Today, in the so-called grandes écoles, in companies and in all associations or social groups, everyone is a “leader”, and everyone is an “entrepreneur”. It’s become a fashion, a fashion-culture. Everyone wants to be seen, recognized; everyone wants to be not just on stage, but at the forefront. In the new social network society, everyone talks, but no one listens. We were all born to become bosses, if not at least to become our own bosses. In the startup society, there’s no need for hierarchical bosses or enlightened leaders, just a group of buddies where everyone is a “leader”, the boss in jogging suits, the agent the same, a cartoon vocabulary, a single horizon of hard cash.

Setting up a start-up becomes the exercise of staging a ballet composed solely of star dancers, and for a single jackpot-season. It’s like a new version of the Mexican army, where you can pull off a stock market heist and retire at 35. And since we know that the breeze comes before the rain, (1) we sell wind and (2) after me, the déluge.

To create more “leaders”, we’ve agreed to uberize work, thus creating singleton bosses, conceptually independent but savagely dependent on a ferocious market where everyone is a seller of something, and few are buyers.

In private higher education, this has become a veritable business. They don’t just teach you accounting, law or engineering, they teach you to be a LEADER. In the corporate world, results will be better when we’ve trained as many leaders as possible, with a certified, voluble and dissert coach, whose training sessions are more like a NASDAQ Church high mass, with fiery preaching inspired by the 4 new apocryphal evangelists: Saint GATES (Bill by his first name), Saint BUFFET (Warren for friends), Saint MUSK (Elon for intimates) and Saint BEZOS (Jeff in real life). Think what you do, say what you think, think what you say, say what you do and do what you want… In short, free-quarter and open-bar, life is yours, and you can bite into the apple because there’s no risk of it eating you. If your parents can afford to pay for your training, or your company can afford to pay for your coach, that’s proof that you’re leaders, isn’t it?

Training isn’t about teaching you to become a leader, it’s about revealing to you that you already were one without knowing it, dear Mr. Jourdain… That’s pretty cool, especially for the coach, since by definition the training he gives is always successful. No one comes out of these capital orgies thinking “I’m really not a leader”, no, that’s what Life whispers in their ear 20 years later… for most of them. What about the rest of us? Is there such a thing as leadership training, i.e. a deterministic path to becoming a leader? It’s strictly impossible to answer this question without a consensus on what a corporate leader is (already).

 

Direction, strength, speed

Apart from the other marginal definitions it gives, the Grand Larousse defines a leader as:

“The person who, within a group, takes most of the initiatives, leads the other members of the group, holds command.”

There are three key ideas in the definition: taking the initiative, leading others and commanding. I interpret them in the very dialectic of the real and the everyday, as at any moment in the evolution of a group:

  1. Among an almost infinite number of possibilities, you have to choose one, and that’s what constitutes INITIATIVE. You can’t initiate the impossible, because “no one can take nine women to give birth in a month”. The initiative is to choose a realistic or at least achievable path, among many others, among all the others. Starting from the present, initiative simply means choosing the DIRECTION in which to evolve.
  2. The very idea of LEADING a group implies the need for movement. But movement doesn’t exist without Energy, without initial power, because movement is the consequence of the application of a FORCE.
  3. And the trivial imaginary for a Commander is indeed a Commander in front of his marching troops who, like a conductor, first sets the pace, and therefore the rhythm, and therefore the SPEED of execution.

So, I translate leadership according to the Larousse as the ability of a Group member, starting from an initial state, to impart DIRECTION, STRENGTH and SPEED to reach a final state.

 

Once upon a time, there was a little ship…

At my more modest level than the Larousse, the best explanation of leadership is the one I drew from a simple joke that almost everyone knows without perhaps having drawn a parallel with the subject for themselves.

The short version of the joke tells the story of a crew of 10 on a small boat in the middle of a huge storm. The captain says, “We’ve got to lighten the boat or we’ll capsize, so one of us has to jump overboard until the storm’s over. But as it’s at the risk of his life, I’m not imposing it on anyone, I’m asking for a volunteer”. After a few moments of heavy silence, someone jumped into the water! After hours of battling the raging elements, the storm came to an end, and after a great deal of searching and effort, the waterlogged, swollen and half-dead sailor was fished out. The whole crew, saluting his courage, roared with joy, congratulating him and proclaiming him the hero of the adventure. And the sailor replies half-heartedly, “Thank you, thank you my friends, thank you very much, but tell me, who pushed me?”

You can read the rest of this article in our next fortnightly publication.

Picture of Jean-François SENE

Jean-François SENE

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