Management and Leadership

The following presents my orientations toward the study and the

practice of leadership. I tend to equate leadership and management,

however, analytically, while all management is leadership, not all

leadership is management. To concretely state my orientations, the

following might well sum it up: 1) Management is primarily a moral

pursuit and, therefore, is Value-laden (this to the extent and degree

that every manager ought aspire to being a "philosopher-king"; 2)

Management is much more art than science; 3) A manager's understanding

of him/herself and of the human condition/situation is his/her primary

tool and vehicle; 4) Mankind's systems for developing, selecting and

elevating managers/leaders tend to favor the more neurotic and

power-oriented among the group, this at the expense of and detriment

to the group itself and the TRUE potential leaders in its midst. This

aspect is primarily due to mankind's basic insecurities and weak ego

functioning, which, as Drucker observes, favors manner over substance,

show over reality.

1) What ARE the personality/character traits of "true" leaders?; 2)

What sorts of social systems have been developed in the past, and what

sorts could be developed now, which would enable the group to utilize

"true" leaders?, and; 3) How can the group nurture and develop more

"true" leaders?

Same of the fascinating sub-sets of the above relate

to the argument as to whether leadership evolves from "greatness", as

in the "great man" or "hero" orientation, or whether the primary

reality is that certain people are able to rise to the occasion, as is

often held of Churchill and Truman, for example. Also, all of the

above leads to a powerful curiosity regarding just WHERE our current

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explain the dichotomy, Western Electric went to Harvard and retained

Elton Mayo who had already gained notoriety for solving issues

surrounding people at work.

Using the resources of the highly respected Harvard Graduate School of

Business, he performed a series of carefully documented studies that

established the springboard which human relation’s practitioners

follow – to this day. Succinctly, Mayo’s findings concluded that it

was the attention Western Electric management paid to satisfying

employee’s wants and needs, not the lighting, that yielded the

unimagined productivity increases and improved morale.

It wasn’t until the early 1940s that Hawthorne was thoroughly

explained. The person to do that was Abraham Maslow, the father of

Humanistic Psychology. Maslow theorized that people have ascending

wants and needs that always require attention.