As recently as a century ago, the world was run almost exclusively by states and a few immensely powerful individuals, some of whom were business titans. But the age of potentates and plutocrats has given way to a more colorful world of infinitely greater scope and capability—a world owned and run by ordinary people. Historically speaking, this is quite an extraordinary fact, and one in which you, the manager, play a distinct role.

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	Jim Stroup

A signal feature of this new landscape is the dominant institution in it: the organization. Sure, the government is still quite influential, and we pay close attention to its intentions. But today, those intentions are, at bottom, ours, and what we are watching for is that government officials don’t stray too far from them. Even among the more centralized states of Europe, the reach and domain of government is restricted by the new sovereign: us.

The important issues of the real world are now run principally by a multitude of civil, non-governmental organizations in every sphere from public services to commerce. Moreover, those organizations in turn are run not by ministers and their agents, but by professional managers—by you.

The Fifth Column

Indeed, the rise of organizations was made possible by the rise along with them of skilled managers. But there is a peril within the walls of professional management, threatening its continued relevance and growth.

That danger resides in this: despite the fact that sovereignty, today, is widespread, and organizations answering to and controlled by regular citizens fill most of the purposes previously monopolized by the state, as well as untold new ones, we still tend to look to the past for guidance about how to manage them. That is, a self-referential and consciously elitist view, one that is characteristic of the age of privilege and exclusion, continues to insinuate itself into our thinking about how to organize our affairs in the new world.

There are two key reasons why this happens. One is that the past is so full of truly extraordinary examples of remarkable individual accomplishments by princes at the head of governments and armies. The other is that this past remains so hard on our heels; we have little experience, after all, of being out from under the influence of kings and king-makers— indeed, we have seen many examples of their continued operation in modern governmental, military, commercial, and even charitable, organizations.

So, when we look back for examples of how to manage modern organizations, these are pretty much all there is, as of yet, to see. And that’s the problem: the lessons they teach are false, outdated, and ill-suited to the uses to which they will be put.

Make no mistake about this: modern organizations are not the extensions of individual sovereigns, existing merely to give expression to their personal passions. Neither are modern managers agents of such sovereigns, imposing their will on people burdened by varying degrees of feudal obligation to these princes.

Repeating the Past

And yet, this habit of thought, with roots millennia-deep in historical experience, continues to captivate us in many ways in the modern world. But with respect to the study and practice of management, a particularly dangerous by-product of this fascination has been the peculiar rise of the modern leadership movement. The problem with this development is that it teaches individual leadership characteristics based largely on—or inevitably rooted in—the self-involved and self-referential assumption of privilege that is so specifically out of place in modern organizations.

In other words, it tells you what you should be, rather than what you should do. The historical leader, after all, was the font of all rules, and the only source of ambition and innovation that mattered in a realm where everything and everyone was his or her property. Accordingly, the most relevant fact in those organizations centered on who that person was, and that single issue bore a great influence on how successfully he or she competed with royal rivals.

Accordingly, it may have been appropriate to pay attention to the personal characteristics of these exceptional persons. The fate of whole nations, whole peoples, could hang on the ability to cultivate the right mix of traits in them. Certainly, the fate of the key organizations of the state did.

But be sure of this: the organization in which you work as a manager does not depend so abjectly on you—not now, and not when you become its CEO. As skilled and insightful as you may be, and as key as the function that you perform is to the operation, to the very existence, of modern organizations, the vital element in the equation today is the function, not the person.

So, learn to perform that function, and forget about trying to learn how to be the kind of person who is quickly fading into the past. Certainly, such figures are not going quietly, but the scandals they leave behind are the mark of their inaptness to today’s circumstances, and to their sad, and often devastating, inability to apprehend this new fact of life.

Looking over Your Shoulder

That new fact is that today a small coterie of interlocking organizations does not exist in order to give expression to the ambitions and whims of the singularly entitled person at the top. Rather, the reverse: managers exist to enable organizations to most efficiently pursue the widely diverse purposes for which they were organized by innumerable owners from every corner of the social and economic spectrum.

In other words, it’s about the work—not you. And if you get those mixed up, aside from looking irrelevant and ridiculous, you will begin to lose your way. You will become unfocussed, confused about who serves who, about what your priorities really are, and about the first causes that govern your actions.

If you allow that to happen, your actions will run the risk of becoming unhitched from those first causes, from your obligations and responsibilities. Without realizing it, perhaps even willfully in denial of it, you may begin to fail in the discharge of your fiduciary duties.

The models used by the modern leadership movement were not subject to sanction for fiduciary misconduct. Their overweening ambitions, soaring passions, and unanchored self-awareness were their sole authority for action, and their only restraints. Their reward was conquest, their punishment destruction. These were administered by their competitors, their peers.

Yours are more prosaic: on the one hand, promotions and bonuses; on the other, dismissal and even fines and imprisonment. And these are administered by a myriad of sources—from boards of directors to customers, interest groups, regulators, and district attorneys—that represents the new facts of this new world.

Do not mistake what the implications of this are for you. Avoid prescriptions about what it means to be a “leader” that are self-referentially focused on putatively exclusive and rarified personal characteristics. Concentrate on learning the skills and practices that enable you to do your job and that will help you become an effective manager, able to contribute to the goals of living, meaningful, purposeful modern organizations.

About the Author

Jim Stroup is an international management consultant specializing in organizational leadership and strategic planning. Learn more at www.managingleadership.com/blog.

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