Doctor Phix and the riddle of leadership

I have spent more time than is humanly wise researching what makes a good leader. Too much time was spent asking big shot leaders what made them good leaders (in their eyes, if not in the eyes of their staff or shareholders). This was an exercise in toadying and ingratation which is well worth not repeating, not even in the cause of science and the advance of human happiness.

Each leader was very clear about what it took to be a good leader: be like themselves. The problem was, that they were all different. No one can succeed by trying to be someone else, until such time as science invents the brain transplant, although logically a body transplant would be the same as a brain transplant. Think about that, carefully. Body and/or brain transplants are beyond my capabilities, although if anyone wants to be a guinea pig I will get my rusty pen knife out and give it a go.

We can not succeed by trying to be some combination of Mother Theresa and Genghis Khan. Equally, Mother Theresa would not have succeeded by trying to be a Genghis Khan: leading the Mongol horde across Asia in an orgy of looting, rape and pillage (or bringing stability and order to Asia if you are a Khan apologist) would not have fitted the Theresa mould very well. Equally, it might have been interesting to watch Genghis Khan sort out the slums of Kolkata.

And if we try to be some combination of Bush and Brown, we are doomed to fail: either we fail to copy them, or we succeed in which case we fail as leaders.

So we can not be leaders by being someone else.

But equally, we can not become leaders just by being ourselves and hoping, like some teenager in full hormonal angst, that the world will immediately recognise our deep humanity and genius subtly hidden beneath layers of idleness indifference and incompetence.

So, we will not succeed by being someone else and we will not succeed by being ourselves. So how do we solve the riddle?

The solution is simple: we have to be the best of who we are. Build on our strengths, find ways around our weaknesses (get other people to do stuff we are useless at) and have the courage to be honest about our own talents or lack of talent. This is a deceptively simple formula which takes decades to master. In the blogs which follow, I will show how you can accelerate your journey to the top.