A Saint and a Leader:

Art by Dall-E

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4 thoughts on “A Saint and a Leader:”

  1. Thank you.

    I’ve always resisted the idea of “Human Resource Management” from the very start the Staff and Organisation Department (P&O) with AT&T and Philips Telecommunication started to call itself “HRM”. With the same argument you’re using: human beings are not means, but ends in themselves.

    A few years later I was fired – actually for no reason at all, I’ve always had very good reviews, and I had made sure they had asked me for this job – manager productions. (The people in my production department offered to strike for me. I said, they had better things to do). A member of HRM told me in confidence: “you’re a real leader. They’re always being fired in our organisation”. I said: “So you know”.

    (Later I realized, it was inevitable. People who manage things- like most people – haven’t learned to deal with ambiguity in a constructive way. Human beings are both objects and subjects. The word “management” has been derived from hand (in French: “le main”), using one’s hand to steer(!) horses or a ship. (your) Hands are no ambiguous, hands – as in crew – are).

    I’ve always been influenced by Max DuPree, “Leadership is an Art”, who states that the first task of a leader is to define reality – he does this by asking questions. And the important one is to say “thank you”.

    Being a radical constructivist, I reject the idea of a split between subject and object. So I also reject the idea of leader and followers. I used to show a clip from Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”, where he speaks to the people. I goes something like this:

    B: “I’ve got two things to say” …
    B : “You’re all different” -Crowd: “Yes, yes, we’re all different!” – Simon(?): “no, I’m not” – crowd: “shh, shh!”
    B: “You’ve got to think for yourself”. Crowd: “we’ve got to think for ourselves!”
    B: “No, you don’t get it. You’ve got to think for yourself”.

    Leadership, as all core-concepts – is inherently paradoxical. You cannot live with them, nor without them. We use it as an explanatory principle.

    As paradoxes go, leadership is associated with authority, dependency, creativity and courage.

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