzgerald said: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposite ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to act.” Leaders ought to have a first-rate intelligence. They must possess the ability to resolve the conflict between data and concepts by not siding with any one of them, but by being able to amicably weld them to galvanize their countrymen into taking actions that could reap nothing but well-being, material as well as spiritual.
Leading Lessons from Literature
By Sampat P. Singh
Response/Sage Publications, B-42, Panchsheel Enclave, Post Box 4109, New Delhi-110017, India.
Tel: 91-11-2649 1290-7.
Email: marketing@indiasage.com Website:
www.indiasage.com
ISBN 0-7619-9753-9
213pp. Indian Rs300
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