Ten Great Works for Leadership Development

This chapter was born out of two striking experiences. Both concerned failure. The first followed upon Nietzsche’s (2002) correct observation that there is something undeniably visceral about the use of evocative language. Language can ‘move’ us. It can quicken the heart and set off the dreams that make life worth the struggle. Reading the funeral oration given by Pericles of Athens, or hearing Paul Schofield’s Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons is riveting, heart stopping, inspiring. I wanted the most senior management course at the institution in which I was working to include some practice in the art of oratory on its timetable. I thought that part of the leader’s repertoire must include the ability to mobilise and focus, through the magic of language, the positive energies and warm feelings of subordinates. My proposal, however, was immediately dismissed. Why? Well, it was because the future leaders would ‘refuse to do it’. It was then that I realised that the programme of senior management development was not about leadership at all; along with being an induction into the Establishment, its main concern was to produce a kind of system-functionary.’ The world had gone ‘systemic’.